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...
Let’s say you’re an investment banker or work in private equity and you get invited to a cocktail party. While there, you get the dreaded question, “What do you do for a living?” (because very few people outside New York understand what investment bankers do). Although I worked as an investment banker for Bear Stearns in London (back when that was still a firm), I’m pretty sure my own...
It’s interesting what we can learn from just playing around in the lab. The thoughts below originate from messing with the equipment in the acoustics lab at Penn State many years ago. If you generate an electronic pulse X times per second and run this signal through a speaker to hear it, so long as X is below 20 Hertz (beats per second), you hear the individual pulses. You can almost count them...
While working on my Master’s degree in Acoustics at Penn State, our lab professor (we’ll call him “Dr. Dave”) wrote a computer program in C to randomly place students in different teams for each lab throughout the semester. This would prevent us from working with the same people every week. A high-tech solution to completely randomize lab teams for the whole semester at the push of a button...
Do a little bit all the time instead of a lot some of the time.
Consistently making incremental progress is the most effective method to longer-term productivity. I have heard it said that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in the short-term and underestimate what we can accomplish in the long-term. True.
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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...
It’s difficult to keep things simple. Whether starting a new company or launching an additional product or service, aim for the absolute minimum viable product and keep everything as simple as possible. I cannot over-emphasize this point. Strive for stunningly simple. In design. In policies. In procedures. In relationships. Simple means easy-to-use, frictionless and minimalistic. Simple is good...
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...
My 16-year old daughter Julia and I were at the grocery store. At one point, she stopped to smell a bag of marshmallows and began to tell me how awesome it smelled. Meanwhile, I was thinking about what to get next on my shopping list. “Smell it Daddy.” I grabbed what I needed from the shelf and, before I walked away, I humored her. I picked up a bag of marshmallow and breathed in. As...
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...
If the market you want to enter is wide open, without competition, you might pause to ask yourself why. There may be a legitimate reason. It is possible to be too avant-garde. Completely original ideas without pre-existing competitors are difficult businesses to start. On top of everything a new business must do right to succeed, you really don’t want to add “educate the customer” to your TO DO...
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 comes a time in the growth of every startup when you overhear two employees (non-founders) talking about the business, or a procedure, or discussing the best way to do something and arriving at a solution… without you. To a first-time founder, this seems almost unreal. You think, ‘Wow. Work is happening without me.’ Real decisions are being made without founder input. And it’s fantastic. I...
In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson talks about the “adjacent possible”. The adjacent possible, as the name suggest, entails all the near-collision ideas that might form with a simple, first-order combinations of previously existing concepts, ideas, products or services. Although important, the adjacent possible requires no monumental leaps...
After an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, a Master’s degree in acoustics (also engineering) and working as an engineer at General Electric for three and a half years, I realized I really didn’t enjoy engineering. While I learned a lot at my time at General Electric, especially in project management, engineering just didn’t excite me, at all. I was also discovering that I had an...
As young adults, my brother and I bought my Dad a model airplane for Christmas one year. Included in our gift were lessons from an experienced instructor to help Dad learn to fly it. As it turns out, model airplanes are more difficult to maneuver than one might assume. Apparently, the instructor told my Dad a general rule of thumb for beginners is to fly at an altitude “three mistakes from...
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Tulsa, I was at the computer lab writing my final paper for the semester. As was common, it was quite late in the evening and the computer lab was full of students cramming in that last assignment… just trying to get done. At one point in the evening, the football player a few seats over stood up to walk to the printer. On his way, he tripped over...