M&A
As mentioned in my recent Curse of the Megaround post, some companies that find themselves flush with cash and under heavy pressure to grow, decide to embark on dubious acquisitions to help shore up the growth story. As one reader it put it, you can summarize your megaround post with
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.
CEO
While driver-based planning is a bit of an old buzzword (the first two Google hits date to 2009 and 2011 respectively), I am nevertheless a huge fan of driver-based planning not because the concept was sexy back in the day, but because it's incredibly useful. In
Management
I often get asked by technical founders what business / marketing / strategy books they should read. While there are many excellent relatively new books (e.g., The Lean Startup), the primary purpose of this post is to list a set of classic business books that most (older) business people have read
Leadership
In business we have a sad tendency to copy success blindly. I remember the first time I read about this I didn't even understand what I was reading: "Nothing in business is so remarkable as the conflicting variety of success formulas offered by its numerous practitioners and
Grateful Dead
As a long-time Grateful Dead fan, I have to say that I was advantaged in understanding how the Blown to Bits problem would affect digital media businesses. You see, for years, the Dead had changed the business model of the music industry, choosing to use albums as a loss
Strategy
Like many others, I have often used Salesforce / Siebel as a classic example of Innovator's Dilemma style disruption. Several months ago, in response to this article about Host Analytics, I received a friendly note from former Siebel exec and now venture capitalist Bruce Cleveland saying roughly: “nice PR
Management
Congratulations! If your company is like most, you've recently finished a (hopefully) solid 2013 and, from an EPM perspective, completed your 2014 annual planning process. Before we get too excited, however, let’s ask one quick question: did you just make a plan or a budget? In business,
Management
I was talking to a startup CEO the other day and he said: Sales is From Mars, Engineering is From Venus Sure. Two things typically go wrong in this relationship. One is that you have a strategic alignment problem. The other is that you're treating sales and engineering
Strategy
Founders, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and startup employees often spend a lot of time wondering, worrying, and pondering if a company is in a hot market. Will the company shoot the moon? What is the market potential? Are you in Geoffrey Moore's tornado? After 25 years or so doing
Strategy
It’s fairly common to hear the CEO of a company that makes most of its money doing thing-X announce that the future of this company is thing-Y. Why might they do this? I think it’s often just to sound visionary and bold. In rare cases it
Strategy
When asked why he won so many matches, chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer would reply: "all that matters on the chessboard is good moves." That is, winning is all about the moves. And moves, in turn, are all about the situation. Contrast this to today's Silicon Valley
