A friend who is a newly promoted CEO just wrote me and asked me this: I’m having a sort of guilt complex. Let me explain. I’ve set up a bunch of positions, which people are grooving into. We just completed our budget for our new fiscal year, probably faster and easier than ever before. Sales are going really, really well. BUT, despite all of this, I feel more relaxed than I have in years. And I am struggling with that. I’m relaxed because we seem out in front of stuff, I’ve reduced my span of control from a dozen direct reports to four. Things are progressing in good ways. I also have time now that I’ve not had in ages…
Archives / January, 2012
Scaling the Team
Scaling the Team (This post was requested by my long-time Board member Fred Wilson and is also running concurrently on his blog today. I’ll be back with the third and fourth installments of “The Best Laid Plans” next Thursday and the following Thursday) When Return Path reached 100 employees a few years back, I had a dinner with my Board one night at which they basically told me, “Management teams never scale intact as you grow the business. Someone always breaks.” I’m sure they were right based on their own experience; I, of course, took this as a challenge. And ever since then, my senior management team and I have become obsessed with scaling ourselves as managers. So far, so…
The Best Laid Plans, Part II
The Best Laid Plans, Part II Once you’ve finished the Input Phase (see last week’s post) of producing your strategic plan, you’re ready for the Analysis Phase, which goes something like this: Assemble the facts. Keep notes along the way on the input phase items, assemble them into a coherent document with key thoughts and common themes highlighted. Select/apply framework. Go back to the reading and come up with one or more strategic frameworks. Adapted them from the academic stuff to fit our situation. Academic frameworks don’t solve problems on their own, but they do force you to think through problems in a structured way. Step back. Leave everything alone for two weeks and try not to think about it. …
Help Us, Help You
Before becoming Chairman of the Direct Marketing Association, one of the things I’d noticed over the years was that the association didn’t have a ton of primary market research on itself, sort of a classic case of the cobbler’s children having shoddy shoes. Today we are launching a new survey to help us establish a baseline for awareness and perceptions of all aspects of the DMA on behalf of all members of the marketing community. Whether or not you are a DMA or EEC member – in some ways, it’s even more important for non-members to take this – I’d greatly appreciate you taking 10 minutes to fill out this survey. It will help us continue to reshape the association…
The Best Laid Plans, Part I
The Best Laid Plans, Part I One of my readers asked me if I have a formula that I use to develop strategic plans. While every year and every situation is different, I do have a general outline that I’ve followed that has been pretty successful over the years at Return Path. There are three phases — input, analysis, and output. I’ll break this up into three postings over the next three weeks. The Input Phase goes something like this: Conduct stakeholder interviews with a few top clients, resellers, suppliers; Board of directors; and junior staff roundtables. Formal interviews set up in advance, with questions given ahead. Goal for customers: find out their view of the business today, how we’re…
Articulating the Problem is the First Step Toward Solving It
A while back, we were having some specific challenges at Return Path that were *really* hard to diagnose. It was like peeling the proverbial onion. Every time we thought we had the answer to what was going on, we realized all we had was another symptom, not a root cause. We’re a pretty analytical bunch, so we kept looking for more and more data to give us answers. And we kept coming up with, well, not all that much, besides a lot of hand-wringing. It wasn’t until I went into a bit of a cave (e.g., took half a day’s quiet time to myself) and started writing things down for myself that I started to get some clarity around the…
Book Short: Fixing America
Book Short: Fixing America I usually only blog about business books, but since I occasionally comment on politics, I thought I would also post on That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum (book, Kindle), which I just finished. There is much that is good about America. And yet, there is much that is broken and in need of serious repair. I wrote about some thought on fixing our political system last year in The Beginnings of a Roadmap to Fix America’s Badly Broken Political System?, but fixing our political system can only do so much. Tom Friedman, with whom I usually…
Taking Stock
Taking Stock Every year around this time, I take a few minutes to reflect on how the business is doing, on my goals and development plans, and on what I want to accomplish in the coming year. Although most of that work is focused on how to move the business forward, I also make sure to take stock of my own career trajectory. I always ask myself three questions when I do this: Am I having fun at work? Am I learning and growing as a professional? Is my work financially rewarding enough, either in the short term or in the long term? Of course, I always shoot for 3 YES responses. Then I know my career is on track. …