General – Page 3

Recapping 2011

January 2, 2012

Happy New Year 2012. Before last year fades into our collective memories, I want to recap some lessons that I learned (or re-learned) in 2011. Over the holidays I was performing some admin on my website. The task was to implement a Blog feature to allow anyone to add comments without having the hassle of ...

Relevance

October 14, 2011

Do you have time for a coffee? I receive at least half dozen emails like this each month. The sender is often a senior executive who has been introduced to me by someone who is trying to help them. They are educated, credentialed, experienced and looking for their next job. Many are trying to build ...

Recruiting Top Talent

October 7, 2011

I have been dithering on writing this blog since a good friend of mine, Paul Dodd at Head2Head Recruiting sent me Jeff Bussgang's article, "Startups Need To Hire A Recruiter…Now" in May. While I agree with a lot of what Jeff is saying, I couldn't put my finger on what was bothering me about his ...

YASN

August 20, 2011

According to Wikipedia, YA stems from "yet another…" which "is an idiomatic qualifier in the name of a computer program, organization, or event that is confessedly unoriginal". In this case, YASN is "yet another social network" and is becoming a derogatory terms amongst Angel investors, VC's and those of us whom advise and mentor startup ...

The New Economic Reality

August 18, 2011

A few years ago, I was responsible for a business unit which developed software that optimized product placement on grocery stores shelves. This was very sophisticated stuff that used sales data to figure out how much space should be devoted to each SKU and where products should be placed on the shelf or endcap to ...

Betting your Job

August 7, 2011

A recurring theme that I see in my consulting practice is people's reluctance to confront bad news. This happens in start-ups who are dealing with a market that just doesn't need their product, VC's who don't want to invest, and organizations or employees who won't scale up to the next level needed to grow. It ...

Choosing Top Sales People

August 3, 2011

I am catching up on my summer reading and just re-read Seven Personality Traits of Top Salespeople. This is an article worth reading if you are hiring sales reps. Based on thousands of interviews with top salespeople, Steve W. Martin identified seven personality traits that directly influence top performers' selling style and set them above ...

WFANP Part II

August 1, 2011

Summer is always a great time for “Working from a Nicer Place” and I am back up at the cottage for the fifth time since I first wrote about it at Easter. Then, the ice was just dissolving from the lake. Now, it is baking hot in the sun and the lake is a very ...

Legal Advice for Start-ups. (and stories from resultant miscues)

July 25, 2011

My legal advice for start-ups : GET SOME. I am a layman so that is the summation of the legal advice contained in this blog. The rest of it is stories of encounters with legal matters as well as some tips I have learned on when and how to effectively use legal counsel. One of ...

It’s a Small World

July 21, 2011

I often hear people say "It's a small world". It is and tools like LinkedIn are rapidly making it smaller. I've had three small world encounters in the last few weeks and there is a lesson to learn from each. Story #1: In 2006, I worked for a year in Chicago. I developed and have ...

Category: General