Archives / May, 2012

What Kind of Entrepreneur Are You?

What Kind of Entrepreneur Are You? I think there are two kinds of entrepreneurs, and sometimes, you can be both.  There is the kind that starts businesses, and there is the kind that builds businesses. The kind of entrepreneur who starts businesses but usually doesn’t like running or building them are typically serial entrepreneurs.  How can you spot one?  They: Have an idea a minute and a bit of ADD – they are attracted to bright shiny objects – they can’t focus Would rather generate 1 good and idea and 19 bad ones than just 1 good one Are always thinking about the next thing, only excited by the possibility of what could be, not by what is Are more…

Book Short: Internet True Crime

Book Short:  Internet True Crime Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet, by Joseph Menn (book, kindle) was a bit of a disappointment.  I was really hoping for more of an explanation of how the “business” of Internet crime works — what the economics are like, what the landscape/scope/sectors are like, who the players are. What I got was a bit of a true crime novel, the story of Barrett Lyon and Andy Crocker, who are respectively a geek and a cop, and their very specific stories of tracking down a handful of internet criminals around a handful of technical tactics (DDOS attacks and botnets).  It wasn’t bad, the stories were…

You Can’t Teach a Cat How to Bark, But You Might be Able to Teach it How to Walk on its Hind Legs

You Can’t Teach a Cat How to Bark, But You Might be Able to Teach it How to Walk on its Hind Legs My co-founder George and I have had this saying for a while.  Cats don’t bark.  They can’t.  Never will.  They also don’t usually walk on their hind legs in the wild, but some of them, after some training, could probably be taught to do so. Working with people on career evolution sometimes follows that same path.  Lots of the time, an employee’s career evolution is natural and goes well.  They’re playing to their strengths, in their sweet spot, progressing along nicely.  But often that’s not the case.  And it goes both ways.  Some employees want something different. …

Learning Through Extremes, or Shifting Gears part II

OnlyOnce is 8 years old this week, which is hard to believe. So it is fitting that I got halfway through a new post this morning, then a little alarm bell went off in my head that I had written something similar before.  The topic is around moderation versus extremes.  I first wrote about this topic in 2005 in a post called Shifting Gears but I have thought about it more recently in a different way.  Instead of phrasing this as a struggle between “Meden Agan,” which is Greek for “everything in moderation,” and “Gor oder gornischt,” which is Yiddish for “all or nothing,” I’d like to focus here on the value of occasionally going to an extreme. And that…

Skip-Level Meetings

I was talking to a CEO the other day who believed it was “wrong” (literally, his word) to meet directly 1:1 with people in the organization who did not report to him.  I’ve heard from other CEOs in the past that they’re casual or informal or sporadic about this practice, but I’ve never heard someone articulate before that they actively stayed away from it.  The CEO in question’s feeling was that these meetings, which I call Skip-Level Meetings, disempowers managers. I couldn’t disagree more.  I have found Skip-Level Meetings to be an indispensable part of my management and leadership routine and have done them for years.  If your culture is set up such that you as CEO can’t interact directly…