You Have to Throw a Stone to Get the Pond to Ripple This is a post about productive disruption. The title comes from one of my favorite lines from a song by Squeeze, Slap & Tickle. But the concept is an important one for leaders at all levels, especially as businesses mature. Founders and CEOs of early stage companies don’t disrupt the flow of the business. Most of the time, they ARE the flow of the business. They dominate the way everything works by definition — product development, major prospect calls, client dialog, strategy, and changes in strategy. But as businesses get out of the startup phase and into the “growth” phase (I’m still trying to figure out what to…
Archives / May, 2011
Be Ruthless With Your Time
Be Ruthless With Your Time I have historically been very open with my calendar. For most of my career, people who want to meet with me, both internally or externally (with the exception of random vendor solicitation), generally have gotten to meet with me. Some of this is generosity, but I’m also a compulsive networker and have always made time proactively to meet with people just to meet them, learn more about different pockets of the industry or finance, meet other entrepreneurs and find out what they’re up to or help them, and connect more broadly from there. I’ve also routinely been on multiple boards at the same time, as I’ve found that’s a very helpful part of my management…
Pret a Manager
Pret a Manager My friend James is the GM of the Pret a Manger (a chain of about 250 “everyday luxury” quick service restaurants in the UK and US) at 36th and 5th in Manhattan. James recently won the President’s Award at Pret for doing an outstanding job opening up a new restaurant. As part of my ongoing effort to learn and grow as a manager, I thought it would be interesting to spend a day shadowing James and seeing what his operation and management style looked like for a team of two dozen colleagues in a completely different environment than Return Path. That day was today. I’ll try to write up the day as combination of observations and learnings…
GEOITS
GEOITS This is another gem that I picked up years ago from my boss at MovieFone — the “Great Employment Office In The Sky.” It’s a simple but powerful concept: the organization is grappling with a difficult employee situation, and the likely path is that the employee needs to leave the organization either immediately or sometime in the future, and it’s impossible for the organization to figure out how to get from A to B for whatever reason, then the employee resigns of his or her own accord, or the employee does something that leaves the organization no choice but to terminate him or her immediately with no gray area This has come up time and again over the years…
Blogiversary, Part VII
Blogiversary, Part VII Today marks the seventh anniversary of OnlyOnce. I haven’t marked the date with a post in three years, but here was my last such post (with links to prior posts in it). In sum up until now, my reasons for blogging have been written up as: “Thinking” (writing short posts helps me crystallize my thinking) “Employees” (one of our senior people once called reading OnlyOnce “getting a peek inside Matt’s head) My book reviews help me crystallize my takeaways from books and serve as a bit of a personal reference library I like writing and don’t get to do it often After seven years, though, I’m going to add another important point of value for me for…
The Gift of Feedback, Part III
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),…
Why Winning Matters (Especially When You’re Young)
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has long been a leading voice for direct marketing for nearly 100 years – back when direct marketing was really only about postal. It has evolved in that time to include phone, fax (for the nanosecond that was relevant), and then interactive tactics, including email. While the DMA has not always incorporated the new technologies in the most elegant way – the tendency has been to apply previous best practices, even when consumers have demanded a new way of thinking – the organization has made tremendous strides in recent years to re-shape itself into an organization that will be relevant for another 100 years. And one way it is doing that is by supporting and…
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition Once I stripped out the spam and the person:person emails from my inbox this morning, here were the five subject lines I was left with: Wall Street Journal: Osama Bin Laden is Dead [eCommerce company]: Final Hours to Shop Our Private Sale! Wall Street Journal: Bin Laden Was Killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan Official Says [Travel site]: Last minute deals from NYC and more! Wall Street Journal: Osama Bin Laden Buried at Sea Return Path (yes, my own company): Why Whitelisting is Important to Your Email Marketing Mix The cynic in me says “wow, nice timing on the email marketing.” I am guessing the attention and click-through on anything other than today’s big news will be greatly diminished. But the…