Speaking of Leadership® – If It Works at Google, Is It Right for Others?
Reading Time: < 1 minute The management practices of successful companies are often touted as ground breaking. Some like Zappos claim to have abandoned traditional management structures altogether in favor of “holacracy”. Yahoo at one time allowed large numbers of employees to work from home (although the latest CEO Marissa Mayer quickly put an end
Speaking of Leadership® – Keeping Your Business Models Relevant
Reading Time: < 1 minute Technology and demand for content are disrupting the entertainment business and making life tougher for other content creators and the middlemen. Maybe you can learn how to change your own business model before time and circumstance make if a matter of life and death by absorbing the lessons of those who
Giving Feedback – Are you a Leader?
Reading Time: < 1 minute “It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend of his faults. If you are angry with a man, or hate him, it is not hard to go to him and stab him with words; but so to love a man that you cannot bear to
If You Can’t Wait for Karma, Try This
Reading Time: < 1 minute Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella garnered some unwelcome publicity this week when he suggested that women in tech should be patient and wait for “karma” to bring their salaries in line with those of their male counterparts. Social media quickly excoriated Nadella for his remarks and he has spent the past few days
May the Strategic Forces (all five of them) Be With You
Reading Time: < 1 minute Many companies are getting ready for their annual planning retreats and wondering how to create a winning strategy. If one person can be associated with the development of strategy as a discipline in the past thirty years it’s Michael Porter whose book “Competitive Strategy” is the final word on understanding
Another Lost Art: Political Leadership
Reading Time: < 1 minute The price we pay for technology is that certain art forms go by the wayside. Email and telephones virtually wiped out letter writing; keyboards made the cursive writing most of us learned a thing of the past. Former assistant director of the CIA looks at another lost art: political leadership. In a
Four Reasons Your Strategic Plan Will Fail
Reading Time: < 1 minute We’re almost to the last quarter of the year and many organizations will begin their annual strategic planning ritual. Before you launch whatever strategy planning process you use, check out this short article in Forbes that offers some cautionary tales about the things that usually take the planning process off the
“What I Really Learned from Running 20 Companies”
Reading Time: < 1 minute The problem with taking advice from successful people is that their experience, like everyone’s, is a sample size of one. You can’t always be sure if a particular executive was smart or lucky based on just one company, or one career. This is why James Altucher who has run 20 companies and writes
Sins of Commission(s) – Transactional Leadership vs Transformational Leadership
Reading Time: < 1 minute One of the hardest things for CEOs to get right is how to pay people….but most of them would agree that variable commissions are essential to properly incent sales people. An Inc Magazine article looks at incentive compensation for sales people and suggests that in companies with good cultures that Sales
20 Things for 20 Somethings – Leadership Lessons for the Next Generation
Reading Time: < 1 minute It can be hard to give the young people in your life advice because of the age difference. So here’s some advice from a younger person for his peers that I wish someone had given me. Pass on 20 things I Should have known at 20 to someone with more years ahead than