Continuations

As a board member I am often actively engaged in helping to recruit new hires to a company. A lot of people have written about the importance of cultural fit. I want to add the idea of “mission desire” to the characteristics companies should look for. That’s not just true for companies that would self identify as mission driven (as in having a social component to their business) but all companies. By mission desire I mean a candidate’s desire to work in this particular domain and on the speci...

Yesterday, Yahoo fired CEO Carol Bartz. Whether or not you agree with that, one thing is clear: firing someone over the phone is wrong. Much as it may be difficult this is a message that should be delivered in person if at all possible (for a remote contractor might have to use Skype). Hearing that Bartz was fired over the phone reminded me not just of “Up In the Air” but also of struggles with firing that I have encountered myself. Firing is probably the hardest thing to do and I was terribl...

One of the things that’s particularly difficult in being a startup board member is striking the right balance between supporting a founder CEO and listening to other people from the organization. It is possible to err on either side – undermining a CEO’s leadership by giving too much weight to complaints; or ignoring/not knowing about complaints for too long so that actual problems become very hard to fix. I have personally made both mistakes as a director! The first step in trying to get thi...