Archives / June, 2012

How Many Thermometers Do You Need to Know the Turkey’s Done?

How Many Thermometers Do You Need to Know the Turkey’s Done? Full credit to my colleague Jack Abbot for using this awesome phrase in an Engineering Management meeting I observed recently. It’s a gem. Filed!  The context was around spending extra cycles creating more metrics that basically measure the same thing. And in theory, sure, you don’t want or need to do that, even if you do have a cool data visualization tool that encourages metric proliferation. But as I was thinking about it a bit more, I think there are situations where you might want multiple thermometers to tell you about the done-ness of the turkey. First, sometimes you learn something by measuring the same thing in multiple ways….

Running a Productive Offsite

Running a Productive Offsite A couple OnlyOnce readers asked me to do a post on how I run senior team offsites.  It’s a great part of our management meeting routine at Return Path, and one that Patrick Lencioni talks about extensively in Death by Meeting (review, book) – a book worth reading if you care about this topic. My senior team has four offsites per year.  I love them.  They are, along with my Board meetings, my favorite times of the year at work.  Here’s my formula for these meetings: –          WHY:  There are a few purposes to our offsites.  One for us is that our senior team is geographically distributed across 4 geographies at the executive level and 6 or…

Book Short: Alignment Well Defined

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business is Patrick Lencioni’s newest book.  Unlike most or all of his other books (see the end of this post for the listing), this one is not a fable, although his writing style remains very quick and accessible. I liked this book a lot.  First, the beginning section is a bit of a recap of his Five Dysfunctions of a Team which I think was his best book.  And the ending section is a recap of his Death by Meeting, another really good one.  The middle sections of the book are just a great reminder of the basic building blocks of creating and communicating strategy and values – about driving alignment….

How Creative Do You Have to Be?

How Creative Do You Have to Be? To follow up on last week’s post about the two types of entrepreneurs, I hear from people all the time that they can’t be an entrepreneur because they’re not creative.  I used to say that myself, but Mariquita reminds me periodically that that’s nonsense…and as a case in point, I didn’t have the original idea that gave birth to Return Path James Marciano did.  And I didn’t have the original idea to create a deliverability business, George Bilbrey did.  Or an inbox organizer consumer application, Josh Baer did. But I still consider myself an entrepreneur as the founder and leader of the company, as it takes a lot of creativity and business building…