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Keeping It All In Sync?

I just read a great quote in a non-business book, Richard Dawkins’ River out of Eden, Dawkins himself quoting Darwinian psychologist Nicholas Humphrey’s revolting of a likely apocryphal story about Henry Ford. The full “double” quote is:

It is said that Ford, the patron saint of manufacturing efficiency, once

commissioned a survey of the car scrapyards in America to find out if there were parts of the Model T Fird which never failed. His inspectors came back with reports of almost every kind of breakdown: axles, brakes, pistons — all were liable to go wrong. But they drew attention to one notable exception, the kingpins of the scrapped cars invariably had years of life left in them. With ruthless logic, Ford concluded that the kingpins on the Model T were too good for their job and ordered that in the future they should be made to an inferior specification.

You may, like me, be a little vague about what kingpins are, but it doesn’t matter. They are something that a motor far needs, and Ford’s alleged ruthlessness was, indeed, entirely logical. The alternative would have been to improve all the other bits of the car to bring them up to the standard of the kingpins. But then it wouldn’t have been a Model T he was manufacturing but a Rolls Royce, and that wasn’t the object of the exercise. A Rolls Royce is a respectable car to manufacture and so is a Model T, but for a different price. The trick is to make sure that either the whole car is built to Rolls Royce specifications or the whole car is built to Model T specifications.

Kind of makes sense, right? This is interesting to think about in the context of running a SaaS business or any internet or service business. I’d argue that Ford’s system does not apply or applies less. It’s very easy to have different pieces of a business like ours be at completely different levels of depth or quality. This makes intuitive sense for a service business, but even within a software application (SaaS or installed), some features may work a lot better than others. And I’m not sure it matters.

What matters is having the most important pieces — the ones that drive the lion’s share of customer value — at a level of quality that supports your value proposition and price point. For example, in a B2B internet/service business, you can have a weak user interface to your application but have excellent 24×7 alerting and on-call support — maybe that imbalance works well for your customers. Or let’s say you’re running a consumer webmail business. You have good foldering and filtering, but your contacts and calendaring are weak.

I’m not sure either example indicates that the more premium of the business elements should be downgraded. Maybe those are the ones that drive usage. In the manufacturing analogy, think about it this way and turn the quote on its head. Does the Rolls Royce need to have every single part fail at the same time, but a longer horizon than the Model T? Of course not. The Rolls Royce just needs to be a “better enough” car than the Model T to be differentiated in terms of brand perception and ultimately pricing in the market.

The real conclusion here is that all the pieces of your business need to be in sync — but not with each other as much as with customers’ needs and levels of pain.

The Best Place to Work, Part 7: Create a Thankful Atmosphere

My final installment of this long series on Creating the best place to work (no hierarchy intended by the order) is about Creating a thankful atmosphere.

What does creating a thankful atmosphere get you? It gets you great work, in the form of people doing their all to get the job done. We humans – all of us, absolutely including CEOs – appreciate being recognized when they do good work. Honestly, I love what I do and would do it without any feedback, but nothing resonates with me more than a moment of thanks from someone on my exec team or my Board. Why should anyone else in the organization be any different?

This is not about giving everyone a nod in all-hands by doing shout-outs. That’s not sustainable as the company grows. And not everyone does great work every week or month! And it’s not about remembering to thank people in staff meetings, either, although that’s never bad and easier to contain and equalize.

It is about informal, regular pats on the back. To some extent inspired by the great Ken Blanchard book Whale Done, and as I’ve written about before here, it’s about enabling the organization to be thankful, and optimizing your own thankfulness.

Years ago we created a peer award system on our company Intranet/Wiki at Return Path. We enable Peer Recognition through this. As of late, with about 350 employees, we probably have 30-40 of these every week. They typically carry a $25 gift card award, although most employees tell me that they don’t care about the gift card as much as the public recognition. Anyone can nominate anyone for one of the following awards, which are unique to us and relevant to our culture:

EE (Everyday Excellence) -is designed for us to recognize those who demonstrate excellence and pride in their daily work.
ABCD (Above and Beyond the Call of Duty) -is designed for us to recognize the outstanding work of our colleagues who go Above and Beyond their duties and exemplify exactly what Return Path is about
WOOT (Working Out Of Title) -is designed for us to recognize those who offer assistance that is not part of their job responsibilities.
OTB (On The Business)-is about pulling ourselves out of day-to-day tasks and ensuring we are continually aligned with the long-term, strategic direction of the business. We make sure we’re not just optimizing our current tasks and processes but that we’re also thinking about whether or not we should even be doing those things. We stop to think outside of the “box” and about the interrelationship between what we are doing and everything else in the organization. In doing so, we connect the leaves, the branches, the trunk, the roots and soil of the tree to the hundreds of other trees in the forest. We step back to look at the big picture
TLAO ( Think Like An Owner)-means that every one of us holds a piece of the Company’s future and is empowered to use good judgment and act on behalf of Return Path. In our day-to-day jobs we take personal responsibility for our products, services and interactions. We spend like it’s our own money and we think ahead. We are trusted to handle situations like we own the business because we are smart people who do the right thing. We notice the things happening around us that aren’t in our day-to-day and take action as needed even if we’re not directly responsible
Blue Light Special is designed for us to recognize anyone who comes up with a clever way to save the company money)
Coy Joy Award is in memory of Jen Coy who was positive, optimistic and able to persevere through the most difficult of circumstances. This award is designed to recognize individuals who exemplify the RP values and spread joy through the workplace. This can be by going above and beyond to welcome new employees, by showing a high degree of care and consideration for another person at RP, by being a positive and uplifting influence, and/or making another person laugh-out-loud.
Human Firewall is awarded if you catch a colleague taking extra care around security or privacy in some way, maybe a suggestion in a meeting, a feature in a product, a suggestion around policy or practice in the office.

In the early days, we read these out each week at All-Hands meetings. Today at our scale, we announce these awards each week on the Wiki and via email. And I and other leaders of the business regularly read the awards list to see who is doing what good work and needs to be separately thanked on top of the peer award.

Beyond institutionalizing thanks…in terms of you as an individual person, there are lots of ways to give thanks that are meaningful. Some are about maximizing Moments of Truth. Another thing I do from time to time is write handwritten thank you notes to people and mail them to their homes, not to work. But there are lots of ways to spend the time and mental energy to appreciate individuals in your company in ways that are genuine and will be noticed and appreciated. To some extent, this paragraph (maybe this whole post) could be labeled “It’s the little things.”

That’s it for this series…again, the final roundup for the full series of Creating the Best Place to Work is here and individual posts are here:

Anyone have any other techniques I should write about for Creating the Best Place to Work?

How Do You Eat an Elephant?

Credit to my colleague Chuck Drake for this one…but How Do You Eat an Elephant? One Bite at a Time. The David Allen school of time management (post, book) talks about breaking your projects down into “Next Actions” so they don’t become overwhelming and can easily move forward one step at a time.

I think the same is true of organizational projects – perhaps even more so. Any time we find ourselves swirling around a big initiative at Return Path, we are at our best when we ask ourselves some questions along these lines:

How can we be scrappier about this?
It it ok to be messy here…or at least not perfect?
What is the next milestone?
What else needs to be done until we learn the likely outcome?

We had a great example of this recently around rolling out a new product to our sales and service team. The team is now pretty large – over 100 globally. It was a daunting task to try to get all those people trained up at once. The answer? We took a bite out of the elephant. We picked a couple of sales reps and a couple of account managers and started by training them on the new product. Now we can figure out how to institutionalize learnings from the limited roll-out and figure out the next step from there. Much easier than what otherwise would have been a pretty high-stakes project without enough learnings behind it, even though it will take a little longer and be a little messier.

Unknown Unknowns

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” –Donald Rumsfeld

Say what you will about Rumsfeld or the Iraq war, but this is actually a great and extensible quote. And more to the point, I’d say that one of the main informal jobs of a CEO, sort of like Connecting the Dots in that it’s not one of the three main roles of a CEO) is to understand and navigate known unknowns and unknown unknowns for your organization (hopefully you already understand and navigate the known knowns!). Here’s what I mean:

An example of a known unknown is that a new competitor could pop up and disrupt your business from below (e.g., the low end) at any minute. Or let’s say your biggest partner buys one of your competitors. These are the kinds of things you and your team should be cognizant of as possibilities and always thinking about how to defeat
While I suppose unknown unknowns are by definition hard to pin down, an example of an unknown unknown is something like a foreign leader deciding to nationalize the industry you’re in including your local subsidiary, or a young and healthy leader in your organization dying unexpectedly, or September 11. I suppose these are “black swan” events that Nassim Nicholas Taleb made famous in his book.

Helping your team identify potential known unknowns and think three steps ahead is critical. But helping your team turn unknown unknowns into known unknowns is, while much harder, probably one of the best things you can do as CEO of your organization. And there are probably two ways you can do this, noting that by definition, you’ll never be able to know all the unknowns. As you might expect, the way to do that comes down to increasing your pool of close-at-hand knowledge.

First, you and your executive team can have as broad a view of your industry and corporate ecosystem, and of the economy at large, as possible. It’s critical for business leaders to read diverse publications, to share insights with teammates, and to network with experts both inside and outside your space.

Second, you can design a culture so that information flows freely up, down, and sideways — so that people in your organization want to share information instead of hoard it. That’s easier said than done, and there’s more than a blog post worth of what has to go into making that a reality. But think about the CIA and all the flak they got about failure to connect the dots around September 11. To close this post where I opened it, you can be the chief connector inside your organization…but you need to get your organization connecting the dots itself.

A friend of mine just emailed me and asked how I collect feedback from the Board after Board meetings. I have a good routine for this which I wrote about a little bit here but have since expanded.

First, we are disciplined about leaving an hour at the end of the board meeting for the following three things :

Executive session – directors only, including me – sometimes I’ll have my CFO Jack come for a few minutes at the beginning, depending on the topics. The topics can be about people on the team, or things I’m concerned about that I didn’t want to talk about with observers and team present. I tee up any topics in a separate memo that I send only to board members when I send the main board book out. My board meetings are very inclusive – lots of team members and observers present, so it’s good to have this time available case the Board wants to talk more openly with me about something or ask questions they didn’t feel like asking with the broader group in the room.
Closed session – I leave, so I give non-management directors an opportunity to talk about any issues related to me.
CEO Debrief – I ask one director to take notes for me during Closed Session, then that person calls me back in to debrief anything.

All three of these are important, and it’s important to do them every meeting, even if you don’t have any specific issues to discuss. That way, no one freaks out (including you) if suddenly and unexpectedly, there’s a part of the meeting to which they’re not invited.

The key to this is really leaving time for it. Now that board meetings are often on Zoom, a lot of CEOs have shrunk the time to 2-3 hours to avoid Zoom fatigue, but that doesn’t usually leave a full hour for this end-of-meeting routine. Finish your main meeting, give everyone 10 minutes to breathe, then come back for the final three steps of the meeting.

Then, I use this form after every meeting, which was a suggestion from Fred a few years back (not here or here, though these are also really good posts he wrote on this topic). I sent it during Executive Session and ask people to fill it out immediately after the meeting while things are fresh in their minds.

Quick, easy, effective. You should never finish a Board meeting and have no idea how it went.

The Books

Keeping It All In Sync?

The Best Place to Work, Part 7: Create a Thankful Atmosphere

How Do You Eat an Elephant?

Unknown Unknowns

Collecting Feedback from Your Board