March 25th, 2007 | 
My general view of business (and life) is that humility is a big part of success. But that’s almost assuredly more representative of my value system than of any generally accepted business wisdom. In fact, there may be strong evidence to the contrary. There are of course many quiet, humble people who have run [...]
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iinovate has a great podcast with accompanying YouTube videos of an interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. They have broken out one segment where a luminary, in this case Andy Grove of Intel fame, asks a question. Grove queries: “From the outside it looks like Google’s organizational structure is best described by . [...] A while back, I did a post titled Work:Life Balance – It’s a Perspective Thing in which I talked about my belief that everyone needs to find their own version of balance and that biasing that balance to the work end of the spectrum is not a bad thing. That post turned out to be one [...] I always chuckle when I hear a presentation by a new or prospective startup that “has no competition.” It’s an amazingly ignorant thing to state because it’s almost impossible to be true. In the most basic case, inertia and manual processes represent real competition. In the more likely case, if the idea has any [...] The old adage in sports is that defense wins games. It’s one that has shown itself to be true for all time and for all sports. Unlike many analogies that hold true between sports and business, though, this one does not. If you play defense in business, you will lose. It’s almost guaranteed. [...] I have never seen a board of advisors work after the initial few meetings. I’m sure there are cases where they are managed well and it works out, but for the most part, my experience is that any initial engagement and excitement wanes and the value diminishes fairly quickly. I think that the reason this [...] Brad Feld has a great post this week titled, Don’t Be Casual, in which he talks about a company in his portfolio that did a “casual” presentation to a VC firm, only to realize that the company’s idea of casual didn’t match the VC firm’s. In the end, “the meeting was a disaster.” Brad [...] Several years ago, I was part of a team that did a slightly leveraged management buyout of a division of a larger company. The deal was a relatively straightforward acquisition of all the assets, licenses, rights and so forth of the division for about $55M. Roughly $35M came from a single VC fund. Another [...] Or, more simply put, more effort and concern goes into last ditch efforts to prevent failure than into planning for success along the way. The title of this post is my very slight modification of what one of my board members, Larry Reeder of The Sprout Group, used to say: “more work happens in desperation than aspiration.” I’m [...] It’s about halfway through the 4th quarter for the companies I work with (all have fiscal year = calendar year). About this time during each quarter I reach a point that I think of as the hockey stick turning point, the point at which I move from being confident that there will be no bookings or [...] |
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Copyright © 2012 William Herman - All Rights Reserved |
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