Tag Archives | personal mastery

Just How Powerful Are You?

By on April 30, 2012 in Entrepreneurship, Market Power, The Personal Story

When you write online, no one checks to see if you have a journalism degree before they start to read. If you experience an earthquake and want to report on its danger or safety, no one asks your credentials before you report to Ushahidi. And if you were interested a creating a new company, you [...]

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Advice to Writers

By on April 17, 2012 in Entrepreneurship, The Personal Story

When I was in grad school, I had this habit to clean the house to avoid the act of studying. I would study with some amount of focus for 20 minutes, and then go scrub the tub and so on. Someone could have created a barometer of sorts for how near it was to Test [...]

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Quiet: Understanding & Celebrating Introverts

By on March 29, 2012 in Culture & Leadership

The last few weeks I’ve been as limp as a lettuce leaf that had stayed a few weeks too long in the fridge. This is not unusual. It is what happens if / when I do back to back events / workshops/ etc. I end up putting so much energy into the world to be [...]

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What Ideas Are You Fighting For?

By on December 9, 2011 in Entrepreneurship

Leadership always operates at two levels. There is the immediate and perhaps even pragmatic stuff of leadership – who is in charge, what responsibilities do they own, what defines the shape of their arena. We spend a lot of time paying attention to this stuff, in all domains – work, economies, and especially now during [...]

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Courage Does Not Roar

By on December 8, 2011 in Entrepreneurship, The Personal Story

Today, I was in a room full of remarkable people, making a list of what qualities make someone remarkable. The predictable elements were listed: Hard-working Resourceful Creative Intelligent/ Smart Organized… After 15 or so elements were listed on the post-it board… courageous was added to the list. When you are courageous (or fearless, bold – [...]

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Kill the Meetings

By on November 21, 2011 in Entrepreneurship

After coming off a 6-month sabbatical from Apple, I returned to work at about 5:30 am, cleared my inbox by 8 a.m. (hey, it was 1994 – this was still humanly possible, back then). By 8:30, I was sitting bright and cheery in the conference room for the regular weekly kickoff meeting that our work [...]

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The Stories We Tell Ourselves

By on October 24, 2011 in Entrepreneurship

When we invite people over at the house, we notice many of our friends have an interesting way of talking about themselves. “I suck at that”. “No way can my company grow given these market conditions” “I’ll never make it”. “It’s never gonna happen because of (these million, ever changing reasons)” “Every time I try [...]

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Resentment, Resilience and Rebounding

By on September 12, 2011 in Entrepreneurship

“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 [...]

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The Kick In the Pants

By on September 6, 2011 in Entrepreneurship

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 [...]

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The Seasons

By on September 3, 2011 in Entrepreneurship

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 [...]

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