Management
At Disney -- a company that is truly focused on customer experience -- every “cast member” (i.e., employee) gets six weeks of training before they see a “guest” (i.e., customer). "Face characters" (e.g., Snow White walking through the park) spend an additional 40 hours just watching and
Career
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though I’m thinking seriously of dropping
Marketing
I think in today's world that we need to ask PR people to be not just literate, but numerate. What does that mean? * They need to do basic math correctly. Most PR people think that going from size $100K to size $700K is 700% growth. It's
Marketing
Say you've got a new product release. You’re super excited about your app’s new Feature X. It’s very innovative. Product marketing sees it as long-needed differentiator. Sales sees it as a silver bullet: “with Feature X, our competition is screwed.” Everyone’s excited. Then
IPO
As we move into the third week of January, I figured it was “now or never” in terms of getting a set of predictions out for 2015. Before jumping into that, let’s take a quick review of how I did with my 2014 predictions and do some self-grading.
Management
I get a fair number of emails and calls from former colleagues and friends asking for career advice. I'm always happy to provide it and the process of doing so is both thought-provoking and fun. I have a learned a lot from having these conversations and have
CEO
I was digging through my reading pile and found this about nine-month-old report by Accenture and Oracle entitled The CFO as Corporate Strategist by Donniel Schulman and David Axson of Accenture. Those who follow Host Analytics might remember David Axson as he's spoken at several of
Databases
It took me a week or so to get to it, but in this post I’ll take a dive into the Hortonworks S-1 filing in support of a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of their stock. While Hadoop and big data are unarguably huge trends driving the industry
Cloud
I love metrics. I live for metrics. Every week and every quarter I drown my team in metrics reviews. Why? Because metrics are the instrumentation -- the flight panel -- of our business. Good metrics provide clear insights. They cut through politics, spin, and haze. They spark amazing debates. They help you
Churn
**** Please note that this post has been superseded by A Fresh Look at How to Measure SaaS Churn Rates. I'm leaving it posted to protect in-bound links only and to provide a referral to my latest material on this subject. **** While I've already done a
Seven words that changed the world: “make a plan that you can beat.” This pithy piece of wisdom was first passed onto me by the sage of Sequoia Capital, Mike Moritz, on the first day of my six-year journey at MarkLogic, during which time we grew the company from
Management
I have to admit I’m not a fan of succession planning in general, at startups in particular, and especially when the successee is involved in the process. Why? Because the process quickly ends up presumptuous and political. In my experience, the successee is more concerned with being a “good
