CEO & Boards – Page 6

It happened again.

April 4, 2011

This morning a new Business Analyst should have arrived for his first day at work. Although he accepted the position two weeks ago, he chose this past weekend to accept another position. His email stated that he had long been coveting this other position and their offer came as a surprise. I wrote about this ...

Meatball Surgery and other interesting practices of Start-ups

March 28, 2011

One of my favourite phrases from the M*A*S*H was "Meatball Surgery". It referred to the shortcuts that the surgeons of the 4077 developed to keep their patients alive while they quickly performed surgery. While there were better ways, "Meatball Surgery" allowed them to finish with one priority case so that they could move on to ...

Improving Sales: The Excuse Department is Closed

March 25, 2011

Improving Sales: The Excuse Department is Closed: by Mark Suster started circulating a few of weeks ago but I was too busy to do anything with it at the time. Nevertheless, its wisdom demanded that I come back to it and comment. Mark has done a fabulous job of succinctly articulating the challenges of managing ...

Five Questions to test if your start-up will be successful?

March 15, 2011

I have a new job, or at least one more job to add to my time-slicing life. A few weeks ago, I began as an Executive-in-Residence at the Innovation Factory, the newest Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation sponsored Regional Innovation Centre. In this role, I will be mentoring and advising early stage companies as they ...

Making Big Bets #2

February 1, 2011

I was reading a blog by my friend Jim Carroll "Why thinking big could save you in the 21st century". He talks about companies that are using "Big Bets" to drive stunning levels of innovation such as Wal-Mart's goal to completely eliminate packaging. I am a big fan of "big bets" and "shoot for the ...

Business Ethics and the Bottomline

November 24, 2010

Steve Tennant posted an interesting tweet yesterday, "SAP must pay $1.3B in TomorrowNow damages. Add $160M legal costs, that's a -14,700% ROI on your $10M acquisition.http://bit.ly/fjtF6p" His tweet got me thinking. For those of you who don't know the TomorrowNow story, they were founded by ex- PeopleSoft employees who left the organization to start a ...

Will my product sell?

November 23, 2010

I have been engaged in a email exchange with a young entrepreneur over the past couple of weeks. I met him at the C100 Accelerate TO event. Like any good CEO, he was trying to get exposure for his company by pitching it to senior execs and investors in attendance. I gave him some coaching ...

How are you hiring today?

November 19, 2010

How are you hiring talent today? Still using job boards? Stll using the traditional recruiter that is paid on success fees when you hire someone? How is that working for you? What about social media? Do you post status updates to your LinkedIn profile? Do you use Linked In job postings or ads? Do you ...

Being Competitively Different

November 12, 2010

On Monday morning, I attended a presentation by Professor Youngme Moon on how companies differentiate themselves from their competitors. Similar to her colleague, Clayton Christensen, Moon points out the danger of listening too much to your customers. Her point is that doing so will lead competitors to move towards a point where they look like ...

Why is the start-up world different? (or How to choose your advisors and employees)

November 10, 2010

I recently had coffee with a colleague who spent many years with large global consulting firms, specializing in large complex projects involving strategy, restructuring, governance and project management. He now has his own consulting firm which focuses on strategy, and primarily works with medium to large organizations. Over coffee, he wanted to pick my brain ...

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