Punchbowl Blog

This post written by Matt Douglas, Founder & CEO

How do you judge your success? Do you value how others view your success or are you content with your own measuring stick for your accomplishments? I’ve been reading a book recently that deals with these questions, and I believe it’s an important concept for a startup like MyPunchbowl to consider. The book introduces the concept of an “Inner Scorecard” vs. an “Outer Scorecard.” Here’s my quick take on how this concept applies to our daily work on MyPunchbowl:

Inner Scorecard: How we judge ourselves, relative to our own goals:

• Satisfaction of our employees (in their daily work)
• Traffic and metrics relative to our plan (are we hitting our monthly and quarterly numbers?)
• Funding based on how much we need to run the company (Just enough and not too much)
• Costs and revenue according to our plan

Outer Scorecard: How we judge ourselves, relative to others:

• Employee satisfaction at other companies (Google has free lunch everyday!)
• Traffic comparisons to other companies (using tools such as Alexa or Compete)
• Press coverage and general internet buzz of MyPunchbowl relative to other sites (e.g. how many times your competitor appears on TechCrunch)
• Comparison to other companies who have raised money (e.g. How the ^%@&# did Chacha raise another $30M??)

Here’s my take: if you are a person (or company) who constantly judges your success based on comparisons to others, my guess is that you spend a lot of your time unhappy. I try to have a clearly defined “Inner Scorecard” so that we measure our success by our own metrics. It’s fine to compare yourself to others once in a while, but if it dictates your decisions, it’s probably a sign that your internal goals are not clear enough.

So keep your head down, your goals clear, and stop judging yourself by what everyone else is doing. Take care of business using your Inner Scorecard, and you’ll be happier and more successful.

This entry was posted on January 26, 2009 at 10:21 am and is filed under Company Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.