Let's Do Lunch.....Leadership and Career Growth in Silicon Valley

The most common corporate buzzwords that I’ve been hearing over the last year are “transformation and “disrupt”.  Companies are focusing on how to create a competitive advantage in this tough economic downturn.  Markets have been shrinking during this 22 month recession and any advantage must come from focusing on business infrastructure in the reduction of [...]

We’ve all sat through long presentations that left us wondering how to get that fraction of our lives back. You know, those “FYI” presentations that are often more self aggrandizing than informative. During this economic downturn, I have seen an increased number of internal company business communications that have made me wonder who [...]

I chuckled when I read “Speaking Truth to PowerPoint” in the Wall Street Journal this morning. Business has grown to rely heavily on PowerPoint as a primary communications medium. Unfortunately, details are lost because the nature of presentation slides is summarization. I depth business planning requires a format that is conducive to [...]

When I first heard about the modified Pecha Kucha exercise that I was invited to participated in (see Pecha Kucha on Summer Vacation) I wondered “what kind of nonsense is this?”. I first had to look on Wikipedia to figure out what it was. I’m not one for gimmicks, and this seemed [...]

I was invited to a pot luck dinner with other industry leaders and the host organized a very clever group activity that was a lot of fun. The invitation said that we would each be doing a modified and shortened Pecha Kucha that will consist of 2 to 4 slides with a couple of [...]

I saw a great article in the Wall Street Journal that I wanted to highlight, “Fine-Tuning Your Resume for Maximum Impact“.  It really focuses on the important aspects of your resume. I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I’ve spent a lot of time looking at resumes over the last 2 months and [...]

The economy seems to have stopped its free fall and is wallowing at a bottom. Individual savings has increased as a percentage of earnings and the housing market looks like its begun to stabilize. Unfortunately, credit has not been as readily available as the government policies have promised and businesses are not expanding [...]

Product Management is often an under appreciated skill in large companies.  Organizational structures are built around product delivery and support.  Early in a company’s life the definition of products allow for economic survival.  As a company grows more cross-functional organizations try to have greater impact on product definition so that they can perform their functions [...]

Wow, its been a busy summer.  So much so that I have not been able to practice what I preach and write my thoughts down. I have at least maintained my reading schedule to keep myself semi-sane (and for those of you who know me well, that’s even a stretch).  I picked up an interesting [...]

I was asking a friend for advice about situations at work and he asked me if I journal-ed (as if it were a verb!)  I told him I’d tried a few times to put things down on paper but that I’d never really been able to maintain the habit.  He asked me what time of [...]