A Lighter, Yet Darker, Note
I’ve been meaning to post about this for some time now since my colleague Tami Forman introduced me to this company. It’s a riot.
You know all those well-intentioned, but slightly cheesy motivational posters you see in places like dentists’ offices? The kind that talk about “Perseverence” and “Commitment” and “Dare to Dream” and have some beautiful or unique, usually nature-centric image to go with them and their tag line?
For the sarcastic among us, you must visit Despair, Inc.’s web site, in particular any of the “Individual Designs” sections featured on the left side navigation. The posters are brilliant spoofs on the above, with such gems as “Agony” and “Strife” and “Despair” (whose tag line is “It’s always darkest just before it goes pitch black”). E.L. Kersten is one funny, albeit strange dude.
Worth a look, and everything is for sale there, too, in case you need to have these posted in a back room somewhere.
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!
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!
Book Short: The Anti-Level-5 Leader
The Five Temptations of a CEO, another short leadership fable in a series by Patrick Lencioni, wasn’t as meaningful to me as the last one I read, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link), but it wasn’t bad and was also a quick read.
The book to me was the 30 minute version of all the Level-5 Leadership stuff that Collins wrote about in Good to Great and Built to Last. All that said, it was a good quick read and a reminder of what not to do. The temptations are things that most CEOs I’ve ever known (present company very much included) have at least succumbed to at one point or another in their career. That said, you as a CEO should quit or be fired if you have them in earnest, so hopefully if you do have them, you recognize it and have them in diminishing quantities with experience, and hopefully not all at once:
– The temptation to be concerned about his or her image above company results
– The temptation to want to be popular with his or her direct reports above holding them accountable for results
– The temptation to ensure that decisions are correct, even if that means not making a decision on limited information when one is needed
– The temptation to find harmony on one’s staff rather than have productive conflict, discussion, and debate
– The temptation to avoid vulnerability and trust in one’s staff
I’m still going to read the others in Lencioni’s series as well. They may not be the best business books ever written, but they’re solid B/B+s, and they’re short and simple, which few business books are and all should be!
Book Short: What’s Your Meeting Routine?
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!
So far the series includes:
- The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link)
- The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link
)
- The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link)
I have two more to go, which I’ll tackle in due course and am looking forward to.
Book Short: A Brand Extension That Works
Usually, brand or line extensions don’t work out well in the end. They dilute and confuse the brand. Companies with them tend to see their total market share shrink, while focused competitors flourish. As the authors of the seminal work from years ago, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Jack Trout and Al Reis would be the first people to tell you this.
That said, The New Positioning, which I guess you could call a line extension by Jack Trout (without Reis), was a fantastic read. Not quite as good as the original, but well worth it. It’s actually not a new new book – I think it’s 12 years old as opposed to the original, which is now something like 25 years old, but I just read it and think it’s incredibly relevant to today’s world.
Building on the original work, Trout focuses more this time on Repositioning and Brand Extensions — two things critical to most businesses today. How to do the impossible, to change people’s minds about your brand or product mid-stream, whether in response to new competitive activity or general changes in the world around you. And how to think about brand extensions (hint: don’t do them, create a new brand like Levi’s did with Dockers).
The book also has a very valuable section on the importance of sound and words to branding and positioning, relative to imagery. Trout has a short but very colorful metaphor about women named Gertrude here that’s reminiscent of the research Malcolm Gladwell cited in Blink.
If you haven’t read the original Positioning, that should be on your wish list for the holidays. If you have, then maybe Santa can deliver The New Positioning!
Book Short: It Sounds Like it Should be About Monkeys, Doesn’t It?
The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, is a must-read for anyone in the Internet publishing or marketing business. There’s been so much written about it in the blogosphere already that I feel a little lame and “me too” for adding my $0.02, but I finally had a chance to get to it last week, and it was fantastic.
The premise is that the collapsing production, distribution, and marketing costs of the Internet for certain types of products — mostly media at this point — have extended the traditional curve of available products and purchased products almost indefinitely so that it has, in statistical terms, a really long tail.
So, for example, where Wal-Mart might only be able to carry (I’m making these numbers up, don’t have the book in front of me) 1,000 different CDs at any given moment in time on the shelf, iTunes or Rhapsody can carry 1,000,000 different CDs online. And even though the numbers of units purchased are still greatest for the most popular items (the hits, the ones Wal-Mart stocks on shelf), the number of units purchased way down “in the tail of the curve,” say at the 750,000th most popular unit, are still meaningful — and when you add up all of the units purchased beyond the top 1,000 that Wal-Mart can carry, the revenue growth and diversity of consumer choice become *really* meaningful.
The book is chock full o’ interesting examples and stats and is reasonably short and easy to read, as Anderson is a journalist and writes in a very accessible style. You may or may not think it’s revolutionary based on how deep you are in Internet media, but it will at a minimum help you crystallize your thinking about it.
Book Short: Wither the Team
I keep expecting one of his books to be repetitive or boring, but Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team held my interest all the way through, as did his others. It builds nicely on the last one I read, Death by Meeting (post, link).
I’d say that over the 9 1/2 years we’ve been in business at Return Path, we’ve systematically improved the quality of our management team. Sometimes that’s because we’ve added or changed people, but mostly it’s because we’ve been deliberate about improving the way in which we work together. This particular book has a nice framework for spotting troubles on a team, and it both reassured me that we have done a nice job stamping out at least three of the dysfunctions in the model and fired me up that we still have some work to do to completely stamp out the final two (we’ve identified them and made progress, but we’re not quite there yet.
The dysfunctions make much more sense in context, but they are (in descending order of importance):
- Absence of trust
- Fear of conflict (everyone plays politically nice)
- Lack of commitment (decisions don’t stick)
- Avoidance of accountability
- Inattention to results (individual ego vs. team success)
For those who are wondering, the two we’re still working on at the exec team level here are conflict and commitment. And the two are related. If you don’t produce engaged discussion about an issue and allow everyone to air their opinions, they will invariably be less bought into a decision (especially one they don’t agree with). But we’re getting there and will continue to work aggressively on it until we’ve rooted it out.
There’s one other interesting takeaway from the book that’s not part of the framework directly, which is that an executive has to be first and foremost a member of his/her team of peers, not the head of his/her department. That’s how successful teams get built. AND (this is key) this must trickle down in the organization as well. Everyone who manages a team of group heads or managers needs to make those people function well as a team first, then as managers of their own groups second.
At any rate, another quick gem of a book. I’m kind of sorry there’s only one left in the series.
So far the series includes:
I have one or two more to go, which I’ll tackle in due course and am looking forward to.
Book Short: Beyond 10,000 Hours
In Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (post, buy), we are taught, among other things, that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something, as well as a dash of luck and timing, as opposed to huge amounts of innate and unique talent. In Talent is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin, this theory comes to life, with a very clear differentiating point – it’s not just logging the 10,000 hours, it’s HOW the hours are spent.
Colvin’s main point is that the hours need to be spent in what he calls “deliberate practice.” The elements of deliberate practice are best explained with his example of Jerry Rice, although you can apply these to any discipline:
- He spent very little time playing football (e.g., most of his practice was building specific skills, not playing the game)
- He designed his practice to work on specific needs
- While supported by others, he did much of the work on his own (e.g., it can be repeated a lot, and there are built-in feedback loops)
- It wasn’t fun
- He defied the conventional limits of age
If you’re the kind of person who cares deeply about your own performance, let alone the performance of people around you, it doesn’t take long to be completely riveted by Colvin’s points. They ring true, and his examples are great and cross a lot of disciplines (though not a ton about business in particular). I wasn’t 50% done with the book before I had made my list of three key things that I need to Deliberately Practice.
There are some other great aspects to the book as well — including a section on Making Organizations Innovative, from creating a culture of innovation to allowing people the freedom to think, to a section on where passion and drive come from, but hopefully this post conveys the gist of it all. Want to be a better CEO? Or a better anything? This is a good place to start the process.
Thanks to Greg Sands for sending me this excellent book. I’m going to work it into my rotation for Return Path anniversary presents.
Book Short: Why Not Both?
Craig Hickman’s Mind of a Manager, Soul of a Leader talks about how tapping the natural tension between managers and leaders allows an organization to achieve its best. It covers dozens of topical areas and for each compares how a prototypical manager handles the area (practical, reasonable, decisive) vs. how a prototypical leader handles it (visionary, empathetic, and flexible). Of course, the book describes the ideal organization as “balanced an integrated” between the two extremes.
My take for startups, a topic not addressed in the book, is that the job of the entrepreneur CEO is to be both manager and leader, and try to do both roles effectively without driving the team nuts. The book says that “managers wield authority, leaders apply influence.” Entrepreneurs have to be comfortable with both styles. Thanks to my colleague Stephanie Miller for giving me a copy of this one.
Book Short: Which Runs Faster, You or Your Company?
Leading at the Speed of Growth, by Katherine Catlin at the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership is a must read for any entrepreneur or CEO of a growth company. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read targeted to that audience – its content is great, its format is a page-turner, and it’s concise and to the point.
The authors take you through three stages of a growth company’s lifestyle (Initial Growth, Rapid Growth, and Continuous Growth) and describe the “how to’s” of the transition into each stage: how you know it’s coming, how to behave in the new stage, how to leave the old stage behind.
I didn’t realize it when I started reading the book, but Brad had one of the quotes on the back cover that says it all: “There are business books about starting a company, but they tend to deal with the mechanics of business plans and financing. Then there are books about ‘how to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.’ This is the first book I’ve seen that details the role of the CEO of a small but growing company.” Thanks to my colleague George Bilbrey for pointing this one out to me.
UPDATE: Brad corrects me and says that I should mention Jana Matthews, who co-wrote the book with Katherine Catlin and is actually the Kauffman Center person of the duo.
