My dad (one of my main CEO/entrepreneur role models) and I team-teach a business school class in entrepreneurial leadership every year at USD where a friend of his is the professor. Sometimes I go in person, usually I just do it by video. We did this a few weeks ago, and my dad talked through a decision-making framework that I’d never heard him mention before. I sketched it out and really like it and am already using it internally, so I thought I would share it here as well: To walk through it, delegating decision-making to someone on your team can be as simple as understanding where a decision falls along two different spectrums. On the vertical axis is “How familiar…
Archives / June, 2017
Don’t Confuse Sucking Down with Servant Leadership
I love the concept of Servant Leadership. From the source, the definition is: While servant leadership is a timeless concept, the phrase “servant leadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader, an essay that he first published in 1970. In that essay, Greenleaf said: “The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are…
Why You Won’t See Us Trash Talk Our Competition
We’ve been in business at Return Path for almost 18 years now. We’ve seen a number of competitors come and go across a bunch of different related businesses that we’ve been in. One of the things I’ve noticed and never quite understood is that many of our competitors expend a lot of time and energy publicly trash talking us in the market. Sometimes this takes the form of calling us or our products out by name in a presentation at a conference; other times it takes the form of a blog post; other times it’s just in sales calls. It’s weird. You don’t see that all that often in other industries, even when people take aim at market leaders. During…
Company of Origin
Most psychologists, and lots of executive coaches, end up talking to their clients about their “Family of Origin” as a means of more deeply understanding the origins of their clients’ motivations, fears, hopes, and dreams. Presumably they do this in service of helping their clients gain self-awareness around those things to be more effective in their personal or professional lives. A smattering of highly-ranked search results on the term yields snippets like these for its definition: One’s family of origin—the family one grew up in, as opposed to the people one currently lives with—is the place that people typically learn to become who they are From the family of origin a person learns how to communicate, process emotions, and get…