Innovation

As a former intrapreneur and current professor and entrepreneur, I’ve made a number of observations about innovation that I’d like to share.

AI Future. Teach students to think, not compute

Let’s Teach Students to Think NOT to Compute

With OpenAI and other LLM companies demonstrating the amazing potential of an AI future, It’s become an almost unavoidable question: what should we teach students. I hear all the time about bringing more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education to our schools. I watch (with horror) as some politicians and others try to shift …

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Moving On Up! How To Climb The Corporate Ladder

As my @Hultbiz class of 2016 gets ready to graduate later this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about what advice to give them about getting ahead professionally in an increasingly competitive world. I’d like to offer something beyond simple platitudes like “work hard,” “know what you want,” and “be your own advocate.”

Can We Control What People Think About Us?

The opinions other people form and adjust about us can be critical personally and professionally. People’s opinions of us give us our practical authority, our ability to influence and our ability to draw satisfaction from our work. Though we may often feel powerless to shape the opinions that others have of us, the truth is that we have much more influence than …

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3 Acts of Courage

My MBA start-up competition @hultbiz just finished. My best teams were awesome. Every team demonstrated plenty of inspiration and perspiration, but the best teams were willing to do a few very uncomfortable things that the average teams weren’t.

The perfectly wrong person to put in charge of building a new product

Many years ago, I created and delivered training for resellers of LiveVault, one of the first online backup services. At the time, what we were selling was very new and counterintuitive to most of our target customers. We were basically telling them that what they were doing and had been doing for many years (often …

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Nobody really hates marketing, but everyone hates BAD marketing (updated)

I’ve been struck by how many times I’ve heard people say – “I hate marketing” or “I hate being marketed to.”  While I’ve probably said the same thing myself, I feel myself nonetheless getting defensive. It makes me uneasy. I would argue that what they’re really saying is that they hate BAD marketing.  They dislike being …

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What do successful startup founders have in common?

As a group, startup founders are an incredibly diverse collection of people. If you were in a room with 50 randomly selected founders, you’d find yourself with people from every demographic group. They’d have many different skills and have had a wide variety of life experiences. Some would be introverts. Some would be extraverts. Some …

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Top 10 consulting tips

I’ve aggregated some observations I’ve made from working with a number of consultants and doing some consulting myself. These are focused on corporate management consulting, but are mostly applicable to any type of consulting.