Closer to the Front Lines, Part II
Closer to the Front Lines, II
Last year, I wrote about our sabbatical policy and how I had spent six weeks filling in for George when he was out. I just finished up filling in for Jack (our COO/CFO) while he was out on his. Although for a variety of reasons I wasn’t as deeply engaged with Jack’s team as I was last year with George’s, I did find some great benefits to working more directly with them.
In addition to the ones I wrote about last year, another discovery, or rather, reminder, that I got this time around was that the bigger the company gets and the more specialized skill sets become, there are an increasing number of jobs that I couldn’t step in and do in a pinch. I used to feel this way about all non-technical jobs in the early years of the company, but not so much any more.Â
Anyway, it’s always a busy time doing two jobs, and probably both jobs suffer a bit in the short term. But it’s a great experience overall for me as a leader. Anita’s sabbatical will also hit in 2010 — is everyone ready for me to run sales for half a quarter?
Just Ask a 5-Year Old
Just Ask a 5-Year Old
I heard this short but potent story recently. I can’t for the life of me remember who told it to me, so please forgive me if I’m not attributing this properly to you!
A man walks into a kindergarten classroom and stands in front of the class. “How many of you know how to dance?” he asks the kids. They all raise their hands up high into the air.
“How many of you know how to sing?” he queries. Hands shoot up again with a lot of background chatter.
“And how many of you know how to paint?” 100% hands up for a third time.
The same man now walks into a room full of adults at a conference. “How many of you know how to dance?” he asks. A few hands go up reluctantly, all of them female.
“How many of you know how to sing?” Again, a few stray hands go up from different corners of the crowd. Five percent at best.
“And how many of you know how to paint?” This time, literally not one hand goes up in the air.
So there you go. What makes us get de-skilled or dumber as we get older? Nothing at all! It’s just our expectations of ourselves that grow. The bar goes up for what it takes to count yourself as knowing how to do something with every passing year. Why is that? When we were 5 years old, all of us were about the same in terms of our capabilities. Singing, painting, dancing, tying shoes. But as we age, we find ourselves with peers who are world class specialists in different areas, and all of a sudden, our perception of self changes. Sing? Me? Are you kidding? Who do I look like, Sting?
I see this same phenomenon in business all of the time. The better people get at one thing, the worse they think they are at other things. It’s the rare person who wants to excel at multiple disciplines, and more important, isn’t afraid to try them. But we’ve seen lots of success over the years at this at Return Path. The account manager who becomes a product manager. The tech support guy who becomes a software developer. The sales rep who becomes an account manager.
I love these stories! My anecdotal evidence suggests that people who do take this kind of plunge end up just as successful in their new discipline, if not more so, because they have a wider range of skills, knowledge, and perspectives on their job. Or it could just be that the kind of people who WANT to do multiple types of jobs are inherently stronger employees. Not sure which is the cause and which is the effect.
It’s even more rare that managers allow their people the freedom to try to be great at new things. It’s all too easy for managers to pigeonhole people into the thing they know how to do, the thing they’re doing now, the thing they first did when they started at the company. “Person X doesn’t have the skills to do that job,” we hear from time to time.
I don’t buy that. Sure, people need to be developed. They need to interview well to transition into a completely new role. But having the belief that the talent you have in one area of the company can be transferable to other areas, as long as it comes with the right desire and attitude, is a key success factor in running a business in today’s world. The opposite is an environment where you’re unable to change or challenge the organization, where you lose great people who want to do new things or feel like they are being held back, and where you feel compelled to hire in from the outside to “shore up weaknesses.” That works sometimes, but it’s basically saying you’d rather take an unknown person and try him or her out at a role than a known strong performer from another part of the organization.
And who really wants to send that message?
Knowing When to Ask for Help in Your Startup
I had a great networking meeting yesterday along with Tami Forman, the CEO of our non-profit affiliate Path Forward, and Joanne Wilson, my board co-chair. It was a meeting that Joanne set up that the three of us had been talking about for over a year. Joanne made a great comment as we were debriefing in the elevator after the meeting that is the foundation of this post. Tami and I shaped her comment into this metaphor:
Finding wood to help start a fire is different from pouring gasoline on a fire
As an entrepreneur, you need to constantly be asking for help and networking. Those meetings will shape your business in ways that you can never predict. They’ll shape your thinking, add ideas to the mix, kill bad ideas, and connect you to others who can help you in your journey.
But you need to have a good sense of who to meet with, and when, along the way. Some people, you can only meet once, unless they become core to your business, so you have to choose carefully when to fire that one bullet. Others will meet with you regularly and are happy to see longitudinal progress. Regardless, being clear on your ask is critical, and then backing up from that to figure out whether this is the one bullet you can fire with someone or whether it’s one ask of many will help you figure out if you should push for that networking meeting or not.
Why?
Because asking someone to help you find wood to start a fire (the early stages of your business) is different from pouring gasoline on an existing fire (once you’re up and running). If you’re in the super early stages of your business and looking for product-market fit, you won’t want to meet with people who aren’t conceptual thinkers, who aren’t deep in your space, or who might only see you once. Maybe they can help you brainstorm, but you’ll find better partners for that. They might be able to provide concrete help or introductions, but you’re probably not ready for those yet. It’s a waste of time. You need wood to start your fire, and people like this aren’t helpful scouring the forest floor with you to find it.
However, those people can be fantastic to meet with once you have product-market fit and are deep in the revenue cycle. You have clear demonstration of value, customer success stories, you know what works and what doesn’t and why. You can have short, crisp asks that are easy for the person to follow-up on. They will be willing to lend your their name and their network. You have a fire, they have a cup of spare gasoline, and you can get them to pour that cup on your fire.
The judgment call around this isn’t easy. Entrepreneurial zeal makes it abnormally comfortable to call on any stranger at any time and ask for help. But developing this sense is critical to optimizing your extended network in the early years.
How Much Blogging is Too Much Blogging?
How Much Blogging is Too Much Blogging?
After being completely (and blissfully, I might add) offline for 11 days, I have returned to find 247 new postings in my Newsgator folder. Only a short year ago, I would have come back from vacation to too many emails…now I get to sift through too many emails AND too many blog postings.
On the bright side, I have at least these two images of the Barolo wine country 
and the Amalfi coast
solidly etched in my brain to ease re-entry to work. Anyone interested in a brief travelog of the Italian countryside, click here and follow the top link.
I Don’t Want to Be Your Friend (Today), part III
I Don’t Want to Be Your Friend (Today), part III
My first thought when my colleague Jen Goldman forwarded me a SlideShare presentation that was 224 pages long was, “really?” But a short 10 minutes and 224 clicks later, I am glad I spent the time on it.
Paul Adams, a Senior User Experience Researcher at Google, put the presentation up called The Real Life Social Network. Paul describes the problem I discuss in Part I and Part II of this series much more eloquently than I have, with great real world examples and thoughts for web designers at the end.
If you’re involved in social media and want to start breaking away from the “one size of friend fits all” mentality – this is a great use of time.
The Greatest Minds in Email
I recently returned from a six-week sabbatical. It was fantastic. I blogged about it here if you’re curious about the experience. It turned out that, while I was gone, we had probably the most successful, least dramatic six weeks in our 10 year history. I had assumed that’s because the team buckled down while I was out, and so did our Board.
Little did we know what really happened during that six week stretch. It’s often said that when the cat’s away, the mice play. The short video below is what greeted me today at an all-hands meeting. If the team can crank out such great work and have this much fun while I’m out, well, I guess I should take more time off!
Living With Less…For Good?
Living With Less…For Good?
Like all companies, Return Path is battening down the hatches a bit on expenses these days. Our business is very strong and still growing nicely, but in this environment, the specter of disaster looms large, so there's no reason not to be more cautious and more profitable.
We weren't an extravagant company before this, and we never have been. But there is almost always room to save. Less travel, leaner budgets for office cafeterias, no more pilates classes in the Colorado office. We've been very clear internally that our three priorities are protecting everyone's job, everyone's salary, and everyone's health benefits. Hopefully things continue to go well and those can remain sacrosanct.
We are now a few months into our various cost savings plans, and it's great to see the results on the income statement and balance sheet. More than that, it's great to see how everyone in the company is rallying around the common cause and looking for other ways to save money as well. We've made it chic to be cheap. And so far, there's no impact on the business.
It will be interesting to me to see what happens on the far end of this economic badness. It's often said the companies that make it through times like these emerge stronger on the other side, and I think I now understand why: it's clear to me that some of the changes will work long term and some will only work short term, which means that we'll learn during this period that we can live with less.
That doesn't mean we were profligate in the past; but it does mean that I think we are going to retrain ourselves. We don't have to send 10 people to a big trade show to have an impact and drive the business forward. We don't have to be the vendor who picks up the tab at the end of the night. We don't need to pay for half the company to have cell phones (a very 1999 policy) to retain top talent. I bet we will learn those things — and a bunch of others to come — in the next few months.
Morning in Tribeca
We live on the 35th floor of our building in Tribeca (downtown Manhattan), facing south, about 7 blocks up from the World Trade Center site. From 1994-2001, our view was grand and corporate. For a short time in September 2001, it was horrific. Since then, it’s just been depressing. Seeing such a large gap in the skyline every morning just made us remember what — and who — used to be there.
It’s not getting a lot of coverage because it’s not the Freedom Tower, but the new World Trade Center 7 building is on its way up.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s the most beautiful construction site I’ve ever seen. It’s definitely morning once again in Tribeca!
If Only International Relations Were This Easy
If Only International Relations Were This Easy
Iceland is one of those weird places on earth where two continental plates meet — and you can see it. Here we are, me on the American plate and Mariquita on the Eurasian plate, with the earth seemingly coming apart at the seams in between.
If anyone’s interested in a short travelog to Iceland, here it is.
The Hiring Challenge
Fred had a great posting a couple weeks back called The Talent Economy. In it, he writes:
The CEOs who survived the downturn with their companies intact proved that they were tenacious, creative, hard nosed, and financially savvy. Now they are waking up to find out that the game has changed. They have to start focusing on the people side of the business a lot more. Hiring, managing, and retaining the talent is back at the top of the priority list.
Retaining good people has always been at the top of my list, even in the dark days. But hiring and managing in an environment that’s once-stagnant-now-growing presents some real challenges. Many of these aren’t unique to startups — it’s always tough to find A players — but there are three things I’ve observed that are uniquely tough about hiring in an entrepreneurial environment:
2. Finding the time to do it right. Most managers in small companies are at least a little overworked (sometimes a lot!). And most cash-sensitive small companies don’t want to hire new people until it’s absolutely necessary, or more specifically, until it was absolutely necessary about a month ago. This mismatch means that by the time the organization has decided to add someone, the hiring manager is even more overworked than usual — and can’t find the time to go through the whole process of job definition, recruiting, interviewing, and training. This is one of the biggest traps I’ve seen startups fall prey to, and the only way to break the cycle is for hiring managers to make the new hire process their #1 priority, recognizing short term pain in the form of less output (prepare your colleagues for this with good communication) in exchange for longer term gains of leverage and increased responsibility.
3. Remembering that the hiring process doesn’t end on the employee’s first day. I always think about the employee’s first day as the mid-point of the hiring process. The things that come after the first day — orientation (where’s the bathroom?), context-setting (here’s our mission, here’s how your job furthers it), specific skill training, goal setting (what’s your 90-day plan?), and a formal check-in 90 days later — are all make-or-break in terms of integrating a new employee into the organization, making sure they’re a good hire, and of course making them as productive as possible.
UPDATE: Joe Kraus has a great post on this topic as well.
Sometimes It's Worth Travelling 5,000 Miles for a 5 Minute Meeting
Sometimes It’s Worth Travelling 5,000 Miles for a 5 Minute Meeting
I re-learned this lesson shortly before the holidays. We’re negotiating a big deal with a company out on the west coast, and we were at a tense and critical spot in the negotiations. I knew that the only way to move the deal forward to a handshake and a term sheet was to meet face to face with the decision makers on the other side of the table, in person.
So I got on a plane. It wasn’t my first choice of activities, and although I was able to work a couple of other meetings into the trip, the trip was a long way to go for a really short meeting. But it was 100% worthwhile, with a very specific mission accomplished.
As I mentioned in one of my earliest posts, it’s important to be "Present AND Accounted For" in business settings, and with everyone’s busy schedules and increasingly frenzied and multi-tasking office environments, it’s harder than ever to really get someone’s attention. There’s just no substitute for looking someone in the eye and doing a real handshake, not a virtual one.