Culture
Would you serve food that fell on the kitchen floor? Then why tolerate typos, broken demos, and numbers that don’t add up? Leaders set culture by defining and enforcing what’s acceptable. You don’t need to shout. You do need to say: that’s unacceptable here.
Leadership
Startup VPs sometimes lament that their CEOs don't really know the people on their teams, don't realize how smart and talented they are, or fully appreciate the value of their teams' work. How, they wonder, can they build a better bridge between their boss and
Leadership
Well, when you run a company focused on corporate finance, you don't get a lot of Holiday Party scandals. At Host's very nice 2018 Holiday Party the closest thing we had was an employee conversing with me about books (Bad Blood) and then wholeheartedly suggesting that
BI
Last week I sat down with interviewers Doug Henschen, Vala Afshar, and a bit of Ray Wang (live from a 777 taxiing en route to Tokyo) to participate in Episode 100 of DisrupTV along with fellow guests DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth and big data / science recruiter Virginia Backaitis. We covered
Leadership
In an effort to promote my upcoming presentation at SaaStr 2018, which is currently on the agenda for Wednesday, February 7th at 9:00 AM in Studio C, I thought I'd do a quick post sharing what I'll be covering in the presentation, officially titled, "
Career
As executives there are certain things we are expected to know -- in our heads -- about our jobs and our functions. Sometimes I call this "the 3:00 AM test" because someone should be able to wake you up at 3:00 AM in the middle of a sound
Leadership
In every executive team there are going to be times when people don't agree on certain important strategic or operational decisions. Some examples: * Should we split SDRs inbound vs outbound? * Should we map SCs to reps or pool them? * How should we split upsell vs new business focus
Career
Most managers, save for true sycophants, want to challenge their boss. Few managers want to be puppet yes-people to the boss. They've worked hard to get where they are. They bring years of wisdom and experience. They want to push and challenge. But many don't
AR
How would you like our company to win deals even when you tie or lose the product evaluation? Halo effects do precisely that. This post discusses what halo effects are and how to use them to your advantage.
Entrepreneurship
It was early in my career, maybe 8 years in, and I was director of product marketing at a startup. One day, my peer, the directof of marketing programs hit me with this in an ops review meeting: You want to be judged on intentions, not results. I recall being
Culture
I went looking for a post to help someone decide if they should move into management, but couldn't find one that I really loved. These three posts aren't bad. Nor is this HBR article. But since I couldn't find a post that I thought
Leadership
I read this New York Times editorial this morning, How the Truth Got Hacked, and it reminded me of a situation at work, back when I first joined Host Analytics some four years ago. This line, in particular, caught my attention: Imagine the conversation we’d be having if we