Always On is Too Much On Among other things last week travelling abroad for work, I learned another good CEO lesson — sometimes it’s ok, even good, to be a bit out of touch. Don’t get me wrong. I’m Always On at the office, while travelling in the US, and usually at home and on weekends as well. And as I’ve said before in various postings (here, here, here, and definitely here), it’s great to completely unplug at least once a year for a peaceful vacation with friends & family. But last week was a nice lesson in the middle ground. I had an international cell phone that people at work didn’t seem to want to call, so they could…
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Leadership
The Good, The Board, and The Ugly, Part III
The Good, The Board, and The Ugly, Part III To recap other postings in this series: my original, Brad Feld’s, Fred Wilson’s first, Fred’s second, Tom Evslin’s, and my lighter-note follow-up. So speaking of lighter-note takes on this topic, Lary Lazard, Tom Evslin’s fictional CEO who ran Hackoff.com, now has his own tips for effective board management. You have to read them yourself here, but I think my favorite one is #3, which starts off: Never number the pages of what you are presenting. Lots of time can be used constructively figuring out what page everybody is on. Enjoy.
Counter Cliche: Connected at the Top
Counter Cliche: Connected at the Top Fred hasn’t written an official VC Cliche of the Week for a while, but his post yesterday on Connectors is close enough — in it, he talks about how he likes to be a good Connector between people and thinks it’s a quality of great VCs. First, we should give credit to Malcolm Gladwell for a great definition of Connectors in The Tipping Point. Gladwell not only defines Connectors as Fred has but also defines two other types of people who are critical in the social networking/buzz building arena: Mavens and Salesmen. I’d argue that a great VC has to have a bit of all three! But in terms of entrepreneurs (the point of…
Get a Phone!
Get a Phone! An emerging pet peeve of mine (which I’m feeling acutely at this precise moment) is people who do job interviews on a cell phone. I understand that lots of people today, especially younger people, don’t have land lines, only cell phones. They’re welcome to do that, although why someone wouldn’t get Vonage for $15/month, I’m not sure. The reality is that cell phones in this country still get poor reception half of the time. How can you conduct a job interview and expect to be taken seriously if the person interviewing you can’t hear you and has to keep asking you to repeat yourself? It’s as if you showed up for a job interview wearing a suit…
The Good, The Board, and The Ugly, Part II
The Good, The Board, and The Ugly, Part II Much has been written of late on various VC and entrepreneur blogs on effective management of a Board of Directors, Board materials, running good Board meetings, and the like. A couple years ago, I even wrote out a few tips for those things myself. But here’s one critical ingredient of a good Board you won’t find in all those posts: have fun! This picture was from today’s Halloween Board meeting at Feedburner…as one of Dick’s colleagues labeled it, The Dawn of the Living Costolos. Happy Halloween!
Choose Voice, Part II
Choose Voice, Part II One reader writes to me: I am a vice president at a startup that isn’t in great shape. We have some customers and a product that is meeting some market needs, but we’re way off our plan and don’t show signs of changing our trajectory in a material way. I disagree with the direction our CEO is taking things, which is ok, but more important, our CEO refuses to listen to me when I try to discuss and debate strategy with her. One of our board members has asked me what I thought we should do. I don’t want to be disloyal to our CEO, and I want to seem like a team player who rallies…
Doing Well by Doing Good, Part IV
Doing Well by Doing Good, Part IV This series of posts has mostly been about things that people or companies do that help make the world a better place — sometimes when it’s their core mission, other times (here and here) when it becomes an important supporting role at the company. Today’s post is different — it’s actually a Book Short as well of a new book that’s coming out later this fall called Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, published by Yale Press and written by Daniel Esty (a Yale professor and consultant), and a good friend of mine, Andrew Winston, a corporate sustainability consultant. Green to Gold…
Book Short: Just One Minute
Book Short: Just One Minute What The One Minute Manager does for basic principles of management and goal setting, The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey does for delegation. Both are blessedly quick reads (the classic “airport” book), and Ken Blanchard really nails some of management’s most critical components with simplicity and grace. I’m a fan of the One Minute Manager school, and it does work well for some of the basics, but it has its limitations in terms of how broadly it can be applied. My colleague Whitney McNamara‘s words in an email to me a few months back say it all: OMM has actually been useful. I have to agree that it’s got a bit of a “Jonathan…
A Better Way to Shop
A Better Way to Shop I love Zappos.com. It’s rapidly becoming the only place I buy shoes. Their web site experience is ok – not perfect, but pretty good, but their level of service is just unbelievable. They are doing for e-commerce (shoes in particular) what Eos is doing for air travel. They’re always great at free shipping and have always been super responsive and very personal and authentic when it comes to customer service. But today took the cake. I emailed them when I placed an order for new running shoes because I also wanted to buy one of those little “shoe pocket” velcro thingies that straps onto shoelaces and holds keys and money for runners. I didn’t find…
Book Short: Choose Voice!
Book Short: Choose Voice! I took a couple days off last week and decided to re-read two old favorites. One –Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — my fourth reading — will take me a little longer to process and figure out if there’s a good intersection with the blog. One would think so with entrepreneurship as the topic, but my head still hurts from all the objectivism. The second — Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, by Albert O. Hirschman — is today’s topic. I can’t remember when I first read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. It was either in senior year of high school Economics or Government; or in freshman year of college Political Philosophy. Either way, it was a long time ago,…
Good Help is Hard to Find
Good Help is Hard to Find We’re having a bitch of a time lately hiring good sales people. We’re growing like crazy this year and are trying to invest more in our salesforce, but it’s not easy. And we’re a good catch. Good brand, healthy company, good comp and benefits, charming CEO, the works. I just traded emails with a friend who is CEO of another online marketing services firm who said the same thing, with the exact same explanation I have: I have been so unimpressed with everyone from our space (weak links drop out, mediocrity churns from company to company, and true talent is retained). Anyway, we have gotten very lucky with a few key hires the past…