It’s no secret that traditional training methods are generally boring, ineffective, and disconnected from the challenges that employees face on the job. As a result, it’s not uncommon for employees to tune out or forget much of what they’ve learned shortly after the training has ended. Yet the need for…

What is a high-performing team, and how does it differ from a merely ‘good’ team? The answer is four-fold: 1) In a high-performing team, members work together to generate ideas and solutions that are better than any one member of the team could have created by themselves. Put differently, they…

“What is the most important skill for me to develop to bring my company to the next stage?” This great question was put to me by a Series C scale-up CEO I recently started to work with. For the last decade, I’ve coached startup executives on building high-performance organizations (HPOs)…

Before all you execution-obsessed startup folks start throwing tomatoes, let me clarify my meaning. At a company-wide level, execution is everything: strategy and goal-setting don’t mean much if your organization can’t translate them into getting things done. Anyone who’s worked in a startup knows this. It seems logical, then, to…

If you’re working in a rapidly growing startup, chances are high that cross-functional collaboration isn’t as smooth or seamless as it was a few years back, when you were really small. There are frictions, and where these frictions have been going on for a while, you may see some silos…

Here in Southeast Asia, the vast majority of startup Founders are young and inexperienced, certainly compared to Silicon Valley. There aren’t many seasoned entrepreneurs to act as mentors…but that hasn’t stopped local Founders from building 40 unicorns in less than ten years! I’m impressed. How do they do it? Simple…

Imagine you’re Lex, an ambitious 31-year old software engineer with some good managerial experience. You’ve just been offered the role of Head of Engineering for a hot young series A start-up, reporting directly to the CEO, Meg. Naturally, you’re super pumped: this role puts you in the senior leadership position…

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You join your weekly update meeting, someone throws a slide deck up on the screen, and you spend the next hour combing through spreadsheets, graphs, and charts tracking all the KPIs you need to keep an eye on. There’s a lot of information to…

For the past ten years, I have helped startups and scale-ups build high-performance organizations (HPOs). It’s more than an occupation — it’s a preoccupation, maybe even an obsession, in part because there are still so many unanswered questions. Most experienced executives would know an HPO when they saw one, but…