Category: Leadership
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Doubt is the Spark Killer
It may be that “Fear is the mind killer”, but doubt is the spark killer. Earlier in my career, I had the opportunity to hire a number of great engineers and tried to help cultivate their careers. In the process, I found that one of the most difficult things to teach was initiative. Some were capable…
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Nature of Leading and Following
Concrete and concise stories of leadership are hard to come by, but the video below provides exactly that. It creates a visual picture of the relationship between leaders and followers. I originally saw this video on Seth Godin’s blog in the middle of last year. Seth mentioned that we need more “Guy #3″s. Since then,…
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Cultural Inertia
Often, as a leader, you can see the long term consequences of a culture if it continues unabated. You see people taking habitual actions that lead to horrible ends and you want to encourage them to change, but changing a culture is never as simple as you’d like it to be. Recently, I finished reading Earth…
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I’m not optimistic or pessimistic – I’m a slave
I was recently reading an article about the economy and it ended with the line – I’m not optimistic or pessimistic – I’m realistic. I’m always surprised when I hear someone say this. Doesn’t every optimist and pessimist consider their views realistic? Moreover, this retort is beside the point. Optimism and Pessimism ultimately are about whether…
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Following By Consensus
Early in my career, I took over as the project leader of a small group of engineers in the midst of the merger between Symbios and LSI. LSI had a manager at another location whose group had the same charter as the group I was leading, and we were asked to figure out how to…
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Experimental Costs
“If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward” Thomas Edison Science requires thousands of failures in order to find a success. Following the success, we look back and rationalize why that one success was obviously the solution to the…
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Rowers and Sailors: Two Types of Startups
More often then not, entrepreneurial enterprises get lumped together as all the same. We speak of entreprenuers which includes people who start restaurants, new retail stores, or web 2.0 companies. While we often recognize the difference between companies that “can scale” (like software) with companies that can not (consultant services, stores, etc), we seldom consider…
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Shibboleth Question
You arrive in a conference room dressed to impress. Sitting across the table is Bob and you’re trying to explain to Bob, someone you’ve never met, why this product would help him. In the middle of the explanation, he interrupts you and says: Yeah, I know all about this field, just skip to the conclusion…
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Moral Hazard in Startups
If you’ve followed the news regarding the government bailout of large corporations, you’ve probably heard of “Moral Hazard” — a term used to describe that when you mitigate the risk or take away the consequences of bad decisions, those who took the risks to begin with will take even more risks. This concept extends well beyond…
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Thanksgiving in Mexico
Since moving to Mexico, we’ve become accustomed to differences between our expectations and the culture. Since Thanksgiving isn’t celebrated here, Thursday felt like any other day, and since my wife didn’t have class on Friday, we planned a celebration with her class of 13 (plus guests) from the University. The plan was to meet at…