Management and Strategy

Awesome talk on choices..  

Really good article by James Dyson on business week. Education is key to long term success. To make the economy build to last you have to focus on education at every level…

Photograph of Lewis Hine/Redux Photo

President Obama is right: America’s long-term success hinges on its ability to invent technology the world wants. It seems simple, but getting America back in the business of making things isn’t. It’s a global process. An idea born in Silicon Valley could be engineered in Switzerland, tested in China, and assembled in Taiwan. A stimulus to boost manufacturing may help the U.S. economy in the short term, but reinvigorating postwar-style production or space-race ingenuity is impossible without an increasingly capable workforce. Business demands it. And without it, long-term success will remain elusive.

These days manufacturing extends far beyond the assembly line. It’s about inventing and solving problems: researching, testing, and experimenting with ideas and technology. The development of new products more and more defies borders. It’s impossible to make electronic goods exclusively on U.S. or U.K. soil—the supplier base, infrastructure, and often the expertise needed to produce everything from electric cars to solar panels is dispersed.

Within that context, it’s easier to understand why highly skilled jobs are going the way of assembly and manufacture. New research by the National Science Foundation (NSF) reports that more companies are taking research and development—and 85 percent of the new jobs it creates—overseas. Still, this is by no means a one-way street. As Caterpillar shifts some R&D abroad, it’s considering moving parts of its manufacturing operations back to the U.S. Creating new products is no longer one size fits all.

But constructing an economy that’s built to last depends on a ready supply of talented individuals: people who invent, create, and develop the ideas that will drive exports and those who can assemble them. China gets it. To make its economy more knowledge and technology intensive, China is investing heavily in science and engineering education, infrastructure, and R&D support. Already wages are increasing, the middle class is growing, and the country is developing new technology rather than just assembling products. And while the U.S. continues to file more patents than any other country, the Far East’s investment in R&D, fueled by China, matched U.S. contributions in 2009, according to the National Science Board’s report, Science and Engineering Indicators 2012.

Creating an Economy That’s ‘Built to Last’ – Businessweek

Discovering Your Authentic Leadership is a great read for people who want to improve their Leadership skills. I have read many articles on leadership and everyone of them focuses on different aspects of leadership.

Best part about this article is it tells you to focus internally to look at your own history and learn from that. Authors focus on following key aspects of your life to learn from

• Learn from your own life story
• Know your authentic self
• Practice your values and principles
• Balance your extrinsic and intrinsic motivations
• Build a support team to learn and get guidance from
• Integrate your life by staying grounded

Original Article: http://hbr.org/2007/02/discovering-your-authentic-leadership/ar/1

Authors: Bill George, Peter Sims, Andrew N. McLean and Diana Mayer

Synopsis:

During the past 50 years, leadership scholars have conducted more than 1,000 studies in an attempt to determine the definitive styles, characteristics, or personality traits of great leaders. None of these studies has produced a clear profile of the ideal leader. Thank goodness. If scholars had produced a cookie-cutter leadership style, individuals would be forever trying to imitate it. They would make themselves into personae, not people, and others would see through them immediately.

No one can be authentic by trying to imitate someone else. You can learn from others’ experiences, but there is no way you can be successful when you are trying to be like them. People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not a replica of someone else. Amgen CEO and president Kevin Sharer, who gained priceless experience working as Jack Welch’s assistant in the 1980s, saw the downside of GE’s cult of personality in those days. “Everyone wanted to be like Jack,” he explains. “Leadership has many voices. You need to be who you are, not try to emulate somebody else.”

This Article by Daniel Goleman is a great read on different leadership styles and how leaders can use them in different scenarios to get results. In this article Goleman explores which precise leadership behaviors yield positive results. He outlines six distinct leadership styles, each one springing from different components of emotional intelligence. Each style has a distinct effect on the working atmosphere of a company, division, or team, and, in turn, on its financial performance.

You have to read the article to get the full picture. You can access it at http://hbr.org/product/leadership-that-gets-results/an/R00204-PDF-ENG . Below is a preview…

1. Coercive leaders demand immediate compliance.
2. Authoritative leaders mobilize people toward a vision.
3. Affiliative leaders create emotional bonds and harmony.
4. Democratic leaders build consensus through participation.
5. Pacesetting leaders expect excellence and self-direction.
6. Coaching leaders develop people for the future.

Leadership Styles at a glance

The research indicates that leaders who get the best results don’t rely on just one leadership style; they use most of the styles in any given week.

Awesome articles on what should startups invest and not invest in.   HumbledMBA has really great blog…

Stuff we startups do that doesn’t delight users:

Office space
Launch parties
Health insurance plans
Salary negotiations
Founder equity splits
Series F stock
Office Food
Team-building activities
CRM systems
Bookkeeping
Head count
Working in SOMA
Convertible debt caps
Valuations
TechCrunch
Karma scores
ISOs
Powerpoint
Business Cards
Banks
Lawyers
Desks
1099s
Bug Trackers
Agile Processes
Advisory Boards
Hiring
Cap Tables
Payroll
Meetups
Meetings

Of course, much of this stuff still needs to get done.  At some point.  And some of it really is important to the process that eventually creates delight for users.  But none of it directly delights users.  They’re all inputs.  None of it is product.  When you build a great product, one that delights users and achieves product-market fit, you’ll have lots of time to work on all these things and optimize them to your heart’s content.  When your product is not even built yet, none of this stuff matters.  But your startup, in the pre-product phase, is basically a ticking time bomb.  The only thing that can prevent it from exploding is user delight.  User delight attracts funding, enhances morale, builds determination, earns revenue…Until you get to user delight, you’re always at risk of running out of money or, much more likely, losing a key engineer to something more interesting.  Time is your most precious resource.

Don’t. Waste. Time.

Don’t. Waste. Time. – humbledMBA

Yesterday got a chance to listen to Marshall Goldsmith, he is amazing. Also received a signed copy of his book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful”. Have heard it is an amazing book. Will write a review once I finish…

His best advice, think you are 95 years old and on death bed. You have few more moments to go… What advice will you give someone young? Personal and Professional? Now take that advice and live by it because you should have fun and enjoy the life now.  

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is a world authority in helping successful leaders get even better – by achieving positive, lasting change in behavior: for themselves, their people and their teams.

MOJO was released in February 2010.  It is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal top ten best-seller – and the Shanghai Daily #1 business book in China.  It is already scheduled to be translated into 14 languages.

Marshall Goldsmith Library

5 lessons in social media from Home Depot executive. Pretty good article.

1. You can’t control the conversation
2. Be authentic
3. It’s about people
4. Your people need hands-on expertise in what customers care about
5. Be patient and flexible

At Home Depot (HD), we first realized we needed to have a real conversation with our customers back in 2007. A blogger flamed us about customer service in a post that drew thousands of comments. In the past we might have responded in a corporate voice, but our chief executive officer took a different tack. He wrote a personal response in the comments, acknowledging that the blogger was right and that we had to work to improve.

Social media has since become a way for us to improve our customer service—not merely a vehicle for us to talk about it. In 2008 we started on Twitter, but many of the solutions our customers were looking for needed more than 140 characters. In 2009 we launched our Facebook page and a year later started a DIY (do it yourself) community online.

One of our more important decisions was to use store associates in much of our social interaction. They are the ones with the project and product expertise customers need. It was the right choice.

Here are five lessons we’ve learned about social media from our own still-evolving experience.

Five Social Media Lessons for Business – BusinessWeek

Really cool article.

Ooh, that is a big idea, a really, really big idea. The other guys have ideas, but theirs are so small. You’d better watch out or you may hurt someone with that big thing. And I can see you’re very excited about it, too!

We know what you’re thinking. We’re just a couple of guys overly amused by sophomoric humor, making a lame attempt to get your attention and some cheap laughs, right? Well, kinda.

We admit to not taking ourselves too seriously, but before you rush to judgment, let us make a simple point that leaders too often miss when it comes to innovation: It is easy to make a big idea small and nearly impossible to make a small idea big

Innovation: Size Matters – BusinessWeek