Management
Dear Dave: I think the art of negotiation is dead. Over the past two years we have won over prospects on our product capabilities, but then lost out on price to inferior products. In all recent cases the prospect never once negotiated with us for a lower cost but clearly
Management
Since I've had the good fortune to work at small, large, and small-that-became-large software companies, people sometimes ask me about the pro's and con's of working at companies of different sizes. Let's start with the basics. At a small
Management
Quick, go ask any sales manager or Silicon Valley how much pipeline you need to make your quarter. The answer you will hear: 3x. Always, everywhere, every time. Let's talk about why that's true, what it means, and what to do about it in this post.
Management
Everyone knows the old joke about the new CEO and the three envelopes. I thought I'd take a moment in this post to talk about the new CEO and what I call the three doors. I think most people fail to grasp the commitment that hired (non-founder)
Management
I can't tell you how many times over the years that I've needed to coach people to "answer the question" when dealing with senior executives. It amazes me to sit in meetings and watch people hem, haw, dodge, extemporize and do just about anything
Management
When I was new to the workforce, I was violently opposed to matrixed organizational structures. “They're bullsh*t," I thought, "people will always favor one direction over the other, making one of the two managers superfluous. And, if that's the case, then why bother
Management
The situation was clear. The company had just brought in a new COO. That person was band-leader, intent on bringing a slew of folks from his last company. My friend Pete, who worked for the new COO, had strong track record of delivering results, but the internal rap on
Management
I first became interested in decision making more than a decade ago, back when I was running marketing at Business Objects. My interest was prompted by the evolution of taglines among BI vendors. In the early days, taglines were descriptive like First in Enterprise Decision Support or The Enterprise Data
Management
While I've blogged before about Palantir Technologies (e.g., Beware the Spectacular B-Round Valuation), this will probably be my last post about them because, since leaving MarkLogic, I am no longer terribly involved in the Intelligence Community space nor engaged against them as an indirect competitor. I
Management
Everyone’s aligned in a Silicon Valley startup, right? Give everyone some options so everyone has skin in the game and then everyone wants what’s best for the share price: one for all and all for one! Not so fast. In this post, inspired by a chat with longtime
Management
Building on on a post by 10gen's Max Schireson which in turn built on a post by me, I thought I'd have some fun by playing with and enhancing Max's taxonomy of technology senior executives. Max's theory is that a surprisingly number
Management
I've always found business to have a fair amount of accidental, built-in hubris, largely resulting from the strategy formulation process. I remember one time at Business Objects we had a strategy offsite where, in our infinite wisdom and with a fair bit of groupthink, we came up
