More Good Inc. Last year I was pleased and proud to write about our debut on the Inc. 500 list of America’s fastest growing companies. At that time I wrote that “Now our challenge, of course, is STAYING on the list, and hopefully upping our ranking next year!” Well, I am again please and proud to announce that we, in fact, stayed on the list. (You can read all the Inc. coverage here and see our press release about the ranking here.) Unfortunately, we didn’t make the second part of our goal to up our rank. But, we did up our growth – our three-year revenue growth rate was 18% higher than last year. This is a testament to the…
Archives / August, 2007
Father/Mother Knows Best?
Father/Mother Knows Best? USA Today had an interesting article today about how founder-led companies perform better than their non-founder-led counterparts, with a 15-year stock price appreciation of 970% vs. the S&P 500 average of 222%. That’s pretty powerful data. The general reasons cited in the article include founders having deep industry knowledge…having a powerful presence in the company…having a huge financial stake in the success of the business…not looking for the next job so can take a long-term perspective…being street fighters early on I think all those are true to some extent. And it’s certainly true, as one of the CEOs interviewed for the article said, that it’s not because founders are smarter or harder working. But to add to…
A Culture of Appreciation
A Culture of Appreciation As I mentioned in my last post in the Collaboration is Hard series, we’ve tried to create a culture of appreciation at Return Path that lowers barriers to collaboration and rewards mutual successes. We developed a system that’s modeled somewhat after a couple of those short Ken Blanchard books, Whale Done and Gung Ho! It may seem a little hokey, and it doesn’t work 100% of the time, but in general, it’s a great way to make it easy for people to say a public “thanks” to a colleague for a job well done. The idea is simple. We have an “award request” form on our company Intranet that any employee can use to request one…
Spam Filter and False Positive Reality Check
Spam Filter and False Positive Reality Check For a variety of reasons, we had to take our spam filter offline for a day or two here, so I am getting a good look at what raw, unfiltered email traffic looks like. It’s not pretty. I have two main observations: – Spam filters are getting pretty good at eliminating false negatives (e.g., catching real spam). There’s a virtual tidal wave in my inbox of crap that I never see. I have multiple, very old, very public email addresses feeding the same inbox, so I am probably seeing more than most, but wow. Spam is a far worse problem on networks than it is in actual inboxes – Spam filters are still…
Collaboration is Hard, Part III
Collaboration is Hard, Part III In Part I, I talked about what collaboration is: partnering with a colleague (either inside or outside of the company) on a project, and through the partnering, sharing knowledge that produces a better outcome than either party could produce on his or her own and why it’s so important knowledge sharing as competitive advantage, interdependency as a prerequisite to quality, and gaining productivity through leverage In Part II, I suggested a few reasons why collaboration is difficult for most of us It doesn’t come naturally to us on a cultural level, it’s hard to make an up-front investment of time in learning when you don’t know what you’re going to learn, and there’s a logistical…
A Model for Transparency
A Model for Transparency Rob Kalin from Etsy (a marketplace for handmade goods) wrote an outstanding blog post today that Fred describes as a transparent window into what makes the company tick. I’d like to riff off of two themes from the post. First, the post itself and the fact that Rob, as CEO of the business, is comfortable with this degree of transparency and openness in his public writing. I still think that far few CEOs blog today. There is probably no better window into the way a company works or the way a management team thinks than open and honest blogging. One member of our team at Return Path described my blogging once as “getting a peek inside…
Collaboration is Hard, Part II
Collaboration is Hard, Part II In Part I, I talked about what collaboration is: partnering with a colleague (either inside or outside of the company) on a project, and through the partnering, sharing knowledge that produces a better outcome than either party could produce on his or her own and why it’s so important knowledge sharing as competitive advantage, interdependency as a prerequisite to quality, and gaining productivity through leverage In Part II, I’ll answer the question I set out to answer originally, which is why is collaboration so hard? Why does it come up on so many of our development plans year in, year out? As always, there isn’t an answer, but here are a few of my theories:…