I’ll be at the RSA conference this week as a board member of Malwarebytes. If you’re going, feel free to drop by the Malwarebytes booth (#344) and say hello.
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Executive meetings
My task on this blog has evolved to bringing you the nuts and bolts of actually running a tech company. Call it “stories from the field”. Sometimes I think what I write is just ludicrous (probably is) but in all the work I do with so many CEOs, I find the simple things of actually running a company are what they are looking for.
There are so many business advice books out there that talk about radical solutions for this new technology world, but there aren’t any simple places to get advice on actually getting the show on the road. Tony Hsieh can play around with Holacracy to his own destruction, but in the end, someone’s gotta make payroll, if you get my gist.
So this is your “nuts and bolts” blog. Welcome to it.
With that being said, I’ll now get to the incredibly pedestrian subject, just for CEOs: Running internal meetings.
Yup: You got it. This is probably one of the most pedestrian posts you’ll ever find on management. But probably one of your more useful ones.
First off, I’m not going to delve into the cute ideas of having all of your meetings standing up, or fun things like that. Experiment all you like. Like I said, this is going to be very pedestrian.
The role of a leader
As I’ve said before, I describe a leader as someone who establishes and communicates clear goals, gets the right people in place, gets everyone working toward these goals and focuses on what’s important.
And that takes meetings.
A couple of pointers on how to run your exec meetings.
Weekly senior staff
This is the staple of most business: the weekly senior staff meeting. However, it’s generally done incorrectly.
Usually, what happens is:
- The CEO does all the talking (often lecturing) while others sit, mute.
or
- The meeting turns into a long, extended, boring, endless “consensus building” or “discussion” session.
Both of these scenarios suck as senior staff meetings go. And when they both happen together at the same time, ugh. I’ve been there all too many times.
So, here’s how to run it:
- Keep it short. An hour at the most.
- Understand that the purpose is to get the team together, review the business, make decisions on the state of the business and move on. The primary goal is coordination of existing plans and goals.
- Always do it Monday morning. Never on a Friday. (J. Paul Getty learned this years ago. He would hold his senior staff meetings on a Friday and by Monday, everyone would forget what they were supposed to do.)
- Only key executives should attend, perhaps five or six executives. Don’t turn it into a love fest with all the middle management team as well.
- The CEO starts off the meeting with a brief statement, to get things going. Perhaps a quick summary of the business. However, it’s not the CEO’s meeting: it’s a coordination meeting to get the team working together.
- Each executive presents their KPIs for their department and discusses the state of their area. (Don’t have KPIs in place? You can’t manage what you can’t measure…)
- Don’t spend all of your time preparing stuff for the meeting. That’s the job of each executive. And let them speak for themselves.
- Decisions are made based on the data presented. Follow-up meetings and actions items are decided upon.
- The meeting ends.
And that’s your basic senior staff meeting.
Employee staff meetings
This is largely a cultural issue, but I am often discover CEOs that don’t hold regular all-staff meetings with the employees. Perhaps they just send email missives out to all staff. But there’s nothing better than getting the team together on a regular basis to review what’s happening with the business.
Employees hate — hate — not knowing what’s going on. And hell, they’re doing all the work, why shouldn’t they know? Worse, if you don’t tell them what’s going on, they’ll make stuff up about what’s happening. That’s the definition of a rumor mill. Nature abhors a vacuum…
When the meetings are held is a question of your size. Smaller companies do well with weekly meetings. When you get above 50 employees, go to monthly. When you get to above 500 employees, think about quarterly. If you’re public, time it after the quarterly numbers are out. And so on.
Generally, the format I’ve found successful is:
- The purpose is to get staff briefed on the state of the business.
- The CEO presents. Not other staff, unless it’s for some special update on a specific area.
- The meeting is short – perhaps 30–45 minutes or so.
- Don’t be an bore and lecture the employees (or worse, rail at them). This is not about you — you’re just giving them an update! That’s it.
- The meeting is recorded for replay to remote offices (or live streamed).
- Put everyone in a big room and bring cookies. Or lunch. Or whatever fits your culture. It should be fun.
Generally, I prepare slides in advance that show:
- HR. Start with new staff hires. Have them stand up, or just show a picture of the new staff member. If you’re too large for that, just highlight the key new hires (director and above, for example). Play it by ear.
- Depending on your size, it’s a really nice idea to announce employee anniversary dates (one year, two year, etc.).
- Then, any other HR updates, such as new health insurance plan, etc.
- Then do a quick set of slides on each major department (Sales, Marketing, Technical Support, Dev/QA, Finance/Ops). You don’t make the slides. The managers of each of those departments make the slides in advance and send them to you to put together. The slides give a brief status report and, if they like, any key employee shout-outs.
Employees are generally starved for data. So give each department the opportunity to give that data. For marketing, show the ads being run, or a picture of the new website being designed. For Sales, show where the numbers are and the top sales reps. For Tech Support, highlight the KPIs and acknowledge any employees (tech support rep of the month, etc.)
- Assuming I’m holding a monthly meeting: each quarter, I’d suggest getting each department’s top three “big picture” goals. Example: Dev’s goal is to a) release product x, b) get defects below x and c) do a service release on product z.
Then three months later, do a recap as to how they did on their goals. Obviously, you time it based on your size. You can do annual goals, as well.
- I then do a big picture presentation as to how the company is doing against its key goals. At the start of the year, I’ll tell the company what the goals are (revenue, EBITDA, market share, whatever). And then I’ll tell them how we’re doing against the goal.
Don’t hide key information. Just tell the truth, but tell it intelligently. The employees are not slaves, or “the great unwashed”, but your team members, and deserve respect. There are obvious confidentiality issues, but CEOs who are paranoid of letting employees know what’s going on are invariably arrogant and insecure (my direct experience). The opposite, CEOs who believe in things like “servant leadership” (where they propitiate to employees), should also be treated with a fair degree of scorn. The CEO is the captain of the ship. Keep that analogy in mind. What do good captains do?
Never, ever, ever rail at the employees or a specific employee.That is what true assholes do. If the numbers are bad, tell the employees but don’t scare them. Don’t harp on them to “get working harder”. Keep it cool and professional. If it’s bad news, tell them what’s being done to fix the problem. I’ve run big all-staff meetings during good times and bad. Just project confidence and tell them the truth. The all-staff meeting is not an opportunity for you to vent your personal frustrations with the company.
I do believe in an open style of management. I do believe that employees should know what’s going on in the company. It’s worked for me, and I would recommend it.
- When in doubt and you don’t know what to do, just follow the old trick: Tell them “where we were, where we are, where we’re going.”
- You can leave time for employees to ask questions but be very careful of not letting this meeting move into a bitch session, or some kind of communistic “everyone gets a vote”. This is how to destroy a good company meeting. Politely and respectfully take bigger points off-line for further discussion.
The fastest way to destroy morale is to run a bad all-staff meeting. But not having all-staff meetings is actually worse.
Now, in between, your time is filled with meetings, all in the an effort to forward your goals. How you run those meetings is your business. I will say, however, that team-building comes from actually doing things together.
Meetings are not bad. Badly run meetings are bad.
Other major tools in the CEO’s management toolkit are quarterly senior management meetings (QBRs — Quarterly Business Reviews), as well as annual planning meetings, annual budget planning and running a good sales kick-off. This fits into a broader context, and I will write about those types of meetings in the future. I also recommend implementing team-based budgeting.
But this is enough for now!
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Your experience matters
Many believe that we are all the sum of our experiences, and while I don’t subscribe to that philosophy, it’s certainly true that experience plays a major part in how we approach things. This can be good, and it can be bad.
And that statement leads me to the topic of discussion here: the role of experience, especially in today’s very young tech culture, is surprisingly underrated. What I see instead is inexperienced managers wasting a tremendous amount of time on tasks that should be straightforward, simply because they’ve never tackled them before.
The mark of a good manager is simplicity in action. Straightforward and decisive. That trait, however, is learned over time. It takes experience. Just as a pro athlete “makes it look easy” after having had quite a lot of practice, a good manager “makes it look easy” through a lot of experience. This doesn’t negate the great capabilities of a junior manager: it simply highlights the fact that junior managers often need quite a bit mentoring, which I don’t see much of going on at all, especially in technology. And “executive coaches” do not fill that gap. I’ve found they sometimes can matters worse.
At one point many years ago, it occurred to me that every decision I was making had, in the background, sometimes hundreds of little lessons that I had learned. While this seems like an obvious statement, it struck me that my decision-making process was the result of many mistakes and successes. I had learned from them. I would look at something and simply decide, based on my experience. I could look at a product feature and simply say “that won’t work”. I could look at a marketing campaign and suggest a change that would make a difference. I was sometimes suprised that this was deemed by some (perhaps with fragile egos), as some sort of condemnation of their work. It wasn’t. It was because I had, in the past, done what they were doing and had failed.
A culture of second guessing and waffling can be very toxic. Companies are built on decisions.
Like many executives, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. But that’s the point — I’ve made those mistakes and I don’t intend to repeat them. Others you work with may not have had the benefit of learning.
And because of that experience factor, I find that a lot of people don’t focus on the core, most important things in the business. They get sidetracked.
So the message here is to make mistakes. Make lots of them. Learn fast. And then really use that knowledge. And respect those that have been there, and done it, and learned.
Anyone on Twitter knows fake followers are a dime a dozen. In fact, virtually every major name on Twitter has fake names. It’s a plague on Twitter.
Hence, this article by the Daily Mail sensationalizing Hillary’s fake followers is a bit silly, showing a brand of sloppy journalism that is no surprise for this rag.
The article breathlessly states:
According to two popular online measuring tools, no more than 44 per cent of her Twitter fan base consists of real people who are active in using the social media platform.
And at least 15 per cent – more than 544,000 – are completely fake.
So what.
From an article on Yahoo Small Business that is, ahem, actually well-researched, here are some other public figures and the numbers of their fake followers:
Ten public figures with fake followers
1. Dick Costello, @dickc, CEO of Twitter
2. Jack Dorsey, @jack, CEO & Founder of Square, Co-Founder of Twitter
Follower Breakdown:
2,248,948 Followers
Fake: 25%
Inactive: 39%
Good: 36%
Klout: 85
3. Evan Williams, @ev, Co-Founder of Twitter
Follower Breakdown:
1,593,232 Followers
Fake: 25%
Inactive: 42%
Good: 33%
Klout: 834. Kevin Rose, @kevinrose, General Partner at Google Ventures, Founder of Digg
Follower Breakdown:
1,409,045
Fake: 28%
Inactive: 35%
Good: 36%
Klout: 85
It’s doubtful that Hillary is buying fake followers (although it’s possible). What’s more likely, however, is that her staff has not been vigilant about scrubbing non-existent followers.
Let’s remember that Bill Gates, who could give a rat’s ass about fake or non-fake followers, has 50% fake followers.
(Let it be known that I am not a fan of Hillary Clinton. But I am a fan of accurate reporting.)
I have a massive collection of PST files dating back 15 years (yes, I’m a packrat). It’s incredibly handy to refer to something stored away, even years ago.
I would also like the freedom to access these PST files without having to use Outlook.
However, getting at this data is a pain. I load all my PST files into Outlook, and then Outlook goes through its endless indexing process…and then I have a huge bucket of PST files in my Outlook inbox.
So, I needed an archiving and search tool. There are plenty of solutions if you search around, but they cost money.
So, as a notorious packratting penny-pincher, I figured out the following utterly simple solution:
- Create a throwaway Gmail account (or use your own, whatever works for you).
- Configure the account as an IMAP client in Outlook.
- Copy the contents of your PST files into any Gmail folder you like. You can even copy subfolders. Just throw ’em in.
- Presto: Use your throwaway gmail account as your Outlook PST file archive, taking advantage of blisteringly fast Google search technology.
Have fun.
I’ve done a fair amount of turnaround work. It’s not my favorite work, but it is interesting and challenging.
Now, one thing that’s very easy to do when you go into a bad area is to blame the people. I hear about “bad” employees constantly. And yes, there is often astonishing incompetence that has to get fixed fast. In fact, usually the most important and critical change in a crisis situation is in rapidly evaluating and replacing certain members of management.
But when we look at a broader scene, there’s one observation I wanted to share with you:
- Good people in a bad system become “bad” people.
- Bad people in a good system become plainly obvious as bad people.
It seems like such an self-evident statement, but I have routinely worked with executives who categorize, without a lot of understanding, a group of employees as low-quality. Now, a good manager has a fine-tuned sense of what a good employee is and those opinions are useful. But all too often, I’ve seen managers immediately make assessments on employees, based purely on their own opinion.
So when I enter a turnaround scene, one of the first things I look at is the system (or scene, whatever you want to call it), and then look at the people.
I have worked in areas where the organization structure and management was toxic. And, of course, the employees similar looked “toxic”. They get painted with the broad brush. But here’s a truth: the majority of employees are all too happy to work well. What I have found is that only a minority are actually bad/lazy/stupid/incompetent/evil/etc.
I recall at one company we had terrible problems with product releases. The “reason why” that I started hearing were general statements such as “the developers are unwilling to work”, “they are lazy”, and so on. I didn’t buy it. A simple and radical change in the development organization system suddenly highlighted the very, very small minority who were actually bad actors. And the good developers were miraculously wildly productive. They were all good people stuck in a bad system. When you implement a good system, the bad actors become clearly obvious.
If you consider that a majority of your employees are idiots, well, careful — don’t throw stones in a very fragile glass house.
Let’s remember, however, that even good employees in a good system need to be motivated, given clear direction and kept productive. That is the art and science of building great teams and strong organizational structures.
So, I’m not advocating being a pollyanna. But the broader picture is worth remembering: Good system, good people. Bad system, bad people.
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Myths about lead quality
Hubspot has a very good overview of various myths when it comes to lead quality.
Some of my favorites, which I have seen first hand:
Myth 1: Any lead is a Good Lead
Fact: You might think, “Look at all these leads we are pulling in! We need to get our sales team to follow up with these leads ASAP and close some deals!” Well, you could do that, but you will find that most of those leads are not ready to buy—in the time they became a lead to the time it took your sales team to reach out to them they haven’t experienced enough touch points with your audience.
Unfortunately, about 61% of B2B marketers still send all leads they receive directly to sales while only 27% of those leads will actually be qualified for a sales call. Remember, you should not pursue every lead you receive. You need to establish a system that better identifies a “hot” lead from someone who is just poking around.
Myth 3: Lead Nurturing Is Not Essential to Produce High Quality Leads
Fact: Lead nurturing is perhaps one of the best ways to produce high quality leads. Not everyone who visits your site and fills out a consultation form is going to be qualified. This is where lead nurturing comes in. In fact, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales due to a lack of lead nurturing. Companies that establish a system for nurturing their leads on average produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.
Myth 8: I Only Need to Actively Pursue Leads That Have Requested Sales Contact
Fact: It’s true that leads that have indicated a readiness for sales need to be actively pursued. However, you should also actively pursue those leads that have been identified as marketing qualified.
In some cases, you might experience what we at Kuno Creative call, a High Velocity Marketing Qualified Lead. This lead is someone that has shown a high level of engagement in a relatively short period of time but has not necessarily completed a bottom funnel conversion. These leads should be actively pursued through nurturing and perhaps even passed to your sales team for a quick qualification call.
More here.
Two useful posts this morning on using visuals for powerful marketing.
Quicksprout has a useful infographic on how to create visually appealing content.
And for Facebook, nothing beats imagery. Especially video. Read this good list of tips here.
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There is no “proper English”
Oliver Kamm, Editor of the Times of London, blasts prescriptive (rules-based) grammar in this delightful essay in the Wall Street Journal.
That’s how scholarly linguists work. Instead of having some rule book of what is “correct” usage, they examine the evidence of how native and fluent nonnative speakers do in fact use the language. Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct.
The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions: An example would be the use of a double negative (I can’t get no satisfaction). It makes complete grammatical sense, as an intensifier. It’s just a convention that we don’t use double negatives of that form in Standard English.
Link here.
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Free UI templates
Good overview from the folks at Elegant Themes, here.
On the heels of my “There’s no budget for that” blog post, there’s this useful post by Lisa Fetterman on running a successful Kickstarter campaign. It’s good.
Now, Kickstarter and Indiegogo are often thought of as a way to fund new ideas and companies, but they can also be powerful product marketing tools, creating pre-sales of a new product.
Did you know that Google has an app to help startups market? I briefly reviewed the app, and while it’s basic, it’s usable by pretty much anyone involved in internet marketing. You can download it for free on the Play store, here.
If you read my earlier blog post on creating a pitch deck, this is the perfect redux on that theme — Reid Hoffman has published his original Series B pitch deck from 2004.
Well worth reading. Link here.
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Are CMOs insecure?
Are marketers an insecure bunch? Apparently, that was the impression made on some viewers at yesterday’s Big ReThinkg US Conference.
A good roundup of the conference is at VentureBeat, here.
Yeah, there’s a new version of Windows out, and it’s Windows 93.
