links for 2006-06-26
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Slice of Lime, Inc. CEO Kevin Menzie, who I have known for years, writes a good summary of his thoughts on the early days of getting a startup off the ground and growing fast!
links for 2006-06-16
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Brad tipped me off to this article — it’s a good one and draws on a lot of the work and thinking done by Jim Collins in both Good to Great and Built to Last (links to both books on my blog in the books sidebar).
links for 2006-06-05
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Dallas Mavs owner and Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Click Fraud, a notorious member of the Internet Axis of Evil
links for 2006-05-10
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Amazon, Microsoft, and Google on big marketing spend
links for 2006-04-13
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Really thorough posting (battle scars *may* be present based on the level of detail) about how to best position your company for sale.
links for 2006-03-28
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Brad has a good posting today about entrepreneur accountability — along the lines of my “Forecast Early and Often” theme. — /2005/11/notsocounter_cl.html
links for 2006-10-06
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Brad’s colorful, quick posting on “how running is like entrepreneurship.”
links for 2006-03-30
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A great posting about Vendor Love from Seth Godin!
links for 2006-04-07
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Good posting from Terry Gold of Gold Systems on his experiences over the years hiring and ramping up a sales team.
A Path Forward in California!
A Path Forward in California!
Back in March I was proud to announce the launch of Path Forward, a nonprofit on a mission to get people back to work after they’ve taken time off to care for a loved one.  I’m even more thrilled today to announce the launch of a Path Forward program in California with six top tech companies — Go Daddy, Demandbase, CloudFlare, Coursera, Instacart and Zendesk. They are all accepting applications now for October start dates. Click on the links above to see all their opportunities.
As a CEO I know how hard it is to find great talent. The Center for Talent Innovation estimates that nearly 30% of college-educated women have taken away from their careers to serve as caregivers to children or aging family members. They have also found that while 90% of them try to return to work, only 40% are able to land full-time jobs. As an industry, we simply can’t afford to lose thousands of talented women who become frustrated by attempts to restart their professional careers.
Please join me in supporting this organization in fulfilling its mission. If you know people in California who might be looking for opportunities to restart their careers, send them to Your Path Forward in California where they can access all the job postings for the fall program.
And if you think Path Forward would be a great program for your company, email the fine folks at [email protected] to learn more.
Book Short: On The Same Page
Book Short:Â On The Same Page
Being on the same page with your team, or your whole company for that matter, is a key to success in business. The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni, espouses this notion and boils down the role of the CEO to four points:
- Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
- Create organizational clarity
- Overcommunicate organizational clarity
- Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems
Those four points sound as boring as bread, but the book is anything but. The book’s style is easy and breezy — business fiction. One of the most poignant moments for me was when the book’s “other CEO” (the one that doesn’t “get it”) reflects that he “didn’t go into business to referee executive team meetings and delivery employee orientation…he loved strategy and competition.” Being a CEO is a dynamic job that changes tremendously as the organization grows. This book is a great handbook for anyone transitioning out of the startup phase, or for anyone managing a larger organization.
I haven’t read the author’s other books (this is one in a series), but I will soon!