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Too many customers have long felt distanced from many successful brands, seeing them as closed and mysterious environments, focused only on profits and killing competitors. They may not have noticed the wave of “open businesses,” spawned by the Internet and social media. These are responding to the Read More

Perhaps sparked by the recent pandemic, I’m seeing a new era of the entrepreneur, with startups springing up all around. Based on my own mentoring and investing experience, the best entrepreneurs are pragmatic problem solvers. They have an uncanny ability to find elegant, easy, and fast solutions t Read More

Every entrepreneur can learn from a mentor, no matter how confident or successful they have been to date. Most people don’t know that billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, for example, gives real credit to the inspiring mentorship of Steve Jobs for Mark’s Facebook success. Yet most entrepreneurs simply don’ Read More

As a long-time mentor to new entrepreneurs and business owners, I have noticed that many no longer associate more fulfillment and satisfaction with more money, power, and success. It seems that fulfillment to these new entrepreneurs is all about changing the world and legacy. In fact, customers tod Read More

In my experience with business leaders, real innovation thinking is rare, compared to the urge to add just one more feature to an existing product, or make a small tweak to an existing business model. I call this linear thinking, and it’s a sure way to be ultimately overrun by your competition. I’m Read More

Every one of you business leaders I know struggles with the competing demands of finding and keeping employees motivated and satisfied, versus building and enforcing a set of repeatable processes that work. Obviously, both are required for a company to stay healthy and growing. In my experience, pr Read More

A perfect storm is an expression that describes an event where a rare combination of circumstances aggravates an environment drastically. In the entrepreneur world, I feel we are in such a situation now for new startups, with the confluence of business transformations, the explosion of new digital Read More

Real innovation in the business world is still rare. As I’ve said before, everyone talks about innovation, but the majority of new business plans I see still reflect linear thinking – one more social network with more features, another smartphone app for marketing, or one more platform for faster e Read More

Throughout my career in small companies and large, I’ve always been appalled by the number of people who have a negative attitude or complain all the time. These people don’t seem to realize that they are hurting themselves, as well as other people’s productivity, and jeopardize the future of the c Read More

In my many years of experience in large businesses as well as startups, a key lesson I have learned is that personal leadership is most often the differentiator between success and mediocrity or failure. Building and running a business requires a team of business leaders, not just one creative geni Read More