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The ultimate compliment that any entrepreneur can get is that they can “see around corners.” This is a statement that they are willing and able (and successful) at projecting market and technology turns, not just straight-line innovations. They have the courage to make bold decisions, often contrar Read More

Starting a new venture still costs real money, even though the entry price has come down dramatically in last few decades. For example, I come from a software background, and back in the early PC days, it could easily cost half a million dollars for a team of professionals to produce a commercial p Read More

The challenge for all of us in business is to improve competitiveness by improving employee productivity and reducing costs. According to Gartner, one of the biggest drags on productivity is employee engagement, still hovering around 30 percent, and costing our businesses over $450 billion per year Read More

Entrepreneurs often have formidable technical expertise, key to developing a new product or service, but a great naïveté in management skills. They run into difficulty when their business reaches the $1-2 million annual sales range, or their employee count exceeds 5-10. It’s here that entrepreneurs Read More

The majority of business professionals I meet these days accept that we are now deep in the digital age, where mountains of data are gathered on everything we do, online and offline. Yet most executives are struggling with how to harness this data with artificial intelligence and machine learning, Read More

Based on my own business experience of many years on both sides of the owner-employee role, I believe that one of the quickest ways to improve your employee career is to think like an owner. Conversely, the best owners are those who relate to the positions of their employees. I’m convinced that is Read More

The Internet and social media have totally destroyed the meaning of the word “friend” and even changed it from a noun to a verb. On Twitter and Facebook, many young people follow hundreds of friends before age twenty, all without ever having physically said or heard a word from most of them. Facebo Read More

One of the things I have learned the hard way over my years in business, and in advising others, is that it takes more than passion, creativity, and hard work to start and grow a business. A key skill that many of you don’t appreciate is the ability to effectively manage the negotiations that come Read More

With all the progress in analytical tools and big data available, many people feel there is no place in business today for intuition and gut instincts. As an advisor to entrepreneurs for many years, I strongly disagree, and still see the value of at least combining intuition with logical analysis, Read More

their marketing needs to be more interactive, versus the traditional “push” model, where you broadcast your message to as many people as possible. New generations of customers respond better to the “participative” approach, where they get to provide input via social media and the Internet. Read More