July 2008 Archives

Over the past few quarters we've made a serious effort with the entire executive team at GotVMail to crystallize the core values that unite us as a company. After three weeks of discussion and writing (and re-writing), we arrived at an acronym that represented the core values of our company: GARY (the name of our cartoon mascot): "Go Above and Beyond", "Always Entrepreneurial", "Radically Passionate", and "Your Team."

We also combined our core values with our core purpose to "Empower Entrepreneurs to Succeed," and we created what we believed was a very powerful message that speaks to our work culture. In addition to representing us as a company, we also thought it helped inspire both current and prospective employees, as well as partners.

Defining the core values of your company is a serious endeavor, but we certainly didn't want them to turn out to be this lofty set of ideas that were too mighty for practical application. We also wanted to disseminate our core values in a fun, lighthearted way--in other words, we didn't want people to be afraid of using them. But how would we get people talking about them?

The answer came one night when I was flipping around tv channels and landed on an episode of The Tonight Show. The featured guest was Gary Busey, of reality tv and (some) film fame. For someone who appeared to have been through the ringer in more ways than one, Gary had an uncanny knack for making acronyms from regular words (that actually made sense). That night on Leno, Busey dazzled with an acronym for the word "team": Together Everyone Achieves More. I'm still surprised both Gary Busey and late-night tv watching could be so darn inspiring, but that night, the idea for the Gary Busey videos was born.

After putting the finishing touches on our core values and going over various ideas, the Gary Busey videos went into production. The result was our core values video, starring Busey, which debuted during our Q3 company meeting. Shortly thereafter, the videos were up on YouTube along with the rest of the viral ad campaign we'd produced.

The response to the videos has been amazing: the musician John Mayer blogged about them and the Daily News talked up the campaign on Page Six. People "got" the humor of doing these videos with a guy like Gary Busey, and I think also appreciated that we, as a company, could take ourselves a little less seriously than others. As a result of the immensely positive response, we decided that the videos would be an effective recruiting and marketing tool--it would help people understand what working at GotVMail is like: fun, unusual, and without a doubt, never predictable.

With all of the strife people are experiencing due to the economy, it's only natural that we're seeing the resurgence of news stories offering ways to save money on everything from gas to your daily lunch. We'd probably rather forget the circumstances causing us to search for ways to save money, but stories like the one that ran in the Wall Street Journal last week--"Bagging Lunch: The Inflation Effect"--highlight the ways in which employers can step up and help mitigate the effects of the rising cost of living for their employees.

One of the companies featured in the WSJ article was my company, GotVMail. We started GotLunch, a program that gives every employee a $5 daily credit for use towards lunch from a variety of local sandwich shops and delis. Since we don't have a cafeteria in our building and lunch often entails getting in a car and driving to find food, we thought it would make more sense (and save people gas) if employees could just get their lunch close to home and for a lower cost, too.

We get all of this done via our VMeals interface, through which people order their meal for either one or two days or the entire week. The keys to success have been simple:

1. Easy - Online interface accepts credit cards (if employees go over their $5 allowance each day) and is automated, so no manual processing is required. Also, whether you order in the morning or order in advance, lunch is always there.
2. Lots of selection - Hot and cold options in addition to standard salads and sandwiches and from multiple vendors.
3. Free delivery - GotVMail's lunches are individually labeled and dropped off in our kitchen. GotVMail People never pay a delivery fee.

GotVMail's GotLunch program helps in the following ways (besides the obvious benefit of lower cost lunches):

• Lets people use their time how they want to. GotVMail People no longer have to go out to get lunch, and those who get their lunch delivered now have more time to do other stuff like take a walk, catch up with coworkers, or nap on one of the GotVMail couches or chairs (they're really comfortable).
• Gives people more flexible lunch options. Cuts down on the amount of brown bag lunches people have to bring, and offers those who normally bring their own the choice of additional hot lunch options.
• Supports local businesses. GotVMail People choose their lunches from menus offered by local delis and sandwich shops, so we're helping to drive business to other small businesses in the area (many of which are family owned and operated).
• Gives GotVMail People a chance to socialize. Since many people order lunch at the same time and pick it up in the same spot when it is delivered to GotVMail, it always turns into an opportunity to socialize and meet people from many different departments in the company. We've always felt strongly that GotVMail People need this sort of social release to be the productive.

Overall, the response has been extremely positive, and we're proud of the ripple effect it has had on team member morale and local businesses.

When people talk about entrepreneurship, they almost always use the word 'risk'. It's often said that entrepreneurs are "risk-takers," and as a result, they're often characterized as risk-lovers. It's true that you'll probably find some entrepreneurs who wholeheartedly enjoy that thrilling facet of the process, however, characterizing entrepreneurs as a group as people who only enjoy a thrill would be pretty narrow-minded, and also false.

Exploration of the concepts of entrepreneurship and risk (and the relationship between the two) was the central task of a working paper published in 2005 by Brian Wu, of The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and Anne Marie Knott, of the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Virginia. Wu and Knott's paper, entitled "Entrepreneurial Risk and Market Entry," discussed the work of F.H. Knight, who elaborated on earlier discussions of the matter by identifying entrepreneurs as important economic players, not as thrill-seeking risk-takers.

Wu and Knott pointed out that as the market developed, entrepreneurs served a crucial role as "undertakers" of important tasks at all levels of society. But perhaps the most striking observation the authors make is that entrepreneurs were (and continue to be) those individuals that are willing to take risks in order to innovate new and better ways of doing things. Entrepreneurs are those that, faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles, take the risk because the reward is a better way of life not just for the entrepreneur, but society as a whole.

This brings me to the subject of social entrepreneurship, which is a huge topic to cover in one post (which is why I won't). Does it seem a bit redundant to anyone else to use the term "social entrepreneurship"? It seems to me that the root of entrepreneurship is social-- that is, it's based on interaction and social life. It's one person identifying the need of a group of people, the available resources and the desired outcome and trying to reach that goal with whatever tools/resources he or she has available. In this way, entrepreneurship is less about risk taking than it is about vision building. For whatever reason, the social experiences entrepreneurs combine with the intellectual skills they possess and produce an ability to visualize the desired innovation or outcome.

It's probably true that we've come to think of entrepreneurs a little differently than how they began--as the "undertaker class" outlined in Wu and Knott's article, people like farmers, merchants, and craftspeople. But, as with anything, there is an evolution of terminology that is based on history, society, and the market. The excess of the 1980's and the explosion (and implosion) of start-ups in the late 1990's have made the roots of entrepreneurship worthy of further evaluation, particular how their skills can be best utilized during tough economic times.

Today my company, GotVMail, launched the Gary Busey on Business viral campaign. The Busey on Business series features the actor's musings on everything from cultural clichés to business insights, all delivered in trademark off-the-cuff Busey style. And there's something for everyone. One of my personal favorites--and what really propelled this project forward-- is the "Buseyisms" video in which Gary shares several acronyms that help explain the meaning of various words (e.g., "TEAM--together everyone achieves more!"). In the past few years Busey has become well known for this routine on VH1 Celebrity Fit Club and even on his visit to Jay Leno.

Busey is a free spirit, that's for sure. He says what's on his mind, often without filtering it first, and that's what we love about him. More than anything else, it's funny and gets people interested in the topic of entrepreneurship, and all of the crazy ways ideas take shape.

As the campaign progresses I will post updates, as well as a yet to be released video featuring our company core purpose and core values. Until then use the widget to post this to your social networking sites or blogs. A channel was also created on YouTube which shows all 40 videos.

It's kind of unusual to have an epiphany while foraging for a snack. But that's what happened to me in GotVMail's kitchen one afternoon. After surveying the snacks--a smorgasbord of items that were either high in fat, sugar, preservatives or both--I realized it didn't have to be this way! I knew we could easily find healthier alternatives to greasy chips or provide protein bars instead of candy bars to GotVMail team members in need of something to snack on. The easiest way to do this? A vending machine, but not any old vending machine, it would be free for GotVMail team members and would consist entirely of healthier snacks.

Since I'd already been trying to find foods with fewer processed ingredients for myself at home, I was familiar with a lot of brands that offered healthier versions of favorite items like chips, popcorn, and candy bars. I decided to buy items like Cascadian Farms Organic, LesserEvil, Luna, and Robert's American Gourmet in large quantities on Amazon.com and stock the vending machine with those items and then see the response of GotVMail employees. Naturally, overhauling our snack offerings was a big change, but I had a feeling it would be a really positive change that would enhance our productivity. To make the new system easier to swallow, we decided to offer the healthier snacks in the machine for free, permanently. It just made more sense to supply our employees with snacks that could potentially provide the energy we all needed to get through our projects every day.

Since setting up the new, healthier vending machines, the response from GotVMail team members has been largely positive. Obviously, every now and again people just want a candy bar, and nothing else will substitute, but in terms of providing healthier alternatives to fill that daily, 3pm post-lunch void, the healthier vending machine has made a huge difference. And in addition to food in our vending machines, we continue to offer free drinks (the non-alcoholic kind!), coffee and espresso. Fresh fruit deliveries have also been added to the roster of healthier snack items at GotVMail.

The vending machine project at GotVMail launched around the same time as another initiative of ours, the GotVMail Lunch Program, GotLunch. Look for a post in the coming days about this innovative employee benefit.

SlideShare is great for sharing presentations, getting feedback from invited users, or the SlideShare community as a whole. With a smart little embeddable player and easy tools, anyone can take a PowerPoint presentation and make it into a Flash based presentation that everyone can access. So with all these user-centered features--within a culture increasingly high on user generated content--why would anyone dare suggest there could be a problem with the way it works?

Not long ago I was looking for an easy way to post our Q3 company presenation to our company wiki, and SlideShare came to mind. Since there had been so many recent privacy upgrades, like being able to make some presentations private yet still share your content, we thought it was the solution to our slide sharing problem. But in the process of uploading our quarterly company presentation, we encountered some obstacles that underscore SlideShare's true lack of substantial privacy options. Here's what I noticed:

1. During the uploading process, a user cannot set the presentation to private, so you need to remember to do this immediately after uploading.
2. Enabling links or embedding a SlideShare presentation still allows others to forward (share) this content, even if it's private.
3. Posting company information or other sensitive data on SlideShare's non-enterprise network means you have very little control over where that data eventually ends up.

#3 really threw us for a loop, and it should really any user of a site that gathers and retains sensitive or personal data (think about it: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other social networking sites do the same thing--you may never truly know how and where your information could be accessed by a third party). It's a problem SlideShare and many other sites similar to it all face, yet because everyone's so eager to jump on the social media/user generated content bandwagon, the issue doesn't get much attention.

After thinking about these questions I set out to find a secure solution that would allow us to control the data storage and access. Did a few quick Google searches and found two sets of products: applications made at least 5 years ago that had horrible players and interfaces, and at the other end of the spectrum, complex PowerPoint replacements with audio, and tons of useless features. A minute or two of despair was followed by a bit more searching, and I eventually found iSpring and their slideboom . With a free conversion tool I was able to convert the presentation quickly and easily and upload the Flash file to our wiki behind our firewall.

SlideShare is a great tool for non-sensitive information, but if you're a company (or a person) interested in privacy and data security, you'll probably prefer a tool like iSpring, which offers total user control on a platform that's very similar to SlideShare.

Telling your employees to quit might be the best way to keep them (the good ones, anyway). At least that's the thinking behind Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh's plan to pay any employee $1,000 to quit the company. Employees who can't contribute--for whatever reason--take the money and run.

It's definitely a splashy new story--CEO pays employees to quit!--but does Hsieh's plan work? It certainly could, but it requires companies large and small to have a few crucial elements in place before a plan like this should be implemented. In order for the plan to work, a company needs, at minimum:

1. A rich core values ideology that translates into an identifiable work culture. Hsieh decreases the chances of having too many employees that are a bad fit by screening them before they're hired, and then engaging in an extensive training period (during this time they are being paid as regular employees). "We interview people for culture fit," Hsieh stated in 2006. By having a strong identity and a training program, Zappos makes sure that anyone that doesn't share the same ideology is quickly weeded out.
2. Accountability. Business leaders can't just pay lip service to a certain philosophy of management--he or she has to make sure that the ideology of the company permeates the entire organization. This means holding under-performers accountable at every level, from entry level to senior staff.
3. Investment in employees. Hsieh's plan is meant to attract and keep only the best and most capable employees. Capable employees will leave if a job isn't what they signed up for. That's why in order to minimize turnover, a business needs to do one simple thing: make staying more attractive than leaving. Investing in an employees' future makes staying more worthwhile, especially for those who are especially talented because it allows them to build on previous skills, and learn new ones. Employee investment may come in the form of professional development offerings, or the type of personal investment discussed in books such as The Dream Manager, but it has to enter the picture somehow in order for a company to retain the best talent for as long as possible.

You can't overstate the importance of these three points, especially the one about core values and work culture. Zappos' culture is unique and forward-thinking (many of Zappos' employees post on social media sites such as Twitter), and it's what sets Zappos apart from their competitors in the shoe industry, as well as the job market.

As the Boston Globe reported, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed the Green Communities Act on July 2, 2008, a bill that will ultimately conserve energy and save consumers money.

One of the greatest things about this bill is that it will have positive short- as well as long-term outcomes for those living and doing business in Massachusetts. However, most importantly, the bill takes the energy conservation movement from the fringes of American society to the mainstream. By actively involving the business community in energy conservation projects (by making it attractive to them from both an economic as well as public relations perspective) Massachusetts makes certain that the bill takes on a living, breathing dimension in addition to its symbolic component.

"Business leaders praised the legislation, saying it could stabilize electric rates in New England, already among the highest in the nation. Utilities, including NStar and National Grid, said they have long focused on energy efficiency but are eager to ramp up the effort, as well as to provide solar power to customers. 'It pushes us to a new level,' said Tom May, NStar's chief executive. 'We get to cross the street to our customer side and help them with energy choices . . . such as windmills in a neighborhood or solar panels. It's helping them reduce their carbon footprint.'"

No, this isn't Greenpeace, but it's a start.

The Green Communities Act also stimulates business and raises awareness about small but mighty players in the (green) business world, such as Powerhouse, one of my favorites. Powerhouse is located in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and offers the PowerPOD--a fully configurable structure that is "[f]lexible enough to be anything from a home office to a dojo." With state of the art offerings such as radiant heat flooring, low-flow showerheads, and highly insulated building materials, the POD definitely packs a punch (and not on the environment, thankfully).

Products like Powerhouse's are only going to become more common as we innovate new ways to conserve energy and find new methods of building that will help people save money. It's times like these-- when things not only are changing but have to change--that I think entrepreneurs can be most successful. With your back against the wall (environmentally), it's always easier to expedite the process of innovation and design.