Live Long and Prosper Children born in the US in 2016 can anticipate reaching their 100th birthday. The last two centuries have seen an increase in life expectancy of two years per decade. Unforeseen or unfortunate circumstances aside, you will live longer than your parents and grandparents, and your children will live longer than you.…
Insights, Not Product Details In sales in the past, buyers relied on salespeople for the information they needed to make intelligent purchase decisions. Now, thanks to the Internet, buyers can easily research alternative products and services and compare prices. Today’s buyers rarely deal with salespeople until they have progressed through 60% of the sales cycle.…
Hot or Not? When a product, idea or topic becomes the newest hot talking point, it has gained “social contagion”; this is a good thing, and it can happen spontaneously. For example, a new house of worship can naturally experience a boom of interest within a community, or a pressing political cause can inspire people…
Modern Bloodletting The problem with management is that it still works under the flawed Industrial Age paradigm. Consider that physicians in the Middle Age practised bloodletting. As barbaric as that may seem today, using leeches to draw blood from a sick person simply followed from the era’s paradigm that if you were ill, bad material…
Fifteen Top TimeManagement Tips In a series of revealing interviews, seven billionaires, 13 Olympians, 29-star students and 239 entrepreneurs explained their 15 most useful timemanagement secrets: 1. “Time Is Your Most Valuable and Scarcest Resource” As a CEO irked by constant interruptions, author Kevin Kruse posted a large sign reading, 1440.” He discovered that viewing…
“Testing Values under Pressure” Jon Huntsman is the founder and chair of the Huntsman Corporation, a $13 billion firm in the chemical industry. In 1972, he went to work for the Nixon administration, eventually joining the staff of Bob Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s powerful chief of staff and righthand man. Haldeman soon asked Huntsman to…
“Flawless Leadership: Learning the Lessons Without Paying the Price” Kenneth Lay, the former chairman of Enron, and Jim Owens, the former CEO of Caterpillar, shared similar backgrounds: Both grew up in the same generation and with little money. Each laboured hard, working numerous jobs while studying at state universities. Both earned PhDs in economics before…
The New Sales Manager The sales manager’s job is to lead. People often rise to the rank of a sales manager from a successful career in sales. But the skills required to sell are very different from the skills required to be a leader and manage a sales force. A few of the differences are:…
Loudcloud, Opsware and “the Struggle” “There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience.” Every startup encounters the Struggle. Your product turns out to have costly flaws. Your cash runs low, and your venture capitalist tells you fundraising seems unlikely. A loyal customer leaves you. A valuable employee walks away. There’s no…
The Basic Equipment Needed to Become a CEO You might compare climbing the corporate ladder to climbing a mountain. You need certain qualities, which are like equipment, to make it to the top. You also have to be ready to pass through “tricky and scary situations,” just as you would if you were going higher…
