Category Archive: Leadership

People Skills Are Essential to Negotiation Success

Negotiation is at the heart of a business. Winning customers, building partnerships, and securing vendors are all negotiation processes. The skills required to negotiate successfully are complex: inter-personal communication, sales skills, a bit of analytical psychology, assertiveness, and conflict resolution. In short, for a company to do well, the lead negotiator must like people and know how to deal with many different types of people.

Social Entrepreneurship: The New 21st Century Calling

Social entrepreneurship is an approach by start-up companies and entrepreneurs, in which they develop, fund and implement solutions to social, cultural, or environmental issues. The Camp in Aix has made social entrepreneurship a key part of their program. My students and I worked with Enactus, the international non-profit group which helps develop SE projects world-wide.

Silicon Valley Jerks And The Companies They Ruin

Auguste Rodin was an obsessive genius, horrid toward his family and other people. This type of personality has been evident throughout history. Silicon Valley high tech jerks have also been around for decades. The “bad” Steve Jobs is only one of many examples. A more recent example would Uber’s Travis Kalanick, whose behavior arguable has severely damaged Uber’s business and its IPO. The conundrum we face with these people is that once they are in place it can be very difficult to remove them.

Mayo615 Plans Live Interactive Webinars For French Tech Entrepreneurs

Now that I have a large number of weekly viewers, and subscribers, I want to use this update video to again offer a bit more about myself, and to give you advance notice of my plans for delivering more online streaming and live video content in the next few months. I am specifically looking for your feedback comments to assist me in making those plans most effective.

The Critical Need to Integrate The Humanities With Deep Technology

After watching “The Great Hack” on Netflix I am appalled by the absence of any moral compass at Cambridge Analytica, which transformed Big Data into a political weapon. Other disturbing examples are Uber’s former corporate culture and Facebook’s collusion with CA in abusing our privacy. These cases are prima facie evidence of the crucial need and the opportunity to integrate the Humanities and ethics with deep technology development. I began my career as a Humanities graduate at Intel Corporation working closely with Ivy League MBA’s and senior engineers. We shared our knowledge and learned together to enable the company to excel. The best companies are those grounded in an appreciation of human values, companies that seek out Humanities graduates with a passion for technology to balance out their teams.

The Critical Role of Corporate Culture

Last week I showed a graphic that at its center had the words “the critical role of corporate culture.” Entrepreneurs need to grasp those words as the very core of the formation and development of their new business. You have a unique opportunity to build the culture you want, to build your team and the values you want your entire team to share. The company will develop its own culture if you do nothing, so it is better to intentionally form it and nurture it.

Real Power and Influence

One of my Intel colleagues, a Harvard MBA told me a story of HBS students eager to take John Kotter‘s leadership class, at the time called “Power & Influence.” The students thought that Kotter’s course would teach them how to become calculating and ruthless. He amusingly remembered that Kotter’s course taught them the exact opposite: managers must first learn to be humble, connect and gain the respect of their colleagues and subordinates, before attempting to lead, or they would be doomed. Kotter’s book of the same name is filled with case studies of “ruthless” people who failed and those with humility who succeeded.

Shopify’s Tobias Lütke on Canada’s “go-for-bronze” mentality ironically echos long standing frustrations

Tobi has struck a vulnerable nerve with his painfully accurate comment that Canada has a cultural problem, a “go for the bronze” mentality.” He is not the first to point out Canada’s lack of clothing WRT commitment and investment in innovation and entrepreneurship. Canada frankly has never been keen on risk capital. It’s just not Canadian, eh? Tobi joins Richard Florida and other Canadians in making similar awkward observations. The greatest irony is that Tobi’s remark that we need an “Own the Podium” program for Canadian innovation, was first proposed by former UBC President Arvind Gupta in a Vancouver Sun editorial some 10 years ago. Predictably, nothing has happened since then, and nothing will likely happen now.