Book Short:  Underdog Victorious

The Underdog Advantage, by David Morey and Scott Miller, was a worthwhile read, though not a great book.  It was a little shallow, and although I enjoyed its case studies (who doesn’t love hearing about Ben & Jerry’s, Southwest, JetBlue, Starbucks?), I didn’t feel like the authors did enough to tie the details of the success of the case study companies back to the points they made in the book.

That said, the book had some great reminders in it for companies of all sizes and stages.  The main point was that successful companies always think of themselves as the underdog, the insurgent, and never get complacent.  They run themselves like a political campaign, needing to win an election every single day.  A lot of the tactics suggested are timeless and good to remember…things like never declare victory, always play offense, always respond to attacks, remember to communicate from the inside out, and remember to sell employees on a mision and purpose in order to make them your main ambassadors.  The laundry list of tactics is the book’s greatest strength.

My latest book (I’m a co-author along with Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani), Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors, is now live on Amazon – today is publication day! The book is a major refresh of the first edition, now eight years old. I was quoted in it extensively but not an official author – Brad and Mahendra were nice enough to share that with me this time. The book includes a lot of new material and new voices, including a great Foreword by Jocelyn Mangan from Him for Her and Illumyn. It’s aligned with Startup CEO and Startup CXO in look and in format and is designed to be an easy-to-read operator’s manual to private company boards of directors. Brad also blogged about it here.

We’ve done a lot of work around startup boards at Bolster the past couple of years, including working with over 30 CEOs to help them hire amazing new independent board members. Our landmark Board Benchmark study last year highlighted the problem with startup boards, but also the opportunity that lies within: not enough diversity on the boards, but also not nearly enough independent directors — and a lot of open seats for independent directors that could be filled. That conclusion led me to my Startup Board Mantra of 1-1-1: Independent directors from Day 1, 1 member of the management team, and 1 independent for every 1 investor.

As we posted on the Bolster blog last week, our quick refresh of the Board Benchmark study revealed some good news and some bad news about progress on diversity in the boardroom with startups. The good news is that the needle is starting to move very slowly, and that independent directors present the best opportunity to add diversity to boards. Our data shows that half of all new directors brought onto boards in the last year were independents, and of those, 57.9% were women and 31.6% were non-White board members. Those numbers are well above the prior study’s benchmarks of 36% and 23%, respectively (our experience running board searches skews even further to women and non-White directors being hired).

The bad news is how slowly the needle is moving — only 20% of open independent board seats were filled over the previous year, which is a lot of missed opportunity. The main takeaway is that while overall representation on boards is still skewed largely White and male, the demographic profile of new board appointments looks a lot different from the representation on boards today, indicating that CEOs are making intentional changes to their board composition.

Startup boards are a great way to drive grassroots change to the face of leadership in corporate America. More CEOs need to follow up by filling their open board seats and fulfilling their stated desires to improve diversity in the boardroom. This takes time and prioritization — these are the places where we see board searches either never get off the ground, or falling down once they do, for all the searches we either run or pitch at Bolster.

Hopefully Startup Boards will help the startup ecosystem get there.

Parenting and Corporate Leadership

Let me be clear up front:  I do not think of my colleagues at Return Path as children, and I do not think of Casey, Wilson, and Elyse as employees.  That said, after a couple weeks of good quality family time in January, I was struck by the realization that being a CEO for a long time before having kids has made me a better parent…and I think being a new parent the last three years has made me a better CEO. 

Here's why.  The two roles have a heavy overlap in required core interpersonal competencies.  And doing both of them well means you're practicing those competencies twice as many hours in a week than just doing one – and in different settings.  It's like cross training.  In no order, the cross-over competencies I can think of are…

Decisiveness.  Be wishy washy at work, and the team can get stuck in a holding pattern.  Be wishy washy with kids, they run their agenda, not yours.

Listening.  As my friend Anita says, you have two ears and one mouth for a reason.  Listening to your team at work, and also listening for what's not being said, is the best way to understand what's going on in your organization.  Kids need to be heard as well.  The best way to teach good verbal communication skills is to ask questions and then listen actively and attentively to the responses.

Focus.  Basically, no one benefits from multitasking, even if it feels like a more efficient way of working.  Anyone you're spending time with, whether professionally or at home, deserves your full attention. The reality is that the human brain is full of entropy anyway, so even a focused conversation, meeting, or play time, is somehow compromised.  Actually doing other activities at the same time destroys the human connection.

Patience.  For the most part, steering people to draw their own conclusions about things at work is key.  Even if it takes longer than just telling them what to do, it produces better results.  With kids, patience takes on a whole new meaning, but giving them space to work through issues and scenarios on their own, while hard, clearly fosters independence.

Alignment.  If you and your senior staff disagree about something, cross-communication confuses the team.  If you and your spouse aren't on the same page about something, watch those kids play the two of you off each other.  A united front at the top is key!

I'm sure there are others…but these are the main things that jump to mind.  And of course one can be great in one area without being in the other area at all, or without being great in it.  Are you a parent and a business leader?  What do you think?

Book Short:  Reality Doesn’t have to Bite

I just read Confronting Reality (book; audio), the sequel to Execution, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan.  Except I didn’t read it, I listened to it on Mariquita’s iPod Shuffle over the course of two or three long runs in the past week.  The book was good enough, but I also learned two valuable lessons.  Lesson 1:  Listening to audio books when running is difficult – it’s hard to focus enough, easy to lose one’s place, can’t refer back to anything or take notes.  Lesson 2:  If you sweat enough on your spouse’s Shuffle, you can end up owning a Shuffle of your own.

Anyway, I was able to focus on the book enough to know that it’s a good one.  It’s chock full of case studies from the last few years, including some “new economy” ones instead of just the industrial types covered in books like Built to Last and Good to Great.  Cisco, Sun, EMC, and Thomson are all among those covered.  The basic message is that you really have to dig into external market realities when crafting a strategic plan or business model and make sure they’re in alignment with your financial targets as well as people and processes.  But the devil’s in the details, and the case studies here are great.

CEO Diary:  What Makes a Great Day?

5:30 a.m. – run (have to keep up with Brad)

8:45 a.m. – networking coffee with former main contact at large strategic partner; now CFO of another company in the industry

9:30 a.m. – work time/email/read newsletters, Wall St. Journal online, various RSS feeds

10:30 a.m. – internal meeting to discuss mothballing a product feature that’s hard to maintain and doesn’t generate much revenue

11:00 a.m. – internal meeting to clarify roles and responsibilities between account management and  client technical operations

11:30 a.m. – brainstorm 2006 strategy with head of one of our lines of business

1:00 p.m. – great sales call on a Tier I prospect with new sales person; business almost certainly forthcoming!

3:00 p.m. – meet with head of sales and hea of HR to discuss candidate for sales position and potential changes to sales compensation structure

3:30 p.m. – review draft of new (revolutionary!?!?) corporate web site; do deep dive on critical headlines and copy points with team members

4:30 p.m. – status meeting with new head of marketing,including quick stand-up meeting on PR strategy for upcoming trade show with one line of business head and product manager

5:30 p.m. – work/email/planning next Board meeting agenda/blog posting

7:00 p.m. – dinner with CTO

Energizing (frenetic?).  Diverse in terms of functions/departments covered.  Good balance of internal vs. external.  Some items high level, some more detailed.  Mix of brainstorming vs. decisions vs. status checks.  Some social mixed in with hardcore work.  This is why I love my job!

(This is the sixth post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Other posts in order are 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)

As these posts have been running, a few people have asked me to quickly compare this experience to the experience of being a Startup CEO.  And that’s an interesting way to think about it. In a lot of ways, the couple of weeks of getting the IRT up and running felt like starting up a new business, only a lot more intense.  Following the outline of sections in Startup CEO:  a field guide to scaling up your business…

Part One: Storytelling.  The whole timeframe was super compressed.  It took us 2 days to be able to spend 4 hours writing our initial pitch deck defining scope, structure, and staffing request – and that was while we were working hard on our first two workstreams.  In a startup environment, that process would have taken much longer, involved more customer discovery and product/market fit research and spending 100% of our time on that. But then we got our “approval and funding” in about 45 minutes – that would have taken weeks and involved dozens of pitch meetings.  In terms of creating the organization’s Mission, Vision, and Values, we didn’t even bother, although I think it helped that the three of us were generally on the same page with how to work and that urgency was the essence of our job. The larger emergency operations team that we were more or less embedded in also had a very clear set of values and operating principles on display…although we didn’t actually go read them, I think they were in sync with our view of our team’s mission and principles.  In terms of “bringing our story to life,” that was wholly unnecessary!

Part Two: Building The Company’s Human Capital.  Like a startup, getting it right with the first handful of employees means everything.  In this case, the first two deputies on the team, handpicked by the Governor’s staff, were awesome and critical.  Bringing someone in from the private sector to run a public sector team only works when the rest of the team is incredibly knowledgeable about how the machinery of state government works.  And in the end, I think Sarah will be a better leader for the team than I was because she had a combination of private and public sector experience (and within her public sector experience, she had a lot of emergency response experience).  In general, the recruiting process was soooo different than private sector and public sector normally are. The first two team members handpicked the best people they knew in other relevant parts of the government. People were brought onto the team after one short phone call.  Other state departments heads loaned their people willingly. No such thing as a comp negotiation or a reference check. There were a bunch of other things under the “Human Capital” heading that are interesting notes/comparables as well. First, feedback in a compressed-timeframe emergency is something that you absolutely can’t skip – and you can’t wait for a formal process either.  Our team was pretty good about giving feedback at least daily in a semi-structured way as well as in the moment. We didn’t really have time to get into things like career pathing and compensation and firing. We did, after about 6 days at the suggestion of Kacey, our Chief of Staff, move the team to almost entirely remote (other than leadership and occasional critical meetings). This worked surprisingly well for a workforce probably unaccustomed to remote work.  The rest of the world is also learning how to do a lot of that now, too.

Part Three: Execution.  This whole experience was 97% execution.  In fact, we had a hard time finding time for things like strategy and planning because there was a crushing amount of work to do (welcome to emergency response), and a small team to do it.  We didn’t have to worry about raising money, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and some of the other major execution steps in the private sector. We did do a good job of creating goals and milestones for our workstreams, but even that took a couple of weeks, and in retrospect, I wish we’d been able to do some of those sooner.  In terms of how our work got done, we were very conscious of creating daily meeting routines to structure our day and work – but there was no such thing as even a weekly meeting (let alone monthly strategics or quarterly offsites!), only daily meetings, multiple times per day. One thing that was interesting – I talk in the book about being deliberate and consistent with your platforms, especially around communication.  Channel proliferation is a real issue today (much more so than when I wrote the book), but we had an interesting mismatch at the beginning. The public sector team was used to email, text, and Google hangouts for comms. Nothing else. The private sector team used those things but was a lot more comfortable with Trello, Zoom, and Slack. Thank goodness both teams used G-Suite and not a mix of that and LiveOffice. But getting everyone on the team to converge on a couple systems is a work in progress and was messy, as evidenced in this great moment where Kacey was holding a laptop up to an actual whiteboard to show one of our private sector teams how she was thinking about something. 

Part Four: Building and Leading a Board of Directors.  This is kind of N/A, although the proxy for it in our case on the IRT was the leadership structure of the Emergency Operations Center and then the Governor and the part of his cabinet that was keyed into the emergency response.  In this regard, the main differences between the private sector and public sector were speed/formality (no room for formality when you’re meeting daily or at a moment’s notice!), and, interesting, the need for integration. A company reports to its board on how it’s doing.  This team had to use its “board” to make sure it was integrating with other state agencies and initiatives. In this way, the team functioned more like a business unit within a company than an actual company.

Part Five: Managing Yourself So You can Manage Others.  This was obviously critical…and obviously quite difficult.  And within the overall Emergency Operations Center (outside of our team, the real emergency professionals), there were people, including leaders, who were working 7 days/week for multiple weeks on end, and long days, too.  At one point, the EOC leader posted this note on the wall, and he frequently took time in daily briefings to encourage everyone to take a day or two off and take care of themselves physically.  He role-modeled that behavior as well. You can only run a sprint for so long. Once it becomes clear it’s a marathon, well, you know.

Stay tuned for the final post in the series tomorrow…

Book Short:  Culture is King

Tony Hsieh’s story, Delivering Happiness (book, Kindle), is more than just the story of his life or the story of Zappos. It’s a great window into the soul of a very successful company and one that in many ways has become a model for great culture and a great customer service model.  It’s a relatively quick and breezy read, and it contains a handful of legendary anecdotes from Zappos’ history to demonstrate those two things — culture and customer service — in action.

As Hsieh himself says in the book, you can’t copy this stuff and believe it will work in your company’s environment as it does in Zappos’.  You have to come up with these things on your own, or better yet, you have to create an environment where the company develops its own culture and operating system along the broad lines you lay out.  I think Return Path has many similarities with Zappos in how we seek out WOW experiences and in our Core Values, as well as the evolutionary path we took to get to those places.  But as much as I enjoyed reading about a like-minded company, I also recognized the specific things that were different and had a good visceral understanding as to WHY the differences exist.

It is the rare company that gets to $1 billion in revenue ever – let alone within a decade.  For that reason alone, this is a worthwhile read.  But if you are a student of organizational culture and believe in the power of values-driven organizations, this is good affirmation and full of good examples.  And if you’re a doubter of the power of those things, this might just convince you to think twice about that!

Book Short:  the Garage Workbench of the Future

Makers:  The New Industrial Revolution, by Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail (review, buy) and Free (review, buy) is just as mind expanding as his prior two books were at the time they were published. I had the pleasure of talking with Chris for a few minutes after he finished his keynote address at DMA2012 in Las Vegas this week, and I was inspired to read the book, which I did on the flight home.

 The short of it is that Anderson paints a very vivid picture of the future world where the Long Tail not only applies to digital goods but to physical goods as well. The seeds of this future world are well planted already in 3D printing, which I have been increasingly hearing about and will most likely be experimenting with come the holiday season (family – please take note!).

As someone who, like Anderson, tinkered with various forms of building as a kid in Shop at school and in the garage with my dad, it’s fascinating to think about a world where you can dream a physical product up, or download a design of it, or 3D scan it and modify it, and press a “make” button like you press a “print” button today on your computer, and have the product show up in your living room within minutes for almost nothing. This will change the world when the technology matures and gets cheaper and more ubiquitous. And this book is the blueprint for that change.

While we may look back on this book in 5 or 10 years, and say “DUH,” which is what many people would say now about The Long Tail or Free, for right now, this gets a WOW.

News Travels Fast

Fred’s post was Day 1 of the currently-seems-silly TSA ban on liquids on airplanes.  One day later, today, I had the pleasure of traveling from Idaho Falls to Boise and back (one metropolis to the next!), and I noticed almost no difference in security and passenger behavior at either airport.

Most people in line zinged out one bit of sarcastic resignation after the next about the silliness of banning all liquids.  My favorite was “next thing you know, we’re going to have to travel naked” — yikes — YIKES! — but as terrorists find new and exciting ways to terrorize us, and as our now-nationalized airport security staff doesn’t seem to understand the phrases “anticipation” or “long-term planning,” this seems like a not-so-silly comment.

Hopefully this hysteria will die down at some point.  I do remember for a few weeks after 9/11, security personnel were removing nail clippers and disposable razor blades from unsuspecting passengers, as if somehow we were going to shave the pilot to death.  Then again, the phrase “death by 1,000 cuts” must come from somewhere.

But the element of this whole thing that left the biggest impression on me was the difference between this and 9/11 — in the weeks after 9/11, passengers still showed up at the airport not knowing that Swiss army knives were contraband.  Within 48 hours of this incident, every single person I could hear at both small regional airports in Idaho were 100% informed and had not a single bottle of liquid on their person.  Perhaps one more reminder than in the Internet era, news travels super fast?

There’s been a growing cry for tech companies to add diversity to their leadership teams and boards, and for good reason. Those two groups are the most influential decision making bodies inside companies, and it’s been well documented that diverse teams, however you define diversity — diversity of demographics, thoughts, professional experience, lived experience — make better decisions. 

Gender, racial, and ethnic representation in executive teams and in board rooms are not new topics.  There’s been a steady drumbeat of them over the last decade, punctuated by some big newsworthy moments like the revelations about Harvey Weinstein and the tragic murder of George Floyd.  

It’s also true that in people-focused organizations, and most tech companies claim to be just that, it’s beneficial to have different types of leaders in terms of role modeling and visibility across the company. As one younger woman on my team years ago said, “if you can see it…you can be it!”

My company Bolster is a platform for CEOs to efficiently build out their executive teams and boards. But while nearly every search starts with a diversity requirement, many don’t end that way. 

Here’s why, and here’s what can be done about it. 

For boards, the “why” is straightforward. Board searches are almost never a priority for CEOs. They’re viewed as optional. Bolster’s Board Benchmark study in 2021 indicated that only a third of private companies have independent directors at all;even later stage private companies only have independent directors two-thirds of the time. That same study indicated that 80% of companies had open Board seats. The comparable longitudinal study in 2022 indicated that the overwhelming majority of those open board seats were still open. 

Independent directors are usually the key to diversity, as the overwhelming majority of founders and VCs are still white and male. It takes a lot of time and effort to recruit and hire and onboard new directors, and in the world of important versus urgent, it will always be merely important. Without prioritizing hiring independents, board diversity may be a lofty goal, but it’s also an empty promise. I wrote about my Rule of 1s here and in Startup Boards – I wish more CEOs and VCs took the practice of independent boards and board diversity seriously. The silver lining here is that when CEOs do end up prioritizing a search for an independent director, they are increasingly open to diverse directors, even if those people have less experience than they might want. That openness to directors who may never have been on a corporate board (but who are board-ready), who may be a CXO instead of a CEO, is key. Of the several dozen independent directors Bolster has helped match to companies in the past year, almost 70% of them are from demographic populations that are historically underrepresented in the boardroom.

Diversity is stalling for Senior Executive hiring for the opposite reason. Exec hires are usually urgent enough that CEOs prioritize them. And they frequently start their searches by talking about the importance of diversity. But Senior Executives are much more often hired for their resume than for competency or potential. Almost all executive searches start with some variation of this line, which I’m lifting directly from a prior post: “I want to hire the person who took XYZ Famous Company from where I am today to 10x where I am today.” The problem with that is simple. That person is no longer available to be hired. They have made a ton of money, and they have moved beyond that job in their career progression. So inevitably, the search moves on to look for the person who worked for that person, or even one more layer down…or the person who that person WAS before they took the job at XYZ Famous Company. Those people may or may not be easy to find or available, but they feel less risky. In the somewhat insular world of tech, those candidates are also far less likely to be diverse in background, experience, thought, or, yes, demographics.

Running a comprehensive executive search based on competencies, cultural fit, scale experience, and general industry or analogous industry experience is much harder. It takes time, patience, digging deeper to surface overlooked candidates or to check references, and probably a little more risk taking on the part of CEOs. And while CEOs may be willing to take some risk on a first-time independent director, fewer are willing to take a comparable level of risk on an unproven or less known executive hire. 

For some CEOs, the answer is just to take more risk — or more to the point, recognize that any senior hire carries risk along a number of dimensions, so there’s no reason to prioritize your narrow view of resume pedigree over any critical vector. For others, the answer may be to bring the focus of diversity in senior hires to “second level” leaders like Managers, Directors, or VPs, where the perceived risk is lower, and the willingness to invest in training and mentorship is higher. Those people in turn can be promoted over time into more senior positions. 

Not every executive or board hire has to be demographically diverse. Not every executive team or board has to have individual quotas for different identity groups, and diversity has many flavors to it. But without doing the work, tech CEOs will continue to bemoan the lack of diversity in their leadership ranks, and miss out on the benefits of diverse leadership, while not taking ownership for those efforts stalling.

Book Short:  Presentation Zen

A few years ago, I blogged about Cliff Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullets.  I don’t know whether it’s a better book, or whether the timing of reading it just made a deeper impression on me, but I just read and LOVED Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds.

The concept is similar — a bad Powerpoint presentation kills your message as much as that horrendous high school physics teacher turned you off from the natural sciences.  Reynolds’s examples are rich, and there are tons of “before and after” slides in the book for the visual learners among us.  In addition, he articulates very clearly what I’ve always thought, since my consulting days, made for an excellent presentation:  offline storyboarding.

I’d recommend the book to anyone who does a lot of Powerpoint.  Relevant Return Pathers, don’t worry, your copies will come soon along with a new training course I’m developing using some of the concepts within.