I haven’t done a book review yet on this blog because I haven’t found a very relevant one. I will do more as I go here — I’ve actually read a few pretty useful business books lately — but there’s no better book to kick off a new category of postings here than the one I just finished: The MouseDriver Chronicles: The True-Life Adventures of Two First-Time Entrepreneurs. The book details how two freshly-minted Wharton MBAs skipped the dot com and investment banking job offers to start a two-person company that produced the MouseDriver (a computer mouse shaped like a the head of a golf club) back in 1999-2000. It’s a great, quick read and really captures the spirit of…
Category
Leadership
Negative Role Models
Old news by now, but John Kerry has selected John Edwards as his running mate for this fall’s presidential election. What I found particularly interesting was a line buried in one of the various news reports I read on the web this morning, which said that Kerry, still stinging from the fact that he heard the bad news that he was not to be Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 from the media and not from Gore himself, had kept this decision-making process deliberately private up until the very last moment to avoid making that same mistake and to spare the feelings of those he passed over for the job. How many of us in business have learned things over…
American Entrepreneurs
Fred beat me to it. I wasn’t at a computer to post this yesterday on the actual 4th of July, so today will have to do. I’ve read lots of books on the American revolution and the founding fathers over the years. It’s absolutely my favorite historical period, probably because it appeals to the entrepreneur in me. Think about what our founding fathers accomplished: – Articulated a compelling vision for a better future with home democratic rule and capitalist principles. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is really the ultimate tag line when you think about it. – Raised strategic debt financing from, and built critical strategic alliances with France, the Netherlands, and Spain. – Assembled a team of…
It’s Official – There’s a Blog About Everything
Well, not everything yet, but that day is getting closer. Jack, my VP Finance and an avid blog reader (but not yet publisher) pointed me to Beyond Bullets, a relatively new blog about Powerpoint written by Cliff Atkinson, described in his bio as “a leading authority on Powerpoint and organizational communications.” Who knew such an expert existed? The blog is pretty good and worth reading for people who regularly design and give stand-up presentations and are tired of the same old, same old Powerpoint templates. I read through most of the postings so far, and while some are a little esoteric, many of the tips are great. Most are either about the actual software and things you can do with…
Doing Well by Doing Good
I went to an amazing event this weekend. One of my close friends, Raj Vinnakota, started an education foundation about 7 years ago in Washington, D.C., called the SEED Foundation. The foundation’s first venture is the nation’s first urban public charter boarding school, located in the Anacostia section of town and dedicated to providing a college prep environment for kids who otherwise might not even finish high school in the inner city of D.C. The school has had a tremendous amount of national recognition, from Oprah, to Time, to Good Morning America, to Newsweek. The school has now been up and running for six years, starting with a group of seventh graders back in 1998, and this Saturday, that first…
Breaking Up is Hard to Do
Fred Wilson has a great posting today about how as a VC, it’s important to tell CEOs the truth when you don’t fund them so they can learn from the experience. As someone who’s been dinged by his share of VC’s (although not yet by Fred), I completely agree. He drew a great comparison to a conversation he had with a woman on an airplane about telling someone she didn’t want to go on a second date with him. I’ve always felt that as a manager, firing someone is a lot like breaking up with a significant other. As the song says, Breaking Up is Hard to Do! This is particularly true when the person is either a long-time employee…
CEO, Party of Two
We spent the weekend in Hudson, New York, a charming, urban-renewing town about two hours north of the city. My cousins Michael & Marianne opened a wine store called Hudson Wine Merchants on the main drag in town, Warren Street (343 Warren St. to be exact, you should definitely check it out if you’re ever in Hudson). The store opened for the first time Friday evening, and we had the first full day on Saturday. Mariquita and I, and some other friends of Michael & Marianne’s, helped do everything from stock the shelves, to clean the windows, to use the price tag gun (fun!), to work the register and the very fickle POS software, to watch my cousin’s daughter as…
Lessons from the Gipper
There’s been much coverage in the news of Saturday’s passing of President Ronald Reagan, but I will add a new wrinkle by trying to distill down what I know and remember of The Great Communicator’s leadership style into a few simple lessons of note for CEOs. Lesson 1: Sunny optimism motivates the people you lead, but only when it’s balanced with hard-headed realism. Reagan’s message that tomorrow can be a better day than today was powerful and timely for the American psyche, but he didn’t just assume that because he said it, it would be true. He backed up his message with (a) an understanding that the American economy itself was in the doldrums in the late ’70s, and (b)…
Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Well
I was reminded again today of this very simple but important principle in two separate instances with people on the team here at Return Path. I’ll describe them anonymously here, as I always will when I discuss things that happen at my company. In one case, someone sent a document out to a prospect that was not “client-ready.” It had all the right content, but it was poorly formatted, not as well-organized as it could have been, had a couple of typos, and wasn’t on our company template. My colleague’s comment: “it got the job done, didn’t it?” My response: “it doesn’t matter — it didn’t look world class.” In another case, someone had a relatively minor task to do,…
In This Case, Personality Is a Skill
Business Week just ran an interesting article entitled “I’m a Bad Boss? Blame My Dad,” which unfortunately I can’t link to because Business Week online is for subscribers only. The premise of the article is that our past is always with us…that the patterns of behavior established in our home environments as children inexorably follow us to the workplace. You may or may not agree with the premise — certainly, there is at least a little truth in it — but the article had another interesting statement: CEOs often get hired for their skills, and fired for their personalities. I’ve always felt that Boards and CEOs need to view “personality,” that is to say, the softer skills, as equally important…
From Shakespeare to Nixon
Jerry Colonna, a well-respected venture capitalist in New York and friend of a friend, had an interesting post in his blog about Being a CEO. Any writing that quotes both Shakespeare and Nixon in the same piece should get a reference just for that, if for nothing else. Anyway, he’s right about three things: (1) delivering the good news as well as the bad is an important part of managing a board; (2) having one or more consiglieris is important (although spouses CAN work); and (3) San Diego is one of the greatest places in the world.