Bring on the Snake Oil Sales person and Mr Know it ALL
As a follow on to Cloud Camp Seattle, I met two particularly distasteful people, Mr. Snake Oil Salesperson and Mr. Know it ALL. Both are doing a disservice to everyone, and here is why these people should not be involved in your cloud computing project. Mr. Snake Oil Sales Person This is a huge problem [...]
This is where I get to disagree with Louis Gray about leadership
It is not often that I get to disagree with Louis Gray, who is one of the best people to know for any reason. So it is surprising when he writes an article and misses bits and pieces of what makes some companies succeed brilliantly, while other companies settle, settle for anything with a prayer [...]
What Makes an Entrepreneur? Perspiration (6/11)
This is part of my new series on what makes an entrepreneur successful. I originally posted it on VentureHacks, one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs. If you haven’t spent time over there you should. I started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute: Tenacity. I then covered Street Smarts, Ability to Pivot, [...]
What Makes an Entrepreneur (5/11) – Inspiration
This is part of my new series on what makes an entrepreneur successful. I originally posted it on VentureHacks, one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs. If you haven’t spent time over there you should. I started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute: Tenacity. I then covered Street Smarts, Ability to Pivot [...]
Management, Bad Apples and Toxicity
In my real-world life I have a number of different management positions with both commercial and not for profit organizations. Management is a really interesting topic, especially given the generational shift that a Gen X to Gen Y move is bringing. One of the organizations I’m involved with is voluntary, and that introduces an entirely [...]
Hiring at a Startup? Know Thy Weaknesses
This is part of my ongoing series on Startup Advice. I was reading one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs, VentureHacks, this weekend and noticed that they are running a long piece on how to pick a co-founder. If you’ve read my blog for a while you’ll know that I’m a fan of starting businesses [...]
What Makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI
This is part of my Startup Advice series. I had a picture in the office of my first company with the logo above and the capital letters JFDI. (In case it’s not obvious it’s a play on the Nike slogan, “Just Do It.”) I believe that being successful as an entrepreneur requires you to get [...]
Don’t Roll out the Red Carpet on the Way out the Door
This is part of my Startup Advice series. Before I started my first company in 1999 I worked for Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). One of the things I noticed was that when really talented people – The “A players” – wanted to quit, the firm would quickly scramble to try and keep that person from [...]
Enterprise Cloud Management from Conformity
Recently I had a briefing from Conformity, a cloud application management platform vendor. Conformity seeks to be the hub, managing service provision for cloud/SaaS applications for enterprise. The rationale for this, as told by Scott Bils, co-founder and CMO for Conformity, is that SaaS applications are thus far relatively siloed in terms of provisioning, user [...]
Who Should you Hire at a Startup?
This is part of my ongoing posts on Startup Advice. There are people who tell startups that they should hire the most senior people that they can find. I’m not one of those. I believe that you should always hire people are are looking to “punch above their weight class,” which means to hire people who [...]
Startup Founders Should Flip Burgers
This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. This is a story of one of the risks of venture capital. When you’re an early-stage startup that hasn’t raised any institutional money you end up doing almost every job function of the company yourself. But some companies have entrepreneurs that seem talented on paper, are [...]
Microsoft Danger Sidekick Data Loss Sabotage
Words most CIO’s do not ever want to see the same sentence; Microsoft Danger Sidekick Data Loss Sabotage highlights some interesting aspects of companies, data loss, and the willingness of speculation as to the actual reason why something happened. In this case the ongoing issues with the Danger Data Center and how it has impacted [...]
Why I Don’t Like Board Observers
This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. I wrote recently about the role of Advisory Boards in startups, which I expected to be a bit controversial. People love their advisers and I don’t blame them. It’s just that many companies waste equity on advisory boards, pick the wrong advisers or set up advisory boards [...]
Here’s to the Passionate Creatives
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t [...]
How to Destroy Trust in Three Easy Steps
Trust is a critical foundation for any organization; employees learn that companies and people in those companies behave in routine ways across a number of situations that they encounter. Unfortunately destroying trust can be very quickly done by suddenly changing things, or otherwise hitting a very high randomization level for employees. Here is how to [...]
