Archives / October, 2014

Does size matter?

Does size matter? It is the age-old question — are you a more important person at your company if you have more people reporting into you?  Most people, unfortunately, say yes. I’m going to assume the origins of this are political and military. The kingdom with more subjects takes over the smaller kingdom. The general has more stars on his lapel than the colonel. And it may be true for some of those same reasons in more traditional companies. If you have a large team or department, you have control over more of the business and potentially more of the opportunities. The CEO will want to hear from you, maybe even the Board. In smaller organizations, and in more contemporary organization…

Book Short: Way, Way Beyond Books

Book Short:  Way, Way Beyond Books The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone, was a great read.  Amazon is a fascinating, and phenomenally successful company, and Jeff is a legendary technology leader.  The Everything Store is a company and personal biography and totally delivers. Forget about the fact that Amazon is now almost $100B in revenues and still growing like mad.  I find it even more amazing that a single company could be the largest ecommerce site on the planet while successfully pioneering both cloud computing services and e-readers.  The stories of all these things are in the book. As a CEO, I enjoyed reading more of the vignettes behind the things that Amazon…