We need structure to be successful “One of our most dysfunctional beliefs is our contempt for simplicity and structure.” —Marshall Goldsmith Why can Warren Buffett repeatedly make successful multibillion dollar investments with little due diligence and a corporate staff the size of a family meal at my house while many hedge funds have legions […]
Startups pine for profits, predictable cash flow, a sustainable competitive advantage, and the personal wealth and comfort that come from success. Not many will get there. The ones that do are mostly deserving of all those accoutrements previously mentioned. The leaders of that organization toiled and stressed and made do and sacrificed a great deal […]
For the CEO of a company with a fiduciary board (as opposed to an advisory board), there’s perhaps nothing more complex than developing a healthy, mutually satisfying relationship with the board. I’ve been on numerous boards, worked for a few and observed many management-board relationships up close and personal. Few of them work on the […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about democracy and capitalism recently so thought that I’d share a few interesting quotes—some of them conflicting messages—from some very bright fellows to whom I looked for guidance. Before you read them, please ponder this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in […]
Common wisdom says that family businesses have an extremely high failure rate when moving from the first to second to third generation, and that’s absolutely true. The numbers often cited state that 30 percent survive the second generation, and it decreases to midteens by the third and single digits by the fourth. What you don’t […]
I got hooked on bike racing many years ago when I watched American Greg LeMond beat Frenchman Laurent Fignon on the last stage of the Tour de France by a mere eight seconds after two weeks and 2,041 miles of racing. Later, I was a big Lance Armstrong fan. There has always been a king […]
When I was a kid, we’d sometimes go for a Sunday drive after church. I suspect my mother, a widow with two kids, just wanted some quiet time, but I remember mostly being bored. We lived in the Midwest and frankly, once you’ve seen one field of sugar beets, the others aren’t that interesting! We […]
I’ve read with some interest, amazement and amusement about “new” organizational structures in the past few years. And I believe that if everyone followed all the rules, we’d still have a feudal society. There are some interesting experiments regarding how democratic a work environment should be, but one thing I know for sure: If the […]
Insidious as termites, as hard to destroy as a nuclear-hardened bomb shelter, disguised as health food but as nasty as deep-fried butter, bureaucracy is killing you. Tolerating organizational bureaucracy is like breathing secondhand smoke for decades. You can see it, it’s annoying and it’ll eventually kill you, but it won’t kill you today, so you […]
I’m as web-based as the next guy — searching, buying, posting, texting and noodling just like most of you. I’m also pretty disciplined, so I try to do my noodling only after finishing my work. But I don’t often peruse social media looking for deep thoughts. I still shudder at the poor-quality content that self-made […]