Everything is Data, Part II – Get Those Expenses In My friend and former colleague Angela Baldonero (used to run our People Team at Return Path, now is COO of super cool startup Procurify), used to say about her job as head of HR, “Everything is Data.” She guest blogged about that principle on OnlyOnce years ago here , and she particularly cited this theory when talking about the recruiting and hiring process. I’ve thought about this principle a lot over the years, and I’ve occasionally come up with other examples where I think peripheral data can inform whether or not an employee will succeed, at least in my world. I don’t know how many of these can be caught in…
Archives / March, 2017
Book Short – Blink part III – Undo?
Book Short – Blink part III – Undo? I just finished reading Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, and honestly, I wish I could hit Life’s Undo button and reclaim those hours. I love Michael Lewis, and he’s one of those authors where if he writes it, I will read it. But this one wasn’t really worth it for me. Having said that, I think if you haven’t already read both Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (review, buy) and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (review, buy), then it might be worth it. But having read those two books, The Undoing Project had too much overlap and not enough “underlap” (to quote my friend Tom Bartel) –…
Stamina
Stamina A couple years ago I had breakfast with Nick Mehta, my friend who runs the incredibly exciting Gainsight. I think at the time I had been running Return Path for 15 years, and he was probably 5 years into his journey. He said he wanted to run his company forever, and he asked me how I had developed the stamina to keep running Return Path as long as I had. My off the cuff answer had three points, although writing them down afterwards yielded a couple more. For entrepreneurs who love what they do, love running and building companies for the long haul, this is an important topic. CEOs have to change their thinking as their businesses scale, or…