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. …
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. …
Why do we have meetings?
No, that’s not a rhetorical question. I’m not bemoaning the time wasted in pointless meetings — I’m talking about good meetings, meetings that actually need to happen.
Those meetings are all about solving problems. Brainstorming, generating fresh ideas, going beyond the work individuals can do…
Imagine you’ve just been hired as the new sales director of a billion-dollar software company. It’s big and growing, but behind the flashy revenue numbers, the business is actually under-performing. …
Is your organization like a machine that needs programming? Or a community to nurture?
Every startup founder hopes to build a high-performance organization.
The question is, how do you do it?
Well, running an organization efficiently is a lot like programming a complex machine. You need each part of the…
Think back to the birth of your startup. All the way back to the very beginning, when there were just a few of you.
Exciting times, right? It was all hands on deck, a whirlwind of ideas and activity fueled by pure creativity and adrenaline. Everything happened fast — new…
In a previous post, I wrote about the point in the scaling journey where too many CEOs fail miserably: the transition from a stage 2 to a stage 3 CEO.
Stage 3 CEOs are leading companies that have reached Series C or beyond and probably have well over two hundred…
I was recently chatting with the CHRO of a highly successful tech startup. She has helped them grow from 500 to 2,000 people in less than two years — effectively doubling their size each year.
Every ambitious startup wishes they could do that. That kind of growth is how you…
It’s hard to be great when you don’t know what great looks like.
Before Roger Bannister became the first person to run a mile in under four minutes, the consensus was that this feat was physically impossible. …
To build a unicorn, your people need to perform at their best — even in the heat of battle
Almost by definition, the conversations that matter the most to both the company’s performance (productivity) and each individual’s experience (positivity) are the super-stressful ones… and it’s a lot harder to learn…
