While there are many things worth celebrating of Steve Jobs’ life, the greatest gift Steve gave us is a way to design our own lives. Steve Jobs was known for being a design god who sweated experience, and pixels and, well, everything. “Design,” he once said, “is a funny word. Some people think design means [...]
Archive | Entrepreneurship
What’s Your ScoreBoard?
During my first marriage, I thought the goal was to stay married. In jobs, I thought the goal was to get promoted to the next big title/level/responsibility. When I used to seriously run, I thought it was all about completing a marathon. This lens on life caused a vise-like grip onto certain outcomes. The wrong [...]
Resentment, Resilience and Rebounding
“It’s them, not me”. That’s effectively what Carol Bartz, former CEO of Yahoo (YHOO), has been saying in the few days since she’s been fired. Well, she said it more “colorfully” than that to Fortune’s Patricia Sellers: “These people f—ed me over,” she says, in her first interview since her dismissal from the CEO role [...]
The Kick In the Pants
I felt his foot so far up my butt that I could practically taste the leather. All the way from Oakland to our end destination of Los Gatos, he went on and on. And when traffic hit us, and slowed us down to a crawl, I almost wept from the agony of more time on [...]
The Seasons
This weekend traditionally marks the threshold between the summer of rest, and the fall of new fruition. When people lived on farms, the lore goes, you knew what season you were in. You were either doing the hard work of planting your seeds, or tending them as they grew, or celebrating the harvest itself and [...]
5 Ways to Take Advice
“What do you do?” When I was starting a consulting company called Rubicon back in 1999, my nephew wanted to know what I did for a living. Having just finished running a division of a company where I was responsible for setting and delivering on a specific measurable result, I noticed I was having a [...]
First Days
The walk to school this crisp morning involved little girls dressed in some very stylish ballerina-style sequined skirts, incredibly crisp white shirts with clean new shoes, and a palpable exuberance. Kids who were grunting at each other at the end of last year were hugging with joy at their reunion. But besides those few moments, [...]
Be Unhappy
When you want to be healthy, you could focus on the good stuff you want; maybe you work out and eat healthy to have toned arms, or firm abs, or even a certain weight on the scale. But if you are unhealthy today and you are going to change your habits, you have to first [...]
Normalcy is a Unicorn
We want to be normal. We want to fit in. We all do. Just last week, as I was packing for my first Board of Director meeting, I couldn’t decide what one wore to a BoD meeting, and got all befuddled. In this small way, and in many big ways, we show how much we [...]
Release Ideas Into The Wild
Sometimes I hold onto ideas as mine alone, almost as if I might have held onto my first baby blanket – tightly – for fear I might lose it. When I came to meetings early in my career, I came into meetings more wanting to show the idea, than share the idea. But at some [...]