Category Archives: Innovation

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How to Make a Family Happen

Volunteering and serving on non-profit boards has been an integral part of my life. For the past 14 years I have been deeply involved with Hathaway-Sycamores Child and Family Services, which is one of the most expansive agencies serving  Los Angeles County. Hathaway-Sycamores will impact the lives of more than 8500 children this year through 26 innovative programs, from residential care and counseling for youth at risk to foster family placements and permanent adoptions.

Our signature fundraising event each year is called Celebrating Children. We invite all our wonderful donors and sponsors to this gathering in the fall, and for the second year we have held it in the Stadium Club at Dodger Stadium when the Dodgers play an away-game. I am the event chair as well as the MC, which gives me the privilege of working closely with our dedicated staff all year-long to bring friends together in a room filled with love. We broadcast the game on a multitude of monitors and invite a retired Dodger Great to join us. This year we welcomed the legendary Ron Cey to talk a little about his career and a lot about how the Dodgers are also rooted in community service. We then honor one  or two of our supporters with our highest service award, and this year that went to my dear friends, Annsley and George Strong, longtime contributors of their time, money, and vision to the kids and families of Southern California.

All that is wonderful, but it’s not what I really wanted to post just now. We held the event earlier this week, and as we do each year we made a short video that shows a bit of our work. This year we focused on foster care and adoption. We called this story: “How to Make a Family Happen.” The words I write will never do the mission or impact of this work justice, so please have a look:

The Gutierrez and Puccia families who appear in this video were with us at the event, and there were not a lot of dry eyes in the house. They are examples of what happens when individuals decide in their own way to make a forever family happen. These stories are powerful, and they are just two of the miracles we can help make real, to bring a touch of hope and light to a troubled world. If you want to support the kind of work exemplified here, please visit our website.

Please share this video with anyone whose life you think it might touch. There is so much work we can do to improve our communities, and it all begins with local stories of caring and success.

Together, we can make families happen.

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Elon Musk Blows My Mind

I don’t know Elon Musk. I wish I did. This guy knows stuff. He’s the real deal.

MuskIf there is a possible next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, it could be him. He’s not goofing around with thin stuff that’s going to come and go. He already did consumer software engineering as his opening act as a cofounder of PayPal. With the massive payday he got from eBay for the sale of his company—a company that continues to operate as such an important platform it could someday be spun off again as an independent entity—he could have taken the path of least resistance and become an elder statesman of the industry, a board member, an investor, a wise individual of counsel. Not Elon Musk. He started not one subsequent company, but two—Tesla Motors and SpaceX—and leads both as CEO. He is also the CTO of SpaceX and the chief product architect of Tesla. Not exactly a path to retirement. He’s really, really changing the world.

I don’t know if he’s a nice guy. Like I said, I have never met him. But he is truly impressive and worth studying. Here are some perhaps not so obvious reasons why:

A real track record of repeat innovation.

A lot of people talk about being serial entrepreneurs. Elon Musk has pioneered three immensely important companies. The ability for an innovator to find repeat success in entirely new ventures is perhaps the rarest of proven attributes. Edison did it. So did Walt Disney and Steve Jobs. Musk made a mark in digital payment systems, then battery-powered automobiles and low-cost rocket propulsion. He didn’t start life as a rocket scientist, but he challenged himself to become one. Try to find a resume like his anywhere. I don’t think you can. He not only articulates a clear, bold vision, he leads from the front lines as a player-coach. He is simultaneously a thinker, a doer, and a peer-respected personal risk-taker with real skin in the game. He makes disruption make sense. That’s how you fire up a team and get results.

The work he does is important.

It was not clear to everyone in the first dot-com bubble that digital payments would be essential to our economy. Heck, most of us were lucky if we had a phone that could do email back then. PayPal opened our eyes. People have been betting against alternatives to fossil-fuel powered automobiles since the first suggestion of battery power on our roads. No matter how many failures it takes, we know that we can’t rely on the limited resource of petroleum forever. Space travel has been massively expensive, the province of federal bureaucracy and a very few goliath government contractors to date. We no longer have the luxury to spend endlessly on going into orbit and beyond, yet we know it is human destiny to explore our universe. All of this matters big time. Musk is actively pursuing a broad but selective set of challenges that he decides warrant his time and focus. This is real turf with lasting impact. It creates sustainable, well-paying jobs. Even when it fails, it moves the ball forward.

He is courageous and daring, but not reckless.

Earlier this year when Elon Musk was profiled on 60 Minutes, he said he was an engineer first. I do think he believes that, which is part of what makes him great, but even more than an engineer, even more than innovator, he is a pioneer. To be a pioneer in technology doesn’t just mean you have interesting ideas. It means you stand by your ideas and will them into being. Musk said in the 60 Minutes piece that with SpaceX he went “past strike 3 to strike 4,” not just betting the farm in failure, but staying with his conviction to the last test he could fund, even if it meant losing everything. He knew he was right, and if he wasn’t right, he needed to exhaust every resource at his disposal to make the case that he should have been right. When Musk recently faced a roadblock in submitting a competitive bid for a government contract controlled by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, he sued the federal government for the right to compete at substantially lower cost. Imagine the guts, to take on his own customer in a public forum, risking financial ruin for a principle. He won an injunction from a federal judge. Whether he ultimately prevails in winning the contract (and I think he will), there is little question that the price of that contract is coming down. Want to know how to get the government to think smarter about our tax money? I like this way.

He walks the walk, with standards that matter.

So much of what I write about on this blog—ideas like “good enough is not good” and “eat your own dog food”—are very hard to understand unless you have lived them. If you’re lucky in your career, you get to work for someone for a while who grinds this stuff into your brain until you literally cannot act any other way, no matter the stakes, no matter the challenges. If you don’t get a boss who inserts that chip into the back of your spinal cord, study Elon Musk. You can’t cut corners on quality with the work he tackles, or people die. Of course you’re going to say, Well, in automobiles and rockets, people do die. Sadly in the march of progress where new machinery does fail, there is no way around that no matter the commitment to extraordinary quality, but the question is, what is the ethos at the core of an enterprise? Is it profit first, a love letter to Wall Street with lip service to safety and excellence? Or is it a standard of safety and excellence that exists a priori to all other decision-making that of itself creates value? When I see Musk discuss failure or success in any public setting after something has gone wrong or right, I don’t worry that his statement has been pureed by a publicist. I see an engineer who knows winning means perfection, and as elusive as perfection remains, he is never self-satisfied, never standing on his laurels. What do you really need to say about a reusable rocket that leaps sideways and then lands on its launchpad? The Grasshopper speaks for itself.

Why write about Elon Musk?

In this never-ending discussion of whether we are in a tech bubble, I have grown weary of broad generalizations. If all we are worried about is whether the stock market is due for a correction, then we are wasting brain cycles on an inevitable head fake we cannot control, so why bother? Our world has an abundance of trendy apps, head-bobbing diversions, and flavor-of-the-month prognostications of what at the moment constitutes cool. You know what’s cool? Stuff that lasts, stuff that can have a lasting impact on growing our economy, stuff that makes scientific dreams into tangible realities, and stuff that in doing so makes investment capital make sense. Musk is doing that, which to me looks like real leadership, and it feels good to applaud him. I don’t care that he is a billionaire. I care that he is a creative leader, with half his life likely still ahead of him to teach us things we don’t know and take us places we couldn’t otherwise find.

As Andy Grove taught us decades ago, Only the Paranoid Survive. Somewhere along the ride, Elon Musk must have gotten the memo. He is probably rewriting it with some form of ink yet to be discovered.

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Dear RadioShack

RadioShackGreetings, my fellow nerdy friends. I read with concern last week in the business press that you are closing as many as 1100 stores, following your well-received Super Bowl commercial earlier this year. You are not alone. Sears is closing stores. Staples is closing stores. Quiznos is closing stores. There seems to be plenty of commercial real estate coming on the market in all shapes and footprints. I wanted to write to you because I used to love the RadioShack brand, and I would hate to see it join the other tombstones in the Dead Brand Graveyard. You see, I was a bit of a geek as a kid, still sort of am, mowed a lot of lawns and bought my first CB Radio at RadioShack way back when, then used to love to hang out with the other geeks in the store.

So I wonder if the big-salary strategy teams sitting around the table in your headquarters this modern moment have asked themselves the following ten very personal questions:

1) When was the last time they shopped unprompted as a customer in a RadioShack?

2) What did they love about walking into the store?

3) What did they love about the shelf displays in the store?

4) What did they love about the merchandise on sale in the store?

5) What did they love about the staff in the store?

6) What was in the store that was unique, perfectly priced, or presented so well they couldn’t say no to it?

7) How much did they spend of their own money in the store?

8) Did they tell a friend about the experience and urge that friend to also visit the store?

9) When they got home, did they think, oh wow, I should have bought something else while I was there?

10) Are they actually excited about visiting that store again as soon as they can?

The reason I ask is, I never worked at a RadioShack, but I used to be able to answer every single one of these questions in the affirmative. I was a brand evangelist for RadioShack. I actually loved your brand.

At the moment I have no clue what it stands for, except every once in a while I need an obscure electronics plug or unusually shaped battery, and I drop by because you’re paying top dollar for a great location right between my bank and a sushi place I enjoy. If it pops in my head, sometimes I drop off a bucket of old batteries for you to recycle, and if you have the gizmo I need, I gladly fork over about $3 to $8. The guys at checkout always ask for my zip code for some reason, even though I know you know it, because you used to mail me a catalogue several times a year with cool stuff to come see and at least one great coupon offer, but no one there seems to know me after 40-plus years of stopping by. I’m glad you still have the little wired metal gizmos when I need them, and I wish I could spend more money while I was in the store, but there’s really nothing I need or can’t get online cheaper, and the guy behind the counter doesn’t seem to want to swap stories about weird-shaped neon mini bulbs anymore. I miss that guy, he was a geek like me.

You were once the Tandy Corporation, remember? You sold leather goods. Then you reinvented and became RadioShack, and we geeks thought it was a cool place to gather, kind of like Egghead, before they became rent-free NewEgg. You had the TRS-80 and knew how to load software on it! Are some of those geeks at your conference table? Do they love your brand the way we did–not like, but actually love? If they don’t, are they able to articulate what happened to the magic?  Because if they can’t, and they don’t want to go to RadioShack like a real customer, then why should I? I mean, sure, anyone can hire an agency to do a killer commercial, and you can love a commercial, but that’s not the same as loving a brand. It’s also not the same as a reason to go into your store.

I do believe you have to eat your own dogfood if you want someone else to give it a taste. That’s just me. Call me a simpleton without an MBA, but when I love a brand, and I have reason to recommit my loyalty to that brand time and again, price is only one part of my decision funnel. I want a brand that comes with a promise. What’s yours?

I won’t be writing this letter to Sears or Staples or Quiznos, although I do occasionally frequent those stores, but I did want to share my thoughts with you, because there was a time not long ago when you meant something to me. Like Borders. Like Tower Records. Like Blockbuster. Those old friends are no longer to be found. I wonder if the people sitting around the table in their final year loved their brands as much as their customers once did, or if they just ran spreadsheets and focus tests.

There’s a lot going on in a store; it’s a great laboratory for learning. When there’s nothing going on there at all, you can learn even more.

It all begins with a promise.

Signing off now, that’s a big 10-4.

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A Very Good Year for Good Men

GMPI started writing for The Good Men Project in its second year of life, offering to share some of my thoughts on business, creative leadership, and management also published on my own blog. In its third year I joined the board of directors and became a strategic advisor to the CEO. As we embark now on its fourth year, I continue onward, helping to accelerate our growth, invigorated by what our CEO and team have accomplished in driving, “The Conversation No One Else is Having.”

What is this Good Man Project? It’s an editorial content destination you’ll find on the web and through mobile, riding the wave of digital publishing through curated editorial viewpoints on topics ranging from love and parenting to ethics and sports. Founded by entrepreneur Tom Matlack, our vision is never to tell anyone what we think a good man might be, but to share the considered points of view of thousands of vetted contributors on the uneasy questions surrounding the issues of being a man in the 21st century. Why Good Man and not Good Person? We observe that there are any number of sites dealing with the broader issues faced by both genders, but almost none taking a serious approach to some of the deeper issues faced by men. Curiously, we have found our audience to be half men and half women, with our contributors mirroring that dichotomy. Perhaps more interestingly, we find no bias as to whether a topic is covered by a man or a woman, and in the often hundreds of comments that follow our stories, we observe men and women talking with each other about subjects you seldom observe strangers discussing and debating without invective or attack. It’s a wild line we walk, and we love it.

How are we doing after three years on the playing field? Here are a few metrics that make us especially proud:

  • We have surpassed 150 million cumulative page views.
  • We have published over 22,000 articles.
  • We have ranked as high as #243 in Quantcast.
  • We average about 3 million page views per week, with more than half our stories getting over 5000 views and our best stories over 100,000 views. And of course we occasionally have runaway hits that are off the charts.
  • We have over 60,000 Facebook fans and over 100,000 Twitter followers.
  • Our work is overseen by more than 30 editors from the U.S., Canada, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Spain, and the U.K.

What do we think about this? We call it a decent start. If you had asked anyone at the launch of The Good Men Project how far into the future 100 million page views would be, I promise you no one would have said 3 years–not a chance! So when we think about what our business might look like a year from today, it is impossible for us to predict much of anything other than to say we aspire to do better.

When asked to what do I attribute our joyous success to date, that’s easy: People, Products, Profits, in that order. Yes, that happens to be my life mantra for innovation and the theme of my blog, but like I say, for me, these aren’t words, it’s a mandate. Recently I was reviewing a draft of our annual report with our CEO–more about her in a moment–and as we edited our slides, I got fixated on a virtual org chart that we didn’t have a year ago. It was a matrix of our editors and the categories they cover every week. In looking at that chart and how it tied back to our exponentially increased workflow, it was once again obvious to me that none of this would be possible without the immense talent in our community; these are the People who create our Product. That Product, our collection of stories and voices to which we add new material almost every waking hour of the day, is what our customers experience. The excellence of that Product is our lifeblood, and our unending commitment to improve it is what has graciously allowed us to create an embraced customer experience. Customers mean the world to us, their experience is what matters most, but it is our team that creates that experience, and that is where we focus our energy. And I’ll let you in on a little secret, having focused on People and Products, we are already modestly profitable, albeit at a very early scale, enough to let us recommit to our core values.

None of this would be possible without the ceaseless commitment of our CEO, Lisa Hickey. Lisa’s passion for this subject is exemplary, and her evangelism for our brand and our community is a source of pride for everyone involved with this mission. I honestly don’t think she sleeps. She is at the helm of every aspect of The Good Men Project from uptime to story selection to ad sales to social media integration. And yes, Lisa is a woman guiding The Good Man Project, and that is a big part of what makes us unique. She is welcoming, encouraging, open-minded, and forward-thinking. Most of all, she is a great partner, and I will have to twist her virtual arm to leave this paragraph in the post.

We thank everyone involved–our readers, our commentors, our writers, our editors, our sponsors, and our suppliers–for being part of this launch. We hope if you are a regular, you will sign up for our free email list (we publish a fantastic daily digest) or consider becoming a premium member for a small fee that includes a welcome gift. If you haven’t visited The Good Men Project in a while, come see how we have shaped and molded and evolved our site over the first three years, then join our community and help us take it together into the future. Like I said, we’re just getting started. We have a tremendous amount of work to do, and we can’t do it without you!