Marketing is Like Baskin Robbins A couple years ago, I wrote that Marketing is Like French Fries, since you can always take on one more small incremental marketing task, just as you can always eat one more fry, even long after you should have stopped. Today, inspired in part by our ongoing search for a new head of marketing at Return Path and in part by Bill McCloskey’s follow up article about passion in email marketing in Mediapost, I declare that Marketing is also like Baskin Robbins – there are at least 31 flavors of it that you have to get right. McCloskey writes: I submit that the über marketer who is expert in all the various forms of interactive…
Archives / March, 2007
Book Short: Crazy Eights
Book Short: Crazy Eights In honor of Return Path being in the midst of its eighth year, I recently read a pair of books with 8 in the title (ok, I would have read them anyway, but that made for a convenient criterion when selecting out of my very large “to read” pile). Ram Charan’s latest, Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People People Who Perform From Those Who Don’t, was pretty good and classic Charan. Quick, easy to skim and still get the main points. The book lost a little credibility with me when Charan lionized Verizon (perhaps he uses a different carrier himself) and Bob Nardelli (the book was published before Nardelli’s high profile dismissal), but makes good…
Leaders Discredited from Leading?
Leaders Discredited from Leading? In Bill McCloskey’s Email Insider column on Mediapost today (hopefully the link will work; sometimes Mediapost isn’t open if you’re not a subscriber), he decries the lack of passion and industry evangelists in the email marketing space and compares it to the search world with at least one example involving Dave Pasternack, co-founder and president of Did-It. He then goes on to say that there are a few evangelists in the email world, but that two of us — myself and Rich Gingras, CEO of Goodmail, don’t count because we “have a vested interest in being passionate.” While I appreciate Bill’s main point and appreciate his recognizing that I do evangelize our space and am passionate…
Staying Power
Staying Power I interview a lot of people. We are hiring a ton at Return Path, and I am still able to interview all finalists for jobs, and frequently I interview multiple candidates if it’s a senior role. I probably interviewed 60 people last year and will do at least that many this year. I used to be surprised when a resume had an average job tenure of 2 years on it — now, the job market is so fluid that I am surprised when I see a resume that only has one or two employers listed. But even the dynamic of long-term employment, as rare as it is, has changed. My good friend Christine, who was a pal in…
I Hope I Didn’t Make You Sick, Too
I Hope I Didn’t Make You Sick, Too Fellow entrepreneur and MyWay blogger Chris Yeh takes me to task for my post last week entitled Humbled at TED. Although his blog post was pretty harsh on me — saying essentially that I’d lost my brain and made him sick by fawning over celebrities (which I didn’t do) — his comment on my blog was a little more measured, just reminding me that people like Bill Clinton is human and puts his pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us. I think Chris missed my main point, and since he decided to go public blasting me, I’ll repeat here what I emailed him privately before he…
An Execution Problem
An Execution Problem My biggest takeaway from the TED Conference this week is that we — that is to say, all of us in the world — have an execution problem. This is a common phrase in business, right? You’ve done the work of market research, positioning, and strategy and feel good about it. Perhaps as a bigger company you splurge and hire McKinsey or the like to validate your assumptions or develop some new ones. And now all you have to do is execute — make it happen. And yet so many businesses can’t make the right things happen so that it all comes together. I’d guess, completely unscientifically, that far, far more businesses have execution problems than strategic…
Humbled at TED
Humbled at TED I’m at my first TED Conference this week, and while I’ve watched countless other bloggers around me pounding out post after post summarizing different presentations (which I won’t do — feel free to see the site for official stuff), I’ve been struggling to find something to write about. Then it hit me today. I kind of feel at this conference the way I did when I started college. Totally humbled. I was #2 in my class in high school. Straight As, a few A+s thrown in for good measure. Then I got to Princeton and felt like an idiot. I was convinced I was bottom quartile at best. Everyone around me was either like me or better,…