The Tension That Will Come With the Future of Work

A lot has been written about the Work From Anywhere life that knowledge workers are leading right now due to the pandemic, and what will come next.  Fred has a great post on it, and I’m curious to see how his and Joanne’s “Home Office Away From Home” space called FrameWork does when it opens.  In that post, he references a few other posts and articles worth reading:

• Imagine Your Flexible Office Work Future – Anne Helen Petersen
• We’re Never Going Back – Packy McCormick
• The Future of Offices When Workers Have Choice – Dror Poleg

Instead of entering the debate about what the future will look like, which no one really knows other than to say “not like the past,” I want to focus on a tension I’ve been mulling over lately, and that is the tension between a company’s leaders and its employees.  You could also call it a tension between extroverts and introverts.  And in this regard, Packy McCormick is both right and wrong about the debate:  right in the sense that employees will make the decision, not companies; wrong in the sense that the best employees “are not going to work for companies that make them shave, get dressed, hop into a car or a crowded subway, and sit at a desk in an office five days a week with their headphones on trying to avoid distractions and get work done.”  That’s a blanket statement that, as with most blanket statements, misses an incredibly important point.

That some people like, want to, need to, or benefit from working in offices more often than not.

That those people are some of the most talented, creative, and high potential people in an organization.

And that those people are frequently the ones with the least “voice” in an organization — new employees, younger workers, introverts, and people from underrepresented groups.

It will be really easy for senior people who, in many cases, have longer commutes and kids they are now accustomed to seeing a lot more, not to mention really nice and private home offices, to default to working from home.  In many cases, they’ve already done more of that than most employees, well, because they can.  But the problem is that those people are perfectly fine working from home.  Work and decisions come to them.  Their career trajectories are pretty set.  They will seek out anyone in the organization to ask them any question, any time.

But think about the topic from the perspective of an entry level account coordinator, an associate product manager, a graphic designer in marketing, a financial analyst in the FP&A group, or an AR specialist in accounting. .  Less exposure to decision makers can’t possibly help this.  If you’re one of those people, here are the things you miss out on when there’s no office:

• You don’t get to participate in or overhear interesting conversations in the break/lunch room or at the water cooler about something going on in the company that you’re not working on.  This reduces your ability to learn in unstructured ways at work or get thoroughly onboarded into a new company
• You don’t get to see who comes and goes from the office or different meeting rooms.  This may sound silly, but watching a business in, seeing who is in a glass-walled conference room or what slides are up on the wall, helps employees stimulate good ideas about their day to day work.  This limits your ability to connect the dots and better understand the big picture at work 
• You don’t get to have a casual conversation with your department head or CEO in the elevator or hallway or a conference room between meetings.  That “skip level” leader is much less likely to know who you are or what you do.  This can make it harder for you, the next time you have an idea you want to share or feedback you want to give, to approach a leader.  It also makes it a little tougher for you the next time you’re in line for some kind of promotion or development opportunity

Of course all employees CAN in theory make themselves known, can learn, can seek out others in the organization, and can try to re-create hallway serendipity from the comfort of their own Zoom screens.  It just doesn’t come naturally to most; practically speaking for many, it’s impossible; and it’s particularly hard for younger or quieter team members.  There’s a ton of research about how women in particular aren’t as comfortable advocating for themselves when it comes time to ask for a raise or a promotion.  If you’re the CEO of a 100 person organization, you might be inclined to chat with the new entry level AR person at the coffee machine for a few minutes; you’re unlikely to be excited about a 30-minute Zoom with her.  

(By the way, this whole construct may be different for engineering, where engineers are likely more comfortable with remote work AND aren’t held back in their career development as a result.)

I’ll close this post with an anecdote.  As part of our work at Bolster, I was doing something called an Executive Team Scalability Assessment with the CEO of a $75mm SaaS company a month or so ago.  When we were doing a review of how strongly each of his leaders role modeled company values, he paused when he got to one leader and said, “I honestly don’t know.  That person has only been here 10 months, but don’t worry, that’s just because of the pandemic.  I haven’t seen them in action.”  10 months!  People will discover at some point that it was much easier to “lift and shift” an existing organization to the cloud in year 1 of the pandemic than it will be to sustain or build a culture with a lot of new employees in year 2 or 3 of remote-first work.

CEOs who care about their culture, their people, inclusion and belonging, and their people’s professional development will have to really re-think how things work if they are going to steer their companies towards remote-only policies, or even remote-first employees, and still be inclusive workplaces.  That doesn’t mean it can’t be done.  But gravitating to a remote-only way of life, even if it’s personally enticing or if some talented and vocal employees demand it, may not be in the best interest of their overall company and employee population.

I haven’t done short book summaries in a LONG time, but I’ll try to start adding that back into the mix as I read interesting and relevant books. Here’s one to add to your list: One Life to Lead, by Russell Benaroya. I was recently connected to Russell by a mutual friend, TA McCann at Pioneer Square Labs. TA had a sense Russell and I would hit it off, and we did. Russell is a multi-time founder/CEO, a Coach, and an author, so we have a lot in common.

One Life to Lead is an excellent book. First, it is short and easy to get through. Unlike a lot of business books, it doesn’t go on too long or contain anything extraneous. It’s to the point!

Second, the book is a business book that’s not really about business. It’s about life and what Russell calls Life Design, which is a great framing of how to be intentional about leading your life. While I have become less and less of a life planner as I’ve gotten older under the headline of “man plans, God laughs,” I am a huge believer in being intentional about everything, which I talk about in Startup CEO quite a bit in the nuts and bolts context of building your business.

Finally, Russell’s framework is easy to understand and full of concrete exercises you can to. Here are his five steps, but you’ll have to read the book to get the details:

• Ground stories with facts. This reminds me a lot of the principles we have taught team members over the years in our Action/Design (and related) trainings. First, start with absolute concrete facts that everyone will agree are facts.
• Establish your principles. This is brilliant. Your company has documented values or operating principles. Why don’t you?
• Harness energy from the environment. Figuring out what makes you tick, and what drains your energy, is so important.
• Get in and stay in your genius zone. Shouldn’t we all focus our time on the things we do best and love the most?
• Take action. How to put it together and make it all happen.

If you don’t get out in front of life, it will happen to you, and Russell’s framework is about how to make sure you are in the driver’s seat of your own life. Here’s to that.

Book Short – A Smattering of Good Ideas that further my Reboot path

Ram Charan’s The Attacker’s Advantage was not his best work, but it was worth the read.  It had a cohesive thesis and a smattering of good ideas in it, but it felt much more like the work of a management consultant than some of his better books like Know How (review, buy), Confronting Reality (review, buy), Execution (review, buy), What the CEO Wants You to Know ( buy), and my favorite of his that I refer people to all the time, The Leadership Pipeline (review, buy).

Charan’s framework for success in a crazy world full of digital and other disruption is this:

Perceptual acuity (I am still not 100% sure what this means)

1. A mindset to see opportunity in uncertainty
2. The ability to see a new path forward and commit to it
3. Adeptness in managing the transition to the new path
4. Skill in making the organization steerable and agile

The framework is basically about institutionalizing the ability to spot pending changes in the future landscape based on blips and early trends going on today and then about how to seize opportunity once you’ve spotted the future.  I like that theme.  It matches what I wrote about when I read Mark Penn’s Microtrends (review, buy) years ago.

Charan’s four points are important, but some of the suggestions for structuring an organization around them are very company-specific, and others are too generic (yes, you have to set clear priorities).  His conception of something he calls a Joint Practice Session is a lot like the practices involved in Agile that contemporary startups are more likely to just do in their sleep but which are probably helpful for larger companies.

I read the book over a year ago, and am finally getting around to blogging about it.  That time and distance were helpful in distilling my thinking about Charan’s words.  Probably my biggest series of takeaways from the book – and they fit into my Reboot theme this quarter/year, is to spend a little more time “flying at higher altitude,” as Charan puts it:  talking to people outside the company and asking them what they see and observe from the world around them; reading more and synthesizing takeaways and applicability to work more; expanding my information networks beyond industry and country; creating more routine mechanisms for my team to pool observations about the external landscape and potential impacts on the company; and developing a methodology for reviewing and improving predictions over time.

Bottom line:  like many business books, great to skim and pause for a deep dive at interesting sections, but not the author’s best work.

Book Short:  Not As Deep As You’d Like

Deep Change, by Robert Quinn, is a reasonably interesting collection of thoughts on management and leadership, but it doesn’t hang together very well as a single work with a unified theme.  The promise is interesting — that we must personally abandon our knowledge, competence, techniques and abilities and “walk naked into the land of uncertainty” to undergo great personal change that can then lead us to organizational change — but the book doesn’t quite deliver on it.

That said, I enjoyed the book as a quick read for a few of its more interesting concepts.  For example, Quinn has a great crystallization of many things I’ve observed over the years called “the tyrrany of competence” where organizations can get paralyzed by people who are technically strong at their jobs but who are either disruptive culturally or who have such a chokehold on their role that they hold back the organization as a whole from growing.  Another good concept is a chart and some related commentary about how a person transforms from an individual contributor, to a manager, to a leader — great for any growing company.  The last interesting one was a grid mapping out four different types of CEOs — Motivator, Vision Setter, Anazlyer, and Taskmaster.  Quinn goes into some detail about the characteristics of each and then circles back to the inevitable conclusion (like most Harvard Business Review articles) that the best CEOs exhibit all four characteristics at different times, in different circumstances.

So not my favorite book overall, but some good tidbits.  Probably worth a quick read if you’re a student of management and leadership.  Thanks to my former colleague Kendall Rawls for this book.

Book Short:  Deep Dive on Customer Development

I continue to be on a tear reading books about startups as I finish and get ready for the publication of Startup CEO (now available for pre-ordering at Amazon).   This week’s selection was The Startup Owners Manual:  A Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, by Steve Blank and Bon Dorf.  This book is a significantly more detailed version of Blank’s first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which was a revolutionary book a few years ago that helped spawn the Lean Startup movement.

And when I say significantly, I mean it!  The Startup Owners Manual is 600 pages of really detailed how-to around the first two steps of Blank’s four steps, Customer Discovery and Customer Validation.  It doesn’t get into the last two steps at all, Customer Creation and Company Building.  It has a lot of overlap with Ash Maurya’s Running Lean (post, book), although it’s significantly more detailed.  And essentially, especially around the topic of “Company Building,” my book starts where this one stops.

One of Blank’s great lines in the book is that a “A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model.”  That frames the whole Lean Startup movement really, really well.  The whole concept of Customer Discovery and Validation, of testing hypotheses, is critical to getting product-marketing fit right in a capital-efficient manner.  If I were starting Return Path today, we’d be using these methods from the get-go.

But Lean principles are wholly compatible with larger companies, as well, and in fact we use all of these principles in our product development organization today.  We adapt them for our size and scale and the fact that often we are selling either new or enhanced versions of existing product into existing customers, but our product teams have all embraced the Lean principles and the vocabulary around them, and our goal is that we should never bring a product to market that isn’t already being bought.

Book Short:  Catchiest Title in a Long Time

You have to admit, a book called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich has a pretty enticing title.  The email geek in me thinks that if it were a subject line, it would have a good open rate.  Anyway, the book, by Timothy Ferriss, is a breezy read that  blends self help with entrepreneurship, has a lot of good resource lists in it, and is worth reading  if you don’t take it too  seriously.

There are some good central points to the book.  First, life has changed, and people don’t want to slave away until they’re 65 any more so they can do all the fun stuff in their old age — they want to change directions, unplug more regularly, and enjoy life with their families when they’re younger.  I buy that.
Second, good companies are increasingly allowing employees more degrees of freedom in the where and when and even how of getting things done, just as long as they get things done — and people should take advantage of that.  I buy that as well — we practice that at Return Path, generally speaking.  Third, startups that are mainly virtual organizations and internet-based are easier, cheaper, and potentially more profitable than most businesses have been, historically speaking.  Ok, fair enough.

Fourth, anyone can be just like the author and do all of this stuff, too, right?  Start a business that turns into a cash machine that requires little to no maintenance while becoming one of the best tango dancers in the world in South America, etc. etc. etc.  Well, maybe not.  I guess the point of self-help books is to show an extreme example and inspire people to achieve it, and I do think there’s a lot to what Ferriss says about how people can live richly without being rich, but the fact is that the world would fall apart if everyone did what he does.  And the other fact is that Ferriss is well above average in intellect and drive, and probably some physical talents as well from his descriptions of tango dancing and kick boxing, which must contribute to his success in life far more than his operating philosophy does.

But as I said, it’s a fun read, and if you don’t take it too seriously, or at least take the feedback directionally as opposed to whole hog, it’s well worth it.

Book Short:  Great Marketing Checklists

Trade Show and Event Marketing:  Plan, Promote, and Profit, by our direct marketing colleague Ruth Stevens, is hardly a page-turner, but it is a great read and well worth the money for anyone in your B2B marketing department.  That’s true as much for the event marketing specialist as the marketing generalist.

The author brings a very ROI-focused approach to planning and executing events – whether big trade shows or smaller corporate events, which are becoming increasingly popular in recent years for cost, focus, and control reasons.  But beyond events, the book has a number of excellent checklists that are more general for marketers that I found quite useful both as a reminder of things we should be doing at Return Path as well as ways we should be thinking about the different elements of our B2B marketing mix.

Some of the best tables and charts include:  strengths, weaknesses, and best applications of trade shows vs. corporate events; comparative analysis of marketing tools by channel (this was great – talks about best applications for all major tools from events to newsletters to search to inside sales); 12-month exhibitor timeline for trade shows; a great riff on bad booth signage vs. good booth signage (hint:  don’t make the visitor do the work – be obvious!); business event strategic planning grid; pre-show campaign and post-show follow-up checklists; dos, don’ts and options for corporate events; a great section on qualifying and handling leads that extends well beyond trade shows; and several good case studies that are show-focused.

Thanks to Ruth herself for an autographed copy!  Team Marketing and sales leaders at Return Path – your copies are on the way.

How to Get Laid Off – an Employee’s Perspective

One of my colleagues at Return Path  saw my post about How to Quit Your Job about 5 years ago and was inspired to share this story with me.  Don’t read anything into this post, team!  There is no other meaning behind my posting it at this time, or any time, other than thinking it’s a very good way of approaching a very difficult situation, especially coming from an employee.

In 2009 I was working at a software security start up in the Silicon Valley.  Times were exceedingly tough, there were several rounds of layoffs that year, and in May I was finally on the list. I was informed on a Tuesday that my last day was that Friday.  It was a horrible time to be without a job (and benefits), there was almost no hiring at all that year, one of the worst economic down turns on record.  While it was a hard message,  I knew that it was not personal, I was just caught up on a bad math problem.

After calling home to share the bad news, I went back to my desk and kept working. I had never been laid off and was not sure what to do, but I was pretty sure I would have plenty of free time in the short term, so I set about figuring out  how to wrap things up there.  Later that day the founder of the company came by, asked why I had not gone home, and I replied that I would be fine with working till the end of the week if he was okay with it.  He thanked me.

Later that week, in a meeting where we reviewed and prioritized the projects I was working on, we discussed who would take on the top three that were quite important to the future of the company.  A few names were mentioned of who could keep them alive, but they were people who I knew would not focus on them at all.  So I suggested they have me continue to work on them, that got an funny look but when he thought about it , it made sense, they could 1099 me one day a week.  The next day we set it up.  I made more money than I could of on unemployment, but even better I kept my laptop and work email, so I looked employed which paid off later. 

That one day later became two days and then three, however, I eventually found other full time work in 2010.  Layoffs are hard,  but it is not a time to burn bridges.   In fact  one of the execs of that company is a reference and has offered me other opportunities for employment.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

I don’t understand why everyone in the world hasn’t yet signed up for VOIP services from companies like Vonage. We just did it a couple of weeks ago at home. In terms of quality, it’s virually indistinguidhable from a POTS land line. You can have as many numbers as you want on the same account. TiVo works with it. You can keep your old phone number. There are no minimums and no contracts. They don’t have to come to your house to get it to work. They’ve even figured out how to get 911 and 311 to work with it.

It’s got tons of other cool features, as well, but even if all you do with it is use it like your old phone or fax line, all it costs is $15/month with a $40 startup cost for 500 minutes/month (they also have $25/month for unlimited calling). I hate to sound like an ad for the thing, but it’s just a better way of having a phone at home. The only real risk is an outage with your cable modem, and while that does happen from time to time, most people now have cell phones as a backup, and if your modem is out, calls go straight into voicemail.

We’ve had one or two phone lines at home forever and bounced around over the years from Verizon to Sprint to AT&T depending on who had the best deal of the month. No matter which carrier we’ve used, we don’t use our home phone that much, and we’ve always paid between $50-100/month per line for the privilige. No longer!

Anyway, I don’t know much about Vonage, and they may have tons of competitors. From a business perspective, then, I don’t know who is going to win this war…but as my board member Greg Sands says, I certainly know who’s going to lose it. I wouldn’t want to be a big old phone company today!

I was excited to read Launchpad Republic: America’s Entrepreneurial Edge and Why It Matters, by Howard Wolk and John Landry the minute Brad sent it to me. I love American history, I love entrepreneurship, and I’m deeply concerned about the health of our country right now. I have to say…on all fronts, the book did not disappoint!

The authors make several points, but the one that sets the tone for the book is that like our country’s origins and culture in general, entrepreneurship is itself rebellious. It’s about upstarts challenging the status quo in some way or other with a better way to do something, or with a new thing. The balance between protecting private property rights and allowing for entrepreneurs to fail and to disrupt incumbent leaders is what makes America unique, especially compared to the way European business culture has traditionally operated (consensus-oriented) and the way China operates (authoritarian).

I loved how the authors wove a number of business history vignettes together with relevant thru lines. Business in Colonial times and how Alexander Hamilton thought about national finances may seem dusty and distant, but not when you see the direct connection to John D. Rockefeller, IBM, GE, Microsoft, or Wendy Kopp.

The book was also a good reminder that some of the principles that have made America great and exceptional also underly our successful business culture, things like limited government, checks and balances within government and between government and the private sector, and decentralized finance.

Without being overly political, the authors also get into how our political and entrepreneurial system can and hopefully will tackle some of today’s more complex issues, from climate change to income inequality to stakeholder capitalism.

At the heart of all of it is the notion that entrepreneurs’ creativity drive America forward and are a leading force for making our country and our economy durable and resilient. As a career entrepreneur, and one who is now in the business of helping other entrepreneurs be more successful, this resonated. If you’re a student of American history…or a student of entrepreneurship, this is a great read. If you’re both, it’s a must read.

Book Short:  Entrepreneurial Lessons

The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from 42 Founders, by David Kidder, is the ultimate coffee table book for entrepreneurs and people who are interested in how they think about running their businesses.

David is the author of the Intellectual Devotional series (here’s a link to one of the five or six books in the series), he’s a good friend of mine and a member of a CEO Forum that I’m in, and my major disclosure about this blog post is that I’m one of the 42 entrepreneurs David interviewed for and profiles in the book.

The Startup Playbook is very different from my own book (in progress) on being a Startup CEO.  Where my book is going to go deep on different topics – think of it as a bit of a field guide – David’s book is extremely broad in its coverage of different entrepreneurs and their stories.  Taken together, the book paints a great picture of how CEOs think about the most important parts of the job.  It’s also a nice change of pace (for me, anyway) that David profiles some entrepreneurs who aren’t in the Internet/tech space.

It was an honor to be included in The Startup Playbook next to entrepreneurs like Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk.