What a View, Part II

In Part I, I talked about how Return Path’s 360 reviews have become a central part of our company’s human capital strategy over the past five years.  While most staff members’ reviews have been done for weeks or months now, I just finished up the final portion of my own review, which I think is worth sharing.

I always include my Board in my own 360.  My process is as follows:

1. I send the Board all the raw (and summarized) data from the staff reviews of me, both quantitative and qualitative.

2. I send the Board a list of questions to think about in terms of their view of my performance (see below).

3. I have a third party moderator, in my case a great OD consultant/executive coach that I work with, Marc Maltz from Triad Consulting, meet with the Board (without me present) for 1-2 hours to moderate a discussion of these questions.

4. The moderator summarizes the conversation and helps me marry the feedback from the Board with the feedback from my team.

The questions I ask them to consider are different from the question my staff answers about me, because the relationship and perspective are different.  For each question, I also summarize what their collective response was the prior year to refresh their memory.

1. Staff management/leadership:  How effective am I at building and maintaining a strong, focused, cohesive team?  Do I have the right people in the right roles at the senior staff level?

2. Resource allocation:  Do I do a good enough job balancing among competing priorities internally?  Are costs adequately managed?

3. Strategy:  Did you feel like last year’s strategy session was thorough enough?  Do you think we’re on target with what we’re doing?  Am I doing a good enough job managing to it while being nimble enough to respond to the market?

4. Execution:  How do I and the team execute vs. plan?  What do you think I could be doing to make sure the organization executes better?

5. Board management/investor relations:  Do you think our board is effective and engaged?  Have I played enough of a role in leading the group?  Do you as a director feel like you’re contributing all you can contribute?  Do I strike the right balance between asking and telling?  Are communications clear enough and regular enough?

6. Please comment on how I have handled some of the major issues in the past 12 months (with a listing of critical incidents).

The feedback I got is incredibly valuable, and once I marry it with the feedback I got from my staff, I will have my own killer development plan for the next 12-24 months.

The Good, The Board, and The Ugly, Part III

To recap other postings in this series:  my original, Brad Feld’s, Fred Wilson’s first, Fred’s second, Tom Evslin’s, and my lighter-note follow-up.

So speaking of lighter-note takes on this topic, Lary Lazard, Tom Evslin’s fictional CEO who ran Hackoff.com, now has his own tips for effective board management.  You have to read them yourself here, but I think my favorite one is #3, which starts off:

Never number the pages of what you are presenting.  Lots of time can be used constructively figuring out what page everybody is on.

Enjoy.

It’s been a big break between posts – as many of you probably know, I moved to Board Chair and left the CEO role at Bolster last summer (it’s now in the very capable hands of my friend and co-founder Cathy Hawley), and I’m now CEO of a super cool AI company called Acrolinx.  So yes, that means I went through a job search – and I found my ultimate job as a result of an inbound cold email from a headhunter!  The rich irony in that as someone who founded an executive search platform is not lost on me.

So when a good friend of mine who is also between CEO gigs and looking at several opportunities asked me the other day “why is this process so slow, and what can I do about it?” I riffed with him on the theme for a bit and thought I’d share my thinking here. 

Why Executive Searches are Slow

My top three reasons on this are pretty varied – there’s no specific theme.

1. Boards aren’t efficient hiring managers. When hiring a CEO, even the best intentioned boards can be slow to move. Frequently they operate with a search committee, and even if there’s a lead director on the search committee or even no actual search committee, by design they need to operate with a high degree of consensus. Organizing five calendars to meet with or debrief on a candidate can take weeks. And a single loud voice saying “no” or “not sure” can paralyze a board. All this is true for a CEO search but can also be true when a less experienced CEO is trying to hire a CXO and needs a lot of Board involvement in the process. At Bolster, we’ve worked on mitigating this by getting the key decision-makers aligned on search criteria at the beginning of the search, prepping interviewers, and creating a scorecard for each candidate that is visible to all decision-makers, but sometimes that doesn’t matter.
   
2. Boards and CEOs often don’t know what they want.  Whether a company is hiring a role for the first time or replacing an executive, they often get to a generic job spec but don’t actually know what they’re looking for. Not all CEOs are created equal. Not all CROs have the same core competencies. At Bolster, we developed a description of role archetypes for each C-suite or Head-or role that helps with this process (eg for a CFO, do you want an Accounting type, a Finance/Ops type, or a Deal type?). But even if a Board or hiring CEO has this level of detail down, it can still be a murky picture, trapped between the company’s past successes and failures on one side and its future needs on the other. Processes move slowly because it take a while for the picture to become less murky – circumstances around the company evolve, or people see how the company operates without this role as others pick up the slack, and therefore the needs of the role shift or come into focus. Sometimes meeting a series of candidates is the only thing that can help drive this focus, and per the first bullet above, this just takes time. If a company has a strong search partner, that may speed things up via quick presentation of calibration candidates.
   
3. There’s no precipitating crisis.  Most companies and departments, most of the time, are not in crisis. A lot of companies can operate without a given executive, even a CEO, for quite some time. Some things done (don’t) get done. Other people rise to the occasion and pick up the most important items. Or the company has hired an interim or fractional executive as a stop gap measure. Without a specific and clear sense of urgency, searches often don’t have a driving force. Sometimes there’s a precipitating crisis like a system outage or massive customer churn or the company running out of cash that can provide that driving force, but that is not the norm.

What Can You as a Candidate Do About It?

The answer is probably “not much.”  But if my own search was any indicator, I’d give you the same advice I give people internally at my company when they ask me how to get a promotion.  My answer is “start doing the job today, don’t wait to actually get the job.”  Obviously a candidate for a CEO role or any other executive role can’t actually start doing the job as an existing employee could start taking on additional pieces of work.  But there are a lot of things you can do to “act as it” and get the hiring Board or hiring CEO’s attention.  For example:

• As a CEO candidate, be a management consultant.  Work on designing a strategy for the company you want to work for.  Do a tremendous amount of homework you can do from the outside – read analyst reports, get stealth demos, do market and customer interviews.  You don’t have to explain what you’re up to in terms of identifying the company.  You can say you’re interviewing for a CEO role in the sector.  Or even that you’re doing market research.  But proactively sending the hiring board a strategy deck and asking for the next meeting is a good way of differentiating yourself as a candidate and potentially accelerating a process.
  
• As a CRO candidate, go try to sell the company’s product.  Do it to a couple “friendlies” (e.g, people who are friends of yours, not active customers or prospects of the company you’re interviewing with) so you don’t tread on the actual business.  But create your own deck.  Get meetings.  Write up your experience.  Sending the CEO or board an email that says “Hey, I have a prospect already in the final stage of the funnel for you, can we work together to close her?” is a sure way to differentiate yourself as a candidate and potentially accelerate a process.

There may be a macro answer here as well.  The market is still choppy, and boards and CEOs are more conservative in most sectors and subsectors than they are in go-go times.  So that may be slowing things down in general and may even make it harder to act as-if.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t try.

A New Path Forward

Welcome to the world, Path Forward, Inc.!

I’m thrilled to announce the launch today of Path Forward, a new non-profit with a goal of empowering millions of women to rejoin the workforce after taking time out for childcare. We are launching today with a Crowdrise campaign.   See more about that below.  And we launched with a bang, too – the organization is featured in this really amazing story on Fortune.

The concept started at Return Path two years ago, as I wrote about here and again here, when our CTO Andy Sautins came to me with a simple but powerful idea of creating a structured program of paid fellowships with training for women who want to reenter the workforce but find it difficult to do so because of rusty skills, lapsed networks, or societal bias. We expanded the program later that year with partner companies ReadyTalk, SendGrid, MWH Global, SpotX, and Moz, as I wrote about here.  The response from both participants and companies has been nothing short of amazing.

The day after I put up that last post about v2 of the program, a human resources leader at PayPal gave me a call and asked if we could help them structure a program for their engineering organization, too.  That’s when it struck me that the idea of midcareer internships as one means of providing an on-ramp to the paid workforce for people who’d been focused on caregiving could work for many companies, and also that for this program to work and scale up, it couldn’t be an “off the side of the desk” project for the People Team at Return Path.  So we decided to create a new company separate from Return Path to carry out this important work.  And we decided that with a practical, but social mission, it should be a non-profit, dedicated to creating and managing networks of companies offering opportunities to many more people.

To date, the program has served nearly 50 participants (mostly women, but a couple of stay-at-home dads, too!) and 7 companies in 6 cities around the world, producing an impressive 80% hire rate.  The participants who have been hired by us and our partner organizations have made impressive contributions to their companies’ businesses and cultures.  The companies have benefitted from their experience and passion.  That’s what I call product-market fit.  Now it’s time to officially launch the new organization, and scale it up!  Our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, in the language of Jim Collins) is that within 10 years, we want to serve 10,000 companies and 1 million women and men.  We want to reduce the penalty that caregivers face when they take time away from paid work.  We want to transform lives by getting people who want to work, back to work in jobs that leverage all their many skills and talents.  We want to help companies tap into an incredibly important but overlooked part of the talent pool to grow their workforces.  We want to change the world.

We’ve been able to assemble a strong Board of Directors to lead this effort.  Joanne Wilson, often better known as Gotham Gal and the founder of the Women’s Entrepreneur Festival, is joining me as Board Co-chair. Joanne is a force to be reckoned with in championing women founders in tech.  Brad Feld joins our Board with great credentials as an early-stage investor, but more importantly he’s served for more than 10 years as Board Chair of the National Center for Women and Technology.  Media luminary and investor Cathie Black was most recently the President of Hearst Magazines having previously served as President and Publisher of USA Today.  Cathie has been the “first” woman many times and has broken her share of glass ceilings.  Rajiv Vinnakota is the Executive Vice President of the Youth & Engagement division at the Aspen Institute and prior to that was the co-founder and CEO of The SEED Foundation, a non-profit managing the nation’s first network of public, college-preparatory boarding schools for underserved children which he started and successfully scaled up for more than 17 years.  Cathy Hawley, our long-time VP of People at Return Path, gets (though often deflects) the lion’s share of the credit for conceiving and championing the original return to work program at Return Path.  It is, truly, an embarrassment of riches. We are so thrilled to have them all on board Path Forward’s Board.

On the staff side I’m also pleased to announce that one of my long-time executive lieutenants at Return Path, Tami Forman, has accepted the role of Executive Director of Path Forward. I can’t think of anyone better for this role. Tami is the consummate storyteller, which every good founder and Startup CEO needs to be! More importantly she has been living and breathing work/life integration for eight years since the birth of her daughter (followed by a son). She is absolutely passionate about the idea that women can have jobs and families and live big lives. And, more importantly, she’s dedicated to the idea that taking a “break” (she and I agree it’s not a break!) to care for a loved one shouldn’t sideline anyone’s career dreams.

I can’t wait to see how far this idea can go. I truly believe this program can have a measurable, positive impact on thousands of companies across the country and the world.

Please join me and Tami and our talented Board on this journey.  Help us change the world.  There are three ways to participate:

• Click here if your company would like to learn more about having the Path Forward program in the future
• Click here if you would like to return to the workforce after a break and think a Path Forward fellowship might be a good, well, path forward for you
• And as a non-profit, we need financial help! Click here to contribute to our Crowdrise campaign, the goal of which is essentially a $500k “Series A” round (although it’s a non-profit, so this is a purchase of emotional equity, not actual equity) to move from product-market fit to a proven business model!

(Please note – we haven’t yet received word of our non-profit status yet from the IRS, though we expect it in the next couple of months.  As such, any donation now is not tax deductible until after the certification comes through.  While there’s some risk that we don’t gain non-profit status…we don’t think the risk is large.)

Book Short:  Culture is King

Joy, Inc.:  How We Built a Workplace People Love, by Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations, was a really good read. Like Remote  which I reviewed a few weeks ago, Joy, Inc. is ostensibly a book about one thing — culture — but is also full of good general advice for CEOs and senior managers.

Also like Remote, the book was written by the founder and CEO of a relatively small firm that is predominately software engineers, so there are some limitations to its specific lessons unless you adapt them to your own environment. Unlike Remote, though, it’s neither preachy nor ranty, so it’s a more pleasant read.  And I suppose fitting of its title, a more joyful read as well. (Interestingly on this comparison, Sheridan has a simple and elegant argument against working remotely in the middle of the book around innovation and collaboration.)

Some of the people-related practices at Sheridan’s company are fascinating and great to read about. In particular, the way the company interviews candidates for development roles is really interesting — more of an audition than an interview, with candidates actually writing code with a development partner, the way the company writes code. Different teams at Return Path interview in different ways, including me for both the exec team and the Board, but one thing I know is that when an interview includes something that is audition-like, the result is much stronger. There are half a dozen more rich examples in the book.

Some of the other quotable lines or concepts in the book include:

• the linkage between scalability with human sustainability (you can’t grow by brute force, you can only grow when people are rested and ready to bring their brain to work)
• “Showcasing your work is accountability in action” (for a million reasons, starting with pride and ending with pride)
• “Trust, accountability, and results — these get you to joy” (whether or not you are a Myers-Briggs J, people do get a bit of a rush out of a job well done)
• “…the fun and frivolity of our whimsically irreverent workplace…” (who doesn’t want to work for THAT company?)
• “When even your vendors want to align with your culture, you know you’re on the right path” (how you treat people is how you treat PEOPLE, not just clients, not just colleagues)
• “One of the key elements of a joyful culture is having team members who trust one another enough to argue” (if you and I agree on everything, one of us is not needed)
• “The reward is in the attempt” (do you encourage people to fail fast often enough?)
• “Good problems are good problems for the first five minutes. Then they just feel like regular problems until you solve them” (Amen, Brother Sheridan)

The benefits of a joyful culture (at Return Path, we call it a People-First culture) have long been clear to me. As Sheridan says, we try to “create a culture where people want to come to work every day.” Cultures like ours look soft and squishy from the outside, or to people who have grown up in tough, more traditional corporate environments. And to be fair, the challenge with a culture like ours is keeping the right balance of freedom and flexibility on one side and high performance and accountability on the other. But the reality is that most companies struggle with most of the same issues — the new hire that isn’t working out or the long-time employee who isn’t cutting it any more, the critical path project that doesn’t get done on time, the missed quarter or lost client.  As Sheridan notes though, one key benefit of working at a joyful company is that problems get surfaced earlier when they are smaller…and they get solved collaboratively, which produces better results. Another key benefit, of course, is that if you’re going to have the same problems as everyone else, you might as well have fun while you’re dealing with them.

If you don’t love where you work and wish you did, read Joy, Inc. If you love where you work but see your company’s faults and want to improve them, read Joy, Inc. If you are not in either of the above camps, go find another job!

Executive and Closed Sessions

Brad has a good post up about what he calls “closed sessions” in Board meetings — time at the end of the meeting reserved for a conversation with Board members ONLY, no other observers or non-Board management.  While we differ in terminology, I agree completely with the sentiment and with his logic.

We call the part of the meeting that Brad describes the Executive Session.  We’ve always done them.  And the Board and I find it incredibly useful, and a good practice, even if there are no contentious or puzzling issues during a meeting.  Not that our Board holds back much, but the Executive Session is a good time for us to connect 100% freely about management issues as well as elements of business strategy and performance that might be better hashed out without others present.

We also have an additional part of the meeting at the very end which we call the Closed Session.  This part of the meeting has NO MANAGEMENT in it, even me, although I’m Chairman of the Board.  This time allows the other directors an even greater degree of freedom to discuss the business or my performance without worrying about saying something in front of me — and without hearing my opinion.

Both sessions are incredibly valuable parts of high functioning Boards.

Must-Read New Blog

I’ve talked about Why I Love My Board a few times in the past.  I was reminded at my quarterly Board meeting and dinner this week that it’s a great and unusually strong group, and we’re lucky to have them.  Fred and Brad have both been prolific bloggers for years,and I know many of you follow their blogs closely.  Think of that as getting a taste of the input and wisdom you’d get by having them on your Board.

In a very exciting development, one of my independent directors, Scott Weiss, has now started blogging on the Andreessen-Horowitz platform.  Scott is probably our most outspoken and colorful director (and that’s saying something).  Scott just joined Andreessen-Horowitz as a partner in their fund, so he now a VC, but his experience as an operator both at Hotmail in Internet 1.0 and then at Ironport have been incredibly valuable for me as an entrepreneur, and I expect most of his posts to focus on the entrepreneur’s perspective.

Two of Scott’s first three posts, Looking Bigger and Ridiculously Transparent, are perfect examples of the value I’ve gotten out of my six year relationship with Scott as a Board member.  If you want a taste of what it would be like to have him in your corner…subscribe to his blog!

Book Short:  a Corporate Team of Rivals

One of the many things I have come to love about the Christmas holiday every year is that I get to go running in Washington DC.  Running the Monuments is one of the best runs in America.  Today, at my mother-in-law’s suggestion, I stopped i8n at the Lincoln Memorial mid-run and read his second inaugural address again (along with the Gettysburg Address).  I had just last week finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals:  The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and while I wasn’t going to blog about it as it’s not a business book, it’s certainly a book about leadership from which any senior executive or CEO can derive lessons.

Derided by his political opponents as a “second-rate Illinois lawyer,” Lincoln, who arrived somewhat rapidly and unexpectedly on the national scene at a time of supreme crisis, obviously more than rose to the occasion and not only saved the nation and freed the slaves but also became one of the greatest political leaders of all time.  He clearly had his faults — probably at the top of the list not firing people soon enough like many of his incompetent Union Army generals — but the theme of the book is that he had as one of his greatest strengths the ability to co-opt most of his political rivals and get them to join his cabinet, effectively neutering them politically as well as showing a unity government to the people.

This stands in subtle but important contrast to George Washington, who filled his cabinet with men who were rivals to each other (Hamilton, Jefferson) but who never overtly challenged Washington himself.

Does that Team of Rivals concept — in either the Lincoln form or the Washington form — have a place in your business?  I’d say rarely in the Lincoln sense and more often in the Washington sense.

Lincoln, in order to be effective, didn’t have much of a choice.  Needing regional and philosophical representation on his cabinet at a time of national crisis, bringing Seward, Chase, and Bates on board was a smart move, however much a pain in the ass Chase ended up being.  There certainly could be times when corporate leadership calls for a representative executive team or even Board, for example in a massive merger with uncertain integration or in a scary turnaround.  But other than extreme circumstances like that, the Lincoln model is probably a recipe for weak, undermined leadership and heartache for the boss.

The Washington model is different and can be quite effective if managed closely.  One could argue that Washington didn’t manage the seething Hamilton and frothy Jefferson closely enough, but the reality is that the debates between the two of them in the founding days of our government, when well moderated by Washington, forged better national unity and just plain better results than had Washington had a cabinet made up of like-minded individuals.  As a CEO, I love hearing divergent opinion on my executive team.  That kind of discussion is challenging to manage — at least in our case we don’t have people at each other’s throats — but as long as you view your job as NOT to create compromises to appease all factions but instead to have the luxury of hearing multiple well articulated points of view as inputs to a decision you have to make, then you and your company end up with a far, far better result.

Book Short:  Steve Jobs and Lessons for CEOs and Founders

First, if you work in the internet, grew up during the rise of the PC, or are an avid consumer of Apple products, read the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs (book, kindle).  It’s long but well worth it.

I know much has been written about the subject and the book, so I won’t be long or formal, but here are the things that struck me from my perspective as a founder and CEO, many taken from specific passages from the book:

• In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.  Man is that ever true.  I’ve come up with some ideas over the years at Return Path, but hardly a majority or even a plurality of them.  But I think of myself as innovative because I’ve led the organization to execute them.  I also think innovation has as much to do with how work gets done as it does what work gets done.

• There were some upsides to Jobs’s demanding and wounding behavior. People who were not crushed ended up being stronger. They did better work, out of both fear and an eagerness to please.  I guess that’s an upside.  But only in a dysfunctional sort of way.

• When one reporter asked him immediately afterward why the (NeXT) machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years ahead of its time.”  Amen to that.  Sometimes product deadlines are artificial and silly.  There’s another great related quote (I forget where it’s from) that goes something like “The future is here…it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”  New releases can be about delivering the future for the first time…or about distributing it more broadly.

• People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”  Amen.  See Powerpointless.

• The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.  This is critical.  You can’t always be first in everything.  But ultimately, if you’re a good company, you can figure out how to recover when you’re not first.  Exhibit A:  Microsoft.

• In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning, Jobs started an in-house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny, who was dean of the Yale School of Management, to compile a series of case studies analyzing important decisions the company had made, including the switch to the Intel microprocessor and the decision to open the Apple Stores. Top executives spent time teaching the cases to new employees, so that the Apple style of decision making would be embedded in the culture.  This is one of the most emotionally intelligent things Jobs did, if you just read his actions in the book and know nothing else.  Love the style or hate it – teaching it to the company reinforces a strong and consistent culture.

• Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.  There’s always a tension between listening TO customers and innovating FOR them.  Great companies have to do both, and know when to do which.

• What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.  This is perhaps one of the best explanations I’ve ever heard of how creativity can be applied to non-creative (e.g., most business) jobs.  I love this.

My board member Scott Weiss wrote a great post about the book as well and drew his own CEO lessons from it – also worth a read here.

Appropos of that, both Scott and I found out about Steve Jobs’ death at a Return Path Board dinner.  Fred broke the news when he saw it on his phone, and we had a moment of silence.  It was about as good a group as you can expect to be with upon hearing the news that an industry pioneer and icon has left us.  Here’s to you, Steve.  You may or may not have been a management role model, but your pursuit of perfection worked out well for your customers, and most important, you certainly had as much of an impact on society as just about anyone in business (or maybe all walks of life) that I can think of.

Jim Collins, in both Good to Great and Built to Last talked about the BHAG – the Big, Hairy Audacious Goal – as one of the drivers of companies to achieve excellence.  Perhaps that’s true, especially if those goals are singular enough and simplified enough for an entire company of 100-1000-10000 employees to rally around.

I have also observed over the years that both star performers and strong leaders drive themselves by setting large goals.  Sometimes they are Hairy or Audacious.  Sometimes they are just Big.  I suppose sometimes they are all three.  Regardless, I think successfully managing to and accomplishing large personal goals is a sign of a person who is driven to be an achiever in life – and probably someone you want on your team, whether as a Board member, advisor, or employee, assuming they meet the qualifications for the role and fit the culture, of course.

I’m not sure what the difference is between Hairy and Audacious.  If someone knows Jim Collins, feel free to ask him to comment on this post.  Let’s assume for the time being they are one and the same.  What’s an example of someone setting a Hairy/Audacious personal goal?  My friend and long-time Board member Brad Feld set out on a quest 9 years ago to run a marathon in each of the 50 states by the age of 50.  Brad is now 9 years in with 29 marathons left to go.  For those of you have never run a marathon (and who are athletic mortals), completing one marathon is a large, great and noteworthy achievement in life.  I’ve done two, and I thought there was a distinct possibility that I was going to die both times, including one I ran with Brad .  But I’ve never felt better in my life than crossing the finish tape those two times.  I’m glad I did them.  I might even have another one or two in me in my lifetime.  But doing 50 of them in 9 years?  That’s a Hairy and Audacious Goal.

For me, I think the Big goal may be more personally useful than the Hairy or Audacious.  The difference between a Big goal and a Hairy/Audacious one?  Hard to say.  Maybe Hairy/Audacious is something you’re not sure you can ever do, where Big is just something that will take a long time to chip away at.  For example, I started a quest about 10-12 years ago to read a ton of American history books, around 50% Presidential biographies, from the beginning of American history chronologically forward to the present.  This year, I am up to post-Civil War history, so roughly Reconstruction/Johnson through Garfield, maybe Arthur.  I read plenty of other stuff, too – business books, fiction, other forms of non-fiction, but this is a quest.  And I love every minute of it.  The topic is great and dovetails with work as a study in leadership.  And it’s slowly but surely making me a hobby-level expert in the topic.  I must be nearing Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours by now.

The reason someone sets out on a personal quest is unclear to me.  Some people are more goal-driven than others, some just like to Manage by Checklist, others may be ego-driven, some love the challenge.  But I do think that having a personal quest can be helpful to, as Covey would say, Sharpen the Saw, and give yourself something to focus personal time and mental/physical energy on.

Just because someone isn’t on a personal quest doesn’t mean they’re not great, by the way.  And someone who is on a quest could well be a lunatic.  But a personal quest is something that is useful to look for, interesting and worth learning more about if discovered, and potentially a sign that someone is a high achiever.

Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B

Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth, by David Thomson (book, Kindle) sounds more formulaic than it is. It’s not a bad book, but you have to dig a little bit for the non-obvious nuggets (yes, I get that growing your company to $1B in sales requires having a great value proposition in a high growth market!). The author looked for commonalities among the 387 American companies that have gone public since 1980 with less than $1B in revenues when they went public and had more than $1B in revenue (and were still in existence) at the time of the book’s writing in 2005.

Thompson classifies the blueprint into “7 Essentials,” which blueprint companies do well on across the board. The 7 Essentials are:

– Create and sustain a breakthrough value proposition

– Exploit a high growth market segment

– Marquee/lighthouse customers shape the revenue powerhouse

– Leverage big brother alliances for breaking into new markets

– Become the masters of exponential returns

– The management team: inside-outside leadership

– The Board: comprised of essentials experts

As I said above, there were some nuggets within this framework that made the entire read worthwhile. For example, crafting a Board that isn’t just management and investors but also includes industry experts like customers or alliance partners is critical. That matches our experience at Return Path over the years (not that we’re exactly closing in on $1B in revenues – yet) with having outside industry CEOs sit on our Board. Our Board has always been an extension of our management and strategy team, but we have specifically gotten some of our most valuable contributions and thought-provoking dialog from the non-management and non-investor directors.

Another critical item that I thought was interesting was this concept of not just marquee customers (yes, everyone wants big brand names as clients), but that they also need to be lighthouse customers. They need to help you attract other large customers to your solution – either actively by helping you evangelize your business, or at least passively by lending their name and case study to your cause.

The book is more of a retrospective analysis than a playbook, and some of its examples are a bit dated (marveling at Yahoo’s success seems a bit awkward today), and the author notes as well that many of the “blueprint” companies faltered after hitting the $1B mark. But it was a good read all-in. What I’d like to see next is a more microscopic view of the Milestones to $100 Million!