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.
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!
If you’ve been reading this blog for a long time (amazingly, it is over 16 years old now!), you know that my company and main professional life’s work up to this point, Return Path, was a 1999 vintage email technology company that we sold last year. I then had a couple other interim leadership roles, first as interim CEO of another tech company in New York, then in March as the founder and interim leader of Colorado’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team, which I wrote a series of blog posts about (this is the final post in the series, which links to the whole series).
I’ve generally been quiet on OnlyOnce since last year, but I will be picking up the pace of writing in the weeks ahead for a couple of reasons.
First, I’ve teamed up with a few former Return Path colleagues and some amazing investors and partners to start a new company. We’re still in quasi-stealth mode, so I’m sorry I can’t talk about it much yet, but I will as soon as we publicly launch sometime after Labor Day. It’s a cool business in a totally different space from Return Path and plays to our team’s interests and skills around people, values, culture, leadership development, and team scalability. I won’t rename this blog OnlyTwice, but there’s definitely a lot to be said for being a second-time founder.
Related to that, I have also been working on a Second Edition to my book from 2013, Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, which is coming out in a week or two from Wiley & Sons, and which is available for pre-order now. I will write a series of posts in the coming weeks that talk about the new material in the second edition. Our team at the new company is also working on a sequel to that book – more to come on that as well.
For now, I am doing great, enjoying life as a brand new Startup CEO once again, and feeling quite privileged and a little guilty for it by being in this weird bubble of my nice home and yard and feeling safely isolated from the pandemic, from economic dislocation, from social protests, and from having to lead a scaled organization through all of that turmoil.
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:Â 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:Â 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: 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.
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 Short:Â Internet Fiction, part II
I hate to write a lame post, but here’s what I wrote earlier in the year about Eliot Peper’s first Internet thriller, Uncommon Stock:
Eliot Pepper’s brand new startup thriller, Uncommon Stock, was a breezy and quick read that I enjoyed tremendously. It’s got just the right mix of reality and fantasy in it. For anyone in the tech startup world, it’s a must read. But it would be equally fun and enjoyable for anyone who likes a good juicy thriller.
Like my memory of Hackoff, the book has all kinds of startup details in it, like co-founder struggles and a great presentation of the angel investor vs. VC dilemma. But it also has a great crime/murder intrigue that is interrupted with the book’s untimely ending. I eagerly await the second installment, promised for early 2015.
Having just finished that second installment, called Uncommon Stock: Power Play, basically I want to say “ditto.” Â Power Play was just as good as the first book, and now I can’t wait for the third. Where the first installment’s startup focus was around funding and founder dynamics, this one’s startup focus was around shipping product and customers. The thriller part was just as juicy.
It’s also kind of fun reading about the Boulder startup scene, especially from a writer who doesn’t and who has never spent a ton of time there. He gets some things remarkably accurate with crisp descriptions. I was kind of hoping for a cameo by Brad, at least in the form of a throw-away comment about the “long haired homeless-looking investor in the corner of Frasca.”
Book Short:Â A Must Read
Every once in a while, I read a book and think, “This is an important book.” Microtrends, by Mark Penn, was just that kind of read. Penn is the CEO of one of our largest clients in the market research business as well as CEO of Burson Marstellar and, more notably, the Clintons’ pollster and strategy director for much of the last 16 years. He’s a smart guy, and more important than that, he’s awash in primary research data.
The premise of Microtrends is that America is no longer a melting pot, where lots of different people come together to try to be the same, but rather that it’s a big tent, where lots of small groups are now large enough to express their individuality powerfully. The book is also perfect for the ADD-afflicted among us, with 75 chapters each of about 4 pages in length describing one new “microtrend” or small faction of American identity. Penn not only describes the trend in a data-rich way but then goes on to postulate about the impact that trend will have on society at large and/or on the business opportunities that could come from serving those in the trend.
Just to give you a sample of the trends he covers:Â Sex-ratio singles (explaining why there really are more single women than men), Extreme commuters (we certainly have a couple of those at Return Path),
Pro-Semites vs. Christian Zionists (they sound the same but are completely different), Newly-released Ex-cons (hint – there are a ton of them), and the rise of Chinese artists.
Whether you’re interested in marketing, entrepreneurship (you’ll get loads of ideas here), investing (more loads of ideas), or just trends in American and global society, Microtrends is a must must must read. All 75 chapters were interesting to me, but even if you don’t love some…they’re only 4 pages each!
Book Short: Tech Founder? Varsity Basketball Captain? Both! At the Same Time!
Ben Casnocha’s My Startup Life has some of the same appeal as The Mousedriver Chronicles (which I reviewed years go here) in its tale of a startup, its successes, failures, and lessons learned. If you like that kind of book or are starting a company and are looking for kindred spirits, it’s a good book for you.
Ben’s story is more remarkable in some ways because he started his eGovernment software (SaaS of course) company Comcate at the age of 13. That’s right, 13. When I was learning how to shave, having a bar mitzvah, and dealing with acne and a voice dropping at terminal velocity. Starting a business was the furthest thing from my mind. Though to be fair, teenage entrepreneurs are a featured new demographic in Mark Penn’s Microtrends (also worth a read). Perhaps if I were Ben’s age today, I would be a startup junkie, too.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Ben a couple times via Brad — I think Brad MUST have been a lot like him 20ish years ago. The advice in the book is good and relevant and incredibly mature for a 20-year old, and Ben, I mean that in an impressed way, not a patronizing one. It’s not necessarily revolutionary, but it’s a very quick and light read if you like the genre/premise.
