Posted on December 21, 2011
After buying over 100 albums this year (mostly in CD format), I’m ready to reveal my top listens from 2011. To qualify, the entire album must be good, not just a few songs. I still love to listen to an album from beginning to end, instead of just grazing on singles via a playlist. It’s …
Posted on December 14, 2011
Since reading Primal Leadership, I’ve been a fan of this topic and a student of the discipline. Later, as Yahoo’s Leadership Coach, I studied the areas of excellence in leaders both inside the company, and throughout our customer and partner base. Some, like Howard Stringer of Sony, had very clear skill sets, such as people …
Posted on December 7, 2011
Today’s article (Facebook: Zynga’s #1 Frenemie) prompted this blog post. While Zynga stands as a multi-billion dollar example of the dangers of platform squatting, many of you might be doing in a smaller but still deadly way. Examples: you don’t have a website anymore, you build a big Facebook Page following instead. You don’t build …
Posted on December 1, 2011
If you sell a solution, make sure the problem is acute. Otherwise, you’ll never close the deal. This is a takeaway I got from reading Nail It Then Scale It. In the book, written for startup founders, Nathan Furr reveals a startling statistic: 90% of startups that fail, fail because they built something no one …
Posted on November 29, 2011
Here’s a rule of thumb for sales: The less the prospects talks, the less they buy. This might run counter to conventional sales-pro wisdom, but in my experience this is true. In my 2nd book (The Likeability Factor) I quote findings from a 2004 study at Yale that concluded that the highly-likeable sales person (with …
Posted on November 23, 2011
Think of Thanksgiving as a platform to express, feel and share gratitude. It’s easy, with all this Black Thursday Night and Black Friday talk, to think of Thanksgiving as a commercially made up holiday. But it’s not. It’s certainly at risk of being hijacked by the money changers, but still, it was created to observe …
Posted on November 17, 2011
For entrepreneurs of all types, your time is by far your most valuable asset. Are you investing it wisely? After all, in this competitive and disruptive environment, you can’t be late when the barn door opens. Every day you waste working on the wrong stuff, gives your competitor a day to gain or you or …
Posted on November 15, 2011
Last Saturday, I spoke at the Identity Conference about Why We Work. It’s a critical topic for all of us. What’s our motivation for our 9-5 efforts? If it’s just ‘making a wage’ we are likely to be as listless as the first of the three bricklayers on the scaffold that architect Christopher Wrenn encountered …
Posted on November 11, 2011
All I can say about this week’s Penn State child sex scandal is that it’s really saddening. So many victims and casualties this week. A mighty institution and it’s revered leader are disgraced in internet time. The above picture, of a smart mob, capturing raw JoPa, is just surreal. Everywhere I go this week, people …
Posted on November 9, 2011
I could write a long post about the above chart. But that picture is worth a thousand posts. Instead, I direct you to an analysis of the Dutch Tulip Bubble and Crash. Full a longer read, download Dutch Tulip Mania: The Social Politics Of A Financial Bubble. After you read it, ask yourself, should Facebook …
