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.

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.

A Sense of Urgency, by John Kotter, is a solid book – not his best, but worth a read and happily short, as most business books should be.  I originally was going to hold off on writing this post until I had more time, but the subject matter alone made me think that was a mistake and that I should write it while it’s fresh in my mind.  <g>

The three tools to fight complacency are the organizing framework for the book — bring the outside in, behave with urgency every day, and turn crises into opportunities — are all good thoughts, and good reminders of basic management principles.  But there were a couple other themes worth calling out even more.

First up, the notion that there is a vicious cycle at play in that urgency begets success which creates complacency which then requires but does not beget urgency.  The theme is really that success can drive arrogance, stability, and scale that requires inward focus — not that success itself is bad, just that it requires an extra level of vigilance to make sure it doesn’t lead to complacency.  I’ve seen this cycle at different times over the years in lots of organizations, and it’s one of the reasons that if you look at the original companies on the Dow Jones Industrials index when it was expanded from 12 to 30 around 100 years ago, only one of them (GE) still exists.

Second, that busy-ness can masquerade as urgency but actually undermines urgency.  A full calendar doesn’t mean you’re behaving with urgency.  Kotter’s example of an Indian manager is great:

If you watch the Indian manager’s behavior carefully and contrast it with the hospital executive’s, you find that the former relentlessly eliminates low-priority items from his appointment diary. He eliminates clutter on the agenda of the meetings that do make it into his diary. The space that is freed up allows him to move faster. It allows him to follow up quickly on the action items that come out of meetings. The time freed up allows him to hold impromptu interactions that push along important projects faster. The open space allows him to talk more about issues he thinks are crucial, about what is happening with customers and competitors, and about the technological change affecting his business.

Finally, Kotter’s theme of “Urgent patience” is a wonderful turn of phrase.  As he says,

It means acting each day with a sense of urgency but having a realistic view of time. It means recognizing that five years may be needed to attain important and ambitious goals, and yet coming to work each day committed to finding every opportunity to make progress toward those goals.

How true is that?  It’s not just that big ships take a long time to turn…it’s that big opportunities take a long time to pursue and get right.  If they didn’t…everyone would do them!  Urgent patience is what allows you to install a bias for action in your team without causing panic and frenzy, which is never productive.

Thanks to my friend Chad Dickerson for recommending this book, a great read as part of Operation Reboot Matt.

Book Short:  A SPIN Selling Companion

At Return Path, we’re big believers in the SPIN Selling methodology popularized by Neil Rackham. It just makes sense. Spend more time listening than talking on a sales call, uncover your prospect’s true needs and get him or her to articulate the need for YOUR product. Though it doesn’t reference SPIN Selling, Why People Don’t Buy Things, by Kim Wallace and Harry Washburn is a nice companion read.

Rooted in psychology and cognitive science, Why People Don’t Buy Things presents a very practical sales methodology called Buying Path Selling. Understand how your prospect is making his or her buying decision and what kind of buyer he or she is, be more successful at uncovering needs and winning the business.

The book has two equally interesting themes, rich with examples, but the one I found to be easiest to remember was to vary your language (both body and verbal) with the buyer type. And the book illustrates three archetypes: The Commander, The Thinker, and The Visualizer. There are some incredibly insightful and powerful ways to recognize the buyer type you’re dealing with in the book.

But most of the cues the authors rely on are physical, and lots of sales are done via telephone. So I emailed the author to ask for his perspective on this wrinkle.  Kim wrote back the following (abridged):

Over the phone it is fairly easy to determine a prospect’s modality. I’ve developed a fun, conversational question which can be asked up front, “As you recall some of your most meaningful experiences at XYZ, what words, thoughts, feelings or visuals come to mind? Anything else?”

If you’re interested in letting your blog readers test their modalities, the link below will activate a quick 10 question quiz from our website that generates ones modality scores along how they compare with others. (It’s like Myers-Briggs applied to decision making.) http://www.wallacewashburn.com/quiz.shtml

In any case, if you are a sales, marketing, or client services professional (or even if you just play one on TV), Why People Don’t Buy Things is a quick, insightful read.  Thanks for the quick response, Kim!

Book Short:  On Employee Engagement

The first time I ever heard the term “Employee Engagement” was from my colleague David Sieh, one of the better managers I’ve ever worked with.  He said it was his objective for his engineering team.  He explained how he tried to achieve it.  I Quit, But forgot to Tell You, by Terri Kabachnick, is a whole book on this topic, a very short but very potent one (the best kind of business books, if you ask me).

It’s got all the short-form stuff you’d expect…a checklist of reasons for disengagement, an engagement quiz, the lifecycle of an employee that leads to disengagement, rules for dealing as a manager.

But beyond the practical, the book serves as a good reminder that employee engagement is the key to a successful organization, no matter what industry you’re in.  All managers at Return Path — this is on the way to your desk soon!

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about the Agile methodology on this blog. For those of you who are regular readers, you may remember a post I wrote about our Agile Everywhere initiative— where all Return Path teams were tasked with implementing agile practices. A little over a year later, I want to update you on our agile journey–where we are now and how we got there.  My colleague Cathy Hawley (our head of People) will write a more detailed series of guest posts  for those of you who want to get more details of our transformation process.

Before we started our Agile Everywhere initiative, only our product and engineering teams were using agile. The rest of the organization (a few hundred people!) weren’t at all familiar with agile practices. Despite this, there were a few things that helped accelerate our transformation:

1. Strong executive buy-in
2. A clear vision
3. Agile-friendly company culture and values
4. A passionate project team
5. Resident agile experts

These 5 initial ingredients proved to be essential and enabled us to hit the ground running in Q1 2016. We started out by experimenting with non-technical pilot teams from all different offices, functions, and levels. After a couple months of experimentation, early qualitative results from pilot team members suggested that implementing agile principles was enhancing team communication and productivity. So we embarked on our next step, implementing agile practices across all non-technical teams at Return Path.

We are now 18 months into our transformation and the data shows us that the transformation is helping with our productivity:  we track a  metric that is comprised of many different measures of business performance that fall into 3 main themes–operating efficiency, planning effectiveness, and business success. So far we have already seen a 51% increase in the metric from Q4 2015 (before our Agile Everywhere initiative) to Q1 2017. We are emboldened by these promising results, but still have a lot of work to do to ensure that all teams at RP are taking full advantage of agile and reaping its benefits. Keep an eye out for Cathy Hawley’s posts for more information about our agile adventure, soon to be published the RP blog.

When the series is over, I’ll publish a summary with all the specific post links here as well.

Book Short:  And It’s Not Just Because I’m In It

Debbie Weil’s The Corporate Blogging Book is a good super quick read for any CEO or senior executive who is contemplating starting a blog — or even better, for those who have decided not to do so.

Weil’s writing style is great and very informal (blog-like, in fact) – a representative snippet is where she tells readers that there are two types of information to worry about posting on a blog, in her words, “stuff you don’t to reveal and stuff you could get sued for.”  And her range of topics is great and deals with issues head-on. Things like fear of losing control, time commitment, and ghost writing are all well covered.

Chapter 8 also includes a great Cliff’s Notes guide to web 2.0 technologies — RSS, podcasting, wikis, tagging — which is useful if you still Feel Like a Luddite about those things.

I did contribute a couple interviews to the book, as did most of the other oft-cited CEO bloggers like Mark Cuban and Jonathan Schwartz in whose company I am somewhat embarrassed and humbled to be. But don’t let that deter you from picking up a copy if you are in the target audience!

Thanks to my friend and long-time former Board member Jeff Epstein, I recently downed a new book, You’re in Charge – Now What?, by Thomas Neff and James Citrin.  I’m glad I read it.  But it was one of those business books that probably should have just been a Harvard Business Review article.  It’s best skimmed, with helpful short summaries at the end of every chapter that you could blow through quickly instead of hanging on every word. 

The authors’ 8-step plan is laid out as:

1. Prepare yourself during the countdown
2. Align expectations
3. Shape your management team
4. Craft your strategic agenda
5. Start transforming culture
6. Manage your board/boss
7. Communicate
8. Avoid common pitfalls

Ok fine, those make sense on the surface. Here are three things that really stood out for me from the book:

First, “working” before you’re officially working – the countdown period. I tried hard NOT to do this when I was between things, but I’m glad I did the things I did, and now, I wish I had done more. The most poignant phrase in the book is “scarce time available during your first hundred days.” That is an understatement. As my “to read” pile grows and grows and grows with no end in sight…I wish I had done more pre-work.

Second, remember that in every interaction, you are being evaluated as much as you are evaluating. And note that for many people, they will be thinking very critically, things like “do I want to work with this person…is he/she showing signs that he/she wants to work with me?” Yes, we all know as leaders, we live in a fishbowl. But I think that may be even more true during the first couple months on the job.

Finally, this phrase stood out for me: “Acknowledging and in some cases embracing your predecessor can sustain a sense of continuity within the organization and instill a sense of connectivity with employees’ shared past.” There is frequently a temptation to focus on things that need change, which invariably there are…and which invariably you will hear from people who are happy to find a willing new ear to listen to them. But this posture of acknowledge/embrace is especially true in my case, where my predecessor is the founder and 25-year CEO who continues on as our active chairman.

I know there are a ton of books like this on the market, and while I’ve only read this one, I’d say that if you’re starting a new CEO or executive-level job, this is a good one to at least skim to get some ideas.

Book Short: Stick Figures That Matter

I have read a bunch of books lately to try to improve my presentation skills. The latest one, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam, was good, and quite different from some of the others I’ve read recently like Presentation Zen and Beyond Bullet Points, both of which are much more focused on effective use of Powerpoint.

The Back of the Napkin takes a different approach. The focus is much more on creating compelling visuals. It’s not about Powerpoint so much as it is about teaching how to crystallize concepts into tight and compelling schematics. Roam creates two pretty good frameworks for thinking about this: one that breaks down the message of a given slide into its most simple element — are you describing a who (use a portrait), what (chart), when (timeline), where (map), why (plot), or how (flowchart)? And a second that takes that element and asks five questions about the best way to convey the information — simple vs. elaborate, quality vs. quantity, vision vs. execution, individual vs. comparison, or change state vs. as-is.

Both frameworks are good, and if you’re already doing really good presentations, this will help improve them. In short, I’d say The Back of the Napkin is a good read if you’re obsessed with creating compelling visuals, but it’s more of a deeper drill than the two books I noted above. I’d read and master the material from Presentation Zen for 101, then dive into this topic for the 201 course.

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!

Half as Long, One Third as Hard

(Post written on Saturday, August 23.) I ran the Mesa Falls Marathon & Half Marathon near our house in Teton Valley, Idaho today.  I ran the 1/2 and Brad ran the full marathon as part of his quest to run 50 marathons, one in each state, by the time he turns 50.  Return Path is a proud sponsor of Brad’s running, donating $1,000 for each race he completes to the Accelerated Cure project for Multiple Sclerosis.

Brad chronicled the race here.

The run was set up well for us.  I wasn’t up for training for a full marathon, and this race had a half marathon that started at the halfway point of the full race, 2 hours after the start of the race.  So I waited a few minutes with Amy at that point until Brad came cruising by us, and then he and I ran it in together.  I was in charge of keeping him fresh and focused during a big hill and when he hit the proverbial wall.

As usual, the 26.2 mile run is an awe-inspiring distance.  Even more so running the second half of it with Brad today when I had fresh legs at the beginning and he had already done 13.1 miles.  My conclusion, based on my training, my strength at the finish, and the way my legs feel at the moment (pre-Advil and pre-cocktail), is that a half marathon is a nice accomplishment, but it’s not 1/2 as hard as a full marathon.  It’s probably about 1/3 as hard.  I’m sure there’s some great CEO metaphor about doing something halfway with a third of the effort, but I can’t conjure it up at the moment. 

So hats off to Brad on completing #12 in his amazing series. I was delighted to have my favorite people in the world meet me at the finish line, shown here  with Amy taking our picture.  (Yes, for those who are wondering, we are expecting #3 in January.) 

Also, Happy Birthday to my colleague Brian Westnedge, who was born in Ashton, Idaho (right near Mesa Falls) a bunch of years ago on the race day of all days.