Category: Decision Making

Reading Time: < 1 minute “Follow Your Passion”….. “Do What You Love”….. “Build It and They Will Come.”   These phrases have practically become big laws of career wisdom; but do they really lead to success?   Many would-be entrepreneurs have found that starting businesses by following their passion results in no one following them. Ultimately, passion

Reading Time: < 1 minute All executives should heed Malcolm Gladwell’s warning that “No one — not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone.” A recent installment in Vistage Speaker Andi Simon’s new podcast series explores why “Leaders Need Coaches to Succeed.”   Andi invited me

Reading Time: < 1 minute The two most eagerly awaited events every spring are the opening of baseball season and Mary Meeker’s, (aka Queen of the Internet,) annual Internet Trends presentation.  As the lead internet analyst at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers,  millions of business people rely on her analysis and predictions. Whether

Reading Time: < 1 minute By now you’ve heard at Amazon is paying almost $14 Billion for Whole Foods.  This seems counter intuitive on two fronts: a move into brick and mortar by a firm that has done so much damage to the brick and mortar world ….who is also world famous for low prices

Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s commencement time and whether your child is in high school, off to college, headed to a summer internship, or off to conquer the world, here is collection of my favorite commencement speaker advice and a few other observations that you may wish to share with the young people in

Reading Time: < 1 minute Professional sports team employ full time talent scouts.  Do you?    You may not need to go as far as the sports team do in this regard, but with the economy at near full employment, all the low hanging fruit has moved further up the tree. Wouldn’t you be well served

Reading Time: < 1 minute Every CEO should remember the proverb that “every silver lining has a cloud.”  The business translation of this adage was best put by Vistage Speaker Pat Murray who has warned thousands of Vistage members that the “second worst thing that can happened to a company is success.” In that spirit,

Reading Time: < 1 minute Being a C-Level Executive means having a point of view about the future.  Many executives limit their thinking about the future to the initial impact of a particular change but don’t think about what happens after that. Business (and life) is often like a row of dominoes:  we push one

Reading Time: < 1 minute “Technological advancement is greatly overestimated in the short run and greatly underestimated in the long run,” remarked science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.  The Director of Industry Strategy for Adobe shares  “6 Tectonic Shifts in Tech Every Executive Should Know” based on research at the World Economic Forum.  You have probably

Reading Time: < 1 minute Quality isn’t everything.  Case in point: Domino’s Pizza.  Founder Tom Monaghan discovered that the key to success in the pizza business wasn’t great pizza, but free delivery.    But no competitive advantage lasts forever and the company’s subpar pizza began to deliver subpar results, no matter how fast it’s delivered, especially