Stew was my Leadership and Teamwork professor at Wharton's MBA program.  Wharton is a pretty hard-nosed school, located in a tough area in Philadelphia, with famous graduates like Steve Wynn, Donald Trump, Donny Deutsch, Charles Butt (of local fame), Leonard Lauder, Lawrence Lessig, Peter Lynch, Harold McGraw III, Michael Milken, Michael Moritz, Elon Musk, Ronald Perelman, Lewis Platt, J.D. Power III, Mortimer Zuckerman, and countless investment bankers and management consultants.  Stew actually founded the Leadership and Teamwork program at Wharton in 1991.  Hard to believe that no business school, in the U.S. at least, taught this subject until then.

Like many Wharton MBA candidates, I was skeptical of the subject.  Most of us were thinking, "why are we in this class learning this 'soft' stuff when we could be learning the 'real' stuff?" (note: Stew's class was part of the core, or required, curriculum).  However, a few years after I graduated, I wished I had paid more attention.  As an entrepreneur, I can tell you that this is the most important subject of any MBA program.  You cannot build a great company without great people.  And you cannot attract and retain great people without great leadership and teamwork.  Realizing this a few years after graduation, I contacted Stew and he has been a fantastic mentor ever since.

Stew is one of the world's foremost experts on the subject of work/life balance, pioneering in the field since 1984 (read his amazing bio).  He doesn't like the term "balance", though, as it implies tradeoffs.  So, for the last few years, he has working on a program he pioneered called "Total Leadership", which challenges the participants on the "balance" notion.  By the way, when I say working, I mean practicing in the field, as in with real companies.  This is one of the best aspects of a world-class MBA program: professors that actually learn from the field instead of inside an ivory tower.

Stew's new book, appropriately named Total Leadership, will be released on June 8.  I have been a student of leadership and teamwork for over a decade now, and I honestly think this is the single most powerful book I have read on the subject (I was an early reader, per my mentoring relationship with Stew).  So I decided to buy everyone in our company a copy of it and ask Stew to visit us in Austin and personally train us on it.  Graciously, he accepted.

Stew trained all of us on Wednesday, May 14 for the entire afternoon.  It was the most powerful moment in our culture's history, in my opinion.  Prior to his visit, I told my co-founder, Brant, that this would have a "massive impact" on our culture, and I wasn't disappointed in our company's initial response. Many employees thanked me afterwards, and the fun is only beginning (we are going through the entire program and all of its exercises over the next four months).

Culture has been a huge focus for us from the beginning, and is, I believe, the most important reason that we now lead our emerging industry.  We have tried and adopted many practices that were controversial at the time, such as:

• Testing for all new hires – many fail the test and it is frustrating when under pressure to hire, but it ensures that we make fewer mistakes and build a strong culture (without a strong foundation, building a strong culture is not possible).
• No vacation policy – we trust our employees to not abuse it and we do not want to limit them from taking personal time when they need it; for example, we had an employee take a 3-week vacation to China just two months after starting with us (and beating all of his goals at that time).
• Quarterly performance feedback (our "3/3/1" process), including "upward" feedback for the managers from their staff – to help all of our employees rapidly grow and reduce the anxiety in our organization (everyone always knows where they stand); I have been told by many of our employees and managers that they have learned more at Bazaarvoice than anywhere else they have worked.  Our feedback is balanced (the 3/3/1 is a simple email form to document the 3 things you did well that quarter, the 3 things you could have done better, and the 1 initiative you are going to focus on as a result).  The upward feedback from staff illuminates blind-spots on our management team, many of which have never been discussed with them in previous companies because the feedback process was too poor to generate intensely constructive dialogue.
• And much more (read our Culture page to learn more).

But perhaps none of these were more controversial than the roll-out of the Total Leadership program.  Why?  Because it usually results in a decrease of time spent at work.  So why take this risk when Bazaarvoice is doing so well?  Well, because I sincerely trust our employees.  Many of our cultural policies are "discovered" at our quarterly executive strategy meetings when brainstorming on how to evolve culture by treating employees with trust, like the mature adults that they are (treat others the way you want to be treated, remember?).  And I know from first-hand experience that I wasted so much time at work before the birth of my daughter, Rachel.  Once she was born I was more focused than ever before, and it led to a corresponding increase in my productivity although my work hours actually decreased.  So, I believe that the Total Leadership program will do the same.  And, sure enough, Stew's research shows that productivity/effectiveness goes up at work once employees go through the exercises in this program.

Why did I call this "an experiment"?  Well, it certainly is one for our company, with it being a new initiative.  But, as importantly, it is an experiment for Stew too.  He has never rolled out the program to an entire company – usually just to a large team at a Fortune 500.  So he is just as excited about it as I am.

To bring the power of Stew's program to the rest of the Austin community, I also hosted Leadership Austin, Bootstrap Austin, 100 attendees outside of Bazaarvoice, and Stew Friedman at our offices the evening of May 14.  I received just as many compliments from those attendees as I did from our own employees.

This is a very powerful book, and I highly recommend it to all of our clients and partners.  Roll this out to your team and you will not be disappointed.  Buy it for your friends, clients, and partners as a holiday gift.

Total Leadership is a way of life, and I have already incorporate many elements of it into my workstream.  I hope you decide to do the same.  The workplace will be a happier place if more leaders "take the leap" to trust and empower their employees to not just be a leader at work, but a leader in all aspects of their lives.  If you want to learn more, buy the book and check out Stew's website for the program (watch the videos, especially).

Finally, I have one request.  We are going to double our staff this fiscal year, and we need your help.  Please forward this post to anyone that you think may be interested in joining us, and remember that we have four offices now (Austin, London, Paris, and Singapore).  Here is our jobs page.   Your friend would not only be joining a great culture, they would be joining at an amazing time of growth, globally, in our company.

Update 5/28:
The New York Times just wrote about the Bazaarvoice Total Leadership experience.  This will be live tomorrow in their May 29 print edition and is online now.  I am very proud of this recognition, especially for Stew Friedman who has spent his entire professional career helping others become better leaders, managers, and people.  For Bazaarvoice, I am especially proud of this press hitting on the evening of the launch of our first Social Commerce Summit, which is sold-out with 230 attendees present!  I'm off to network with our clients and partners, and I hope to see you here next year if you missed it.

Monday:

Yahoo! has acquired many Web 2.0 / social networking properties in the past year, including del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming.org,  and WebJay (plus they are rumored to be shopping for digg).  Yahoo! also launched 360 last March, Shoposphere in November, and Yahoo! Answers in December.  From my perspective, they are turning to social networking as the answer to competition from Google.  At Bazaarvoice, we know that people who write reviews on a retail site return an average of four times just to see if their review posted yet.  This shouldn't be that surprising as the social call-to-action to write a review in the first place would lead one to want to see that their own word-of-mouth actually "went public".  Yahoo!'s strategy seems sound to me as they have a diversified portfolio of services to get users addicted to, and therefore monetize more advertising.  Therefore, the more repeat visits, the better.

So, it makes sense to me that last week Yahoo! announced a contest for users to create their own Yahoo! advertisements.  This is a smart way to generate word-of-mouth for the new Yahoo!  It reminds me of what General Motors did recently for The Apprentice.  Here is my blog entry on that topic.  You may want to check out some of the new Yahoo! user-generated ads – some of them are quite clever and entertaining.  There is a lot of talent out there waiting to be tapped (remember crowdsourcing?).

Update on 8/15: Data released by Neilsen/NetRatings shows visitors to Google-branded sites in July spent less than an hour a month while AOL visitors logged 5 hours 35 minutes and Yahoo! visitors logged 3 hours and 10 minutes.  This made Terry Semel proud, as clearly his diversified media strategy is his core competitive differentiator.  Google visitors are reported to be more like "hunters" while Yahoo!'s are "gatherers".  No doubt this is encouraging for Yahoo!, but what really matters for both Google and Yahoo! is how well they drive customer acquisition for their clients.  Google's entire business model is based on that goal while the majority of Yahoo!'s is (they are more revenue diversified for obvious reasons).  I believe that Yahoo!'s user-generated ads strategy will only drive more awareness of why people need to spend more time on Yahoo!.  Are companies looking for hunters or gatherers?  Obviously the answer is a mixture of both.

Thursday:

Wayne Stribling, our VP of Client Services, sends me this article.  I am struck by two things.  First, this quote:

• "The voice of the customer is actually getting heard by the manufacturers," said Neal Oddes, director of product research and analysis for J.D. Power. "They are understanding what's getting replaced, what's going wrong, and then they're taking that information and designing better products."

Second, the fact that General Motors has two of the brands in J.D. Power's top five most reliable.  This reminds me of my blog entry about the change in General Motors culture brought on by word-of-mouth techniques (such as their blog).  I like the fact that J.D. Power's is now showing quantitative evidence of this change.

I have long believed that the Internet and the power of word-of-mouth will make companies more customer-centric and, therefore, products and services far better than in the past.  An educated consumer serves as a wake-up call – no more being lazy.  Co-creation will generate more sales and customer satisfaction.

Friday:

Google, not to be outdone by Yahoo!, invests $900 million in Rupert Murdoch's MySpace to become their exclusive search engine provider.  Instead of Google creating the social networking properties, like Yahoo! is doing, they decide to partner with the best of them (the traffic growth for MySpace is off the charts).  Here are the words from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, from his speech at the Search Engine Strategies conference this week:

• But the "development to me that's most interesting is the social networks as online lifestyles. That's a really new phenomenon," [Schmidt] said. It's a phenomenon on scale with the rapid-fire adoption of instant messaging, he added. "It's [social networks] a big deal."

$900 million is a lot of money, no doubt.  But there are two reasons why this makes a lot of sense for Google.  First, eMarketer announced that ad growth on social networking sites will grow astronomically ($280 million in 2006 to $1.9 billion in 2010).  Second, MySpace is the favorite destination for the IM Generation, which all marketers will need to learn how to advertise to.  They distrust traditional advertising (and companies) more than any other generation (because they are the most educated, due to the Internet), and they turn to their friends for recommendations (i.e. word-of-mouth) more than any other generation.  For more research, see my blog entry on the IM Generation.

Pivotal changes are underway… and that creates a tremendous amount of opportunity for marketers if they navigate these new waters correctly.