Blog
If you want to grow your business, you have to have good people to delegate functional work to. Otherwise, you become the bottleneck and risk making customers unhappy. Many years ago, I remember learning the lesson of delegation early while working an engineering project. I had a designer working on
Blog
“It manifests itself in the shape of the lucky fool, defined as a person who benefited from a disproportionate share of luck but attributes his success to some other, generally very precise, reason.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness If you haven't read Taleb's book, he
Blog
Every handoff in your business is a failure point. When one person is handling information and moving execution to the next step, often you can get things done without many mistakes or delays. When you have to hand off a lead, support call, requirements, or project task, it's
Blog
We can laugh at the paper shuffling reference as a bygone era, however, you would not be hard-pressed to see manual processes still being run today. Regardless of the efficiencies, cost-savings and better customer experience of digitization, old habits can die hard, especially in businesses. Never mind if your livelihood
Blog
I can see why people often want someone to simply listen rather than give their opinion. The person with the problem knows more than you do about their situation. When you don't have skin in the game or know the nuances of a predicament, your advice can come
Blog
I left a message for a company yesterday again. They have still not called me back. I am thinking about moving on. Too bad. There's a lot of business that could come their way. I tend to be a loyal person to the things I like. In this
Blog
Pushing on your work takes an intense amount of energy. And without energy, it's hard to maintain consistency, perseverance and results. Energy is not a given. You have to foster your routines and habits to keep peak performance going. I like to hike, play tennis, trail run and
Blog
I love dealmaking. I agree with Robert Ringer's observation about dealmaking: "There are no statistics to prove it, but after years of experience, I'm absolutely convinced that dealmaking is the highest-paid profession in the world." I think the creative pieces and bringing ambiguous, and
Blog
There's a saying that the enemy of the good is perfect. The longer I am in business, the more sensitive and skeptical I get of perfectionism. When I hear fixation on some endless detail that is not necessarily going to prove an idea, the less I want to
Blog
I like spending the weekends thinking, learning and relaxing. The weeks are such a grind and intensive with deal making and doing business. Today, I was having some reflections on the NPR podcast, How I Build This: Lady Gaga & Atom Factory: Troy Carter. I embedded it above and you
Blog
I am a big fan of working meetings. They cut through the back and forth of getting something done. It actually creates time and space to get real work done in real-time with another person or group. Too often, we talk about the secondary stuff: What we are going to
Blog
It is truly refreshing to listen to candor in a world full of hype and noise. The connected world today feels like high school. We are inundated by popularity and hype continually because of the internet. And we have the sage advice of someone who has been persistent, humble and