Archives / June, 2011

The Value of Constraints

The Value of Constraints The beauty of Twitter is that a tweet can only be 140 characters long.  With that as a constraint, you end up seeing some amazingly creative messages on Twitter that manage to convey both a specific tone and a lot of content — in close quarters! The same logic can apply to business more generally. If you give your team two hours to solve a complex problem, you’ll be amazed at how far they can get with it, even if they don’t have enough time to do thorough research If you have to balance your budget every year, you’ll be amazed at the clarity of decision-making you find yourself with (Wonder why Congress can’t figure out…

Triple Book Short: For Parents

Triple Book Short: For Parents People who know me know that I am a voracious reader.  Among other things, I probably read about 25-30 books per year — and I wish I had time for more.  I probably read about 50% business books, which I blog about.  Most of my other reading is in a couple specific topical areas that interest me like American History and Evolutionary Biology.  Over the last few years, Mariquita and I have discovered and read a handful of books about parenting that have been foundational for us as we work deliberately at raising our three kids, and two of them have roots in some of the same philosophies, psychologies, and research as a lot of…

Keeping It All In Sync?

Keeping It All In Sync? I just read a great quote in a non-business book, Richard Dawkins’ River out of Eden, Dawkins himself quoting Darwinian psychologist Nicholas Humphrey’s revolting of a likely apocryphal story about Henry Ford.  The full “double” quote is: It is said that Ford, the patron saint of manufacturing efficiency, once commissioned a survey of the car scrapyards in America to find out if there were parts of the Model T Fird which never failed. His inspectors came back with reports of almost every kind of breakdown:  axles, brakes, pistons — all were liable to go wrong. But they drew attention to one notable exception, the kingpins of the scrapped cars invariably had years of life left…

Sometimes, Things Are Messy

Sometimes, Things Are Messy Many people who run companies have highly organized and methodical personality types – in lots of cases, that’s probably how they got where they got in life.  And if you work long enough to espouse the virtues of fairness and equality with the way you manage and treat people, it become second nature to want things to be somewhat consistent across an organization. But the longer we’re in business at Return Path and the larger the organization gets, the more I realize that some things aren’t meant to fit in a neat box, and sometimes inconsistency is not only healthy but critical for a business to flourish.  Let me give a few examples that I’ve observed…

Try It On For Size

Try It On For Size I’ve always been a big fan of taking a decision or a change in direction I’m contemplating and trying it on for size.  Just as you never know how a pair of pants is really going to fit until you slip them on in a dressing room, I think you need to see how decisions feel once you’re closing in on them. Here’s why:  decisions have consequences.  No matter how prescient leaders are, no matter if they’ve been trained in chess-like (three-moves-ahead) thinking, they can almost never perfectly foresee all the downstream reactions and effects of decisions.  Figuring out how to create “mental fittings” is a skill that I think is critical for CEOs and…