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…
Archives / August, 2008
Opportunity Knocks
Opportunity Knocks When our friends at Habeas announced that they were exploring a sale of the company a few months back, we were intrigued. While fiercely competing in the marketplace does create some degree of tension or even mistrust between two companies, that activity also creates a lot of common ground for discussion about the market and the future. So we are very excited today to announce that we are acquiring Habeas in a deal that is signed and should close within a couple weeks. Cutting through all the PR platitudes, here’s what this deal really means for our stakeholders: For everyone we work with, this deal means we have even more scale. More scale is a good thing. It…
Book Short: Catchiest Title in a Long Time
Book Short: Catchiest Title in a Long Time You have to admit, a book called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich has a pretty enticing title. The email geek in me thinks that if it were a subject line, it would have a good open rate. Anyway, the book, by Timothy Ferriss, is a breezy read that blends self help with entrepreneurship, has a lot of good resource lists in it, and is worth reading if you don’t take it too seriously. There are some good central points to the book. First, life has changed, and people don’t want to slave away until they’re 65 any more so they can do all the fun…
Curbing My Enthusiasm
Curbing My Enthusiasm For the first time since I started blogging over four years ago, I have recently run into several examples in a short period of time where I’d love to blog about something happening in the business, and I think it would make for a great blog posting, but I can’t do it. Why can’t I? Lots of different reasons: – Don’t want to telegraph strategy to the competition – Don’t want to compromise an employee (current or former) – Worried about downstream legal ramifications There are other reasons as well, but these are the main three. I love transparency as much as the next person (and more than most), but these scenarios have to trump transparency in…
Book Short: On The Same Page
Book Short: On The Same Page Being on the same page with your team, or your whole company for that matter, is a key to success in business. The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni, espouses this notion and boils down the role of the CEO to four points: Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team Create organizational clarity Overcommunicate organizational clarity Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems Those four points sound as boring as bread, but the book is anything but. The book’s style is easy and breezy — business fiction. One of the most poignant moments for me was when the book’s “other CEO” (the one that doesn’t “get it”) reflects that he “didn’t go…