The Limits of Perseverance My Dad has a great saying, which is that It’s ok to chip away at a brick wall, but not if you’re using a toothpick Entrepreneurs are famous for persevering in the face of adversity, a trait more commonly known as stubbornness. And generally, that’s a good thing. Breakthrough ideas aren’t easy to come by, nor is leading the market. If those things were common, they wouldn’t be breakthrough. But perseverance doesn’t go anywhere without amassing the proper resources to do the job at hand. Just as you’d never chip away at a brick wall with a toothpick, you’d never willingly go up against a fierce competitor without a great product or sales effort, or you’d…
Archives / August, 2011
People First
People First I do not think it’s telling that my fourth post in this series of posts on Return Path’s core values (kickoff post, tag cloud) is something called People First. Ok, it probably should have been the first post in the series. To be fair, it is the first value on our list, but for whatever reason, the value about Ownership was top of mind when I decided to create this series. Anyway, at Return Path, We believe that people come first And we aren’t shy about saying it publicly, either. This came up in a lengthy interview I did with Inc. Magazine last year when we were profiled for winning an award as one of the top 20…
Peter Principle, Applied to Management
Peter Principle, Applied to Management My Management by Chameleon Post from a couple weeks ago generated more comments than usual, and an entertaining email thread among my friends and former staff from MovieFone. One comment that came off-blog is worth summarizing and addressing: There are those of us who should not manage, whose personalities don’t work in a management context, and there is nothing wrong with not managing. Also, there promotion to management by merit has always been a curiosity to me. If I am good at my job, why does it mean that I would be good at managing people who do my job? In other words, a good ‘line worker’ doth not a good manager make. I’d prefer…
Keeping Commitments
Keeping Commitments Today’s post is another in the series about our 13 core values at Return Path, about making commitments. The language of our value specifically is: We believe in keeping the commitments we make, and we communicate obsessively when we can’t Making and keeping commitments is not a new value – it’s one of Covey’s core principles if nothing else. I’m sure it has deeper roots throughout the history of mankind. But for us, this is one of those things that is hard wired into the social contract of working here. The value is more complicated than some of the other ones we have, and although it is short, it has three components that worth breaking down: Making commitments: …