Counter Cliche:  It’s Fun at the Top!

Fred’s VC cliche this week is a good one — that CEOs have the weight of the company on their shoulders, otherwise known as "it’s lonely at the top."  He’s right in a lot of ways, and his two suggestions for dealing with it are good.  To those, I’d add a third suggestion, which is to create a peer group of other CEOs that gets together periodically to talk, share ideas, and blow off steam.  It doesn’t need to be something formal like YPO or YEO — just have a quarterly dinner roundtable with a handful of other local CEOs you know and respect, whether from your industry or not. 

But the counter to Fred’s cliche is that while yes, it can be lonely at the top, it can also be a ton of fun.  Having the weight of the company on one’s shoulders also means having the ability to do some exciting things:

– Being social and interacting with people all across the organization, at all levels, to really understand what’s going on

– Being multi-disciplinary and working on projects with all departments to make sure things are in sync

– Periodically getting out of the organization and understanding what’s happening in the outside world, with customers, suppliers, partners, and investors

I’m sure there are others, and I’m certainly lucky to have an investor who has sympathy for the "weight of the company" problem — but there are many days where the weight is completely overshadowed by the fun!

Why I Love My Board, Part II

I’ve written a few things about my Board of Directors over the years, some of which I note below.  Part I of this series isn’t particularly useful, though there’s an entertaining link in it to a video of Fred that’s worth looking at if you know or follow him.

Today, we are happy to announce that we are adding a new independent director, Scott Petry, the founder of Postini and now a senior email product leader at Google (read the official press release [here]).  Scott’s a fantastic addition to our already strong Board, and the process of recruiting and adding him has made me reflect a bit on my Board and its strengths and weaknesses, so I thought I’d share a couple of those thoughts here.

I think Return Path has cultivated a very high functioning Board over the years, and I feel very fortunate to have the group that we have.  Here are the top five things I think make our Board special, in no particular order.

1. We have great individuals on the Board.  Each of our individual Board members — Fred Wilson, Greg Sands, Scott Weiss, Scott Petry, and Brad Feld (now officially an observer), (in addition to me) — could anchor a super strong Board in his own right and have all served on multiple Boards of related companies.  And not only do these guys know their stuff…they do their homework.  They all come to every meeting very well prepared.
2. The individual Board members are different but have different experiences and personalities that complement each other nicely.  Among the three VCs on the Board, two have operating experience, one as a founder and one in product management.  Among the two industry CEOs, one has more of a business development focus, and the other has deep technical expertise.  Some directors are excitable and a bit knee-jerk, others are more reflective; some are aggressive and others are more conservative; some have extremely colorful metaphors, others are a bit more steeped in traditional pattern recognition.
3. We have built a great team dynamic that encourages productive conflict.  I assume a lot of rooms full of great directors of different types are so ego-laden that people just talk over each other.  Our group, for whatever reason, doesn’t function that way.  We are engaged and in each others’ faces during meetings, no one is afraid to voice an opinion, and we listen to each other.  Some of this may be the way we spend time together outside of Board rooms, which I wrote about in The Social Aspects of Running a Board. Some is about just making sure to have fun, which I wrote about in The Good, The Board, and The Ugly (Part I, Part II, Part III), I talk about other aspects of running a good Board, including making sure to have fun – that post includes an entertaining picture of now-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and a few of his friends from his FeedBurner days.
4. We are deliberate about connecting the Board and the Executive team, and the rest of the company.  We encourage every director to have a direct relationship with every one of my direct reports.  They connect both during and outside of meetings, and they have gotten to know each other well over the years.  This is much more helpful to us than a more traditional “hourglass” structure where all connections go through the CEO.
5. We run great meetings.  We send out a single, well-organized document several days before the meeting.  Board members do their homework.  We focus on current and future issues more than reporting on historical numbers, and we no longer do any presentations — it’s all discussion (I also wrote about a lot of this here in PowerPointLess).

Welcome to the Return Path family, Scott P – we are delighted to have you on board our Board!

5 Ways to Spot Trends That Will Make You (and Your Business) More Successful

I’ve recently started writing a column for The Magill Report, the new venture by Ken Magill, previously of Direct magazine and even more previously DMNews. Ken has been covering email for a long time and is one of the smartest journalists I know in this space. My column, which I share with my colleagues Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey, covers how to approach the business of email marketing, thoughts on the future of email and other digital technologies, and more general articles on company-building in the online industry – all from the perspective of an entrepreneur. Below is a re-post of this week’s version, which I think my OnlyOnce readers will enjoy.

Last week I published my annual “Unpredictions” for 2011. This tradition grew out of the fact that I hate doing predictions and my marketing team loves them. So we compromise by predicting what won’t happen.

But the truth is that the annual prediction ritual – while trite – is really just trend-spotting. And trend-spotting is an important skill for entrepreneurs. Fortunately it’s a skill that can be acquired, at least it can with enough deliberate practice (another skill I talk about here).

Here are five habits you should consider cultivating if being a better trend spotter is in your career roadmap.

Read voraciously. I read about 50 books every year.  About half of them are business books, and I also mix in a bit of fiction, humor, American history, architecture and urban planning, and evolutionary biology.  I keep up with more than 50 blogs and I read all the trade publications that cover email.  I also read the Wall Street Journal and The Economist regularly.  What you read is a little less important than just reading a lot, and diversely.

Use social media (wisely). Julia Child once said that the key to success in life was having great parents. My advice to you is quite a bit simpler:  make friends with smart people. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others have given us a window into the world unlike any other. Status updates, tweets, and – maybe most important of all – links shared by your network of friends and colleagues gives you a sense of what people are talking about, thinking about and working on. And you can’t just lurk.  You actually have to be “in” to get something “out.”

Follow the money. Pay attention to where money gets invested and spent. This includes keeping an eye on venture capital, private equity, and the public markets, as well as where clients (mostly IT and marketing departments) are spending their dollars and what kinds of people they are hiring. Money flows toward ideas that people think will succeed. A pattern of investments in particular areas will give you clues to what might be the big ideas over the next five to 10 years.

Get out of the office: I think it’s hugely important for anyone in business, and especially entrepreneurs, to spend time in the world to get fresh perspectives. I’m not sure who coined the phrase, but our head of product management, Mike Mills, frequently refers to the NIHITO principle – Nothing Interesting Happens in the Office.  Now that’s not entirely true – running a company means needing to spend a huge amount of time with people and on people issues, but last year I traveled nearly 160,000 miles around the world meeting with prospect, clients, partners and industry luminaries. You don’t have to be a road warrior to get this one right – you can attend events in your local area, develop a local network of people you can meet with regularly – but you do have to get out there.

Take a break. While you need information to understand trends, you can quickly get overloaded with too much data.  Trend spotting is, in many ways, about pattern recognition. And that is often easier to do when your mind is relaxed.  Ever notice that you have moments of true epiphany in the shower or while running? Give yourself time every week to unplug and let your mind recharge. As Steven Covey says, “sharpen that saw”!

Book Short:  Sloppy Sequel

SuperFreakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, wasn’t a bad book, but it wasn’t nearly as good as the original Freakonomics, either.  I always find the results of “naturally controlled experiments” and taking a data-driven view of the world to be very refreshing.  And as much as I like the social scientist versions of these kinds of books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink (book; blog post), there’s usually something about reading something data driven written by a professional quant jock that’s more reassuring.

That’s where SuperFreakonomics fell down a bit for me.  Paul Krugman has described the book in a couple different places as “snarky and contrarian.”  I typically enjoy books that carry those descriptors, but this one seemed a bit over the top for economists — like a series of theories looking for data more than raw data adding up to theories.Nowhere is this more true than the chapter on climate change.  It’s a shame that that chapter seems to be swallowing up all the public discussion about the book, because there are some good points in that chapter, and the rest of the book is better than that particular chapter, but such is life.

As with all things related to the environment, I turned to my friend Andrew Winston’s blog, where he has a good post about how the authors kind of miss the point about climate change…and he also has a series of links to other blog posts debunking this one chapter.  If you’re into the topic, or if you read the book, follow the chain here for good reading.  My conclusion about this chapter, being at least somewhat informed about the climate change debate, is that the book seems to have sloppy writing and editing at best, possibly deliberately misleading at worst.  (Incidentally, the reaction in the blogosphere seems highly emotional, other than Andrew’s, which probably doesn’t serve the reactors well.)

But I’ll assume the best of intentions.  Some of the points made aren’t bad – there is no debate about the problem or the need to solve it, the authors express legitimate concern that current solutions, especially those requiring behavioral change, will be too little too late, and most interestingly, they show an interest in alternative approaches like geo-engineering.  I hadn’t been familiar with that topic at all, but I’m now much more interested in it, not because it’s a “silver bullet” approach to dealing with climate change, but because it’s a different approach, and complex problems like climate change deserve to have a wide range of people working on multiple types of solutions.  I met Nathan Myhrvold once (I almost threw up on him during a job interview, which is another story for another day), and it makes me very happy that his brilliance is being applied to this problem as a general principle.

As I said, though, beyond this one chapter, the book is good-not-great.  But it certainly is chock full of cocktail party nuggets!

Book Short:  Be Less Clever

In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess, by Jack Trout, is probably deserving of a read by most CEOs.  Trout at this point is a bit old school and curmudgeonly, the book has some sections which are a bit repetitive of other books he and his former partner Al Reis have written over the years, he does go off on some irrelevant rants, and his examples are a bit too focused on TV advertising, BUT his premise is great, and it’s universally applicable.  So much so that my colleagues Leah, Anita, and I had “book club” about it one night last week and had a very productive debate about our own positioning and marketing statements and how obvious they were (they need work!).

The premise in short is that, in advertising:

Logical, direct, obvious = relevant, and

Entertaining, emotional = irrelevant

And he’s got data to back it up, including a great case study from TiVo on which ads are skipped and not skipped – the ones that aren’t skipped are from companies like Bowflex, Hooters, and the Dominican Republic, where the presentation of the ad is very direct, explanatory of the product, and clear.  His reasons why advertising have drifted away from the obvious are probably right, ranging from the egos of marketing people, to CEOs being to disconnected from marketing, to the rise in importance of advertising awards, and his solution, of course is to refocus on your core positioning/competitive positioning.

It is true that when the only tool in your box is a hammer, everything starts to look a bit like a nail, but Trout is probably right in this case.  He does remind us in this book that “Marketing is not a battle of products. It is a battle of perceptions”– words to live by.

And some of his examples of great obvious advertising statements, either real or ones he thinks should have been used, are very revealing:

• Kerry should have turned charges that he was a flip-flopper in 2004 around on Bush with the simple line that Bush was “strong but wrong”
• New Zealand: “the world’s most beautiful two islands”
• The brilliance of the VW Beetle in a big-car era and “thinking small”
• Johnny Cochrane’s winning (over)simplification of the OJ case — “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit”
• BMW is still, 30 years later, The Ultimate Driving Machine
• “Every day, the Kremlin gets 12 copies of the Wall Street Journal. Maybe they know something you don’t know.”

If you are looking for a good marketing book to read as a refresher this year, this one could be it.  And if you’re not a very market-focused CEO, this kind of thinking is a must.

And for the record, the library of books by Trout and/or Reis (sometimes including Reis’ daughter Laura as well) that I’ve read, all of which are quite good, is:

• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind – the original – a brilliant, short, classic
• The New Positioning (link, post) – good refresher on the original, gets into repositioning
• Marketing Warfare –
• The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR – excellent but pre-social media
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding –
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! –
• Bottom-up Marketing –
• Differentiate or Die: Survival in Our Era of Killer Competition –
• In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess – the current book

What Makes an Awesome Board Member

(This post was requested by my long-time Board member Brad Feld and is also running concurrently on his blog today)

I’ve written a bunch of posts over the years about how I manage my Board at Return Path.  And I think part of having awesome Board members is managing them well – giving transparent information, well organized, with enough lead time before a meeting; running great and engaging meetings; mixing social time with business time; and being a Board member yourself at some other organization so you see the other side of the equation.  All those topics are covered in more detail in the following posts:  Why I Love My Board, Part II, The Good, The Board, and The Ugly, and Powerpointless.

But by far the best way to make sure you have an awesome board is to start by having awesome Board members.  I’ve had about 15 Board members over the years, some far better than others.  Here are my top 5 things that make an awesome Board member, and my interview/vetting process for Board members.

Top 5 things that make an awesome Board member:

• They are prepared and keep commitments.  They show up to all meetings.  They show up on time and don’t leave early.  They do their homework.  The are fully present and don’t do email during meetings
• They speak their minds.  They have no fear of bringing up an uncomfortable topic during a meeting, even if it impacts someone in the room.  They do not come up to you after a meeting and tell you what they really think.  I had a Board member once tell my entire management team that he thought I needed to be better at firing executives more quickly!
• They build independent relationships.  They get to know each other and see each other outside of your meetings.  They get to know inviduals on your management team and talk to them on occasion as well.  None of this communication goes through you
• They are resource rich.  I’ve had some directors who are one-trick or two-trick ponies with their advice.  After their third or fourth meeting, they have nothing new to add.  Board members should be able to pull from years of experience and adapt that experience to your situations on a flexible and dynamic basis
• They are strategically engaged but operationally distant.   This may vary by stage of company and the needs of your own team, but I find that even Board members who are talented operators have a hard time parachuting into any given situation and being super useful.  Getting their operational help requires a lot of regular engagement on a specific issue or area.  But they must be strategically engaged and understand the fundamental dynamics and drivers of your business – economics, competition, ecosystem, and the like

My interview/vetting process for Board members:

• Take the process as seriously as you take building your executive team – both in terms of your time and in terms of how you think about the overall composition of the Board, not just a given Board member
• Source broadly, get a lot of referrals from disparate sources, reach high
• Interview many people, always face to face and usually multiple times for finalists.  Also for finalists, have a few other Board members conduct interviews as well
• Check references thoroughly and across a few different vectors
• Have a finalist or two attend a Board meeting so you and they can examine the fit firsthand.  Give the prospective Board member extra time to read materials and offer your time to answer questions before the meeting.  You’ll get a good first-hand sense of a lot of the above Top 5 items this way
• Have no fear of rejecting them.  Even if you like them.  Even if they are a stretch and someone you consider to be a business hero or mentor.  Even after you’ve already put them on the Board (and yes, even if they’re a VC).  This is your inner circle, and getting this group right is one of the most important things you can do for your company

I asked my exec team for their own take on what makes an awesome Board member.  Here are some quick snippets from them where they didn’t overlap with mine (with only two inside jokes that I couldn’t resist putting up for the Board):

• Ethical and high integrity in their own jobs and lives
• Comes with an opinion
• Thinking about what will happen next in the business and getting management to think ahead
• Call out your blind spots
• Remembering to thank you and calling out what’s right
• Role modeling for your expectations of your own management team – Do your prep, show up, be fully engaged, be brilliant/transparent/critical/constructive and creative.  Then get out of our way
• Offer tough love…Unfettered, constructive guidance – not just what we want to hear
• Pattern matching:  they have an ability to map a situation we have to a problem/solution at other companies that they’ve been involved in – we learn from their experience…but ability and willingness to do more than just pattern matching.  To really get into the essence of the issues and help give strategic guidance and suggestions
• Ability to down 2 Shake Shack milkshakes in one sitting
• Colorful and unique metaphors

Disclaimer – I run a private company.  While I’m sure a lot of these things are true for other types of organizations (public companies, non-profits, associations, etc.), the answers may vary.  And even within the realm of private companies, you need to have a Board that fits your style as a CEO and your company’s culture.  That said, the formula above has worked well for me, and if nothing else, is somewhat time tested at this point!

Pivot, Don’t Jump!

I spoke last night at the NYC Lean Startup Meetup, which was fun.  I will write a couple other posts based on the experience over the next week or so.  The Meetup is all about creating “lean startups,” not just meaning lean as in cheap and lightweight, but meaning smart at doing product development from the perspective of finding the quickest path to product-market fit.  No wasted cycles of innovation.  Something we are spending a lot of time on right now at Return Path, actually.

My topic was “The Pivot,” by which the group meant How do you change your product idea/formation quickly and nimbly when you discover that your prior conception of “product-market fit” is off?  I talked a bit about the pivots we’ve done over the years here, not just the corporate ones, but some of the essential product ones as well.  One of the comments a member of the Meetup made that really stuck with me was that you have to “Pivot, Don’t Jump” when making changes to your business or product.

This has been true of Return Path’s pivots over the years.  Our pivots have all had two very solid foundation points — the company’s deep expertise in email, and our customer base.  Every pivot we’ve done has been in some way at the request/urging of our clients, and the new directions have always been in line with our core capabilities.  While we have a talented team that probably could execute lots of different businesses well, it’s hard to see us being successful in other areas that are farther afield.

People over the years, for example, have suggested that we should get into SMS deliverability — isn’t that going to be a hot topic?  We don’t know.  We don’t spend our lives immersed in text messaging.  What about getting into measurement of social media messaging — isn’t that related?  Maybe, but it’s not in our wheelhouse.  Expanding from email deliverability software and analytics, into services, into data, into whitelisting on the other hand – those were pivots, not jumps.

One other note of course, is that the larger your business is, and the more investors have a stake in it, the harder it is to make BIG pivots or any kind of jumps.  Innovation is still critical, but innovating from a well-protected core is what it’s all about, not chasing new shiny objects.

Secrets to Yawn-Free Board Meetings

[This post first appeared as an article in Entrepreneur Magazine as part of a new series I’m publishing there in conjunction with my book, Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business]

The objective of board meetings should always be to have great conversations that help you and your executive team think clearly about the issues in front of you, as well as making sure your directors have a clear and transparent view of the state of the business. These conversations come from a team dynamic that encourages productive conflict. There’s no sure-fire formula for achieving this level of engagement, but here are three few guidelines you can follow to increase your chances.

Schedule board meetings in advance, and forge a schedule that works. Nothing is more disruptive – or more likely to drive low turnout – than last minute scheduling. Make sure you, or your executive assistant, knows board members’ general schedules and travel requirements, and whether they manage their own calendar or have their own executive assistant. Set your board meeting schedule for the year in the early fall, which is typically when people are mapping out most of their year’s major activities. If you know that one of your board members has to travel for your meetings, work with the CEOs of the other companies to coordinate meeting dates. Vary the location of meetings if you have directors in multiple geographies so travel is a shared sacrifice.

In the startup stage of our business at Return Path, we ran monthly meetings for an hour, mostly call-in. In the revenue stage, we moved to six to eight meetings per year, two hours in length, perhaps supplemented with two longer-form and in-person meetings. As a growth stage company, we run quarterly meetings. They’re all in-person, meaning every director is expected to travel to every meeting. We probably lose one director each time to a call-in or a no-show for some unavoidable conflict, but, for the most part, everyone is present. We leave four hours for every meeting (it’s almost impossible to get everything done in less time than that) and sometimes we need longer.

Many years, we also hold a board offsite, which is a meeting that runs across 24 hours, usually an afternoon, a dinner, and a morning, and is geared to recapping the prior year and planning out the next year together. It’s especially exhausting to do these meetings, and I’m sure it’s especially exhausting to attend them, but they’re well worth it. The intensity of the sessions, discussion, and even social time in between meetings is great for everyone to get on the same page and remember what’s working, what’s not, and what the world around us looks like as we dive into the deep end for another year.

Build a forward-looking agenda. The second step in having great board meetings is to set an agenda that will prompt the discussion that you want to have. With our current four-hour meetings, our time allocation is the following:

I. Welcomes and framing (5 minutes)

II. Official Business (no more than 15 minutes unless something big is going on)

III. Retrospective (45 minutes)

a. Target a short discussion on highlighted issues

b. Leave some time for Q&A

IV. On My Mind (2 hours)

a. You can spend this entire time on one topic, more than one, or all, as needed.

b. Format for discussions can vary—this is a good opportunity for breakout sessions, for example.

V. Executive Session (30 minutes)

This is your time with directors only, no observers or members of the management team (even if they are board members).

VI. Closed Session (30 minutes)

This is director-only time, without you or anyone else from the management team.

This agenda format focuses your meeting on the future, not the past. In the early years of the business, our board meetings were probably 75 percent “looking backwards” and 25 percent “looking forwards.” They were reporting meetings—reports which were largely in the hands of board members before the meetings anyway. They were dull as anything, and they were redundant: all of our board members were capable of processing historical information on their own. Today, our meetings are probably ten percent “looking backwards” and 90 percent “looking forwards”—and much more interesting as a result.

Separate background reading and presentation materials. Finally, focus on creating a more engaging dialogue during the meeting by separating background reading from presentation materials. In our early days, we created a huge Powerpoint deck as both a handout the week before the meeting and as the in-meeting deck. That didn’t create an engaging meeting.

There’s nothing more mind-numbing than a board meeting where the advance reading materials are lengthy Powerpoint presentations, than when the meeting itself is a series of team members standing up and going through the same slides, bullet by excruciating bullet—that attendees could read on their own.

When we separated the background and presentation materials, people were engaged by the Powerpoint—because it delivered fresh content. We started making the decks fun and engaging and colorful, as opposed to simple text and bullet slides. That was a step in the right direction, but the preparation consumed twice as much time for the management team, and we certainly didn’t get twice the value from it.

Now we send out a great set of comprehensive reading materials and reports ahead of the meeting, and then we have a completely Powerpoint-free meeting. No slides on the wall. This changes the paradigm away from a presentation—the whole concept of “management presenting to the board”—to an actual discussion. No checking email. No yawns. Nobody nodding off. Everyone—management and board—is highly engaged

I was talking to a CEO the other day who believed it was “wrong” (literally, his word) to meet directly 1:1 with people in the organization who did not report to him.  I’ve heard from other CEOs in the past that they’re casual or informal or sporadic about this practice, but I’ve never heard someone articulate before that they actively stayed away from it.  The CEO in question’s feeling was that these meetings, which I call Skip-Level Meetings, disempowers managers.

I couldn’t disagree more.  I have found Skip-Level Meetings to be an indispensable part of my management and leadership routine and have done them for years.  If your culture is set up such that you as CEO can’t interact directly and regularly with people in your organization other than the 5-8 people who report to you, you are missing out on great opportunities to learn from and have an impact on those around you.

That said, there is an art to doing these meetings right, in ways that don’t disempower people or encourage chaos.  Some of these themes will echo other things I’ve written in recent posts like Moments of Truth and Scaling Me.  My five rules for doing Skip-Level Meetings are:

1. Make them predictable.  Have them on a regular schedule, whatever that is.  The schedule doesn’t have to be uniform across all these meetings.  I have some Skip-Levels that I do monthly, some quarterly, some once a year, some “whenever I am in town.”
   
2. Use a consistent format.  I always have a few questions I ask people in these meetings – things about their key initiatives, their people, their roadblocks, what I can do to help, what their POV is about the company direction and performance, how they are feeling about their role and growth.  I also expect that people will come with questions or topics for me.  If I have more meaty ad hoc topics, I’ll let the person know ahead of time.
   
3. Vary the location.  When I have regular Skip-Levels with a given person, I try to do the occasional one over a meal or drink to make it a little more social.  For remote check-ins, I now always do Skype or Videophone.
   
4. Do groups.  Sometimes group skip-levels are fun and really enlightening, either with a full team, or with a cross-section of skip-levels from other teams.  Watching people relate to each other gives you a really different view into team dynamics.
   
5. Close the loop.  I almost always check-in with the person’s manager BEFORE AND AFTER a Skip-Level.  Before, I ask what the issues are, if there is anything I should push on or ask.  After, I report back on the meeting, especially if there are things the person and I discussed that are out of scope for the person’s job or goals, so there are no surprises.

 I’m sure there are other things I do as well, but I can’t imagine running the company without this practice.  Doing it often and well EMPOWERS people in the company…I’d argue that managers who feel disempowered by it aren’t managers you necessarily want in your business unless you really run a command-and-control shop.

The People Who Go the the Trainer the Most Are the Onese Who Were int eh Best Shape to Begin With

Have you ever noticed this?  That the people working out with trainers in the gym are usually in great shape?  So why do they keep working with the trainer?  So they maintain their awesome level of fitness, of course!

The lesson for business is the same.  Just because you have a strong suit doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore it and rest on your laurels (at least not for very long).  This is true in good times, and in bad times. 

When things are going well, it can feel like it’s the right time to turn your focus to new things, or to fixing broken things.  And that is true to some extent, but it can’t come at the expense of continuing to develop what’s working.

And the temptation to “cut and coast” in the areas of the business that are working well is especially strong when times get tough and resources are stretched.  In fact, the situation is the opposite.  When times get tough and resources are stretched, it’s even more important to double down on the parts of the business that work well. 

Why is all of this true? 

–Your strong suits have a disproportionate impact on business results.  Are you a product-first organization?  Then great product is what makes your organization successful.  Keep producing more of it.  Are you a sales-dominant organization?  Sell more.   Are you a people-first organization?  Your people don’t become less important over time.  Why would you – in any business environment – do less of what makes you successful?

– Your strong suits are bellwethers for employee insight into the organization.  The things that your company does that are best in class are the things that employees take their cues from, and that employees have the most pride in.  Let those things go – and you risk alienating your most enthusiastic employees.  This isn’t to say that companies should have “third rails,” things that are the equivalent of Social Security or the Pentagon, where the minute someone talks about a budget cut, hysteria ensues.  And it’s not about silly perks (you can be a people-first organization whether or not you have “bring your pet to work day”).  But whatever is important to you one day can’t suddenly be unimportant the next day without risking a high degree of employee whiplash.

– Your strong suits compensate for your weaknesses.  The last two points are all about strong suits being out in front.  But I’d argue that your strong suits do more than that.  They protect you from your weaknesses.  Think about it metaphorically, and relating back to the title of this post, think about the body.  When you have a broken leg, your arms get stronger because you need to use them to crutch yourself around.  If you also broke your arms, you’d have a real problem!  In business, it’s the same.  Strong sales teams tend to compensate for weak marketing teams – invest less in sales, it actually hurts marketing, too.  Strong product can compensate for weak sales teams – so more stagnant product hits twice as hard.

All this may sound obvious.  There are other comparable axioms like “put your best people on your biggest opportunities,” and “manage to your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses.”  And yet, the temptations to coast are real.  So get going to that gym and see your trainer for your weekly appointment.  Even if you’re in great shape.

Think Global, Act Local

At Return Path, we have always had a commitment to community service and helping make the world around us a better place.  We ratcheted that up a lot in the last year, which is why we added the following statement in as one of our 14 Core Values:

Think Global, Act Local.  We commit our time and energy to support our local communities.  

We feel strongly that companies can and should make the world a better place in several different ways.  Certainly, many companies’ core businesses do that — just look at all the breakthroughs in medicine and social services over the years brought to market by private enterprises, including my friend Raj Vinnakota, who I blogged about here years ago. 

But many companies, including Return Path, aren’t inherently “save the world” in nature, and those companies can still make a difference in the world in a few ways:

1.  Allow employees to take a limited amount of paid time off for community service work
2. Organize projects in the local community for their employees to help out/work at
3. Provide matching gift programs so employees’ donations are enhanced by the company
4. Donate money or services to charitable organizations they believe in

As a relatively small company, we have had to pick our battles here.  When we were smaller, we had a policy for #1 above that allowed employees 5 days per year of paid time off for community service work in addition to vacation.  We organized projects here and there for employees, including various walks and races and drives, and multiple Habitat for Humanity projects, including one that our employees blogged extensively about after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (see Tom Bartel’s final blog post of 7 here.  We never had a specific policy around matching donations, but we were always quick to support one-off employee requests.  And we did have comprehensive program for #4 above to donate cash and in-kind services to one particular charitable organization that fought Multiple Sclerosis, which was inspired by a long-time employee who was diagnosed with MS. 

Over the years, our approach has evolved around service.  When we moved to an Open Vacation policy a few years back, we effectively eliminated the Community Service time off benefit since people can just go do that now under the umbrella time-off policy.  We do still organize some projects for employees from time-to-time, but those are done on an office-by-office basis.  The biggest change in our approach was to stop doing company-run projects, stop responding to one-off requests from employees, and stop supporting a single organization.  We felt that those things, while good, were diffusing the impact that we could potentially have.

So this year we launched something called the Dream Fund.  Once each quarter, we invite self-forming teams of employees to submit applications for a $10,000 grant to help make some corner of their community a better place.  There are some loose guidelines around the use of funds (e.g., they can’t be a straight donation, they have to include some hands-on work), and we have a panel select each quarter’s winner.  So far, we have had two projects run very successfully: 

• Sistas Against Cancer which supports the Avan Walk for Breast Cancer.
• Tennyson Center for Children. This charity supports kids suffering from abuse, neglect, emotional crises and other traumatic experiences will get the help they need while finding healing and HOPE in a safe and caring environment

There’s no right way to do community service as a company.  Bu t we feel strongly that part of our “mission” (an overused word if there ever was one) was to have an impact on the world around us – not just on our customers and fellow employees, but by using our time and money to help those who need it most in the many communities where we operate around the world.