Choose Voice, Part II One reader writes to me: I am a vice president at a startup that isn’t in great shape. We have some customers and a product that is meeting some market needs, but we’re way off our plan and don’t show signs of changing our trajectory in a material way. I disagree with the direction our CEO is taking things, which is ok, but more important, our CEO refuses to listen to me when I try to discuss and debate strategy with her. One of our board members has asked me what I thought we should do. I don’t want to be disloyal to our CEO, and I want to seem like a team player who rallies…
Archives / September, 2006
Doing Well by Doing Good, Part IV
Doing Well by Doing Good, Part IV This series of posts has mostly been about things that people or companies do that help make the world a better place — sometimes when it’s their core mission, other times (here and here) when it becomes an important supporting role at the company. Today’s post is different — it’s actually a Book Short as well of a new book that’s coming out later this fall called Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, published by Yale Press and written by Daniel Esty (a Yale professor and consultant), and a good friend of mine, Andrew Winston, a corporate sustainability consultant. Green to Gold…
New Deliverability Index is Out
New Deliverability Index is Out Return Path’s semi-annual Sender Score Deliverability Index, which has become a sort of industry standard metric about how much non-spam commercial email is getting snared by ISP filters, is out. You can read Heather Palmer Goff’s posting about it (and download the report and the metrics) on the Return Path blog here.
Counter Cliche: Between Permission and Forgiveness
Counter Cliche: Between Permission and Forgiveness In today’s VC Cliche of the Week, Fred actually takes a Counter Cliche position himself when he talks about how in a startup, it’s NOT usually better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission, as the team needs to be aligned and on the same page. But Fred does go on to say that startups as organizations need to act like mavericks, essentially that the organization needs to break some eggs in the industry in order to make an omelet. I actually think in most organizations — particularly companies who used to be startups but are growing out of that phase (which is where we are at Return Path now) — there’s…
Book Short: Just One Minute
Book Short: Just One Minute What The One Minute Manager does for basic principles of management and goal setting, The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey does for delegation. Both are blessedly quick reads (the classic “airport” book), and Ken Blanchard really nails some of management’s most critical components with simplicity and grace. I’m a fan of the One Minute Manager school, and it does work well for some of the basics, but it has its limitations in terms of how broadly it can be applied. My colleague Whitney McNamara‘s words in an email to me a few months back say it all: OMM has actually been useful. I have to agree that it’s got a bit of a “Jonathan…
A Better Way to Shop
A Better Way to Shop I love Zappos.com. It’s rapidly becoming the only place I buy shoes. Their web site experience is ok – not perfect, but pretty good, but their level of service is just unbelievable. They are doing for e-commerce (shoes in particular) what Eos is doing for air travel. They’re always great at free shipping and have always been super responsive and very personal and authentic when it comes to customer service. But today took the cake. I emailed them when I placed an order for new running shoes because I also wanted to buy one of those little “shoe pocket” velcro thingies that straps onto shoelaces and holds keys and money for runners. I didn’t find…
Seth Responds
Seth Responds About an hour after I posted a not so flattering review of Seth Godin’s new book this morning, I got an email from Seth with a couple good points worth responding to here. His main points (other than offering me a refund, which was nice) were that (a) the book itself was very clear about its content — on the book itself (back cover, inside flap, marketing copy), kind of like a ‘live album’ for a recording artist; and (b) if I thought the blog postings were worthwhile, why did I still feel like there was a downward trend in his writing? Ok, so these are fair points. Let me try to clarify. I am 99% sure that…
Book Shorts: One Up, One Down
Book Shorts: One Up, One Down I read new books by two of my favorite authors today: Geoffrey Moore and Seth Godin. Moore’s was his best book in years; Godin’s was his worst. Geoffrey Moore’s latest book, Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution, is Moore’s best book in a while. While I loved Crossing the Chasm and thought Inside the Tornado was a close second, both The Gorilla Game and Living on the Fault Line didn’t do it for me — they both felt like a pile of Silicon Valley buzzwords as opposed to the insightful and groundbreaking market definition in his first two books. But Darwin is a gem. It goes back…