22 Nov Small Business Interviewing Ideas
I've managed two small, entrepreneurial businesses over my career, and interviewing and hiring the right candidates for positions is one of the most important tasks an owner/manager faces. ...
Culture
09 Oct Secrets to Netflix Success
I always find CEO interviews that discuss strategy interesting, especially if done well. This TED interview with Reed Hastings, founder and co-CEO of Netflix is one of the good ones. He spends quite a bit of time on culture, in particular, the type of culture necessary for a company where creativity is the key to success....
04 Feb Is the Objective Magic or Margin?
Do I believe in the importance of knowing how to calculate the profit maximizing price, understanding the elasticity of demand, and appreciating price/volume trade-offs? Absolutely! Every business person / entrepreneur should have a good grasp of these fundamentals. But that doesn't mean we have to set the price at the profit maximizing price, because that's what came out of Excel. What's your objective?...
26 Dec How to Build Great Teams from the CEOs of Airbnb & Pinterest
Stanford's How to Start a Start-up course by Sam Altman is built around guest lectures / discussions by the folks who have done it themselves. Recently, the course focused on how build great culture - perhaps the most important ingredient of successful businesses - and brought in Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann. Here are seven of their points distilled by Gregory Ferenstein (with link to full article at the bottom). 1. "Don’t f*ck up the culture.” 2. “Companies around for a really long time had a clear mission. A clear sense of values, and they had a shared...