Tag: Assessment

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News You Can Use: Best CEOs Recruited from Inside?

Results announced yesterday of 20-year study by Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business in conjunction with AT Kearney found that companies that exclusively promote CEOs from within the ranks – as opposed to hiring outsiders – routinely outperform companies that hire CEOs from outside the firm.

The finding, I’d suggest, should hardly be any surprise. Organizational leaders have four or five hurdles to clear to be effective in organizations; effectiveness with colleagues, direct reports, and bosses (CEOs, investors, boards of directors), sector proficiency, managing change and organizational culture.… Read the rest

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What Do You Do When There’s Tension at the Top?

There are three well-known West Coast asset management firms (financial services speak for mutual funds, venture capital, private equity, hedge funds, or fund of funds firms) – none of them clients – where the firm’s leadership team members barely tolerate each other.

They talk when they must. Otherwise they minimize their working relationships as much as possible.

The firms make money. … Read the rest

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Business Life: The Problem with Women

There is a problem with women in business. Symptoms are everywhere.

And where you expect it the least given the perceived meritocracy – high technology – it appears to be the most present.

“Is the ‘Mommy Track’ Still Taboo?” blared a headline in the Wall Street Journal this week.

That piece follows the Journal’s post “Addressing The Lack of Women Leading Tech Start-Ups” that noted that only 11% of U.S.… Read the rest

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Life & Death Lessons for Startups

There are lessons that some startups learn after they’ve crashed, and mistakes that successful startups either learn early or avoid making.

If you want to be successful as a startup, learn these lessons early – or be very lucky and avoid them.

Lunch yesterday with my friend and colleague Dr. Jo Whitehouse – a rockstar in the startup world – highlighted two of them.… Read the rest

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[Life Back West] March 2011 – “Flatopup”

Our 8 1/2 year old son Traylor seems finally settled on a transitional object.

The Peanuts’ cartoon character Linus has his omnipresent blanket; my little big guy has Flatopup.

Flatopup took hold after a number of other alternatives were considered and then discarded. When Traylor was in preschool my spouse and I were convinced that his friend Emma – another child of a non traditional (single mom) and adoptive family – was his transitional object, the enduring item in his preschool life that enabled him to go through any number of other changes with the sense of a constant at this side.… Read the rest

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(Mere) Talent Takes a Beating

Malcolm Gladwell had Sandy Nininger. I have March Madness. The results are the same.

Mere talent is taking a beating.

Gladwell’s writings – built in part on the work of people like Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth – have shown that raw talent – smarts as we like to say in the business world – is overrated.

Gladwell demonstrated in The Talent Myth that hiring by collegiate pedigree – shorthand for smart – gave us the Enron fiasco (with McKinsey & Co’s significant backing).… Read the rest