John's Music Blog

I once visited a very successful technology integrator just outside of Boston.  Every Wednesday, the mother of the founder, who was Italian, would cook for the entire company.  At the time, they had more than one hundred employees.  What a feast!

If you want to launch a startup, and you want to recruit and retain high-quality, highly-motivated members for your team, it’s imperative that you take care of them.  Cash conservation is important, but food, really good food, can go a long way to keeping a team motivated.  After all, it can’t all be about the distant and potentially huge payoff.  Employees can’t eat options.  There’s got to be something it in for them today.  Which brings me to today’s post.  A friend directed me to their son’s blog: One Food Guy.  There are enough restaurant and recipe suggestions to keep an entire team of entrepreneurs motivated.   Check out the Andalusian crepes.  Hmm.  Is that my stomache growling?

I’m a couple of hundred pages into The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  In Taleb’s world view, The Black Swan can be the highly-improbable good event or the highly-improbable bad event, either of which has the ability to change the course of history.  He makes a good case for his statement that highly-improbable events have more impact on the world’s future than probable events.  I’m sorry, if that seems irrational.  But my recommendation is that you slug through the first 200 pages, as I did, and see if you reach a similar understanding.  (more…)

I wrote earlier today on leadership and The Five Temptations of a CEO, so it seemed an appropriate follow on to comment on an article about “followers” (as opposed to leaders) that I found in my morning newspaper.  The article, written by Barbara Kellerman, was a summary of her article  published in the Harvard Business Review and available here. 

She classifies followers into five types:

1. Isolates
2. Bystanders
3. Participants
4. Activists
5. Diehards

If you are the CEO of a startup or a business unit, you know the importance of picking the right leadership team.  But I wonder how much time you think about hiring the right kind of follower.  You might find a useful resource in this article.

I just finished reading The Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni.  If you’re a Facebook friend of mine, you might be confused, because my reading-list widget on Facebook tells you that I’m reading The Black Swan.

I actually didn’t know about Patrick’s book, until it was handed to me by my co-founder, David, who bought it as a present for a CEO we know pretty well. And I was totally prepared not to like it. After all, it’s only 132 pages and priced at $22.95. It seemed like a bit of pricing arrogance to me. But, hey, David bought the book. It was no skin off my back, if he wanted me to read it.  And sure, he could have bought it used for a couple of bucks, but whatever. (more…)

I had a call yesterday with a guy (I’ll call him Julio, because that isn’t his name) that is responsible for storage decisions at a very big company (I’ll call the company Acme, because that isn’t the company’s name).  I can’t name the company or the guy for reasons that are obvious to anyone who works in a large public company.   But I can share the gist of our conversation.  The part that is interesting to startups is the conversation we had around supplier management, environment complexity, and supplier support.

Julio’s at the end of a purchase decision cycle, and he told me which way he was going.  “We’re going with Sun, at least for now,” he said, “because they provide great service, we’ve worked with them for years, they understand our environment, and quite frankly, I don’t want to add another supplier.”  (more…)

Paul Gillin was kind enough to meet me for coffee on Friday morning.   Paul and I go back a long way.  He played a key role in the success of TechTarget, and I spoke at one of his first conferences, the highly influential Storage Decisions conference.  When we met for coffee this week, Paul  brought with him an autographed copy of his latest book,  The New Influencers , which I am reading, while on a 3-day holiday in Syracuse, New York.   Who wouldn’t want to be in Syracuse, the land of lake-effect snow, in the middle of winter?  But it’s a great place to go to catch up on reading.

 As part of my New Year’s resolution, I’m determined to become more engaged in the “new social media.”  There are a couple of reasons.  The first is that, while I have an enormous network of contacts, I need a more effective way to maintain communication.  The second is that, I have several clients that need a more effective way to reach potential customers and influencers than traditional marketing approaches provide.  (more…)

I’ve been reminded several times over the past nine months, that one of the most difficult decisions for any entrepreneur is knowing when to walk away.   Yet every entrepreneur is faced with at least four important opportunities to walk away, which, if done thoughtfully and expeditiously, will ultimately strengthen the company.  These are:

1. Walk away from the wrong customers
2. Walk away from the wrong investors
3. Walk away from the wrong employees
4. Walk away from the wrong partners

It may seem odd to talk about building a successful company, while walking away from any resource or opportunity, but, in fact that is often exactly what is needed.  This post focuses on customers.  But why would anyone walk away from a customer? (more…)

At the very kind invitation of my former IBM rep (I mean former as in two companies and 13 years ago, when I was an IT buyer spending multiple tens of millions of dollars on mainframe computers and storage each year and her youngest son wasn’t yet riding a bicycle, much less driving a car), I went to a seminar today hosted by Mainline.  I’ve been told Mainline is IBM’s largest value-added reseller.  I think it was someone at Mainline who told me that.  Anyway, the topic was VMWare’s Virtual Desktop. 

(more…)

I received the following message this weekend:

I received a failed delivery message because your mailbox was full. Here’s the email again. 

Mike

The failed delivery message to my potential client was courtesy of my internet service provider that provides my corporate email. Luckily this potential client also knew my personal gmail address and forwarded his company overview to that address for my review.  Shame on me.  I had not cleared Outlook or my corporate email service from the last 3 months of emails.  Yes, that’s right, 3 months. (more…)

I just finished re-reading “The Challenging Road, Nidec Policy and Nagamori-ism.”  Unfortunately, you probably can’t find a copy, at least not in the U.S.  I’ve checked eBay, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, and there are no copies available.  I got my copy from Crawford Del Prete, who befriended Yoichi Ichikawa, the former Executive Advisor to Shigenobu Nagamori, the CEO of Nidec Corporation, over the course of numerous trips to Japan. I assume that Crawford must have received several copies of Nagamori-san’s book,  because I know Crawford kept at least one, and I and several of my former colleagues each received a cherished copy from Crawford.  As I’ve started my own company, many of the policies and much of the philosophy have been very helpful.  But I would also like to share the ideas with the founders of some of the startups that I meet. So, Nagamori-san, if you are reading this, please let me know how I can get additional copies. (more…)