Book Short:  Wither the Team

I have one or two more to go, which I’ll tackle in due course and am looking forward to.

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:

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 them and learn from them
6. We believe in being transparent and direct
7. We challenge complacency, mediocrity, and decisions that don’t make sense
8. We value execution and results, not effort on its own
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

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!

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business is Patrick Lencioni’s newest book.  Unlike most or all of his other books (see the end of this post for the listing), this one is not a fable, although his writing style remains very quick and accessible.

I liked this book a lot.  First, the beginning section is a bit of a recap of his Five Dysfunctions of a Team which I think was his best book.  And the ending section is a recap of his Death by Meeting, another really good one.  The middle sections of the book are just a great reminder of the basic building blocks of creating and communicating strategy and values – about driving alignment.

But the premise, as the subtitle indicates, is that maintaining organizational health is the most important thing you can do as a leader.  I tell our team at Return Path  all the time that our culture is a competitive advantage in many ways, some quantifiable, and others a little less tangible.

A telling point in the book is when Lencioni is relaying a conversation he had with the CEO of a client company who does run a healthy organization – he asked, “Why in the world don’t your competitors do any of this?” And the client responded, “You know, I honestly believe they think it’s beneath them.” Lencioni goes on to say, “In spite of its undeniable power, so many leaders struggle to embrace organizational health because they quietly believe they are too sophisticated, too busy, or too analytical to bother with it.”  And there you have it.  More examples of why “the soft stuff” is mission critical.

Lencioni’s “Recipe for Organizational Health” (the outline of the book):

–          Build a Cohesive Leadership Team

–          Create Clarity

–          Overcommunicate Clarity

–          Reinforce Clarity

And his recipe for creating a tight set of “mission/vision/values” (the middle of the book):

1. Why do we exist?

2. How do we behave?

3. What do we do?

4. How will we succeed?

5. What is most important, right now?

6. Who must do what?

While there are lots of other good frameworks for doing all of this, Lencioni’s models and books are great, simple reminders of one of the CEO’s most important leadership functions.  We’re recrafting our own mission and values statements at the moment at Return Path, and we’re doing it using this 6-Question framework instead of the classic “Mission/Vision/Values” framework popularized a few years back by Harvard Business Review.

The full book series roundup as far as OnlyOnce has gotten so far is:

• The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, book)
• The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, book)
• The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, book)
• Death by Meeting (post, book)
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, book, Field Guide)
• Silos, Politics and Turf Wars (post, book)
• Getting Naked (post, book)
• The Advantage (book)

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!

The Difference Between Culture and Values

This topic has been bugging me for a while, so I am going to use the writing of this post as a means of working through it. We have a great set of core values here at Return Path. And we also have a great corporate culture, as evidenced by our winning multiple employer of choice awards, including being Fortune Magazine’s #2 best medium-sized workplace in America.

But the two things are different, and they’re often confused. I hear statements all the time, both here and at other companies, like “you can’t do that — it’s not part of our culture,” “I like working there, because the culture is so great,” and “I hope our culture never changes.”  And those statements reveal the disconnect.

Here’s my stab at a definition.  Values guide decision-making and a sense of what’s important and what’s right.  Culture is the collection of business practices, processes, and interactions that make up the work environment.

A company’s values should never really change. They are the bedrock underneath the surface that will be there 10 or 100 years from now.  They are the uncompromising core principles that the company is willing to live and die by, the rules of the game. To pick one value, if you believe in Transparency one day, there’s no way the next day you decide that being Transparent is unimportant. Can a value be changed?  I guess, either a very little bit at a time, slowly like tectonic plates move, or in a sharp blow as if you deliberately took a jackhammer to stone and destroyed something permanently.  One example that comes to mind is that we added a value a couple years back called Think Global, Act Local, when we opened our first couple of international offices.  Or a startup that quickly becomes a huge company might need to modify a value around Scrappiness to make it about Efficiency.  Value changes are few and far between.

If a company’s values are its bedrock, then a company’s culture is the shifting landscape on top of it. Culture is the current embodiment of the values as the needs of the business dictate. Landscapes change over time — sometimes temporarily due to a change in seasons, sometimes permanently due to a storm or a landslide, sometimes even due to human events like commercial development or at the hand of a good gardener.

So what does it mean that culture is the current embodiment of the values as the needs of the business dictate?  Let’s go back to the value of Transparency. When you are 10 people in a room, Transparency means you as CEO may feel compelled to share that you’re thinking about pivoting the product, collect everyone’s point of view on the subject, and make a decision together. When you are 100 people, you probably wouldn’t want to share that thinking with ALL until it’s more baked, you have more of a concrete direction in mind, and you’ve stress tested it with a smaller group, or you risk sending people off in a bunch of different directions without intending to do so. When you are 1,000 employees and public, you might not make that announcement to ALL until it’s orchestrated with your earnings call, but there may be hundreds of employees who know by then. A commitment to Transparency doesn’t mean always sharing everything in your head with everyone the minute it appears as a protean thought.  At 10 people, you can tell everyone why you had to fire Pat – they probably all know, anyway.  At 100 people, that’s unkind to Pat.  At 1,000, it invites a lawsuit.

Or here’s another example.  Take Collaboration as a value.  I think most people would agree that collaboration managed well means that the right people in the organization are involved in producing a piece of work or making a decision, but that collaboration managed poorly means you’re constantly trying to seek consensus.  The culture needs to shift over time in order to make sure the proper safeguards are in place to prevent collaboration from turning into a big pot of consensus goo – and the safeguards required change as organizations scale.  In a small, founder-driven company, it often doesn’t matter as much if the boss makes the decisions.  The value of collaboration can feel like consensus, as they get to air their views and feel like they’re shaping a decision, even though in reality they might not be.  In a larger organization with a wider range of functional specialists managing their own pieces of the organization, the boss doesn’t usually make every major decision, though guys like Ellison, Benioff, Jobs, etc. would disagree with that.  But in order for collaboration to be effective, decisions need to be delegated and appropriate working groups need to be established to be clear on WHO is best equipped to collaborate, and to what extent.  Making these pronouncements could come as feeling very counter-cultural to someone used to having input, when in fact they’re just a new expression of the same value.

I believe that a business whose culture never evolves slowly dies.  Many companies are very dynamic by virtue of growth or scaling, or by being in very dynamic markets even if the company itself is stable in people or product. Even a stable company — think the local hardware store or barber shop — will die if it doesn’t adapt its way of doing business to match the changing norms and consumption patterns in society.

This doesn’t mean that a company’s culture can’t evolve to a point where some employees won’t feel comfortable there any longer. We lost our first employee on the grounds that we had “become too corporate” when we reached the robust size of 25 employees. I think we were the same company in principles that day as we had been when we were 10 people (and today when we are approaching 500), but I understood what that person meant.

My advice to leaders: Don’t cling to every aspect of the way your business works as you scale up. Stick to your core values, but recognize that you need to lead (or at least be ok with) the evolution of your culture, just as you would lead (or be ok with) the evolution of your product. But be sure you’re sticking to your values, and not compromising them just because the organization scales and work patterns need to change.  A leader’s job is to embody the values.  That impacts/produces/guides culture.  But only the foolhardy leaders think they can control culture.

My advice to employees: Distinguish between values and culture if you don’t like something you see going on at work. If it’s a breach of values, you should feel very free to wave your arms and cry foul. But if it’s a shifting of the way work gets done within the company’s values system, give a second thought to how you complain about it before you do so, though note that people can always interpret the same value in different ways.  If you believe in your company’s values, that may be a harder fit to find and therefore more important than getting comfortable with the way those values show up.

Note:  I started writing this by talking about the foundation of a house vs. the house itself, or the house itself vs. the furniture inside it.  That may be a more useful analogy for you.  But hopefully you get the idea.

Return Path Core Values, Part III

Last year, I wrote a series of 13 posts documenting and illustrating Return Path’s core values.  This year, we just went through a comprehensive all-company process of updating our values.  We didn’t change our values – you can’t do that! – but we did revise the way we present our values to ourselves and the world.  It had been four years since we wrote the original values up, and the business has evolved in many ways.  Quite frankly, the process of writing up all these blog posts for OnlyOnce last year was what led me to think it was time for a bit of a refresh.

The result of the process was that we combined a few values statements, change the wording of a few others, added a few new ones, and organized and labeled them better.  We may not have a catchy acronym like Rand Fishkin’s TAGFEE, but these are now much easier for us to articulate internally.  So now we have 14 values statements, but they don’t exactly map to the prior ones one for one.  The new presentation and statements are:

People First

• Job 1:  We are responsible for championing and extending our unique culture as a competitive advantage.
• People Power:  We trust and believe in our people as the foundation of success with our clients and shareholders.
• Think Like an Owner:  We are a community of A Players who are all owners in the business.  We provide freedom and flexibility in exchange for consistently high performance.
• Seriously Fun:  We are serious about our job and lighthearted about our day.  We are obsessively kind to and respectful of each other, and appreciate each other’s quirks.

Do the Right Thing 

• No Secrets:  We are transparent and direct so that people know where the company stands and where they stand, so that they can make great decisions.
• Spirit of the Law:  We do the right thing, even if it means going beyond what’s written on paper.
• Raise the Bar:  We lead our industry to set standards that inboxes should only contain messages that are relevant, trusted, and safe.
• Think Global, Act Local:  We commit our time and energy to support our local communities.

Succeed Together

• Results-Focused:  We focus on building a great business and a great company in an open, accessible environment.
• Aim High and Be Bold:  We learn from others, then we write our own rules to be a pioneer in our industry and create a model workplace.  We take risks and challenge complacency, mediocrity, and decisions that don’t make sense.
• Two Ears, One Mouth:  We ask, listen, learn, and collect data.  We engage in constructive debate to reach conclusions and move forward together.
• Collaboration is King:   We solve problems together and help each other out along the way. We keep our commitments and communicate diligently when we can’t.
• Learning Loops: We are a learning organization.  We aren’t embarrassed by our mistakes – we communicate and learn from them so we can grow in our jobs.
• Not Just About Us:  We know we’re successful when our clients are successful and our users are happy.

For the 4 values which are “new,” I will write a post each, just as I did the old ones and run them over the next couple months.  RPers, I will go back and combine/revise my prior posts for us to use internally, but I won’t bother editing old blog posts.

Book Short:  Bringing it on Home

I’ve written a lot over the years about Return Path’s Core Values (summary post with lots of links to other posts here).  And I’ve also written and believe strongly that there’s a big difference between values, which are pretty unchanging, and culture, which can evolve a lot over time.  But I had a couple conversations recently that led me to think more philosophically about a company’s values.

The first conversation was at a recent dinner for a group of us working on fundraising for my upcoming 25th reunion from Princeton.  Our guest speaker was a fellow alumnus who I’ve gotten to know and respect tremendously over the years as one of the school’s most senior and influential volunteer leaders.  He was speaking about the touchstones in his life and in all people’s lives — things like their families, their faith, the causes they’re passionate about, and the institutions they’ve been a part of.  I remember this speaker giving a similar set of remarks right after the financial crisis hit in early 2009.  And it got me thinking about the origins of Return Path’s values, which I didn’t create on my own, but which I obviously had a tremendous amount of influence over as founder.  Where did they come from?  Certainly, some came from my parents and grandparents.  Some came from my primary and secondary education and teachers.  Some came from other influences like coaches, mentors, and favorite books.  Although I’m not overly observant, some certainly came from Hebrew school and even more so from a deep reading of the Bible that I undertook about 15 years ago for fun (it was much more fun than I expected!).  Some came from other professional experiences before I started Return Path.  But many of them either came from, or were strongly reinforced by my experience at Princeton.  Of the 15 values we currently articulate, I can directly tie at least seven to Princeton:  helpful, thankful, data-driven, collaborative, results-oriented, people first, and equal in opportunity.  I can also tie some other principles that aren’t stated values at Return Path, but which are clearly part of our culture, such as intellectually curious, appreciative of other people’s points of view, and valuing an interdisciplinary approach to work.

As part of my professional Reboot project, this was a good reminder of some of the values I know I’ve gotten from my college experience as a student and as an alumni, which was helpful both to reinforce their importance in my mind but also to remember some of the specifics around their origins – when and why they became important to me.  I could make a similar list and trade and antecedents of all or at least most of our Company’s values back to one of those primary influences in my life.  Part of Reboot will be thinking through all of these and renewing and refreshing their importance to me.

The second conversation was with a former employee who has gone on to lead another organization.  It led me to the observation I’ve never really thought through before, that as a company, we ourselves have become one of those institutions that imprints its values into the minds of at least some of its employees…and that those values will continue to be perpetuated, incorporated, and improved upon over time in any organization that our employees go on to join, manage part of, or lead.

That’s a powerful construct to keep in mind if you’re a new CEO working on designing and articulating your company’s values for the first time.  You’re not just creating a framework to guide your own organization.  You’re creating the beginning of a legacy that could potentially influence hundreds or thousands of other organizations in the future.

New Del.icio.us for: Tag

As usual the laggard behind Fred and Brad, I just set up a for:mattblumberg tag on del.icio.us.  Feel free to tag away for me!  If you don’t know what this means, you can read either of their postings about it here or here.

Startup CEO “Bibliography”

A couple people who read Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business asked me if I would publish a list of all the other business books I refer to over the course of the book.  Here it is — I guess in some respects an all-time favorite list for me of business books.

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Gary Blank
• Running Lean by Ash Maurya
• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development: A Cheat Sheet to the Four Steps to the Epiphany by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits
• Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business by Ram Charan
• The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clay Christensen
• The Innovator’s Solution by Clay Christensen
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin
• The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
• It’s Not Luck by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
• Blue Ocean Strategy by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
• Inside the Tornado by Geoffrey Moore
• Escape Velocity by Geoffrey Moore
• Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins
• Topgrading by Brad Smart
• The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard
• Whale Done by Ken Blanchard
• High Output Management by Andy Grove
• Three Signs of a Miserable Job by Patrick Lencioni
• The Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni
• The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by Patrick Lencioni
• Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni
• The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni
• Hardball by George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
• The Eighth Habit by Stephen Covey
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Built to Last by Jim Collins

And here’s the list of books in Brad Feld’s Startup Revolution series other than Startup CEO:

• Startup Communities: Building and Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City by Brad Feld
• Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur by Brad Feld and Amy Batchelor
• Startup Metrics: Making sense of the numbers in your startup by Brad Feld (not yet published)
• Startup Boards: Getting the Most out of Your Board of Directors by Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani
• Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
• Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by Brad Feld and David Cohen

Book Short:  Vulnerability Applied to Leadership

Getting Naked:  A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty (book, Kindle), is Patrick Lencion’s latest fable-on-the-go book, and it’s as good a read as all of his books (see list of the ones I’ve read and reviewed at the end of the post).

The book talks about the power of vulnerability as a character trait for those who provide service to clients in that they are rewarded with levels of client loyalty and intimacy.  Besides cringing as I remembered my own personal experience as an overpaid and underqualified 21 year old analyst at how ridiculous some aspects of the management consulting industry are…the book really made me think.  The challenge to the conventional wisdom of “never letting ‘em see you sweat” (we *think* vulnerability will hurt success, we *confuse* competence with ego, etc.) is powerful.  And although vulnerability is often uncomfortable, I believe Lencioni is 100% right – and more than he thinks.

First, the basic premise of the book is that consultants have three fears they need to overcome to achieve nirvana – those fears and the mitigation tactics are:

1. Fear of losing the business:  mitigate by always consulting instead of selling, giving away the business, telling the kind truth, and directly addressing elephants in the room
2. Fear of being embarrassed:  mitigate by asking dumb questions, making dumb suggestions, and celebrating your mistakes
3. Fear of feeling inferior:  mitigate by taking a bullet for the client, making everything about the client, honoring the client’s work, and doing your share of the dirty work

But to my point about Lencioni being more right than he thinks…I’d like to extend the premise around vulnerability as a key to success beyond the world of consulting and client service into the world of leadership.  Think about some of the language above applied to leading an organization or a team:

• Telling the kind truth and directly addressing elephants in the room:  If you’re not going to do this, who is?  There is no place at the top of an organization or team for conflict avoidance
• Asking dumb questions:  How else do you learn what’s going on in your organization?  How else can you get people talking instead of listening?
• Making dumb suggestions:  I’d refer to this more as “bringing an outside/higher level perspective to the dialog.”  You never know when one of your seemingly dumb suggestions will connect the dots for your team in a way that they haven’t done yet on their own (e.g., the suggestions might not be so dumb after all)
• Celebrating your mistakes:  We’re all human.  And as a leader, some of your people may build you up in their mind beyond what’s real and reasonable.  Set a good example by noting when you’re wrong, noting your learnings, and not making the same mistake twice
• Taking a bullet for your team, making everything about your team and honoring your team’s work:  Management 101.  Give credit out liberally.  Take the blame for team failings.
• Doing your share of the dirty work:  An underreported quality of good leaders.  Change the big heavy bottle on the water cooler.  Wipe down the coffee machine.  Order the pizza or push the beer cart around yourself.  Again, we’re all human, leaders aren’t above doing their share to keep the community of the organization safe, fun, clean, well fed, etc.

There’s a really powerful message here.  I hope this review at least scratches the surface of it.

The full book series roundup as far as OnlyOnce has gotten so far is:

• The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, book)
• The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, book)
• The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, book)
• Death by Meeting (post, book)
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, book, Field Guide)
• Silos, Politics and Turf Wars (post, book)
• Getting Naked (post, book)