LEADERSHIP

A founder who had built a successful company over several decades hired me to coordinate the CTO, marketing function, and development team for a new technology venture. He wanted to spend only an hour or two each week on the startup and expected the organization to...

The Chairman’s Documentation Rule I Initially Resisted Sometimes we learn from our clients. This one was right. I was serving as Interim CEO for a tech company building a web application, and my role included hiring a number of agencies, devs, and designers....

I served as interim CTO for a startup developing a consumer product for families. The founder was analytically minded, but several product decisions rested on his personal beliefs about how households make decisions and which features would motivate different users....

A pre-revenue founder hired me to prepare his company for an investment raise. He had written a business plan dozens of pages long. I told him we needed to get the story down to ten slides in ten minutes. The Conversation In the course of interviewing him, I asked a...

Early in my career, I was selling optimization software to a large industrial company. The CFO arranged a meeting with several senior vice presidents whose divisions would be affected by the system. None could approve the purchase alone, but any of them could probably...