The Disease of Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley has a disease. It’s very serious. Possibly terminal. Let me tell you how I discovered it…. I started working with a Chief Business Officer in a rapidly scaling business. She was building a new business unit, was whip smart and had all the resources she needed at her disposal. She had a year…

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The Price of Professionalism

While running a leadership program for a group of executives, the topic of ‘professionalism’ came up. One leader was frustrated with one of her employees, and she was trying to be ‘professional’ by handling a situation ‘the right way.’ You know what I mean—trying to give feedback without emotion while in reality she was livid that…

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Trying to Get Your Employees to Do What You Want?

I was working with a CEO named Jeff the other day who was frustrated with one of his employees. This employee—Paul, the leader of an important business unit—wasn’t doing what Jeff would ask of him. This in turn was putting a wrench in the works of the business, and allowing the competition to creep in.…

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WHEN CEOs DELEGATE THE WRONG TASKS

As a first-time CEO, as your company grows and the work becomes more complex, and while you have a team to help you with this goal, you’ll notice that fundamentally there becomes two different kinds of jobs to do. The first job is to imagine new ways of growing the company, to forge new strategies,…

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YOUR TEAM IS LESS ALIGNED THAN YOU THINK

What most leaders assume about their organization or about any other person is that they have a much, much greater shared reality and perspective than really exists.  If the person you’re speaking to agrees with your point of view, the natural human reaction is to assume that this agreement extends to alignment on every aspect of the topic.

Let me give you an example. Say a CEO tells his team, we’re going to focus on channel sales because channel is a much higher leverage approach for us….

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