Doug Theis - Leave your comfort zone.

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25
Jan 12

Inc. – Get a Life Outside Your Start-up: 22 Tips

Work-life balance a little out of whack? We asked busy entrepreneurs to give us their best tricks for coping with the daily grind.

Launching a start-up is demanding and takes huge amounts of time, energy, and attention. Is it possible to have a life outside of work? It’s not easy, say the founders I talked to, but they do have tips to help you launch and maintain some vestige of work-life balance.

1. Start dancing. It’s physical, it’s fun, it’s social, and you can’t check your phone or be working on your laptop while you’re out dancing. Find the coolest place wherever you live, and go out dancing once a week. You’ll feel completely renewed, energized and ready to tackle the world, or at least your start-up. – Vivian Rosenthal, founder and CEO of GoldRun, an augmented reality iOS application.

More of the Inc. article from Christina DesMarais

Inc. – Who Are You Talking To?

Is there anyone outside of your company challenging you to grow yourself and your business?

The “Master Mind Group” I am in is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. This group of business owners and CXOs has been a source of incredible wisdom, insight, painful accountability and great personal growth.

I honestly wonder how anyone goes through the struggle of owning and running a business without one. My strong suggestion is that you don’t.

A Master Mind Group is another name for a peer group that works together to better each member. In business, user groups and associations often provide some of this collaboration. But that said, I have always gotten great benefit from business leaders not in my industry from their diverse experiences and often-complementary thinking.

Choosing a Group: What’s Important

Members are everything. They are more important than format or facilitator. You are looking for a group with which you have enough connection to develop trust, but you want enough diversity to get great value and insight. For me, this includes what I refer to as the three A’s:

More of the Inc. article from Tom Searcy

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23
Jan 12

Gizmodo: Top Stories safety By Andrew Liszewski Jan 19, 2012 5:40 PM 23,123 44 Get our top stories follow gizmodo Watch This Earthquake-Proof Desk Easily Shrug Off a 2,000 Pound Block

I don’t live in a high risk area for deadly tremors, but after watching this earthquake-proof table easily survive having a 2,200 pound block dropped on it, I think I still want one for my office—just in case.

The table was designed by Ido Bruno and Arthur Brutter primarily for use in schools. Students are typically taught to hide under their desks in the event of an earthquake, but most desks aren’t designed to support the weight of all the debris were the building to collapse. Which is clearly demonstrated in this video when they drop just a 1,000 pound weight on a traditional desk and it’s immediately pancaked.

More of the Gizmodo article from Andrew Liszewski

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23
Jan 12

TechCrunch – Do Great Things

Editor’s Note: Guest contributor Justin Rosenstein is the co-founder of Asana.

We have a greater capacity to change the world today than the kings and presidents of just 50 years ago. Whether you’re a programming prodigy or the office manager holding it all together, technology empowers small groups of passionate people with an astonishing degree of leverage to make the world a better place. Yet I fear that our industry is squandering its opportunity and its talent. In companies large and small, great minds are devoting their lives to endeavors that, even if wildly successful, fail to do great things.

We who work in technology have nurtured an especially rare gift: the opportunity to effect change at an unprecedented scale and rate. Technology, community, and capitalism combine to make Silicon Valley the potential epicenter of vast positive change. We can tackle the world’s biggest problems and take on bold missions like fixing education, re-imagining energy distribution, connecting people, or even democratizing democracy. And with increasingly severe threats to our survival — rapid climate change, an unstable international economy, and unsustainable energy consumption — it is more important than ever that we use these gifts to change the world, foster happiness and alleviate suffering, for us and our fellow beings.

More of the TechCrunch article from Justin Rosenstein

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16
Jan 12

Technologizer – The timeless genius of George Eastman

Over at the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal has an exceptionally good post with an exceptionally good title: “The Triumph of Kodakery.” Inspired by the sad news that Eastman Kodak may be on the verge of bankruptcy, he points out that the dream the company was built on–making photography so effortless that it’s everywhere, and enjoyed by everybody–is hardly in trouble. It’s just that its purest expression today is the camera phone, not a Kodak camera that takes Kodak film that’s processed by a Kodak lab.

The dream originated in the brain of the gentleman in the above photo, George Eastman (1854-1932). He was the founder of Eastman Kodak, and he didn’t just start one of the most important companies in the history of consumer technology products. He played as important a role as anyone in inventing the idea of consumer technology products.

Even more than such other pioneering technologist-entrepreneurs as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Henry Ford, Eastman seems astoundingly contemporary. If he showed up in Silicon Valley today, he’d be right at home. (Actually, he might have as good a shot as anyone at fixing what ails Kodak.)

A few of the things that make Eastman so cool, and his accomplishments so timeless:

More of the Technologizer post from Harry McCracken

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13
Jan 12

Fast Company – The Envy Effect: How Friendly Competition Spurs Innovation

Think all the banter on Twitter and in blog comments is for naught? Here’s how social envy and the competition of ideas it generates will lead to faster innovation.

Jason Fidler has posted a very interesting rebuttal to my recent blog post on the envy effect. I originally argued that the e-social revolution will likely lead to more competition among people, because increasing transparency makes it easier to compare attributes.

Fidler suggests my argument is flawed because competition for pay (and other things in the economic world) is based on actual transparency, while competition for social media dominance is based on “selective” transparency. In other words, we are transparent in social media only to the point we permit ourselves to be, choosing either to disclose or not to disclose different personal attributes.

Moreover, he says, the economic comparisons required by the SEC led to actual improvements in CEO pay, while “it is safe to assume that few have truly better personal lives because of their activity on social networks.”

More of the Fast Company article from Don Peppers

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12
Jan 12

Fast Company – 5 Disastrous Moves That Will Botch Your Pitch

Most of us have something to pitch. You may be pitching your startup to a VC to secure funding. Or perhaps you’re pitching your product or service to potential customers. Whether you are pitching your case to a jury, your hypothesis for a research grant, yourself for a new job, or your best friend for a date with that cute guy, a simple rule applies: The better the pitch, the better the results.

As a venture capitalist, I hear pitches every day. In this highly competitive environment, a strong pitch can be the difference-maker between securing millions in funding and completely missing the mark.

There are many obvious cliché moves: Give a firm handshake, communicate with passion, make strong eye contact, and try to relate with your audience. Yet there are approaches I see constantly that sabotage an otherwise good pitch. To significantly improve your batting average, avoid these disaster moves when pitching just about anything:

1) THE GREAT GATSBY: Grandiose braggarts may entertain at cocktail parties, but they rarely win the battle of the pitch. Keep it authentic and real. Your startup with 11 beta customers isn’t a billion-dollar company just yet. Think big, but stay humble. After hearing a pitch where the daring hero outperforms Groupon and Apple in their second year with trillions of revenue and six billion customers, I’m ready for a shower instead of a closing dinner.

More of the Fast Company article from Josh Linkner

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11
Jan 12

TechCrunch – What Startup To Build?

If you’re asking which startup to build, not whether to build, you probably have several half-baked ideas and don’t know which one to devote yourself to. Or you have no idea at all.

Max Levchin and Peter Thiel would tell you innovation is dead and that you should go work on real, world-changing, notable problems. They say too many young companies are solving small problems and creating features. TechCrunch writer Rip Empson would ask you to not build a copycat app. Paul Graham of Y Combinator would tell you to check out instead his list of 30 startup ideas he’s looking to fund.

Or programmer Chris Moyer would tell you, “If you are asking what startup to build, then maybe you are too focused on doing a startup. Find something you are so passionate about, that this isn’t a question. Then make that. Worry about the startup bit later.”

More of the TechCrunch post from Steve Poland

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10
Jan 12

Fast Company – The Leadership Hall of Fame

We have spent a year looking at the most influential business books and authors. Here is a complete syllabus for an education in being a leader. Which are your favorites? And which leadership classics did we miss?

More of the Fast Company article from Kevin Ohannessian

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09
Jan 12

CIO Insight – Making the Leap from CIO to CEO

A CIO turned CEO shares lessons learned as he climbed the C-Suite ladder.

These days you hear a handful of stories of CIOs making the jump to CEO. Once a rare occurrence, such a career move has now entered the realm of the possible for some executives. Although it’s certainly not an easy path, if executed correctly, it can be very rewarding. As a former CIO of a large technology company who recently became a CEO, I’d like to share my firsthand experience.

I’m now CEO of Numara Software, a provider of integrated IT management solutions. Before joining Numara, I was general manager of Enterprise Solutions and Cloud Management at CA Technologies, where I was responsible for the creation and development of a portfolio of cloud products and enterprise solutions. And, before that, I led CA’s Security Business Unit and served as the company’s CIO.

Why Make the Jump?

Becoming CEO was not the ultimate goal for me when I began my IT career. I was extremely lucky to have been given the opportunity to serve as CIO at CA Technologies. I learned more from that role than I ever could have imagined. Because every single process and department in the company relies on technology, CA CIOs play a role in all lines of business.

More of the CIO Insight article from Dave Hansen

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.