Grade A Entrepreneurs

In a recent powwow, I was asked about my takeaway for entrepreneurs from the Winter Olympics. As I was starting to discuss the make-up of a champion, mentally ranking key characteristics, I changed gears and realized that what struck me the most, ultimately, was the victory of Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo in pair figure skating. Not [...]

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We are so used to doing everything via the Internet that we think we have paid our dues when we paypal a donation, or inform all our friends of what’s happening around us via our social networks. Yet, we need to continue to help in the real world and to make sure that we volunteer [...]

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I had a cup of coffee at Il Fornaio earlier this week with Olivia Fox Cabane. The short story is this: she is a consultant, speaker and leadership coach who has worked with a number of large corporations such as Deloitte, Citigroup, or Veracity Worldwide. She has given lectures at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, MIT and [...]

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Last week at a famous bookstore chain, the young lady at the cash register asked me if I had a coupon. “Yes,” I said. “It should show on my account.” “No, it doesn’t work that way,” she replied tersely. “You have to print it.” “Kind of a waste of paper,” I remarked. “It’s not my [...]

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Guest writer: Mark Vernon
Warner Bros Studios in Burbank : This past summer my son Gage and I had the pleasure of taking a tour of the Warner Bros Studios in Burbank. Unlike the glitzy Universal Studios Tours, at Warner they put you in an electric golf cart and drive you around the studios like a star, not [...]

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In her book, The New How, Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy, published by O’Reilly, Nilofer Merchant addresses a difficult topic: the common discrepancy between what is called “strategy” in the one hand, and what is labeled “execution,” on the other. In between, you have what she calls the “air sandwich.” The gap is not [...]

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I had lunch with Dominique Gibert earlier this week at one of my favorite Parisian haunts, the Brasserie Lipp, Boulevard Saint-Germain.
Dominique is the founder of Diateino, the French publisher of Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and Reality Check as well as of Seth Godin’s Tribes, three books that I translated for her. She [...]

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When famous CEOs tell their stories, you are never quite sure if they their goal is self-aggrandizement or an authentic desire to recount something that will be of real interest to others. Marc Benioff has lots of reasons to be very proud of accomplishments, but his book Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com [...]

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It is simply a great pleasure to step into a class of some eighty highly motivated students: when I asked who planned to start a company one day, at least half of them raised their hands!
The name of the course for which I was a guest speaker is “Leadership and Networking,” taught by Bob Lowry. [...]

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Written by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust is for everybody, including folks who think that they have already achieved the status of being “trust agents,” and who believe they know all the ropes and tricks of the social media business. I say this from [...]

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