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

Burnout is rough. You know that feeling when you’re sitting on the couch in the evening and dread going to work in the morning. Or the Saturday that you tell yourself that the weekend is almost over and you’re that much closer to having to go to work. You’re burned out and [...]

There’s a good reason that the Scott Adams cartoon, Dilbert, has a character called “Mordac The Preventer of Information Systems”. I’ve heard many disparaging comments about I.T. departments in general and in the last 3 weeks I’ve been at my wits end trying to get a project approved in our I.T. department.

From Scott Adam’s [...]

I was in a series of leadership offsites this week and had some interesting observations about communication. All the leaders around me were the best that I have ever worked with. They understand business and how to lead. Each leader has their own style and strengths which create their own organizational culture. [...]

One of the biggest traps that we fall into in technical companies is we assume we know what customers want or need. Silicon Valley companies grew up building engineering products for engineers. This means that we started by making products for ourselves and assumed that customers needed the same stuff too. Fortunately, [...]

People hate to fight. Its human nature to avoid conflict and we all want to be liked. Unfortunately, people often mistake confrontation for aggression. The reality is that conflict can be positive and constructive. Confrontation does not have to, and shouldn’t, be personal nor does it have to be mean. [...]

I was chatting with a member of my management team in the hallway the other day and something she said really stuck in my head. We were talking about the organizational performance turn around that we were in the midst of and she said, “You’ve really added simplicity and definition to what we need [...]

Working for a large company makes it very easy to get comfortable. You wake up and go to the same office, work with the same people, and do relatively similar things consistently. It’s easy to get lulled into the pattern. In Silicon Valley, that pattern became a lifestyle. The internet bubble [...]

I’m attending a conference in a couple of weeks where Danny Meyer, author of the best selling book “Setting the Table”, will be speaking about his business philosophy. The conference organizers strongly recommend that we read his book. My initial reaction was an internal groan when I thought about how much trouble I [...]