Sunday’s New York Times had a fascinating article about (American) football entitled Coaches Take More Risks, But Perhaps Not Enough. I’ve always believed that business managers are too conservative for two reasons: They are rewarded for plan performance, not absolute performance. (See Beyond Budgeting for more on this whole meme.) They seek to avoid looking [...]
Entries Tagged as 'management'
Win-Seeking vs. Perceived Stupidity Avoidance
September 7th, 2010 · 2 Comments
Tags: management
The Mythical World-Class Manager
September 5th, 2010 · 6 Comments
If I had a dollar for every time a venture capitalist said “world-class,” I could start my own venture fund. But rather than dismissing world-class as a tired cliché, in this post I’ll spend a few minutes trying to understand what VCs mean when they say world-class and why they say it so often. As [...]
Tags: Venture Capital · management
Twelve Things Good Bosses Believe
August 23rd, 2010 · 8 Comments
I found this post by Stanford evidence-based management professor Robert Sutton and tweeted about it earlier today. But since it’s so good, I decided to do a post about it along with some commentary. First, here are the twelve things: I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for [...]
Tags: management
Seeing Both Sides of an Issue
June 28th, 2010 · 2 Comments
The ability to see both sides of an issue is a critical executive skill. Yet, in typical corporate America culture, that skill is all too often lost. Why? Things get partisan: sales wants X, marketing wants Y, finance wants Z. Discussions turn blame-oriented. Instead of working to solve problems, people work to avoid blame. Managers [...]
Tags: management
Veterans vs. Up-and-Comers in Startups
March 21st, 2010 · 1 Comment
The conventional Silicon Valley / venture capital (VC) wisdom is that startups should not bet on first-time managers in just about any position, but particularly at the executive team level. It’s best captured by the statement: a high-growth startup is not the place to learn how to do your job. This is the conventional wisdom [...]
Tags: Silicon Valley · Uncategorized · Venture Capital · management · startups
