Back in March I was proud to announce the launch of Path Forward, a nonprofit on a mission to get people back to work after they’ve taken time off to care for a loved one.  I’m even more thrilled today to announce the launch of a Path Forward program in California with six top tech companies — Go Daddy, Demandbase, CloudFlare, Coursera, Instacart and Zendesk. They are all accepting applications now for October start dates. Click on the links above to see all their opportunities.
As a CEO I know how hard it is to find great talent. The Center for Talent Innovation estimates that nearly 30% of college-educated women have taken away from their careers to serve as caregivers to children or aging family members. They have also found that while 90% of them try to return to work, only 40% are able to land full-time jobs. As an industry, we simply can’t afford to lose thousands of talented women who become frustrated by attempts to restart their professional careers.
Please join me in supporting this organization in fulfilling its mission. If you know people in California who might be looking for opportunities to restart their careers, send them to Your Path Forward in California where they can access all the job postings for the fall program.
And if you think Path Forward would be a great program for your company, email the fine folks at [email protected] to learn more.
I wrote a few weeks ago about my live 360 – the first time I’ve ever been in the room for my own review discussion. I now have a development plan drafted coming out of the session, and having cycled it through the contributors to the review, I’m ready to go with it. As I did in 2008, 2009, and 2011, I’m posting it here publicly. This time around, there are three development items:
Continue to spend enough time in-market. In particular, look for opportunities to spend more time with direct clients. There was a lot of discussion about this at my review. One director suggested I should spend at least 20% of my time in-market, thinking I was spending less than that. We track my time to the minute each quarter, and I spend roughly 1/3 of my time in-market. The problem is the definition of in-market. We have a lot of large partners (ESPs, ISPs, etc.) with whom I spend a lot of time at senior levels. Where I spend very little time is with direct clients, either as prospects or as existing clients. Even though, given our ASP, there isn’t as much leverage in any individual client relationship, I will work harder to engage with both our sales team and a couple of larger accounts to more deeply understand our individual client experience.
Strengthen the Executive Committee as a team as well as using the EC as the primary platform for driving accountability throughout the organization. On the surface, this sounds like “duh,” isn’t that the CEO’s job in the first place? But there are some important tactical items underneath this, especially given that we’ve changed over half of our executive team in the last 12 months. I need to keep my foot on the accelerator in a few specific ways: using our new goals and metrics process and our system of record (7Geese) rigorously with each team member every week or two; being more authoritative about the goals that end up in the system in the first place to make sure my top priorities for the organization are being met; finishing our new team development plan, which will have an emphasis on organizational accountability; and finding the next opportiunity for our EC to go through a management training program as a team.
Help stakeholders connect with the inherent complexity of the business. This is an interesting one. It started out as “make the business less complex,” until I realized that much of the competitive advantage and inherent value from our business comes fom the fact that we’ve built a series of overlapping, complex, data machines that drive unique insights for clients. So reducing complexity may not make sense. But helping everyone in and around the business connect with, and understand the complexity, is key. To execute this item, there are specifics for each major stakeholder. For the Board, I am going to experiment with a radically simpler format of our Board Book. For Investors, Customers, and Partners, we are hard at work revising our corporate positioning and messaging. Internally, there are few things to work on — speaking at more team/department meetings, looking for other opportunities to streamline the organization, and contemplating a single theme or priority for 2015 instead of our usual 3-5 major priorities.
Again, I want to thank everyone who participated in my 360 this year – my board, my team, a few “lucky” skip-levels, and my coach Marc Maltz. The feedback was rich, the experience of observing the conversation was very powerful, and I hope you like where the development plan came out!
Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting is, as Brad advertised, a great read, and much in line with his other books (running list at the end of the post). His books are just like candy. If only all business books were this short and easy to read.
This fable isn’t quite what I thought it was going to be at the outset – it’s not about too many meetings, which is what I’ve always called “death by meeting.” It’s about staff meetings that bore you to death. With a great story around them featuring characters named Casey and Will (my two oldest kids’ names, which had me chuckling the whole time), Lencioni describes a great framework for splitting up your staff meetings into four different types of meetings: the daily stand-up, the weekly tactical, the monthly strategic, and the quarterly offsite.
There’s definitely something to the framework. We have over the years done all four types of meetings, though we never had all four in our rotation at once as that felt like overkill. But I think at a minimum, any 2 get the job done much better than a single format recurring meeting. As long as you figure out how to separate status updates from more strategic conversations, you’re directionally in good shape. We have almost entirely eliminated or automated status update meetings at this point at my staff level.
The book has some other good stuff in it, though, about the role of conflict in staff meetings, which I’ll save for your own read of the book!
Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek, is a self-described “polemic” that reads like some of the author’s famous TED talks and other speeches in that it’s punchy, full of interesting stories, has some attempted basis in scientific fact like Gladwell, and wanders around a bit. That said, I enjoyed the book, and it hit on a number of themes in which I am a big believer – and it extended and shaped my view on a couple of them.
Sinek’s central concept in the book is the Circle of Safety, which is his way of saying that when people feel safe, they are at their best and healthiest. Applied to workplaces, this isn’t far off from Lencioni’s concept of the trust foundational layer in his outstanding book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team. His stories and examples about the kinds of things that create a Circle of Safety at work (and the kinds of things that destroy them) were very poignant. Some of his points about how leaders set the tone and “eat last,” both literally and figuratively, are solid. But his most interesting vignettes are the ones about how spending time face-to-face in person with people as opposed to virtually are incredibly important aspects of creating trust and bringing humanity to leadership.
My favorite one-liner from the book, which builds on the above point and extends it to a corporate philosophy of people first, customer second, shareholders third (which I have espoused at Return Path for almost 15 years now) is
Customers will never love a company unless employees love it first.
Bottom line:Â this is a rambly book, but the nuggets of wisdom in it are probably worth the exercise of having to find them and figure out how to connect them (or not connect them).
Thanks to my fellow NYC CEO Seth Besmertnik for giving me this book as well as the links to Sinek’s speeches.
Please go put Decide and Conquer: 44 Decisions that will Make or Break All Leadersby David Siegel on your reading list, or buy it. David’s book is up there on my list with Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s a totally different kind of book than Startup CEO, and in some ways a much better one in that there’s a great through-line or storyline, as David shares his leadership framework in the context of his journey of getting hired to replace founder Scott Heiferman as Meetup’s CEO after its acquisition by WeWork, including some juicy interactions with Adam Neumann, through the trials and tribulations of WeWork as a parent company, through COVID and its impact on an in-person meeting facilitator like Meetup, through to the sale of Meetup OUT of WeWork.
It’s hard to do the book justice with a quick write up. It’s incredibly concise. It’s clear. It’s witty. Most of all, it’s very human, and David shares a very human, common sense approach to leadership. I particularly like a device he uses to reinforce his main points and principles by bolding the key phrases every time they show up in the book: be kind, be confident, be bold, expand your options, focus on the long-term picture, be pragmatic, be honest, be speedy, do what’s right for the business, work for your people and they’ll work for you, be surprised only about being surprised. These all resonate with me so much.
One of the interesting things about the book is that David is a CEO, but not a founder (although he was sort of a re-founder in this case). A lot of CEO books talk about how to run a company, or give stories from the trials and tribulations thereof, but few focus on the elements of interviewing for the CEO job, or taking over the reins of a company in the midst of a turbulent flight. So the book is about getting the job, starting the job, doing a turnaround, leading a company through growth, a buy-out, and managing a company inside of another company. And because Meetup is such an iconic brand and business, it’s easy to understand a lot of the backdrop to David’s story.
I just met David for the first time a few weeks ago. We knew a bunch of people in common from his DoubleClick days. We instantly hit it off and traded copies of our books, and then were reading them at the same time trading emails about the parts that clicked. I just can’t recommend the book enough to any CEO or founder. In my view, it joins a pretty elite canon.
I took a couple days off last week and decided to re-read two old favorites. One –Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — my fourth reading — will take me a little longer to process and figure out if there’s a good intersection with the blog. One would think so with entrepreneurship as the topic, but my head still hurts from all the objectivism. The second — Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, by Albert O. Hirschman — is today’s topic.
I can’t remember when I first read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. It was either in senior year of high school Economics or Government; or in freshman year of college Political Philosophy. Either way, it was a long time ago, and for some reason, some of the core messages of this quirkly little 125 page political/economic philosophy book have stayed with me over the years. I remembered the book incorrectly as a book about political systems, and I think it was born consciously in the wake of Eugene McCarthy’s somewhat revolutionary challenge to a sitting President Johnson for the Democratic Party nomination in 1968. But the book is actually about business; it’s just about businesses and their customers, not corporations as social structures (the latter being more of an interest to me). Written by an academic economist (I think), the book has its share of gratuitous demonstrative graphs, 2×2 matrices, and SAT words. But its central premise is a gem for anyone who runs an organization of any size.
The central premise is that there are really two paths by which one can express dissatisfaction with a temporary, curable lapse in an organization: exit (bailing), or voice (trying to fix what’s wrong from within). The third key element, Loyalty, is less a path in and of itself but more an agent that “holds exit at bay and activates voice.”
You need to read the book and apply it to your own circumstances to really get into it, but for me, it’s all about breeding loyalty as a means of making voice the path of least resistance, even when exit is a freely available option (few of us run totalitarian states or monopolies, after all). That to me is the definition of a successful enterprise, both internally and externally.
With your customers:Â make your product so irresistible, and make your customer service so deep, that your customers feel an obligation to help you fix what they perceive to be wrong with your product first, rather than simply complain about price or flee to a competitor.
With your employees:Â make your company the best possible place you can think of to work so that even in as ridiculously fluid a job market as we live in, your employees will come to their manager, their department head, the head of HR, or you as leader to tell you when they’re unhappy instead of just leaving, or worse, sulking.
With your company (you as employee):Â make yourself indispensible to the organization and do such a great job that if things go wrong with your performance or with your role, your manager’s loyalty to you leads him or her to give you open feedback and coach you to success rather than unceremoniously show you the door.
Ok, this wasn’t such a short book short — probably the longest I’ve ever written in this blog, and certainly the highest ratio of short:actual book. But if you’re up for a serious academic framework (quasi-business but not exclusively) to apply to your management techniques, this short 1970 book is as valid today as when it was written. Thanks to David Ramert (I am pretty sure I read it in high school) for introducing it to me way back when!
No matter how frustrated a kids’ soccer coach gets, he never, ever runs onto the field in the middle of a game to step in and play. It’s not just against the rules, it isn’t his or her role.
Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown (book, Kindle) takes this concept and drives it home. The book was a great read, one of the better business books I’ve read in a long time. I read a preview of it via an article in a recent Harvard Business Review (walled garden alert – you can only get the first page of the article without buying it), then my colleague George Bilbrey got the book and suggested I read it. George also has a good post up on his blog about it.
One of the things I love about the book is that unlike a lot of business books, it applies to big companies and small companies with equal relevance. The book echoes a lot of other contemporary literature on leadership (Collins, Charan, Welch) but pulls it into a more accessible framework based on a more direct form of impact: not long-term shareholder value, but staff productivity and intelligence. The book’s thesis is that the best managers get more than 2x out of their people than the average – some of that comes from having people more motivated and stretching, but some comes from literally making people more intelligent by challenging them, investing in them, and leaving them room to grow and learn.
The thesis has similar roots to many successful sales philosophies – that asking value-based questions is more effective than presenting features and benefits (that’s probably a good subject for a whole other post sometime). The method of selling we use at Return Path which I’ve written about before, SPIN Selling, based on the book by Neil Rackham, gets into that in good detail. One colorful quote in the book around this came from someone who met two famous 19th century British Prime Ministers and noted that when he came back from a meeting with Gladstone, he was convinced that Gladstone was the smartest person in the world, but when he came back from a meeting with Disraeli, he was convinced that he (not Disraeli) was the smartest person in the world.
Anyway, the book creates archetypal good and bad leaders, called Multipliers and Diminishers, and discusses five traits of both:
Talent Magnet vs. Empire Builder (find people’s native genius and amplify it)
Liberator vs. Tyrant (create space, demand the best work, delineate your “hard opinions” from your “soft opinions”)
Challenger vs. Know-It-All (lay down challenges, ask hard questions)
Debate Maker vs. Decision Maker (ask for data, ask each person, limit your own participation in debates)
Investor vs. Micromanager (delegate, teach and coach, practice public accountability)
This was a great read. Any manager who is trying to get more done with less (and who isn’t these days) can benefit from figuring out how to multiply the performance of his or her team by more than 2x.
One of the best things I can say about Remote: Office Not Required, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, is that it was short. That sounds a little harsh – part of what I mean is that business books are usually WAY TOO LONG to make their point, and this one was blessedly short. But the book was also a little bit of an angry rant against bad management wrapped inside some otherwise good points about remote management.
The book was a particularly interesting read juxtaposed against Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last which I just finished recently and blogged about here, which stressed the importance of face-to-face and in-person contact in order for leaders to most effectively do their jobs and stay in touch with the needs of their organizations.
The authors of Remote, who run a relatively small (and really good) engineering-oriented company, have a bit of an extreme point of view that has worked really well for their company but which, at best, needs to be adapted for companies of other sizes, other employee types, and other cultures. That said, the flip side of their views, which is the “everyone must be at their cubicle from 9 to 5 each day,” is even dumber for most businesses these days. As usual with these things, the right answer is probably somewhere in between the extremes, and I was reminded of the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go farm go together” when I read it. Different target outcomes, different paths.
I totally agree with the authors around their comments about trusting employees and “the work is what matters.” And we have a ton of flexibility in our work at Return Path. With 400 people in the company, I personally spend six weeks over the summer working largely remote, and I value that time quite a bit. But I couldn’t do it all the time. We humans learn from each other better and treat each other better when we look at each other face to face. That’s why, with the amount of remote work we do, we strongly encourage the use of any form of video conferencing at all times. The importance of what the authors dismiss as “the last 1 or 2% of high fidelity” quality to the conversation is critical. Being in person is not just about firing and hiring and occasional sync up, it’s about managing performance and building relationships.
Remote might have been better if the authors had stressed the value that they get out of their approach more than ranting against the approaches of others. While there are serious benefits of remote work in terms of cost and individual productivity (particularly in maker roles), there are serious penalties to too much of it as well in terms of travel, communication burden, misunderstandings, and isolation. It’s not for everyone.
Thanks to my colleague Hoon Park for recommending this to me. When I asked Hoon what his main takeaway from the book was, he replied:
The importance of open communication that is archived (thus searchable), accessible (transparent and open to others) and asynchronous (doesn’t require people to be in the same place or even the same “timespace”). I love the asynchronous communication that the teams in Austin have tried: chatrooms, email lists (that anyone can subscribe to or read the archives of), SaaS project management tools. Others I would love to try or take more advantage of include internal blogs (specifically the P2 and upcoming O2 WordPress themes; http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/), GitHub pull requests (even for non-code) and a simple wiki.
These are great points, and good examples of the kinds of systems and processes you need to have in place to facilitate high quality, high volume remote work.
Well Being: The 5 Essential Elements, by Tom Rath and Jim Harter from the Gallup organization, is a solid read and incredibly short. It’s one of those books that’s really a long article stretched and bound. But it goes beyond the basics of what I expected, which was something like “having healthy employees cuts down on absenteeism” and has a couple great elements of food for thought for leaders looking to build cutting edge and uber-productive organizations. It comes out of the same general body of research as four other very strong books I’ve written about over time — First, Break all the Rules, Now, Discover Your Strengths, 12: The Great Elements of Managing (book, review), and Go Put Your Strengths to Work (book, review).
The authors define well being as having five separate components:Â career well being, social well being, physical well being, financial well being, and community well being. Ok, that makes sense, but the three most interesting points the book made from my perspective were:
Well being isn’t just about one of these five elements – it’s about all five, and how they interact together, and how the workplace can support all of them
Achieving long-term objectives around well being requires finding short-term incentives that drive the same behavior in more obvious and immediate ways, as most long-term well being drivers require short term sacrifice. So figure out how to make eating a salad better for you not just years from now but TODAY (you’ll have more energy after lunch than if you eat that cheeseburger), for example
Financial well being isn’t something a lot of companies focus on, and maybe it should be. Particularly in our industry we hire knowledge workers and assume therefore that they’re smart and educated about everything…but maybe there are ways that the company can support financial well being that aren’t necessarily obvious
The book is full of stats from the underlying research, most of which show that most people are shockingly unhappy, and that most workplaces dont do enough to support employee wellness. The book also notes, as is the case with most things, that promoting well being among employees requires more than just setting up programs. Doing it right requires constant vigilance, measurement, and follow up. At Return Path, we do a bunch of programs along the lines suggested by the book (but can and should do more!), but we’ve never been rigorous with follow up. Good food for thought.
I haven’t taken a poll to figure out the overlap between people who read this blog and people that bought the first edition of Startup CEO, but I’m guessing there’s a high degree of it. If you are familiar with the book, I don’t want to bore you with a recap of what I wrote, but I thought I would devote the next several blogs to new ideas in the second edition. First, the new cover art from the publisher is kind of cool:
The first question you might have is, “Why a second edition? Didn’t you say everything you needed to say the first time?” The answer to that is, yes, I did say everything I had to say at the time, and the first edition is pretty comprehensive as a field guide. But that was about a dozen years into what turned out to be a 20-year journey, and after we sold Return Path in 2019, I had time to reflect on all that happened. I learned a lot of new lessons between the first and second editions, we had a lot of first-time experiences, we scaled the company significantly, and we sold it. None of those things are, in and of themselves, worthy of a second edition, but collectively they help tell the story of startup to exit and tell it from a perspective of creating a sustainable business over nearly two decades.
But there are other reasons, too, besides new lessons learned. Eight years is a lifetime in terms of changes to micro-trends, language, business in general, and the world around us. I wanted to update the book to make it contemporary so that it can speak to a new generation of CEOs. The second edition is more than a new cover and obvious updates on the number of employees or revenues. I added topics that reflect heightened responsibilities of CEOs around moral and ethical leadership in an increasingly transparent and socially conscious world. How do you navigate a politically charged and divisive society? For example, the State of Indiana passed a law intended to not force people to do things that contravened their religious beliefs but it had the side effect of legal descrimination against LGBT citizens. It was contentious, with rallying cries in business and society for one side or the other, and those same sentiments were found within our employee population.
How should CEOs handle a situation that conflicts with their core values? There are no easy answers, but avoiding them doesn’t make the problem go away.
Whether it’s the #metoo movement, high-profile failures of leadership like airline employees dragging customers off of planes, or something as simple as unconscious bias in the workplace, the best CEOs now need to approach their jobs differently. I didn’t write about that in the first edition, but the second edition has an entire chapter devoted to “Authentic Leadership” and provides guidelines and advice to help CEOs. The book went to press early in the COVID-19 pandemic and prior to all the protests around racial injustice surrounding the George Floyd killing, so nothing in it specifically addresses any of those issues. In some ways, though, that may be better at the moment since the book is more about frameworks and principles than about specific responses to current events.
I also added a new section with several chapters on the ins and outs of selling a business. Startup exits are the important culmination of the startup experience and something that the first edition only briefly touched on. Obviously, I was still CEO of a growing company and although we had an opportunity or two to sell within those first years, we never pulled the trigger. The first edition talks about that process at a surface level, but the second edition has far more content and detail since we had completed a sale transaction.
The first edition of the book has sold close to 40,000 copies as of the writing of the second edition, which blew me away when I tallied it all up. I’ve received many notes of thanks from readers all over the world for the book, and I’m glad that the content has proved useful to so many people, noting from some of the more critical reviews on Amazon that it certainly doesn’t scratch everyone’s itch. I hope the changes in the new edition add even more value to the lives of entrepreneurs and startup management teams. That’s really who the book is written for.
I have a limited number of free copies of the book that I can send out, and oddly, they are only print copies since the book publishing ecosystem hasn’t figured out an efficient way for authors to distribute free Kindle copies of books yet. As a bonus incentive for reading all the way to the end of this post, I will be happy to send a free copy to the first 5 people who comment on this post on the blog and ask for one.
Patrick Lencioni’s The Three Signs of a Miserable Job is a good read, as were his last two books, The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link). They’re all super short, easy reads (four express train rides on Metro North got the job done), with a single simple message and great examples. This one is probably my second favorite so far.
This book, which has a downright dreary title, is great. It points to and proposes a solution to a problem I’ve thought about for a long time, which is how do you create meaning for people in their day to day work when they’re not doing something intrinsically meaningful like curing a disease or feeding the homeless. His recipe for success is simple:
– Get people to articulate the relevance in their jobs…the meaning they derive out of their work…an understanding of the people whose lives are made better, even in small ways, by what they do every day
– Get people to measure what they do (duh, management 101), IN RELATION TO THE RELEVANCE learnings from the last point (ahh, that’s an interesting twist)
– Get to know your people as people
All of these are things you’d generally read in good books on management, but this book ties them together artfully, simply, and in a good story about a roadside pizza restaurant. It also stands in stark contrast to the book I reviewed and panned a few days ago by Jerry Porras in that it is nothing but examples from non-celebrities, non-success stories — ordinary people doing ordinary jobs.
)