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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:

Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
Create organizational clarity
Overcommunicate organizational clarity
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!

Scaling the Team

(This post was requested by my long-time Board member Fred Wilson and is also running concurrently on his blog today. I’ll be back with the third and fourth installments of “The Best Laid Plans” next Thursday and the following Thursday)

When Return Path reached 100 employees a few years back, I had a dinner with my Board one night at which they basically told me, “Management teams never scale intact as you grow the business. Someone always breaks.” I’m sure they were right based on their own experience; I, of course, took this as a challenge. And ever since then, my senior management team and I have become obsessed with scaling ourselves as managers. So far, so good. We are over 300 employees now and rapidly headed to 400 in the coming year, and the core senior management team is still in place and doing well. Below are five reasons why that’s the case.

We appreciate the criticality of excellent management and recognize that it is a completely different skill set from everything else we have learned in our careers. This is like Step 1 in a typical “12-step program.” First, admit you have a problem. If you put together (a) management is important, (b) management is a different skill set, and (c) you might not be great at it, with the standard (d) you are an overachiever who likes to excel in everything, then you are setting the stage for yourself to learn and work hard at improving at management as a practice, which is the next item on the list.
We consistently work at improving our management skills. We have a strong culture of 360 feedback, development plans, coaching, and post mortems on major incidents, both as individuals and as a senior team. Most of us have engaged on and off over the years with an executive coach, for the most part Marc Maltz from Triad Consulting. In fact, the team holds each other accountable for individual performance against our development plans at our quarterly offsites. But learning on the inside is only part of the process.
We learn from the successes and failures of others whenever possible. My team regularly engages as individuals in rigorous external benchmarking to understand how peers at other companies – preferably ones either like us or larger – operate. We methodically pick benchmarking candidates. We ask for their time and get on their calendars. We share knowledge and best practices back with them. We pay this forward to smaller companies when they ask us for help. And we incorporate the relevant learnings back into our own day to day work.
We build the strongest possible second-level management bench we can to make sure we have a broad base of leadership and management in the company that complements our own skills. A while back I wrote about the Peter Principle, Applied to Management that it’s quite easy to accumulate mediocre managers over the years because you feel like you have to promote your top performers into roles that are viewed as higher profile, are probably higher comp – and for which they may be completely unprepared and unsuited. Angela Baldonero, my SVP People, and I have done a lot here to ensure that we are preparing people for management and leadership roles, and pushing them as much as we push ourselves. We have developed and executed comprehensive Management Training and Leadership Development programs in conjunction with Mark Frein at Refinery Leadership Partners. Make no mistake about it – this is a huge investment of time and money. But it’s well worth it. Training someone who knows your business well and knows his job well how to be a great manager is worth 100x the expense of the training relative to having an employee blow up and needing to replace them from the outside.
We are hawkish about hiring in from the outside. Sometimes you have to bolster your team, or your second-level team. Expanding companies require more executives and managers, even if everyone on the team is scaling well. But there are significant perils with hiring in from the outside, which I’ve written about twice with the same metaphor (sometimes I forget what I have posted in the past) – Like an Organ Transplant and Rejected by the Body. You get the idea. Your culture is important. Your people are important. New managers at any level instantly become stewards of both. If they are failing as managers, then they need to leave. Now.

I’m sure there are other things we do to scale ourselves as a management team – and more than that, I’m sure there are many things we could and should be doing but aren’t. But so far, these things have been the mainstays of happily (they would agree) proving our Board wrong and remaining intact as a team as the business grows.

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).

People First

I do not think it’s telling that my fourth post in this series of posts on Return Path’s core values (kickoff post, tag cloud) is something called People First. Ok, it probably should have been the first post in the series. To be fair, it is the first value on our list, but for whatever reason, the value about Ownership was top of mind when I decided to create this series.

Anyway, at Return Path,

We believe that people come first

And we aren’t shy about saying it publicly, either. This came up in a lengthy interview I did with Inc. Magazine last year when we were profiled for winning an award as one of the top 20 small- and mid-sized businesses to work for in America. After re-reading that article, I went back and tried to find the slide from our investor presentations that I referred to. I have a few versions of this slide from different points in time, including one that’s simpler (it only has employees, clients, and shareholder on it) but here’s a sample of it:

That pretty much says it all. We believe that if we have the best and most engaged workforce, we will do the best job at solving our clients’ problems, and if we do that well, our shareholders will win, too.

How does this “people first” mentality influence my/our day-to-day activities? Here are a few examples:

We treat all employees well, regardless of level or department. All employees are important to us achieving our mission – otherwise, they wouldn’t be here. So we don’t do a lot of things that other companies do like send our top performing sales reps on a boondogle together while the engineers and accountants slave away in the office as second-class citizens. That would be something you might see in a “sales first” or “customer first” culture
We fiercely defend the human capital of our organization. There are two examples I can think of around this point. First, we do not tolerate abusive clients. Fortunately, they are rare, but more than once over the years either I or a member of my senior team has had to get on the phone with a client and reprimand them, or even terminate their contract with us, for treating one of our employees poorly and unprofessionally. And along the same lines, when all economic hell broke loose in the fall of 2008, we immediately told employees that while we’d be in for a rough ride, our three top priorities were to keep everyone’s job, keep everyone’s compensation, and keep everyone’s health benefits. Fortunately, our business withstood the financial challenges and we were able to get through the financial crisis with those three things intact.
We walk the walk with regard to employee feedback. Everyone does employee satisfaction surveys, but we are very rigorous about understanding what areas are making people relatively unhappy (for us, even our poor ratings are pretty good, but they’re poor relative to other ratings), and where in the employee population (office, department, level) those issues lie. We highlight them in an all-hands meeting or communication, we develop specific action plans around them, and we measure those same questions and responses the next time we do a survey to see how we’ve improved
We invest in our people. We pay them fairly well, but that’s not what I’m talking about. We invest in their learning and growth, which is the lifeblood of knowledge workers. We do an enormous amount of internal training. We encourage, support, and pay for outside training and education. We are very generous with the things that allow our employees to be happy and healthy, from food to fitness to insurance to time off to a flexible environment to allowing them to work from another office, or even remotely, if their lives require them to move somewhere else
I spend as little time as I possibly can managing my shareholders and as much time as I can with employees and prospective employees. That doesn’t mean I don’t interact with my Board members – I do that quite a bit. But it does mean that when I do interact with them, it’s more about what they can do for Return Path and less about reporting information to them. I do send them a lot of information, but the information flow works well for them and simultaneously minimizes my time commitment to the process: (1) reporting comes in a very consistent format so that investors know WHAT to expect and what they’re looking at, (2) reporting comes out with a consistently long lead time prior to a meeting so investors know WHEN to expect the information, (3) the format of the information is co-developed with investors so they are getting the material they WANT, and (4) we automate as much of the information production as possible and delegate it out across the organization as much as possible so there’s not a heavy burden on any one employee to produce it
When we do spend time with customers (which is hopefully a lot as well), we try to spread that time out across a broad base of employees, not just salespeople and account managers, so that as many of our employees can develop a deep enough understanding of what our customers’ lives are like and how we impact them

There are plenty of companies out there who have a “shareholder first” or “customer first” philosophy. I’m not saying those are necessarily wrong – but at least in our industry, I’ll bet companies like that end up with significantly higher recruiting costs (we source almost half our new hires from existing employee referrals), higher employee churn, and therefore lower revenue and profit per employee metrics at a minimum. Those things must lead to less happy customers, especially in this day and age of transparency. And all of those things probably degrade shareholder value, at least over the long haul.

5 Ways to Get Your Staff on the Same Page

[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]

When a major issue arises, is everybody at your company serving the same interests? Or is one person serving the engineering team, another person serving the sales team, one board member serving the VC fund, another serving the early-stage “angels” and another serving the CEO? If that’s the case, then your team is misaligned. No individual department’s interests are as important as the company’s.

To align everyone behind your company’s interests, you must first define and communicate those goals and needs. This requires five steps:

Define the mission. Be clear to everyone about where you’re going and how you’re going to get there (in keeping with your values).
Set annual priorities, goals, and targets. Turn the broader mission into something more concrete with prioritized goals and unambiguous success metrics.
Encourage bottom-up planning. You and your executive team need to set the major strategic goals for the company, but team members should design their own path to contribution. Just be sure that you or their managers check in with them to assure that they remain in synch with the company’s goals.
Facilitate the transparent flow of information and rigorous debate. To help people calibrate the success, or insufficiency, of their efforts, be transparent about how the organization is doing along the way. Your organization will make better decisions when everyone has what they need to have frank conversations and then make well-informed decisions.
Ensure that compensation supports alignment (or at least doesn’t fight it). As selfless as you want your employees to be, they’ll always prioritize their interests over the company’s. If those interests are aligned – especially when it comes to compensation – this reality of human nature simply won’t be a problem.

Taken in sequence, these steps are the formula for alignment. But if I had to single out one as the most important, it would be number 5: aligning individual incentives with companywide goals.

It’s always great to hear people say that they’d do their jobs even if they weren’t paid to, but the reality of post-lottery-jackpot job retention rates suggests otherwise. You, and every member of your team, “work” for pay. Whatever the details of your compensation plan, it’s crucial that it aligns your entire team behind the company’s best interests.

Don’t reward marketers for hitting marketing milestones while rewarding engineers to hit product milestones and back office personnel to keep the infrastructure humming. Reward everybody when the company hits its milestones.

The results of this system can be extraordinary:

Department goals are in alignment with overall company goals. “Hitting product goals” shouldn’t matter unless those goals serve the overall health of your company. When every member of your executive team – including your CTO – is rewarded for the latter, it’s much easier to set goals as a company. There are no competing priorities: the only priority is serving the annual goals.
Individual success metrics are in alignment with overall company success metrics. The one place where all companies probably have alignment between corporate and departmental goals is in sales. The success metrics that your sales team uses can’t be that far off from your overall goals for the company. With a unified incentive plan, you can bring every department into the same degree of alignment. Imagine your general counsel asking for less extraneous legal review in order to cut costs
Resource allocation serves the company, rather than individual silos. If a department with its own compensation plan hits its (unique) metrics early, members of that team have no incentive to pitch in elsewhere; their bonuses are secure. But if everyone’s incentive depends on the entire company’s performance, get ready to watch product leads offering to share developers, unprompted.

This approach can only be taken so far: I can’t imagine an incentive system that doesn’t reward salespeople for individual performance. And while everyone benefits when things go well, if your company misses its goals, nobody should have occasion to celebrate. Everybody gets dinged if the company doesn’t meet its goals, no matter how well they or their departments performed. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it also important preventive medicine.

Half the Benefit is in the Preparation

This past week, we had what has become an annual tradition for us – a two-day Board meeting that’s Board and senior management (usually offsite, not this year to keep costs down) and geared to recapping the prior year and planning out 2009 together. Since we are now two companies, we did two of them back-to-back, one for Authentic Response and the other for Return Path.

It’s a little exhausting to do these meetings, and it’s 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 off the high dive for another year.

The most exhausting part is probably the preparation for the meetings. We probably send out over 400 pages of material in advance – binders, tabs, the works. It’s the only eco-unfriendly Board packet of the year. It feels like the old days in management consulting. It takes days of intense preparation — meetings, spreadsheets, powerpoints, occasionally even some soul searching — to get the books right. And then, once those are out (the week before the meeting), we spend almost as much time getting the presentations down for the actual meeting, since presenting 400 pages of material that people have already read is completely useless.

By the end of the meetings, we’re in good shape for the next year. But before the meetings have even started, we’ve gotten a huge percentage of the benefit out of the process. Pulling materials together is one thing, but figuring out how to craft the overall story (then each piece of it in 10-15 minutes or less) for a semi-external audience is something entirely different. That’s where the rubber meets the road and where good executives are able to step back; remember what the core drivers and critical success factors are; separate the laundry list of tactics from the kernel that includes strategy, development of competitive advantage, and value creation; and then articulate it quickly, crisply, and convincingly.

I’m incredibly proud of how both management teams drove the process this year – and I’m charged up for a great 2009 (economy be damned!).

Return Path Core Values, Part II

As I said at the beginning of this series, I was excited to share the values that have made us successful with the world and to also articulate more for the company some of the thinking behind the statements.

You can click on the tag for all the posts on the 13 Return Path’s core values, but the full list of the values is below, with links to each individual post, for reference:

As I noted in my initial post, every employee as of August 2008 was involved in the drafting of these statements. That’s a long post for another time, but it’s an important part of the equation here. These were not top-down statements written by me or other executives or by our People team. Some are more aspirational than others, but they are the aspirations of the company, not of management!

The Gift of Feedback, Part III

I’ve written about our 360 Review process at Return Path a few times in the past:

And the last two times around, I’ve also posted the output of my own review publicly here in the form of my development plan:

Here in 2008
Here in 2009

So here we are again. I have my new development plan all spruced up and ready to go. Many thanks to my team and Board for this valuable input, and to Angela Baldonero (my fantastic SVP People and in-house coach), and Marc Maltz of Triad Consulting for helping me interpret the data and draft this plan. Here at a high level is what I’m going to be working on for the next 1-2 years:

Institutionalize impatience and lessen the dependency dynamic on me. What does this mean? Basically it means that I want to make others in the organization and on my team in particular as impatient as I am for progress, success, reinvention, streamlining and overcoming/minimizing operational realities. I’ll talk more about something I’ve taken to calling “productive disruption” in a future blog post
Focus on making every staff interaction at all levels a coaching session. Despite some efforts over the years, I still feel like I talk too much when I interact with people in the organization on a 1:1 or small group basis. I should be asking many more questions and teaching people to fish, not fishing for them
Continue to foster deep and sustained engagement at all levels. We’ve done a lot of this, really well, over the years. But at nearly 250 people now and growing rapidly, it’s getting harder and harder. I want to focus some real time and energy in the months to come on making sure we keep this critical element of our culture vibrant at our new size and stage
I have some other more tactical goals as well like improving at public speaking and getting more involved with leadership recruiting and management training, but the above items are more or less the nub of it

One thing I know I’ll have to do with some of these items and some of the tactical ones in particular is engage in some form of deliberate practice, as defined by Geoffrey Colvin in his book Talent is Overrated (blog post on the book here). That will be interesting to figure out.

But that’s the story. Everyone at Return Path and on my Board – please help me meet these important goals for my development over the next couple of years!

Return Path Core Values

At Return Path, we have a list of 13 core values that was carefully cultivated and written by a committee of the whole (literally, every employee was involved) about 3 years ago.

I love our values, and I think they serve us incredibly well — both for what they are, and for documenting them and discussing them publicly. So I’ve decided to publish a blog post about each one (not in order, and not to the exclusion of other blog posts) over the next few months. I’ll probably do one every other week through the end of the year. The first one will come in a few minutes.

To whet your appetite, here’s the full list of values:

We believe that people come first
We believe in doing the right thing
We solve problems together and always present problems with potential solutions or paths to solutions
We believe in keeping the commitments we make, and communicate obsessively when we can’t
We don’t want you to be embarrassed if you make a mistake; communicate about them and learn from them
We believe in being transparent and direct
We challenge complacency, mediocrity, and decisions that don’t make sense
We value execution and results, not effort on its own
We are serious and passionate about our job and positive and light-hearted about our day
We are obsessively kind to and respectful of each other
We realize that people work to live, not live to work
We are all owners in the business and think of our employment at the company as a two-way street
We believe inboxes should only contain messages that are relevant, trusted, and safe

Do these sound like Motherhood and Apple Pie? Yes. Do I worry when I publish them like this that people will remind me that Enron’s number one value was Integrity? Totally. But am I proud of my company, and do I feel like we live these every day…and that that’s one of the things that gives us massive competitive advantage in life? Absolutely! In truth, some of these are more aspirational than others, but they’re written as strong action verbs, not with “we will try to” mushiness.

I will start a tag for my tag cloud today called Return Path core values. There won’t be much in it today, but there will be soon!

Solving Problems Together

Last week, I started a series of new posts about our core values (a new tag in the tag cloud for this series) at Return Path. Read the first one on Ownership here.

Another one of our core values is around problem solving, and ownership is intrinsically related. We believe that all employees are responsible for owning solutions, not just surfacing problems. The second core value I’ll write about in this series is written specifically as:

We solve problems together and always present problems with potential solutions or paths to solutions

In terms of how this value manifests itself in our daily existence, for one thing, I see people working across teams and departments regularly, at their own initiative, to solve problems here. It happens in a very natural way. Things don’t have to get escalated up and down management chains. People at all levels seem to be very focused on solving problems, not just pointing them out, and they have good instincts for where, when, and how they can help on critical (and non-critical) items.

Another example, again relative to other workplaces I’ve either been at or seen, is that people complain a lot less here. If they see something they don’t like, they do something about it, solve the problem themselves, or escalate quickly and professionally. The amount of finger pointing tends to be very low, and quite frankly, when fingers are pointed, they’re usually pointed inward to ask the question, “what could I have done differently?”

The danger of a highly collaborative culture like ours is teams getting stuck in consensus-seeking. Beware! The key is to balance collaboration on high value projects with authoritative leadership & direction.

A steady flow of problems are inherent in any business. I’m thankful that my colleagues are generally quite strong at solving them!

The Best Place to Work, Part 0

I keep getting questions about a deck I’ve used several times at Techstars, Seedcamp, DreamIt, and the like which is called “7 Ideas for Creating the Best Place to Work.” So today I will launch a 7-part series over the next 7 weeks to describe my 7 points. As always, this is not intended to be perfect or comprehensive, but it is a bit of lessons learned over the last 12-13 years at Return Path. It’s just 7 ideas – not the only 7 ideas. And there’s nothing magic about the number 7, despite what George Costanza says. Or Steven Covey.

Here’s the outline:

Surround yourself with the best and brightest
Create an environment of trust
Manage yourself very, very well
Be the consummate host
Be the ultimate enabler
Let people be people
Create a thankful atmosphere

Let’s go! I will create a tag cloud for this series called Best Place to Work.

The Books

Book Short: On The Same Page

Scaling the Team

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

People First

5 Ways to Get Your Staff on the Same Page

Half the Benefit is in the Preparation

Return Path Core Values, Part II

The Gift of Feedback, Part III

Return Path Core Values

Solving Problems Together

The Best Place to Work, Part 0