Book Short: The Joys of Slinging Hash

Patrick Lencioni’s The Three Signs of a Miserable Job is a good read, as were his last two books, The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link).  They’re all super short, easy reads (four express train rides on Metro North got the job done), with a single simple message and great examples.  This one is probably my second favorite so far.

This book, which has a downright dreary title, is great.  It points to and proposes a solution to a problem I’ve thought about for a long time, which is how do you create meaning for people in their day to day work when they’re not doing something intrinsically meaningful like curing a disease or feeding the homeless.  His recipe for success is simple:

– Get people to articulate the relevance in their jobs…the meaning they derive out of their work…an understanding of the people whose lives are made better, even in small ways, by what they do every day

– Get people to measure what they do (duh, management 101), IN RELATION TO THE RELEVANCE learnings from the last point (ahh, that’s an interesting twist)

– Get to know your people as people

All of these are things you’d generally read in good books on management, but this book ties them together artfully, simply, and in a good story about a roadside pizza restaurant.  It also stands in stark contrast to the book I reviewed and panned a few days ago by Jerry Porras in that it is nothing but examples from non-celebrities, non-success stories — ordinary people doing ordinary jobs.

Brad has blogged glowingly about Death by Meeting, so I’ll probably make that my next Lencioni read next month, with two more to go after that.

The Best Laid Plans, IV

I have had a bunch of good comments from readers about the three posts in this series about creating strategic plans (input phase, analysis phase, output phase).  Many of them are leading me to write a fourth post in the series, one about how to make sure the result of the plan isn’t shelfware, but flawless execution.

There’s a bit of middleware that has to happen between the completion of the strategic plan and the work getting done, and that is an operating plan.  In my observation over the years, this is where most companies explode.  They have good ideas and capable workers, just no cohesive way to organize and contextualize the work.  There are lots of different formats operating plans can take, and a variety of acronyms to go with the formats, that I’ve heard over the years.  No one of these formats is “right,” but I’ll share the key process steps my own team and I went through just over the past few months to turn our strategic planning into action plans, synchronizing our activities across products and groups.

• Theme:  we picked a theme for the year that generally held the bulk of the key work together – a bit of a rallying cry
• Initiatives:  recognizing that lots of people do lots of routine work, we organized a series of a dozen “move the ball forward” projects into specific initiatives
• Communication:  we unveiled the theme and the initiatives to ALL at our annual business meeting to get everyone’s head around the work to be done in the upcoming year
• Plans:  each of the dozen initiative teams, and then also each team/department in the company (they’re different) worked together to produce a short (1-3 page) plan on a template we created, with a mission statement, a list of direct and indirect participants, important milestones and metrics
• Synchronization:  the senior management team reviewed all the plans at the same time and had a meaningful discussion to synchronize the plans, making edits to both substance and timing
• Scorecard:  we built our company scorecard for the year to reflect “green/yellow/red” grading on each initiative and visually display the most important 5-6 metrics across all initiatives
• Ongoing reporting:  we will publish the scorecard and updated to each initiative plan quarterly to the whole company, when we update them for Board meetings

As I said, there’s no single recipe for success here, but this is a variant on what we’ve done consistently over the years at Return Path, and it seems to be working well for us.  I think that’s the end of this series, and judging from the comments I’ve received on the blog and via email, I’m glad this was useful to so many people.

The Best Laid Plans, Part I

One of my readers asked me if I have a formula that I use to develop strategic plans.  While every year and every situation is different, I do have a general outline that I’ve followed that has been pretty successful over the years at Return Path.  There are three phases — input, analysis, and output.  I’ll break this up into three postings over the next three weeks.

The Input Phase goes something like this:

Conduct stakeholder interviews with a few top clients, resellers, suppliers; Board of directors; and junior staff roundtables.  Formal interviews set up in advance, with questions given ahead.  Goal for customers: find out their view of the business today, how we’re serving them, what they’d like to see us do differently, what other products we could provide them.  Goal for Board/staff: get their general take on the business and the market, current and future.

Conduct non-stakeholder interviews with a few industry experts who know the company at least a little bit.  Goal: learn what they think about how we were doing today…and what they would do if they were CEO to grow the business in the future.

Re-skim a handful of classic business books and articles.  Perennial favorite include Good to Great, Contrarian Thinking, and Crossing the Chasm.

Hold a solo visioning exercise.  Take a day off, wander around Central Park.  No phone, no email.  Nothing but thinking about business, your career, where you want everything to head from a high level.

Hold senior staff brainstorming.  Two-day off-site strategy session with senior team and maybe Board.

Next up:  the Analysis Phase.

The Best Laid Plans, Part III

Once you’ve finished the Input Phase and the Analysis Phase of producing your strategic plan, you’re ready for the final Output Phase, which goes something like this:

Vision articulation.  Get it right for yourself first.  You should be able to answer “where do we want to be in three years?” in 25 words or less.

Roadmap from today.  Make sure to lay out clearly what things need to happen to get from where you are today to where you want to be.  The sooner-in stuff needs to be much clearer than the further out stuff.

Resource Requirements.  Identify the things you will need to get there, and the timing of those needs – More people?  More marketing money?  A new partner?

Financials.  Lay them out at a high level on an annual basis, on a more detailed level for the upcoming year.

Packaging.  Create a compelling presentation (Powerpoint, Word, or in your case, maybe something more creative) that is crisp and inspiring.

Pre-selling.  Run through it – or a couple of the central elements of it – with one or two key people first to get their buy-in.

Selling.  Do your roadshow – hit all key constituents with the message in one way or another (could be different forms, depending on who).

The best thing to keep in mind is that there is no perfect process, and there’s never a “right answer” to strategy — at least not without the benefit of hindsight!

People have asked me what the time allocation and elapsed time should or can be for this process.  While again, there’s no right answer, I typically find that the process needs at least a full quarter to get right, sometimes longer depending on how many inputs you are tracking down and how hard they are to track down; how fanatical you are about the details of the end product; and whether this is a refresh of an existing strategy or something where you’re starting from a cleaner sheet of paper.  In terms of time allocation, if you are leading the process and doing a lot of the work yourself, I would expect to dedicate at least 25% of your time to it, maybe more in peak weeks.  It’s well worth the investment.

The Best Laid Plans, Part II

Once you’ve finished the Input Phase (see last week’s post) of producing your strategic plan, you’re ready for the Analysis Phase, which goes something like this:

Assemble the facts.  Keep notes along the way on the input phase items, assemble them into a coherent document with key thoughts and common themes highlighted.

Select/apply framework.  Go back to the reading and come up with one or more strategic frameworks.  Adapted them from the academic stuff to fit our situation.  Academic frameworks don’t solve problems on their own, but they do force you to think through problems in a structured way.

Step back.  Leave everything alone for two weeks and try not to think about it.  Come back to it with a fresher set of eyes immediately before starting on the final outputs.

Reality check.  Go back to one or two of the constituents you originally met with to begin laying out your thoughts to them – “try them on for size” – and get the unfiltered visceral reactions.

Next up:  the Output Phase.

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.

Book Short:  On The Same Page

Being on the same page with your team, or your whole company for that matter, is a key to success in business.  The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni, espouses this notion and boils down the role of the CEO to four points:

1. Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
2. Create organizational clarity
3. Overcommunicate organizational clarity
4. Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems

Those four points sound as boring as bread, but the book is anything but.  The book’s style is easy and breezy — business fiction.  One of the most poignant moments for me was when the book’s “other CEO” (the one that doesn’t “get it”) reflects that he “didn’t go into business to referee executive team meetings and delivery employee orientation…he loved strategy and competition.”  Being a CEO is a dynamic job that changes tremendously as the organization grows.  This book is a great handbook for anyone transitioning out of the startup phase, or for anyone managing a larger organization.

I haven’t read the author’s other books (this is one in a series), but I will soon!

Short of declaring failure and shutting down your company, laying off employees is the worst thing you may have to do as a startup CEO. I’ve had to lay people off on three separate occasions. It was difficult and emotional—those days were the worst of my career, and probably rank in the top 10 worst days of my life, period. This isn’t firing for cause—employees aren’t being asked to leave because of their own failings. They’re being asked to leave because the company can no longer afford to keep them. It’s not their fault.

It’s a truly awful process. Some CEOs will fall into the trap of thinking that because it’s invariably messy, it doesn’t matter how you do it. I couldn’t disagree more. Layoffs are bad, but how you handle them makes all the difference in the world. Here are a few best and worst practices for orchestrating layoffs.

Best Practices

1. Cut earlier and deeper than you have to. You really, really don’t want to go through this a second time. Assume you have less runway than you anticipate, and cut early. Cut more employees than you think you need to in order to reduce the risk of a second round of layoffs. Things are always worse than they look, even when the situation is bad enough to consider layoffs. Financing will take longer than expected to come through, receivables will dry up, and so on. 

2. Remove poor performers. You have no choice but to remove people if their positions are being cut altogether, regardless of performance. However, you can also take this as an opportunity for some major house cleaning. Just be sure to work with someone (a lawyer) who can help you navigate the legalities—particularly if you’re dealing with employees outside the US. 

3. Plan your talking points in advance of meetings. When I’m planning all-hands meetings, I tend to write bullet-point notes and talk freely instead of scripting my comments—but not for this. A round of layoffs is likely to be one of the most emotional moments of your career, and when you face your employees to deliver the news, you won’t be in your usual headspace. Don’t wing it. Plan everything you’re going to say—both to the individuals being let go and to your team as a whole—in advance. How you handle these meetings will depend on the size of your company and how many layoffs you’re doing. Regardless, you want to communicate respect for and appreciation of your employees throughout the process. 

4. Follow layoffs with an all-hands meeting. Layoffs are emotional for the entire team. Follow up with an all-hands meeting to explain what happened, why you made the choices you did—preferably with metrics to back up your decisions—what’s next for the company, and whether people who weren’t laid off are at risk in the future. (Be honest!) Ideally, the people you’re laying off should be included, too. You want to honor and thank them in as public a forum as possible. For those who remain, it’s important to cultivate security and trust. However you’re communicating with your employees, you’ll need to increase your efforts, and clarity is always better. Let them in on the state of the business, financials, and expectations. You don’t want to skip over the pain that comes with layoffs, but you do need to be prepared to move forward effectively. 

5. Treat employees who were laid off with dignity and honor the work they did. This will come into play when we talk about what not to do, but it’s important to remember that they’re being laid off for no fault of their own. One meaningful thing you can do is help people find their next step. Promoting the profiles of your former employees on job boards, portfolio lists, etc., offering your own connections if it’s relevant, or giving excellent referrals when you can are all great places to start. Severance is also key. Be sure to consult your board and follow your company policies, if you have them, then be as generous as you can afford to be. If you can offer a safety net or bridge, do so. 

These folks will still be alumni of your company, so the way you handle them personally will impact how they talk about the organization, rate you on Glassdoor, and refer to you as a leader. Every step of the process matters—whether it’s how you broke the news, how public things were, how helpful your team was, how much you paid—and will impact your company’s brand as an employer and your own reputation as a CEO. 

Worst Practices 

1. (Per above) Do not assume, because layoffs are awful and messy no matter what, that it doesn’t matter how you do it. It absolutely matters. 

2. Do not treat the people you fire like criminals. Don’t hire security guards or bring boxes into the office before breaking the news. Think very carefully about what systems you need to restrict access to, when, and whether there are any loopholes. Sure, you don’t want someone to be able to download a whole list of contacts from HubSpot. But do you really want them to be cut off from their email, calendar, and personal contacts? Shouldn’t you work with them to set up an autoresponder or figure out what happens to their email?

3. Do not promise this will never happen again. You can’t predict the future. You can say “we made the best decision possible, so that hopefully we won’t have to do this again.” Offer reassurance through facts and transparency rather than empty promises. 

4. Do not delegate the responsibility for deciding to lay off employees. As the CEO, this decision is yours to own. Also, do not blame someone else or the economy. Circumstances contribute, but at the end of the day, the buck stops with you, and again, you’re the one making the decision. 

5. Do not make mistakes about who is on which meeting invitation list or which employment list. Double check the list yourself, then have someone else check it. 

FAQs

I held a webinar recently with about 20 CEOs on this topic, and there were a number of questions that came up with interesting crowdsourced answers. Here are some snippets of some of them:

Q: How much severance is the right amount?

A: This is impossible to generalize—if you’re really out of cash, you may have your hands tied. If you can stick to your normal policies, you should. Companies represented on the call tended to give 1-2 weeks per year of service. Other thoughts that came up were: (a) offering a long post-termination exercise period for vested options, (b) accelerating some vesting, (c) creating a Salary Bridge program, which we did once at Return Path. The Salary Bridge program offered people an additional X weeks of continuing severance beyond the standard package if they still hadn’t found a job (but were trying and could show us they were trying) after their severance ran out. Very few people needed this, but the goodwill from offering it was huge.

Q: Have you ever considered salary cuts?

A: Yes. Usually a big layoff will come with some kind of salary cut for those who are staying, even if it’s just executives or just you as the CEO (which is more symbolic than anything else, but symbolism matters). Companies also had experience with doing salary cuts and reinstating the salaries as soon as the economic situation improved. One company talked about doing a 5% salary cut but then offering everyone a 10% bonus based on company financial milestones. In situations like this, it’s also a good idea to share metrics. How many jobs are you preserving by making cuts? 

Q: Do voluntary termination programs work? 

A: They might make you feel better, but be wary of doing them lest you lose key people you don’t want to lose!

Q: Can I expect additional employee attrition after a layoff?

A: Almost certainly. Any time you jolt the system, you’ll produce some unintended consequences. People will feel less stable in their role. Do your best to reassure key employees—even to the point of bringing a couple of them into the know immediately ahead of a layoff—so you don’t lose more people you don’t want to lose. Be wary of offering additional compensation or bonuses for them to stay, unless you are promoting them into expanded responsibilities (which can make sense if you’re consolidating things). Offering some people a raise “for no reason” while you’re letting other people go isn’t a great look.

Q: What about customer communications?

A: Our group was very mixed on whether or not you should do proactive external communications about a layoff. If you run a B2B organization, being a little more transparent with customers shows them you care about them—and gives you an opportunity to talk to them about any changes that might affect them, their service team, or their service levels. In a B2C organization, you’re likely either going to do something public like a short, empathetic blog post, or nothing at all. In all cases, please make sure you have a well developed internal FAQ and clear policies about who can and can’t talk externally as a company representative before doing a layoff so you’re not caught flat-footed.

Layoffs are messy and unfortunate, but you can still handle them artfully as a leader. How you handle layoffs will impact how your company recovers, it’ll impact your reputation as a CEO, and most importantly, it’ll impact the lives of the employees you laid off. I talk a lot about having a people first culture. One of the things I’ve learned about building companies with this in mind is that it’s got to be true all the way through. Even when you resort to layoffs, the people come first. 

(This post also appeared on the Bolster blog.)

Startup CEO (OnlyOnce – the book!), Part III – Pre-Order Now

My book, Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, is now available for pre-order on Amazon in multiple formats (Print, Kindle), which is an exciting milestone in this project!  The book is due out right after Labor Day, but Brad Feld tells me that the more pre-orders I have, the better.  Please pardon the self-promotion, but click away if you’re interested!

Here are a few quick thoughts about the book, though I’ll post more about it and the process at some point:

• I’ll be using the hashtag #startupceo more now to encourage discussion of topics related to startup CEOs – please join me!
• The book has been described by a few CEOs who read it and commented early for me along the lines of “The Lean Startup movement is great, but this book starts where most of those books end and takes you through the ‘so you have a product that works in-market – now what?’ questions”
• The book is part of the Startup Revolution series that Brad has been working on for a couple years now, including Do More (Even) Faster, Venture Deals, Startup Communities, and Startup Life (with two more to come, Startup Boards and Startup Metrics)
• Writing a book is a LOT harder than I expected!

At this point, the best thing I can do to encourage you to read/buy is to share the full and final table of contents with you, sections/chapters/headings.  When I get closer in, I may publish some excerpts of new content here on Only Once.  Here’s the outline:

Part I: Storytelling

• Chapter 1: Dream the Possible Dream…Entrepreneurship and Creativity, “A Faster Horse,” Vetting Ideas
• Chapter 2: Defining and Testing the Story…Start Out By Admitting You’re Wrong, A Lean Business Plan Template, Problem, Solution, Key Metrics, Unique Value Proposition and Unfair Advantages, Channels, Customer Segments, Cost Structure and Revenue Streams
• Chapter 3: Telling the Story to Your Investors…The Business Plan is Dead. Long Live the Business Plan, The Investor Presentation, The Elevator Pitch, The Size of the Opportunity, Your Competitive Advantage, Current Status and Roadmap from Today, The Strength of Your Team, Summary Financials, Investor Presentations for Larger Startups
• Chapter 4: Telling the Story to Your Team…Defining Your Mission, Vision and Values, The Top-down Approach, The Bottom-Up Approach, The Hybrid Approach, Design a Lofty Mission Statement
• Chapter 5: Revising the Story…Workshopping, Knowing When It’s Time to Make a Change, Corporate Pivots: Telling the Story Differently, Consolidating, Diversifying, Focusing, Business Pivots: Telling a Different Story
• Chapter 6: Bringing the Story to Life…Building Your Company Purposefully, The Critical Elements of Company-Building, Articulating Purpose:  The Moral of the Story, You Can Be a Force for Helping Others—Even If Indirectly

Part II: Building the Company’s Human Capital

• Chapter 7: Fielding a Great Team…From Protozoa to Pancreas, The Best and the Brightest, What About HR?, What About Sales & Marketing?, Scaling Your Team Over Time
• Chapter 8: The CEO as Functional Supervisor…Rules for General Managers
• Chapter 9: Crafting Your Company’s Culture…, Introducing Fig Wasp #879, Six Legs and a Pair of Wings, Let People Be People, Build an Environment of Trust
• Chapter 10: The Hiring Challenge…Unique Challenges for Startups, Recruiting Outstanding Talent, Staying “In-Market”, Recruitment Tools, The Interview: Filtering Potential Candidates, Two Ears One Mouth, Who Should You Interview?, Onboarding: The First 90 Days
• Chapter 11: Every Day in Every Way, We Get a Little Better…The Feedback Matrix, 1:1 Check-ins, “Hallway” Feedback, Performance Reviews, The 360, Soliciting Feedback on Your Own Performance, Crafting and Meeting Development Plans      
• Chapter 12: Compensation…General Guidelines for Determining Compensation, The Three Elements of Startup Compensation, Base Pay, Incentive Pay, Equity              
• Chapter 13: Promoting                …Recruiting from Within, Applying the “Peter Principle” to Management, Scaling Horizontally, Promoting Responsibilities Rather than Swapping Titles               
• Chapter 14: Rewarding: “It’s the Little Things” That Matter…It Never Goes Without Saying, Building a Culture of Appreciation
• Chapter 15: Managing Remote Offices and Employees…Brick and Mortar Values in a Virtual World, Best Practices for Managing Remote Employees
• Chapter 16: Firing: When It’s Not Working…No One Should Ever Be Surprised to Be Fired, Termination and the Limits of Transparency, Layoffs

Part III: Execution

• Chapter 17: Creating a Company Operating System…Creating Company Rhythms, A Marathon? Or a Sprint?
• Chapter 18: Creating Your Operating Plan and Setting Goals…Turning Strategic Plans into Operating Plans, Financial Planning, Bringing Your Team into Alignment with Your Plans, Guidelines for Setting Goals
• Chapter 19: Making Sure There’s Enough Money in the Bank…Scaling Your Financial Instincts, Boiling the Frog, To Grow or to Profit? That Is the Question, First Perfect the Model, Choosing Growth, Choosing Profits, The Third Way
• Chapter 20: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Financing…Equity Investors, Venture Capitalists, Angel Investors, Strategic Investors, Debt, Convertible Debt, Venture Debt, Bank Loans, Personal Debt, Bootstrapping, Customer Financing, Your Own Cash Flow
• Chapter 21: When and How to Raise Money…When to Start Looking for VC Money, The Top 11 Takeaways for Financing Negotiations
• Chapter 22: Forecasting and Budgeting…Rigorous Financial Modeling, Of Course You’re Wrong—But Wrong How?, Budgeting in a Context of Uncertainty, Forecast, Early and Often
• Chapter 23: Collecting Data…External Data, Learning from Customers, Learning from (Un)Employees, Internal Data, Skip-Level Meetings, Subbing, Productive Eavesdropping
• Chapter 24: Managing in Tough Times…Managing in an Economic Downturn, Hope Is Not a Strategy—But It’s Not a Bad Tactic, Look for Nickels and Dimes under the Sofa, Never Waste a Good Crisis, Managing in a Difficult Business Situation
• Chapter 25: Meeting Routines…Lencioni’s Meeting Framework, Skip-Level Meetings, Running a Productive Offsite
• Chapter 26: Driving Alignment…Five Keys to Startup Alignment, Aligning Individual Incentives with Global Goals
• Chapter 27: Have You Learned Your Lesson?…The Value (and Limitations) of Benchmarking, The Art of the Post-Mortem
• Chapter 28: Going Global…Should Your Business Go Global?, How to Establish a Global Presence, Overcoming the Challenges of Going Global, Best Practices for Managing International Offices and Employees
• Chapter 29: The Role of M&A…Using Acquisitions as a Tool in Your Strategic Arsenal, The Mechanics of Financing and Closing Acquisitions, Stock, Cash, Earn Out, The Flipside of M&A: Divestiture, Odds and Ends, Integration (and Separation)
• Chapter 30: Competition…Playing Hardball, Playing Offense vs. Playing Defense, Good and Bad Competitors
• Chapter 31: Failure…Failure and the Startup Model, Failure Is Not an Orphan

Part IV: Building and Leading a Board of Directors

• Chapter 32: The Value of a Good Board…Why Have a Board?, Everybody Needs a Boss, The Board as Forcing Function, Pattern Matching, Forests, Trees, Honest Discussion and Debate
• Chapter 33: Building Your Board…What Makes a Great Board Member?, Recruiting a Board Member, Compensating Your Board, Boards as Teams, Structuring Your Board, Board Size, Board Committees, Chairing the Board, Running a Board Feedback Process, Building an Advisory Board
• Chapter 34: Board Meeting Materials…“The Board Book”, Sample Return Path Board Book, The Value of Preparing for Board Meetings
• Chapter 35: Running Effective Board Meetings…Scheduling Board Meetings, Building a Forward-Looking Agenda, In-Meeting Materials, Protocol, Attendance and Seating, Device-Free Meetings, Executive and Closed Sessions
• Chapter 36: Non-Board Meeting Time…Ad Hoc Meetings, Pre-Meetings, Social Outings
• Chapter 37: Decision-Making and the Board…The Buck Stops—Where?, Making Difficult Decisions in Concert, Managing Conflict with Your Board
• Chapter 38: Working with the Board on Your Compensation and Review…The CEO’s Performance Review, Your Compensation, Incentive Pay, Equity, Expenses
• Chapter 39: Serving on Other Boards…The Basics of Serving on Other Boards, Substance, or Style?

Part V: Managing Yourself So You Can Manage Others

• Chapter 40: Creating a Personal Operating System…Managing Your Agenda, Managing Your Calendar, Managing Your Time, Feedback Loops
• Chapter 41: Working with an Executive Assistant…Finding an Executive Assistant, What an Executive Assistant Does
• Chapter 42: Working with a Coach…The Value of Executive Coaches, Areas Where an Executive Coach Can Help
• Chapter 43: The Importance of Peer Groups…The Gang of Six, Problem-Solving in Tandem
• Chapter 44: Staying Fresh…Managing the Highs and Lows, Staying Mentally Fresh, At Your Company, Out and About, Staying Healthy, Me Time
• Chapter 45: Your Family…Making Room for Home Life, Involving Family in Work, Bringing Work Principles Home
• Chapter 46: Traveling…Sealing the Deal with a Handshake, Making the Most of Travel Time, Staying Disciplined on the Road
• Chapter 47: Taking Stock of the Year…Celebrating “Yes”; Addressing “No”, Are You Having Fun?, Are You Learning and Growing as a Professional?, Is It Financially Rewarding?, Are You Making an Impact?
• Chapter 48:  A Note on Exits…Five Rules of Thumb for Successfully Selling Your Company

 If you’re still with me and interested, again here are the links to pre-order (Print, Kindle).

In Defense of Email, Part 9,732

I commented today on our partner Blue Sky Factory’s CEO, Greg Cangialosi’s excellent posting in defense of email as a marketing channel called Email’s Role and Future Thoughts.  Since the comment grew longer than I anticipated, I thought I’d re-run parts of it here.

A couple quick stats from Forrester’s recent 5-year US Interactive forecast back up Greg’s points con gusto:

– 94% of consumers use email; 16% use social networking sites (and I assume they mean USE them – not just get solicitations from their friends to join).  That doesn’t mean that social networking sites aren’t growing rapidly in popularity, at least in some segments of the population, and it doesn’t mean that email marketing may not be the best way to reach certain people at certain times.  But it does mean that email remains the most ubiquitous online channel, not to mention the most “pull-oriented” and “on demand.”

– Spend on email marketing is $2.7b this year, growing to $4.2b in 2012.  Sure, email by 2012 is the smallest “category” by dollars spent, but first of all, one of the categories is “emerging channels,” which looks like it includes “everything else” in the world other than search, video, email, and display.  So it includes mobile as well as social media, and who knows what else.  Plus, if you really understand how email marketing works, you understand that dollars don’t add up in the same way as other forms of media since so much of the work can be done in-house. 

What really amazes me is how all these “web 2.0” people keep talking about how email is dying (when in fact it’s growing, albeit at a slower rate than other forms of online media) and don’t focus on how things like classifieds and yellow pages are truly DYING, and what that means for those industries.

I think a more interesting point is that in Forrester’s forecast, US Interactive Marketing spend by 2012 in aggregate reached $61b, more than triple where it is today — and that the percent of total US advertising going to interactive grows from 8 to 18 over the five years in the forecast. 

The bigger question that leaves me with is what that means for the overall efficiency of ad spend in the US.  It must be the case that online advertising in general is more efficient than offline — does that mean the total US advertising spend can shrink over time?  Or just that as it gets more efficient,
marketers will use their same budgets to try to reach more and more prospects?

Book Not-So-Short:  Not Just for Women

At the request of the women in our Professional Services team, I recently read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In:  Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and while it may seem like dancing the meringue in a minefield for a male CEO to blog about it, I think it’s an important enough topic to give it a shot.  So here goes.

First, given the minefield potential, let me issue a few caveats up front.  These are deep, ages old, complex, societal issues and behaviors we’re talking about here.  There is no quick answer to anything.  There is no universal answer to anything.  Men don’t have the same perspective as women and can come across as observers (which in some respects, they are).  Working moms don’t have the same perspective as stay-at-home moms, or as single women.  We try to be good about all these issues at Return Path, but I’m sure we’ve only scratched the surface.  </caveats>

Perhaps most important, my overall take on the book is that it’s a very good business book that everyone should read – not just women.  I have a strong reaction to the reactions I’ve read and heard about the book – mostly from women dismissing the book because Sandberg has immense financial resources, so how could she possibly know the plight of the ordinary mom, and how could she understand what it is like to be a stay-at-home mom?  That reaction is to dismiss the dismissals!  I found the book to be very broadly applicable.  Of course things about life with a two-working parent family are easier if you have more money.  But that’s completely not the point of the book.  And Sandberg doesn’t once criticize stay-at-home moms for that choice – in fact, she acknowledges feelings of guilt and inferiority around them and admiration for the work they do that benefits all families and kids, not just their own.

Here are a few of the biggest areas of thinking, AHA, or questioning, that the book gave me:

• One of Sandberg’s underlying points is that the world would be a better place with more women in leadership positions, so that’s an important goal.  It’s interesting that few enough of our leaders are women, that it’s hard for me to draw that same conclusion, but it makes sense to me on the surface, and there’s some research about management teams and boards to back it up.  As far as I can tell, the world has yet to see a brutal female dictator.  Or a fair share of political or corporate scandals caused by women.  There are definitely some horror stories of “tough boss” women, but probably no more than “tough boss” men.  It’s interesting to note that in our society, leadership roles seem to be prized for their power and monetary reward, so even if the world wouldn’t be a better place with more female leaders, it would certainly be a more fair place along those two dimensions
• I felt that a bunch of Sandberg’s points about women were more generalizations about certain personality types which can be inherent in men and women.  Maybe they’re more prevalent in women, even much more, but some are issues for some men as well.  For example, her general point about women not speaking up even if they have something to say.  I have seen this trait in women as well as more introverted men.  As a leader, I work hard to draw comments out of people who look like they have something to say in a meeting but aren’t speaking up.  This is something that leaders need to pay close attention to across the board so that they hear all the voices around their tables.  Same goes for some of the fears she enumerates.  Many male leaders I know, myself included at times, have the “fear of being found out as a fraud” thought.  Same goes for the “desire to be liked by everyone” holding people back – that’s not gender specific, either.  All that said, if these traits are much more prevalent in women, and they are traits that drive attainment of leadership roles, well, you get the point
• The fact that women earn 77 cents on the dollar in equivalent jobs for men is appalling.  I’ve asked our People Team to do a study of this by level, factoring in experience and tenure, to make sure we don’t have that bias at Return Path.  I know for sure we don’t at the leadership level.  And I sure as heck hope we don’t anywhere in the organization.  We are also about to launch an Unconscious Bias training program, which should be interesting
• Sandberg made a really interesting point that most of the women who don’t work are either on the low end or high end of the income spectrum.  Her point about the low end really resonated with me – that women who don’t earn a lot stop working if their salaries only barely cover childcare costs.  However, she argues that that’s a very short term view, and that staying in the workforce means your salary will escalate over time, while childcare costs stay relatively flat.  This is compounded by the fact that women who lean back early in their careers simply because they are anticipating someday having children are earning less than they should be earning when they do finally have children.
• The other end of the income spectrum also made sense once I parsed through it – why do women whose husbands make a lot of money (most of whom make a lot of money as well) decide to off-ramp?  Sandberg’s point about the “Leadership ambition gap” is interesting, and her example of running a marathon with the spectators screaming “you know you don’t have to do this” as opposed to “you’ve got this” is really vivid.  See two bullets down for more on this one.  But it might not be straight-up Leadership Ambition Gap so much as a recognition that some of the high-earning jobs out there are so demanding that having two of them in the household would be a nightmare (noting that Dave and Sheryl seem to have figured some of that out), or that moms don’t want to miss out on that much of their children’s lives.  They want to be there…and they can afford to.  Another related topic that I wish Sandberg had covered in more depth is the path of moms who off-ramp, then re-on-ramp once their youngest children are in school, whether into the career they left or a different one.  That would be an interesting topic on many fronts
• Societal influences must matter.  The facts that, in 2011 – Gymboree manufactured onesies that say “smart like Daddy” and “pretty like Mommy,” and that JC Penney teenage girl t-shirts say “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me” are more than a little troublesome on the surface (unless Gymboree also produces “handsome like Daddy” and “wicked smart like Mommy,” which somehow I doubt).  The fact that women do worse on math and science tests when they have to identify their gender at the top of the test is surprising and shocking
• I am really fortunate that Mariquita only works part time, and it’s unclear to me how our lives would work if we both worked full time, especially given my extremely heavy travel schedule, though I am sure we’d figure it out.  And there’s no way that I carry 50% of the burden of household responsibilities.  Maybe 20-25% at best.  But I was struck by Sandberg’s comments (I am sure true) that in two-working-parent families, women still carry the preponderance of household responsibilities on their shoulders.  I totally don’t get this.  If you both work, how can you not be equal partners at home?  A quick mental survey of a couple of the two-working-parent families we know would indicate that the parents split household responsibilities somewhat evenly, though you can never know this from the outside.  This should be a no brainer.  Sandberg’s point that men need to “lean into their families” is spot on in these cases for sure
• On a related note, Sandberg’s comment that “as women must be more empowered at work, men must be more empowered at home…moms can be controlling and critical…if he’s forced to do things her way, pretty soon she’ll be doing them herself” made me smile.  I have definitely seen this “learned helplessness” on the home front with dads quite a bit over the years
• One really good point Sandberg makes is that younger employees who don’t have kids should be allowed to have a life outside of work just as much as women who do have kids.  And that she pays people for the quality and quantity of their output, not their hours.  These are principles that match our values and philosophy at Return Path 100%
• Probably the most startling moment in the book for me – and I suspect many other men – was Sandberg’s vignette about the young woman at Facebook who was starting to “lean back” because she might someday have a family – before she was even dating anyone!  This really gave me a lot of pause.  If widespread (and I assume it is), there are clearly societal forces at work that we need to do more to help women early in their careers overcome, if they want to overcome them
• Sandberg’s point that a rich and fulfilling career “is a Jungle Gym, not a Ladder” is spot on, but this is true for men as well as women.  It matches our philosophy of Scaling Horizontally perfectly
• Another very poignant moment in the book was when Sandberg talked about how she herself had shown bias against women in terms of who she called on in meetings or lectures during Q&A.  Again, lots of pause for me.  If female leaders have the same societal bias against women, that’s a sign that we all have real work in front of us to help level the playing field around giving women air time.  Similarly, her example of the Heidi/Howard study was fascinating around how women with the same characteristics are perceived differently by both male and female co-workers gives me pause (for the record, I know the Heidi in question, and I like her!).  Likewise, the fact that female leaders are often given unflattering nicknames like “The Iron Lady” – you’d never see something like that for a man in the same position.  At least Thatcher wore the name as a badge of honor

I hope this post doesn’t end up as a no-win piece of writing where all I do is touch a few nerves and inspire no ongoing dialog.  “Let’s start talking about it,” the ending theme of the book, is a great way to end this post as well.  As with all tough issues, articulating the problem is the first step toward solving it.  Women need to allow men (as long as the men are open-minded, of course!) to think what they think, say what they think in a safe space, and blunder through their own learnings without feeling threatened.  And men need to be comfortable having conversations about topics like these if the paradigmatic relationship between women and leadership is going to continue to shift instead of avoiding the topic or just calling in HR.

Hopefully this blog post is one step towards that at my company.  Return Path colleagues – feel free to comment on the blog or via email and share stories of how we’ve either helped you or held you back!  But overall, I’m glad I read this book, and I’d encourage anyone and everyone to read it.