I love innovation, and process is no different than product or business model in that regard. I’ve run and attended several hundred board meetings over the years, both those of companies where I’ve been CEO or Chairman, and those where I’m a director. I’ve written a lot about how I like running board meetings in Startup CEO, and as I mentioned the other day, I’m a co-author of a Second Edition of Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors, which is coming out in June and is available to pre-order now, along with Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani.

There are two adaptations I’ve made to my standard board routines in the last year or so, one driven by the pandemic and one not.

In olden times (that makes me sound like I’m 400 years old, but “pre-covid” sounds so clinical), I used to have a board dinner the night before or after every board meeting, and of course, everything was in person. That was a really important ritual in my mind towards the end of building the board as an effective team, where people on the team know each other as people, share things going on in their lives, share vulnerabilities, and develop bonds of trust. Without regular in-person meetings and dinners or social events, that gets a lot harder. Even when we get back to “normal,” I imagine the most we’ll do in-person board meetings is 1-2x/year.

What’s the zoom version of this?

We now do two 30-minute Executive Sessions (directors only) one before the board meeting officially starts and observers and team join, as well as the traditional one after the meeting ends. The purposes of the two sessions are different. The standard post-meeting Executive Session follows up on the meeting and has me talk about business or team issues that I don’t want to talk about with the full group present or get feedback from the board. But the one before the meeting is almost entirely social. I try to come up with a different question or topic to get all of us talking that is not about Bolster. Last week’s meeting was a simple “what’s the best thing that’s happened to you so far in 2022, and what’s the worse?” One time I asked everyone to show a picture from their phone photo roll and talk about it. You get the idea. It’s not the same as a dinner, but it seems like an effective substitute given the medium.

The second adaptation, and full credit to Fred for suggesting this one a while back, is the post-meeting survey. Now immediately after every Board meeting, I send a simple Google form to each director with the following questions:

• What are 1-3 areas/specifics where we are doing well?
• What are 1-3 areas/specifics you’re concerned about or where we could do better?
• Did the board book have the right level of detail and commentary?  Is there anything you’d like to see change about the format or the content?
• Did the meeting meet your objectives for learning and discussion? 
• If not, why not?
• Do you have any other feedback for Matt at this time?

I get great feedback, almost immediately and always from all board members, while things are still fresh in everyone’s mind. I’m planning to do this whether or not the meeting is remote…although it’s definitely good when the meeting is remote, and things like Executive Session, Closed Session, and debrief with me after Closed Session are quick or sometimes rushed.

There’s always room for innovation, even in standard and time-tested processes like board meetings.

Book Short:  Steve Jobs and Lessons for CEOs and Founders

First, if you work in the internet, grew up during the rise of the PC, or are an avid consumer of Apple products, read the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs (book, kindle).  It’s long but well worth it.

I know much has been written about the subject and the book, so I won’t be long or formal, but here are the things that struck me from my perspective as a founder and CEO, many taken from specific passages from the book:

• In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.  Man is that ever true.  I’ve come up with some ideas over the years at Return Path, but hardly a majority or even a plurality of them.  But I think of myself as innovative because I’ve led the organization to execute them.  I also think innovation has as much to do with how work gets done as it does what work gets done.

• There were some upsides to Jobs’s demanding and wounding behavior. People who were not crushed ended up being stronger. They did better work, out of both fear and an eagerness to please.  I guess that’s an upside.  But only in a dysfunctional sort of way.

• When one reporter asked him immediately afterward why the (NeXT) machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years ahead of its time.”  Amen to that.  Sometimes product deadlines are artificial and silly.  There’s another great related quote (I forget where it’s from) that goes something like “The future is here…it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”  New releases can be about delivering the future for the first time…or about distributing it more broadly.

• People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”  Amen.  See Powerpointless.

• The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.  This is critical.  You can’t always be first in everything.  But ultimately, if you’re a good company, you can figure out how to recover when you’re not first.  Exhibit A:  Microsoft.

• In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning, Jobs started an in-house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny, who was dean of the Yale School of Management, to compile a series of case studies analyzing important decisions the company had made, including the switch to the Intel microprocessor and the decision to open the Apple Stores. Top executives spent time teaching the cases to new employees, so that the Apple style of decision making would be embedded in the culture.  This is one of the most emotionally intelligent things Jobs did, if you just read his actions in the book and know nothing else.  Love the style or hate it – teaching it to the company reinforces a strong and consistent culture.

• Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.  There’s always a tension between listening TO customers and innovating FOR them.  Great companies have to do both, and know when to do which.

• What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.  This is perhaps one of the best explanations I’ve ever heard of how creativity can be applied to non-creative (e.g., most business) jobs.  I love this.

My board member Scott Weiss wrote a great post about the book as well and drew his own CEO lessons from it – also worth a read here.

Appropos of that, both Scott and I found out about Steve Jobs’ death at a Return Path Board dinner.  Fred broke the news when he saw it on his phone, and we had a moment of silence.  It was about as good a group as you can expect to be with upon hearing the news that an industry pioneer and icon has left us.  Here’s to you, Steve.  You may or may not have been a management role model, but your pursuit of perfection worked out well for your customers, and most important, you certainly had as much of an impact on society as just about anyone in business (or maybe all walks of life) that I can think of.

I was trading emails a few weeks ago Elliot Noss from Tucows about the current state of the economy after being on a panel together about it, and he wrote:

The market is fascinating right now. Heated competition AND layoffs and hiring freezes. It feel like an old European hotel where there are two faucets, one is too hot and the other too cold.

While a quick rant about European hotel bathrooms could be fun…we’ll just stick to the sink analogy. As anyone who has ever tried to use one of these sinks that Elliot describes knows, they’re hard to use and illogical. Sure, sometimes you want freezing water and sometimes you want scalding water (I guess), but often, you want something in between. And the only way to achieve that is to turn on both freezing and scalding at the same time? That’s weird.

Then I was on another email thread recently with a group of CEOs, when John Henry from Ride With Loop said this:

Whatever the climate, we all surely agree there is no bad time to build a good business.

How true that is!

But here’s the worrisome part. It’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen next. We are in uncharted territory here with a land war in Europe, a partial global oil embargo of a top tier oil producer, a pandemic, supply chain problems, etc. etc. There are days and circumstances where everything feels normal. Plenty of businesses, especially in the tech sector, are kicking ass. And yet there are days and circumstances that feel like 2001 or 2009. It’s tough to navigate as a startup CEO. Yes, it’s obvious you should try to have a couple years of cash on hand, and that you should be smart about investments and not get too far ahead of revenue if you’re in certain sectors (presumably if you’re in an R&D intensive field and weren’t planning to have revenue for years on end, life isn’t all that different?). But beyond that, there’s no clear playbook.

And that’s where the worrisome line comes in. I saw Larry Summers on Meet the Press last weekend, who predicted that

a recession would come in late 2023.

Wait, what? Aren’t things messed up now? Yes, inflation is high, the stock market is down, and interest rates are creeping up. But the economy is still GROWING. Unemployment is still LOW. Summers’ point is a reminder that contraction is likely, but it may still be a ways off, it depends how the Fed handles interest rate hikes (and about a zillion other things), and it’s impossible to predict. That was more worrisome to me. If we’re navigating choppy waters now, it may not just be for a couple of quarters. It may be that 4-6 quarters from now, we are in for 2-3 quarters of contraction. That is a more than most companies are able to plan for from a cash perspective.

Frothy macro environments lead to bad businesses getting created, too many lookalike businesses popping up, or weak teams getting funded. When the tide goes out, as they say, you can see who is swimming naked. But if you’re building a good business, one that has staying power and a clear value proposition, with real people or clients paying real money for a real product or service, and if you’re serious about building a good company, keep on keeping on. Be smart about key decisions, especially investment decisions, but don’t despair or give up.

We’ll all get through this.

How to Get Laid Off – an Employee’s Perspective

One of my colleagues at Return Path  saw my post about How to Quit Your Job about 5 years ago and was inspired to share this story with me.  Don’t read anything into this post, team!  There is no other meaning behind my posting it at this time, or any time, other than thinking it’s a very good way of approaching a very difficult situation, especially coming from an employee.

In 2009 I was working at a software security start up in the Silicon Valley.  Times were exceedingly tough, there were several rounds of layoffs that year, and in May I was finally on the list. I was informed on a Tuesday that my last day was that Friday.  It was a horrible time to be without a job (and benefits), there was almost no hiring at all that year, one of the worst economic down turns on record.  While it was a hard message,  I knew that it was not personal, I was just caught up on a bad math problem.

After calling home to share the bad news, I went back to my desk and kept working. I had never been laid off and was not sure what to do, but I was pretty sure I would have plenty of free time in the short term, so I set about figuring out  how to wrap things up there.  Later that day the founder of the company came by, asked why I had not gone home, and I replied that I would be fine with working till the end of the week if he was okay with it.  He thanked me.

Later that week, in a meeting where we reviewed and prioritized the projects I was working on, we discussed who would take on the top three that were quite important to the future of the company.  A few names were mentioned of who could keep them alive, but they were people who I knew would not focus on them at all.  So I suggested they have me continue to work on them, that got an funny look but when he thought about it , it made sense, they could 1099 me one day a week.  The next day we set it up.  I made more money than I could of on unemployment, but even better I kept my laptop and work email, so I looked employed which paid off later. 

That one day later became two days and then three, however, I eventually found other full time work in 2010.  Layoffs are hard,  but it is not a time to burn bridges.   In fact  one of the execs of that company is a reference and has offered me other opportunities for employment.

The Gift of Feedback, Part III

I’ve written about our 360 Review process at Return Path a few times in the past:

• overall process
• process for my review in particular
• update on a process change and unintended consequences of that process change)
• learnings from this year’s process about my staff

And the last two times around, I’ve also posted the output of my own review publicly here in the form of my development plan:

• Here in 2008
• Here in 2009

So here we are again.  I have my new development plan all spruced up and ready to go.  Many thanks to my team and Board for this valuable input, and to Angela Baldonero (my fantastic SVP People and in-house coach), and Marc Maltz of Triad Consulting for helping me interpret the data and draft this plan.  Here at a high level is what I’m going to be working on for the next 1-2 years:

• Institutionalize impatience and lessen the dependency dynamic on me.  What does this mean?  Basically it means that I want to make others in the organization and on my team in particular as impatient as I am for progress, success, reinvention, streamlining and overcoming/minimizing operational realities.  I’ll talk more about something I’ve taken to calling “productive disruption” in a future blog post
• Focus on making every staff interaction at all levels a coaching session.  Despite some efforts over the years, I still feel like I talk too much when I interact with people in the organization on a 1:1 or small group basis.  I should be asking many more questions and teaching people to fish, not fishing for them
• Continue to foster deep and sustained engagement at all levels.  We’ve done a lot of this, really well, over the years.  But at nearly 250 people now and growing rapidly, it’s getting harder and harder.  I want to focus some real time and energy in the months to come on making sure we keep this critical element of our culture vibrant at our new size and stage
• I have some other more tactical goals as well like improving at public speaking and getting more involved with leadership recruiting and management training, but the above items are more or less the nub of it

One thing I know I’ll have to do with some of these items and some of the tactical ones in particular is engage in some form of deliberate practice, as defined by Geoffrey Colvin in his book Talent is Overrated (blog post on the book here).  That will be interesting to figure out.

But that’s the story.  Everyone at Return Path and on my Board – please help me meet these important goals for my development over the next couple of years!

New People Electrify the Organization

We had a good year in 2009, but it was tough.  Whose wasn’t?  Sales were harder to come by, more existing customers left or asked for price relief than usual, and bills were hard to collect.  Worse than that, internally a lot of people were in a funk all year.  Someone on our team started calling it “corporate ennui.”  Even though our business was strong overall and we didn’t do any layoffs or salary cuts, I think people had a hard time looking around them, seeing friends and relatives losing their jobs en masse, and feeling happy and secure.  And as a company, we were doing well and growing the top line, but we froze a lot of new projects and were in a bit of a defensive posture all year.

What a difference a year makes.  This year, still not perfect, is going much better for us.  Business conditions are loosening up, and many of our clients have turned the corner.  Financially, we’re stronger than ever.  And most important, the mood in the company is great.  I think there are a bunch of reasons for that – we’re investing more, we’re doing a ton of new innovation, people have travel budgets again, and people see our clients and their own friends in better financial positions.

But by far, I think the most impactful change to the organizational mood we’re seeing is a direct result of one thing:  hiring.  We are adding a lot of new people this year – probably 60 over the course of the year on top of the 150 we had at the beginning of the year.  And my observation, no matter which office of ours I visit, is that the new people are electrifying the organization.  Part of that is that new people come in fresh and excited (perhaps particularly excited to have a new job in this environment).  Part of it is that new people are often pleasantly surprised by our culture and working environment.  Part of it is that new people come in and add capacity to the team, which enables everyone to work on more new things.  And part of it is that every new person that comes in needs mentoring by the old timers, which gives the existing staff reminders and extra reason to be psyched about what they’re doing, and what the company’s all about.

Whether it’s one of these things or all of them, I’m not sure I care.  I’m just happy the last 18 months are over.  The world is a brighter place, and so is Return Path.  And to all of our new people (recent and future), welcome…thanks for reinvigorating the organization!

A Perfect Ten

Return Path turns 10 years old today.  We are in the midst of a fun week of internal celebrations, combined with our holiday parties in each office as well as year-end all-hands meetings.  I thought I would share some of my reflections on being 10 in the blog as I’ve shared them with our team. What being 10 means to me – and what’s enabled us to make it this long:

• It means we’ve beaten the odds.  Two major global economic meltdowns.  The fact that 90% of new small businesses fail before they get to this point.  Probably a higher percentage of venture backed startups fail before they get to 10 as well
• We’ve gotten here because we’ve been nimble and flexible.  Over our 10 years, we’ve seen lots of companies come and go, clinging to a model that doesn’t work.  We may have taken a while and a few iterations to get to this point, but as one of my Board members says, “we’re an overnight success, ten years in the making!”
• We’ve also made it this long because we have had an amazing track record with our three core constituencies – employees, clients, and investors – including navigating the sometimes difficult boundaries or conflicts between the three

What I’m most proud of from our first decade:

• We’ve built a great culture.  Yes, it’s still a job.  But for most of our team members most of the time, they like work, they like their colleagues, and they have a fun and engaging time at work.  That’s worth its weight in gold to me
• We’ve built a great brand and have been hawkish about protecting our reputation in the marketplace.  That’s also the kind of thing that can’t be bought
• We haven’t sacrificed our core principles.  We’ve always, going back to our founding and the ECOA business, had a consumer-first philosophy that runs deep.  This core principle continues to serve us well in deliverability (a non-consumer-facing business) and is clearly the right thing to do in the email ecosystem

What I most regret or would do differently if given the chance:

• We have not raised capital as efficiently as possible – mostly because our company has shifted business models a couple of times.  Investors who participated in multiple rounds of financing will do very well with their investments.  First or second round angel investors who didn’t or couldn’t invest in later rounds will lose money in the end
• I wish we were in one location, not five.  We are embracing our geographic diversity and using it to our advantage in the marketplace, but we pay a penalty for that in terms of travel and communication overhead
• We have at times spread ourselves a little too thin in pursuit of a fairly complex agenda out of a relatively small company.  I think we’re doing a good job of reigning that in now (or growing into it), but our eyes have historically been bigger than our stomachs

Thanks to all our investors and Board members, especially Greg Sands from Sutter Hill Ventures, Fred Wilson from Flatiron Partners and Union Square Ventures, Brad Feld from Mobius Venture Capital, and Scott Weiss for their unwavering support and for constantly challenging us to do better all these years.  Thanks to our many customers and partners for making our business work and for driving us to innovate and solve their problems.  Thanks to our many alumni for their past efforts, often with nothing more to show for it than a line item on their resume.  And most of all, thanks to our hardworking and loyal team of nearly 200 for a great 2009 and many more exciting years ahead!  

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.

Less is More

I have a challenge for the email marketing community in 2009. Let’s make this the Year of “Less is More.”

Marketers are turning to email more and more in this down economy. There’s no question about that. My great fear is that just means they’re sending more and more and more emails out without being smart about their programs. That will have positive short term effects and drive revenues, but long term it will have a negative long term impact on inboxes everywhere. And these same marketers will find their short term positive results turning into poor deliverability faster than you can say “complaint rate spike.”

I heard a wonderful case study this week from Chip House at ExactTarget at the EEC Conference. One of his clients, a non-profit, took the bold and yet painful step of permissioning an opt-out list. Yikes. That word sends shivers down the spine of marketers everywhere. What are you saying? You want me to reduce the size of my prime asset? The results of a campaign done before and after the permission pass are very telling and should be a lesson to all of us. The list shrank from 34,000 to 4,500. Bounce rate decreased from 9% to under 1%. Spam complaints went from 27 to 0 (ZERO). Open rate spiked from 25% to 53%. Click-through from 7% to 22%. And clicks? 509 before the permissioning, 510 after. This client generated the same results, with better metrics along the way, by sending out 87% LESS EMAIL. Why? Because they only sent it to people who cared to receive it.

This is a great time for email. But marketers will kill the channel by just dumping more and more and more volume into it. Let’s all make Less Is More our mantra for the year together. Is everyone in? Repeat after me…Less Is More! Less Is More!

Stamina

A couple years ago I had breakfast with Nick Mehta, my friend who runs the incredibly exciting Gainsight.  I think at the time I had been running Return Path for 15 years, and he was probably 5 years into his journey.  He said he wanted to run his company forever, and he asked me how I had developed the stamina to keep running Return Path as long as I had.  My off the cuff answer had three points, although writing them down afterwards yielded a couple more.  For entrepreneurs who love what they do, love running and building companies for the long haul, this is an important topic.  CEOs have to change their thinking as their businesses scale, or they will self implode!  What are five things you need to get comfortable with as your business scales in order to be in it for the long haul?

Get more comfortable with not every employee being a rock star.  When you have 5, 10, or even 100 employees, you need everyone to be firing on all cylinders at all times.  More than that, you want to hire “rock stars,” people you can see growing rapidly with their jobs.  As organizations get larger, though, not only is it impossible to staff them that way, it’s not desirable either.  One of the most influential books I’ve read on hiring over the years, Topgrading (review, buy), talks about only hiring A players, but hiring three kinds of A players:  people who are excellent at the job you’re hiring them for and may never grow into a new role; people who are excellent at the job you’re hiring them for and who are likely promotable over time; and people who are excellent at the job you’re hiring them for and are executive material.  Startup CEOs tend to focus on the third kind of hire for everyone.  Scaling CEOs recognize that you need a balance of all three once you stop growing 100% year over year, or even 50%.

Get more comfortable with people quitting.  This has been a tough one for me over the years, although I developed it out of necessity first (there’s only so much you can take personally!), with a philosophy to follow.  I used to take every single employee departure personally.  You are leaving MY company?  What’s wrong with you?  What’s wrong with me or the company?  Can I make a diving catch to save you from leaving?  The reality here about why people leave companies may be 10% about how competitive the war for talent has gotten in technology.  But it’s also 40% from each of two other factors.  First, it’s 40% that, as your organization grows and scales, it may not be the right environment for any given employee any more. Our first employee resigned because we had “gotten too big” when we had about 25 employees.  That happens a bit more these days!  But different people find a sweet spot in different sizes of company.  Second, it’s 40% that sometimes the right next step for someone to take in their career isn’t on offer at your company.  You may not have the right job for the person’s career trajectory if it’s already filled, with the incumbent unlikely to leave.  You may not have the right job for the person’s career trajectory at all if it’s highly specialized.  Or for employees earlier in their careers, it may just be valuable for them to work at another company so they can see the differences between two different types of workplace.

Get more comfortable with a whole bunch of entry level, younger employees who may be great people but won’t necessarily be your friends.  I started Return Path in my late 20s, and I was right at our average age.  It felt like everyone in the company was a peer in that sense, and that I could be friends with all of them.  Now I’m in my (still) mid-40s and am well beyond our average age, despite my high level of energy and of course my youthful appearance.  There was a time several years ago where I’d say things to myself or to someone on my team like “how come no one wants to hang out with me after work any more,” or “wow do I feel out of place at this happy hour – it’s really loud here.”  That’s all ok and normal.  Participate in office social events whenever you want to and as much as you can, but don’t expect to be the last man or woman standing at the end of the evening, and don’t expect that everyone in the room will want to have a drink with you.  No matter how approachable and informal you are, you’re still the CEO, and that office and title are bound to intimidate some people.

Get more comfortable with shifts in culture and differentiate them in your mind from shifts in values.  I wrote a lot about this a couple years ago in The Difference Between Culture and Values . To paraphrase from that post, an organization’s values shouldn’t change over time, but its culture – the expression of those values – necessarily changes with the passage of time and the growth of the company.  The most clear example I can come up with is about the value of transparency and the use case of firing someone.  When you have 10 employees, you can probably just explain to everyone why you fired Joe.  When you have 100 employees, it’s not a great idea to tell everyone why you fired Joe, although you might be ok if everyone finds out.  When you have 1,000 employees, telling everyone why you fired Joe invites a lawsuit from Joe and an expensive settlement on your part, although it’s probably ok and important if Joe’s team or key stakeholders comes to understand what happened.  Does that evolution mean you aren’t being true to your value of transparency?  No.  It just means that WHERE and HOW you are transparent needs to evolve as the company evolves.

• Get more comfortable with process.  This doesn’t mean you have to turn your nimble startup into a bureaucracy.  But a certain amount of process (more over time as the company scales) is a critical enabler of larger groups of people not only getting things done but getting the right things done, and it’s a critical enabler of the company’s financial health.  At some point, you and your CFO can’t go into a room for a day and do the annual budget by yourselves any more.  But you also can’t let each executive set a budget and just add them together.  At some point, you can’t approve every hire yourself.  But you also can’t let people hire whoever they want, and you can’t let some other single person approve all new hires either, since no one really has the cross-company view that you and maybe a couple of other senior executives has.  At some point, the expense policy of “use your best judgment and spend the company’s money as if it was your own” has to fit inside department T&E budgets, or it’s possible that everyone’s individual best judgments won’t be globally optimal and will cause you to miss your numbers.  Allow process to develop organically.  Be appropriately skeptical of things that smell like bureaucracy and challenge them, but don’t disallow them categorically.  Hire people who understand more sophisticated business process, but don’t let them run amok and make sure they are thoughtful about how and where they introduce process to the organization.

I bet there are 50 things that should be on this list, not 5.  Any others out there to share?

(This is the fourth post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Other posts in order are 1, 2, and 3.)

Monday, March 23, Day 7

• Wellness screening – put hot cup of coffee against my temples – now finally the thermometer works (although I can’t say that it gives me a high degree of comfort that I have figured out a workaround!)
• Furious execution and still backlog is growing no matter how much I do – thank goodness team is growing.  Never seen this before – work coming in faster than I can process it, and I am a fast processer. Inbox clean when I go to bed, up to 75 when I wake up, never slows down
• Private sector explosion – this guy can print 3D swabs – but are they compliant?  This guy has an idea for cleansing PPE, this guy can do 3D printing of Ventilator replacement parts, etc.  How to corral?
• Corporate Volunteer form is up – 225 entries in the first 12 hours – WOW
• Congressmen and Senators – people contact them, so they want to help, they want to make news, not coordinated enough with state efforts
• Jay Want – early diagnosis losing sense of smell – low tech way to New Normal
• Coordination continues to be key – multiple cabinet level agencies doing their own thing while multiple private sector groups are doing their own thing (e.g. App – “everyone thinks they’re the only people who have this idea”)
• Mayor of Denver just announced lockdown, I guess that trumps the state solution in town, maybe it’s ok since that just leaves rural areas a bit fuzzier
• Need to revise OS – team is about to go from 3 to 9, private sector spinning up
• Brad OS and State employee OS are different – Slack/Trello/Zoom are not tools state employees are familiar with or can even access.  Now what?
• Kacey insists the team works remotely other than leaders and critical meetings so we can role model social distancing.  GOOD CALL
• One of our private sector guys goes rogue on PR, total bummer – this part (comms) about what we are doing could be more coordinated for sure, but not a priority
• Lots of texts/call with Jared, such a smart and thoughtful guy, really interesting

Tuesday, March 24, Day 8

• Been a week, feels like a month
• Fluid changes to both OS for team and OS for private sector group
• Zoom licenses – state will take a couple weeks to procure them, gotta work around it with Brad
• Slack app won’t get through the firewall.  Maybe IT’s supervisor can do us a favor?
• Comp – interesting expedited process – normally takes 65 days to get approval for temps, today we got it done in an hour!  Comp levels seem incredibly low. But we got done what we needed to get done
• Some minor territorial conflicts with state tech team and our private sector tech team.  Will have to resolve. Surprising how few of these there have been so far given that our team is new and shiny and breaking rules
• Big new Team meeting for first time with Sarah in lead, Red/Yellow/Green check-in (I like that – may have to borrow it!)
• Starting to feel obsolete – love that!  Sarah crushing it, totally feels like the right leader, need to make sure she has enough support (might need an admin?)
• Also…maybe I’m not feeling well?  A little worried I am getting sick. Hope that’s not true, or if it is, hope it’s not the BAD kind of sick.  Going to go work from hotel rest of afternoon
• Call with Jared – concern about managing state’s psychology – testing and isolation services
• Prep for press conference tomorrow

Wednesday, March 25, Day 9

• Woke up feeling awesome – phew – hopefully that was just fatigue or stress induced
• Sarah drowning a bit, feels like me on my 3rd day so makes sense
• Reigning in and organizing private sector seems like a full time job.  We are going to recruit my friend Michelle (ex-RP) to come work with Brad on volunteer management. HALLELUJAH!
• Whiteboard meeting with Kacey holding up her laptop so they can see it on Zoom – hilarious – technology not really working, but we are making the best of it
• State role – facilitate alt supply chain to hospitals since normal chain is broken…also maintain emergency state cache – complex but makes more sense now
• More territorial things starting to pop up with state government…processing volunteers
• Comms overload – here comes the text to alert you to the email to alert you to the phone call
• This team/project is clearly a case of finite resources meets infinite scope and infinite volunteer hand-raising
• Gov press conference – issues Stay at Home order through April 11 (interesting, that wasn’t in the version of the talking points I saw several hours before)
• Meeting some of our new team members.  I can’t even keep up with them, I think we’re up to 15+ now.  Kacey and Kyle are recruiting machines and all these people’s managers are just loaning to us immediately.  Love that.
• Amazingly talented and dedicated state employees – seem young, probably not paid well, but superior to private sector comprables in some ways 
• Talk with Kacey and Sarah about staff/not drowning
• Kacey feels like Sarah is doing a great job, so she cleared me to go home (wouldn’t have gone without her saying ok, she understands how this whole thing is working way better than I do – I guess that’s what a good chief of staff does!)

Stay tuned for more tomorrow…