Sometime around 2005 – 2006, I was on a flight from Stockholm to New York. The flight attendant took my ticket at the gate and asked me to step aside and wait without explanation. Seemed odd, but OK. She then took boarding passes from everyone in line while I stood waiting further instructions. When the last person in line passed, the flight attendant turned to me and said the flight was...
This update points to a story I wrote on my professional blog. It would have been better on this forum, which didn’t exist at the time. Years ago, a defining interaction happened around a large conference room table as we were negotiating the final points on an M&A deal. This is a story of unusual integrity and transparency in business. It was a beautiful moment and I learned from it. I...
Nothing prepares you for entrepreneurship like being an entrepreneur. As the leader of your company, you are tasked with articulating the mission, setting the overall strategic direction, ensuring successful execution and establishing & shaping the corporate culture. Simple right? But few of us are excellent at leading a company, especially our first company. As leaders and managers, we fail...
This is sort of cheating, but I wrote this story on my company blog this past Summer. It’s better suited for PastMidway (but PM didn’t exist at the time). Humor can be a powerful tool to push through negotiation barriers in M&A transactions. I remember one sell-side deal in particular where humor, brilliantly applied, probably saved the day. We were negotiating the final points of...
One of the great personality traits of my son (Soren) is that he always tells the truth, even to his own detriment at times. Example: We were riding in the van (Soren was 4 years old at the time). I heard some commotion in the back. Then Soren tries to tell on his sister: “Daddy, Svea hit me after I hit her first.” Clearly, he would have benefitted from a slightly shorter sentence. But I like his...
Your goal, for each member on your team, is to develop them – for them, not for you. Openly communicate that your aim is to provide a fantastic growth experience for your team that boosts their resume to go on and do great things beyond your company. Counterintuitively, actively building peoples’ business acumen and skills with a view to propel their careers, even outside your organization, not...
Always strive to hire people that overwhelmingly impress you. Perhaps they might even intimidate you a bit with how good they are in certain areas. Maybe they are smarter, faster, more experienced, have better leadership skills, relationship skills or are more articulate. Whatever. Hire people that can outperform you. Your team should not admire you. That’s just feeding your ego. You should...
The investment banking culture expects perfection. Mistakes are unforgivable. The logic – if you make mistakes on small details, the client will wonder if you also make mistakes on important points – like the valuation of their company. Story Time… While working at Bear Stearns, I arrived at my desk one morning to find two pages on my chair, ripped from the previous day’s...
Continuously leading a well-balanced life is a recipe for mediocrity. The key to success, however you measure it, is unbalanced, singular focus at specific points in time with an aim for overall life balance on average, over time. Ambitious people tend to over-invest in their education and careers and under-invest in their most personal relationships. For a lot of us, it is surprisingly easy to...
You must define, early on, what success for your company means to you. You are not required to measure success by revenue, profit, growth, number of employees or any of the traditional metrics. You may have a different view from common, societal definitions of a successful company. As the owner, you get to decide the success criteria, within the boundaries of corporate survival. While different...
There are challenging seasons in the life of every company. Nearly every entrepreneur who has been in business more than 10 years has at least one story about a time when they weren’t sure the company would make it. When times are difficult, the strategic conversations around the conference table sound like, “We are low on cash. We can do initiative X or Y, or neither, but not both. What should...
Mission. Strategy. Execution. In that order. For people who are hard-working by nature, it’s tempting to go straight to Execution without fully mapping the corporate Mission and the Strategy that accomplishes the Mission. The Mission describes the intended result. Without which, it is impossible to map a coherent Strategy to direct one’s efforts (Execution). Skipping straight to Execution...