Management
While I know that reading the newspaper -- with high unemployment, record budget deficits, and drastic spending cuts -- might make you want to go back to bed in the morning, from my experience there is plenty of positive excitement happening in Silicon Valley right now. Venture capital (VC) is the engine
Boards
I remember during my first year at Cal we’d sometimes see a local band, Psycotic Pineapple [sic], who performed a song entitled “The Devil has Work for Idle Hands.” Every time they sang the chorus, audience members would hold their arms above their heads and dangle their crossed hands
Management
There was a great column in the 12/10 Harvard Business Review entitled Good Decisions, Bad Outcomes by Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at Duke and author of the excellent book Predictably Irrational. In the column, he hits on one of my favorite topics, the loose coupling of decisions
Culture
I wrote this short note on culture a while back for the MarkLogic website, but since it wasn't terribly "poppy copy," the marketing and recruiting folks buried it behind this, relegating me here. I'm OK with that because I think their copy sells better,
Management
I had lunch last week with a senior executive at a major software vendor. I asked him how one of my former (non-MarkLogic) colleagues was doing. His reply: And defending weak people is the beginning of the death cycle The last sentence caught my attention because it's
Management
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
Management
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
Management
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: 1. I have a flawed and incomplete
Management
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,
Management
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
Management
A former colleague hit an old nerve the other day, sending me the following message about budgets and budgeting. A question for you — I just saw a typical idiotic internal email about budgets yesterday, and to my recollection [at our last company], you tried to make the system less dysfunctional,
Management
The older, grumpier, and less patient I get, the more I realize that keeping up with the conversation is probably the key skill for career success and executive development. I wonder why it's taken me so long to realize this because, like the discovery of the non-existence
