leadership

We think we see a lot more of the world around us than we actually do. That’s just one of six illusions that profoundly influence our ability to lead organizations.[read more]

Want to eliminate excellence in your organization? Then make sure to not do these five things.[read more]

Are you trying to innovate but just spinning your wheels? See if any of these anti-innovators apply to your business.[read more]

The employment pendulum seems to be swinging back to the employee side. How do you keep employees from getting “happy feet” when their job options increase?[read more]

Eight Inches Between Our Ears The human mind is a marvel of engineering we may never understand. We can run countries, survive 127 hours trapped in a cave or overcome monumental odds. Our brain can also keep us from succeeding, present obstacles that may not be there and create deep depression. In business, you know that everyone in...[read more]

Following startup, many small businesses are so concentrated on daily business operations that they do not, or cannot, take the time to actively focus on business growth.  While others are focused on growth but do not have a strategic plan to achieve it. The Top Ten Ways to Grow Your Business is provided to help your small...[read more]

Whenever I used to meet with a potential new client that was interested in a social media program, I always used to take a piece of paper with a little drawing on it. The surprise on their faces was always entertaining when they’d ask for my ideas for them, and instead of presenting a huge multi-slide PowerPoint, I’d show them this piece...[read more]

'Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing." - Vince Lombardi How would others describe the performance of your team? Would they refer to your team “the A team”? Or are they compared to the Los Angeles Clippers (winning percentage: .362)? In either case, here are 8 things you can do to boost the performance of your team...[read more]

Here’s a guest post I wrote a few weeks ago for Right Management’s Talent@Work blog: In a recent article in the Washington Post, Deborah Ancona, a professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, wrote about a concept called “distributed leadership”. She used the term to respond to a reader’s question: “How can a senior...[read more]

We make a lot of assumptions about “high potentials”, such as: - They should be told that they are high potential - They should not be told - Their status should be informally implied - If you tell them, it will be a motivator - If you tell them, they’ll become more of a retention risk - If you tell them, they’ll get complacent, or...[read more]

In ‘Going Global’ the series focuses on what it takes for small and mid-sized businesses to leap into new markets, achieve global reach, and potentially improve current business processes and outcomes by extending beyond domestic boundaries for both scale and expertise.   Bird's Nest Stadium, China, [photo by Andrey Belenko.]...[read more]

Here is Bob Prosen's seven-step process to create an environment of accountability and achieve extraordinary results in any organization: Establish the organizations top three objectives. This means the significant few, not the important many. Once identified, objectives must be clear, concise, measurable and obtainable. ...[read more]

We seem to be at the mercy of economic bubbles.  The housing bubble is what led the government to bail out large mortgage and financial institutions.  And while the economy seems to be steadily improving since that action was taken, Crisis Economics author Nouriel Roubini made headlines two weeks ago when he warned that "We are...[read more]

In most fields, there's an awful lot of work put into the last ten percent of quality. Getting your golf score from 77 to 70 is far more difficult than getting it from 120 to 113 or even from 84 to 77. Answering the phone on the first ring costs twice as much as letting it go into the queue. Making pastries the way they do at a fancy...[read more]

We've posted in the past on large corporations recovering more quickly from the Great Recession than smaller businesses.  Two recent mainstream media articles discuss this: The Perils of Being Small from the Economist reports on small businesses shed jobs at a higher rate than large corporations during the recession and have been...[read more]

Later this morning, we are going to announce FirstMark’s seed investment program, FirstSteps.  Although we are making the announcement now, we recently closed on our 10th investment in this program which we started last year.  Since we started FirstMark in 1996, we have had a long history of creating companies from scratch and...[read more]

Mark Suster wrote a post about boards of directors last week in which he coined the phrase "the agile board." I love that phrase. Too many boards meet once a month and that's it. I am on a few boards like that. Some boards I am on only meet six times a year and there is very little involvement between meetings. Those companies might as...[read more]

For those of you familiar with the Social Networking platform Ning- which enables online community and social network creators - there have been some recent announcements which drive the business in new directions. The news may be valuable to MyVenturepad’s small and mid-sized companies looking to build a better online presence...[read more]

When I started writing my book Living Networks in early 2002 I thought that it was important to demonstrate that the concept of 'living networks' was not just a metaphor, but a reality: we, together with the networks that connect us, are literally a new life form. To show this I drew on the literature on autopoiesis, which was proposed...[read more]

The B2B marketing-to-sales process can be a long and complex process for your company—as well as your customers. Without agreement for who does what, when, managing the buying process behind the scenes can get messy, fast. Collaboration between marketing and sales teams to develop a Service Level Agreement (SLA) can help to smooth the...[read more]