Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, by Leidy Klotz is a great read, and in concert with the philosophy of the book, this will be a short blog post.

The book’s basic premise is that less is more, addition by subtraction. The author’s examples range from the genius of the Strider Bike (bike without pedals) that allows 2-year olds to ride bikes to the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Many people don’t remember that that road used to be called the Embarcaro Freeway, a massive, ugly, two-tiered structure that blocked out the views and waterfront, and that the opportunity to tear down the whole thing following the massive 189 earthquake left San Francisco with a much simpler, beautiful, liveable waterfront by the Ferry Terminal.

There are many great takeaways in the book as well as an action plan for how to think about subtracting AND adding, not just adding, which is the normal reflex for humans, and I’d add ESPECIALLY for entrepreneurs!

We put these principles into action a couple weeks ago at Bolster. When we were crafting our 2024 plan, we worked methodically as a leadership team to reduce. We cut out words, but we also cut out topics and strategic initiatives. The end product was less than 50% the size (word for word) of the 2023 plan, and I think it’s much crisper, more memorable, and more actionable for our team than last year’s.

Hopefully over time, we will find more occasions to do less.

I’ll close with two of my favorite quotes, both of which were in the book. One is by Mark Twain, which is “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” The other is by Lao Tzu, which is “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.”

Sometimes less takes more time. But it’s almost always more valuable.

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.)

A Path Forward in California!

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.

Book Short:  On The Same Page

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

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

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

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

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:

1. 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).
2. Set annual priorities, goals, and targets. Turn the broader mission into something more concrete with prioritized goals and unambiguous success metrics.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

Book Short: Smaller is the New Small

Last month, it was Microtrends. This month, it’s MIT Professor Ted Sargent’s The Dance of Molecules: How Nanotechnology is Changing Our Lives. It seems like all the interesting things in life are just getting smaller and smaller. (Note to self: lose some weight.)

Sargent’s book is geeky but well-written. He dives into a couple dozen examples across many fields and disciplines of how nanotechnology holds extraordinary promise for solving some of mankind’s toughest scientific challenges — while creating a few new ethical and economic ones.

The science is for the most part beyond me, but the practical applications are fascinating:

– making solar power the sole source of global energy needs a possibility

– detecting cancer at the level of a single cancer cell rather than waiting to discover a grape-sized tumor; curing that cancer through embedded “pharmacy on a chip” drugs that release the right drugs over long periods of time locally at the spot of the disease

– figuring out how to keep proving the ever-more-challenging Moore’s law when only 4 years from now, parts of a transistor will need to be only 5 atoms across

– curing blindness with wireless retinal implants

Once every year or so, I read a book that makes me sad I didn’t go into engineering or science. The Dance of Molecules is that kind of book.

More Good Inc.

Last year I was pleased and proud to write about our debut on the Inc. 500 list of America’s fastest growing companies.  At that time I wrote that “Now our challenge, of course, is STAYING on the list, and hopefully upping our ranking next year!”  Well, I am again please and proud to announce that we, in fact, stayed on the list.  (You can read all the Inc. coverage here and see our press release about the ranking here.)

Unfortunately, we didn’t make the second part of our goal to up our rank.  But, we did up our growth – our three-year revenue growth rate was 18% higher than last year.  This is a testament to the hard work of our team (now 150 strong!) and wouldn’t be possible without the support of our many great clients (now 1,500 strong!).  Most importantly, we see no end in sight.  In fact, 2008 promises to be an even bigger year for us as we poise for continued growth.  By the way, would you like to be part of a team that has now ranked as one of America’s fastest growing companies two years in a row?  Check out our Careers page and join the team that is advancing email marketing, one company at a time.

Welcome to the new Return Path.

For a tech company to grow and thrive in the 21st century it must be in a state of constant adaptation. We have been the global market leaders in email deliverability since my co-founder George Bilbrey coined that term back in 2002. In fact, back in 2008 we announced a major corporate reorganization, divesting ourselves of some legacy businesses in order to focus on deliverability as our core business.  

 Since then Return Path has grown tremendously thanks to that focus, but we have grown to the point where it’s time for us to redefine ourselves once again.  Now we’re launching a new chapter in the company’s history to meet evolving needs in our marketplace. We’re establishing ourselves as the global market leaders in email intelligence. Read on and I’ll explain what that means and why it’s important.

What Return Path Released Today

We launched three new products today to improve inbox placement rate (the new Inbox Monitor,  now including subscriber-level data), identify phishing attacks (Email Brand Monitor), and make it easier to understand subscriber engagement and benchmark your program against your competition (Inbox Insight, a groundbreaking new solution). We’ve also released an important research study conducted by David Daniels at The Relevancy Group.

The report’s findings parallel what we’ve been hearing more and more recently. Email marketers are struggling with two core problems that complicate their decision making: They have access to so much data, they can’t possibly analyze it fast enough or thoroughly enough to benefit from it; and too often they don’t have access to the data they really need.

Meanwhile they face new challenges in addition to the ones email marketers have been battling for years. It’s still hard to get to the inbox, and even to monitor how much mail isn’t getting there. It’s still hard to protect brands and their customers from phishing and spoofing, and even to see when mail streams are under attack. And it’s still hard to see engagement measurements, even as they become more important to marketing performance.

Email Intelligence is the Answer

Our solution to these problems is Email Intelligence. Email intelligence is the combination of data from across the email ecosystem, analytics that make it accessible and manageable, and insight that makes it actionable. Marketers need all of these to understand their email performance beyond deliverability. They need it to benchmark themselves against competitors, to gain a complete understanding of their subscribers’ experience, and to accurately track and report the full impact of their email programs.  In fact, we have redefined our company’s mission statement to align with our shift from being the global leader in Email Deliverability to being the global leader in Email Intelligence:

We analyze email data and build solutions that generate insights for senders, mailbox providers, and users to ensure that inboxes contain only messages that users want

The products we are launching today, in combination with the rest of our Email Intelligence Solution for Marketers that’s been serving clients for a decade, will help meet these market needs, but we continue to look ahead to find solutions to bigger problems. I see our evolution into an Email Intelligence company as an opportunity to change the entire ecosystem, to make email better, more welcome, more effective, and more secure.

David’s researchoffers a unique view of marketers’ place in the ecosystem, where they want to get to, how much progress they’ve made, and how big a lead the top competitors have opened up against the rest. (It can also give you a sense of where your efforts stack up vs. the rest of the industry.) There are definitely some surprises, but for me the biggest takeaway was no surprise at all: The factors that separate the leaders are essentially the core components of what we define as Email Intelligence.

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:

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

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!

How Much Marketing Is Too Much Marketing?

It seems like a busy holiday season is already underway for marketers, and hopefully for the economy, shoppers as well.  Just for kicks, I thought I’d take a rough count of how many marketing messages I was exposed to in a given day.  Here’s what the day looked like:

5:30 a.m. – alarm clock goes off with 1010 WINS news radio in the middle of an ad cycle – 2 ads total.  Nice start to the day.

5:45-6:30 – in the gym, watching Today In New York News on NBC for 30 minutes, approximately 6 ad pods, 6 ads per pod – 36 ads total.  So we’re at 38, and it’s still dark out.

7:00 – walk to subway and take train to work, then walk to office from subway.  Probably see 6 outdoor ads of various kinds on either walk, then about 8 more on the subway within clear eyeshot – 20 ads total.

7:30 – quick scan of My Yahoo – 2 ads total.

7:32 – read Wall St. Journal online, 15 page views, 3 ads per page – 45 ads total.

7:40 – Catch up on RSS feeds and blogs, probably about 100 pages total, only 50% have ads – 50 ads total (plus another 25 during the rest of the day).

7:50 – Sift through email – even forgetting the spam and other crap I delete – 10 ads total (plus another 10 during the rest of the day).

8:00-noon – basically an ad free work zone, but some incidental online page views are generated in the course of work – 25 ads total, plus a ton of Google paid search ads along the way.

Noon-1 p.m. – walk out to get lunch and come back to office, so some outdoor ads along the path – 12 ads total.

1-7 p.m. – same work zone as before – 25 ads total, plus lots of Google.

7 p.m. – walk to Madison Square Garden to see the Knicks get clobbered by Milwaukee, see lots of outdoor ads along the way – 20 ads total.

7:30-9:30 – at the Garden for the Knicks game, bombarded by ads on the scoreboards, courtside, sponsorship announcements, etc.  Approximately 100 ads total (and that’s probably being exceptionally generous).

9:30 – subway ride and walk home – 14 ads total.

10:00 – blitz through episodes of The Daily Show and West Wing in TiVo.  8 minutes of :30 advertising per half hour, or 48 ads total, fortunately can skip most of them with TiVo.

11:00 – flip through issue of The New Yorker before bed – 50 ads total.

Total: 492 ads.

I’m sure I missed some along the way, and to be fair, I am counting the ads I skipped with TiVo — but hey, I’m also not counting all the ads I saw on Google, so those two should wash each other out.  On the other hand, if I drove to and from work in California, I’d have seen an extra 100 billboards, and if I read the New York Times print edition, I’d have seen an extra 100 print ads.

Approximate cost paid to reach me as a consumer today (assuming an average CPM of $10): just under $5.  Sanity check on that — $5/day*200 million Americans who are “ad seers”*365 days is a $365 billion advertising industry, which is probably in the right ballpark.

What are the two ads I consciously acted on?  An offer from LL Bean through email (I’m on their list) for a new fleece I’ve been meaning to get, and a click on one of the Google paid search results.  No doubt, I subconsciously logged some good feelings or future purchase intentions for any number of the other ads.  Or at least so hope all of the advertisers who tried to reach me.

What’s the message here?  A very Seth Godin-like one.  Nearly all of the marketing thrown at me during the day (Seth would call it interrupt marketing) — on the subway, at the Garden, on the sidebar of web pages — is just noise to me.  The ones I paid attention to were the ones I WANTED to see:  the email newsletter I signed up for from a merchant I know and love; and a relevant ad that came up when I did a search on Google.

Brand advertising certainly has a role in life, but permission and relevance rule the day for marketers.  Always.

Book Not-So-Short:  Not Just for Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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