Blog of Roger Greene, CEO

In this top-10 list (well, okay, top-13), Harvey Mackay explains how to adopt a sales mindset. As research has shown, success in selling is not related to personal style or charm. My favorites in Mackay’s list are stay hungry, never compromise your integrity, be authoritative (know your products backwards and forwards) and become a customer service fanatic. I attribute much of our growth and accomplishments to our many employees who have these qualities.

Here is the article from yesterday’s Sunday Boston Globe that lists all of the winners in their Top Places to Work 2011 awards. Click on the ‘Top small employers’ tab to see Ipswitch at #5!

Last night Al from our IT/Operations department attended the annual Boston Globe Top Places to Work in Massachusetts awards, with this report.

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Last evening I had the honor to represent Ipswitch at an awards reception held by The Boston Globe to recognize the 2011 Top Places to Work in Massachusetts.

I am proud to announce that Ipswitch placed 5th (of 40 finalists) in the small business category!   We were the highest ranked software firm in that category, and one of only four software firms recognized in all categories. The award and a copy of the magazine are on display in the kitchen in Lexington. The results will be published In Sunday’s Globe, but they were announced yesterday. A preview article was posted by the Globe earlier today.

“The Globe’s Top Places to Work survey honors employers who care for their most valuable resource: the people who work for them. Those people – nearly 75,000 employees of the organizations ranked here – told us that their employers pay well, offer progressive benefits and creative perks, allow the flexibility needed to have good lives both at work and at home, embrace the diverse backgrounds of their employees, and offer a promising future to all of their workers.”   Click here for more details describing how the selections were made.

Congratulations everyone!

Al

When she returned from her vacation adventure far, far away, Kaitlyn had some unwrapping to do.

As I reflected on what I wrote yesterday, it occurred to me that other than the obvious differences in the magnitude of our resources, I would like to organize my life differently than Bill Gates has. Rather than follow his model of switching from a focus on business success to one on social well-being, I would like to help demonstrate that building stronger societies enhances business success. I believe they are integral to each other. A business offers a laboratory in which to experiment to see what community programs work, and a more prominent place from which to promote them. I think that on-going business success offers a better platform for influencing social well-being. Once you leave the business world, I think in most cases your influence starts to wane. I consider Bill Gates an exception because of his extraordinary accomplishments.

I used to consider Bill Gates a visionary and brilliant businessman but think little of him as a person. He seemed Machiavellian and underhanded in the way he managed business relationships. I thought he was singularly and disturbingly focused on crushing the competition. These were indirect impressions, though. I had not met him, nor have I since.

Since Gates started his foundation, I have come to think differently. He is spending his fortune and time to trying to improve the lives of millions of people. This says to me that his ambition remains strong. It seems to me that he is applying his talents with the same level of energy that he did when building Microsoft. That impresses me. In this article, I read this that he wrote to the Harvard University community:

I hope you will reflect on what you’ve done with your talent and energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you work to address the world’s deepest inequities, on how well you treat people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

 I admire that sentiment and am glad to have Bill Gates 2.0 as a role model.

I used to look at new technologies as a way of increasing how much content I could consume. In my car, or in airplanes when I wasn’t reading, I would try to make use of every minute to listen to language lessons, podcasts or audio books. As the volume of content kept increasing, and more of my time was filled with taking it in, I found that I passed a saturation point beyond which more information became counterproductive. Just because I can spend much of my time taking in content doesn’t mean that I should, or that I would retain it if I tried.

There are very few people who can absorb and process extraordinary amounts of information. Glenn Reynolds and Robert Scoble come to mind. I no longer aspire to match them. Instead, I am more careful about whether a content source is worth the time. I know that I need time to think.

All of this reinforced a lesson I took from business school – that we were there partly to learn about accounting, finance, marketing, etc. – but more important, to get comfortable with making decisions with incomplete information. Research enough, I discovered – not too little and not too much; then make a decision and keep the business moving. Confusing bandwidth with analysis, or taking in more information than you need can actually lead to worse decisions, or no decision at all.

I lost my phone last week, and decided to take my time looking for a replacement. One that looks promising is expected in August, and perhaps another in September. So what to do in the interim?

I thought it would be interesting to see what life was like without a phone. Just how important is all of my on-the-go communication? Sometimes I feel like that technology makes it easy to fill life with tasks, leaving little time for reflection.

I found that the quality of my conversations improved when I was on a land line. I was in one place, doing one thing and could focus on listening and what I was saying. But it was just too inconvenient to not be able to make calls when out and about. My experiment lasted three days.

Next up was a basic phone – just voice and texting. No web, no e-mail, no apps. So far life without e-mail is okay; I find it more efficient to read it on my laptop anyway, which I am rarely away from for long. I almost never use a mobile web browser, so that was easy to do without. Apps are another story. I find I miss them, but not that much. At times I want GPS navigation, but I also like having to pay a bit more attention or the interaction of asking directions. I probably miss my calendar and contacts the most.

I figure I can make it a few more weeks, and then I’ll be ready for a smartphone fix. I am kind of glad for this experience, though.

I think it is easy to settle for stereotypes, particularly about the distant past. Take Victorian England. For me – I admit I am not up on my history – what comes to mind is proper, class-oriented, risk-averse. Thank goodness for curious writers like Bill Bryson, who unveils the richer fabric behind the stereotype in At Home.

In 1850 Britain decided to construct the world’s largest building to house a World’s Fair-like exhibition. It would span nineteen acres and be spacious enough to contain four St. Paul’s cathedrals. Two major problems were that nothing so large had ever been built, and following several wasted months, there was less than a year to get it done. All initial designs had been rejected.  The second committee came up with an unworkable design. Then they heard from Joseph Paxton, a gardener from a poor family. He had designed the world’s first municipal park, which Olmstead used as a model for New York’s Central Park.

Paxton came up with the idea while chairing a railroad committee meeting and finished the design in two weeks. The core materials were iron and glass, never before used for a large building. Also acres of wood flooring, against the rules for fire safety reasons. Despite all this, after just a couple of days of deliberation, the committee approved Paxton’s design. Then Paxton designed a mobile platform that allowed workers to install 18,000 panes of glass a week. And then another machine that a small team could use to attach 20 miles of guttering at a rate of 2,000 feet per day. All in 1850!

The building was finished in 35 weeks. 1,851 feet long, 408 feet wide, 110 feet high. The cost? 80,000 pounds. The exhibition was  a success.

Paxton’s genius, while remarkable, is not why I write this. Nor is it about Henry Cole, who dreamed up the exhibition, nor Prince Albert, who sponsored it. Nor is my main point the committee, which had the courage and the open-mindedness to support a radical idea from an unconventional source and commission a gardener to design the largest building the world had ever seen. The true wonder is Victorian England and its support for extraordinary ideas, for innovation and for risk-taking. That is the kind of culture I want at Ipswitch.