For any entrepreneur, the value of a mentor can almost never be overstated. Whether it’s building your business plan, defining your market, figuring out a product strategy, or trying to sell your spouse on the idea that giving up a steady paycheck from someone else is a sane thing to do, a mentor is one [ Read More ]
I love startups. I love the chaos. I love the insane hours. I love the energy. I love the types of people who are attracted to work on high-risk ideas with long odds. I love the culture that evolves around them. I love it all. I have spent my career hopping from one startup to [ Read More ]
Last week I wrote an opening rant about “strategists.” In the comments that ensued, I am now inspired to clarify what I mean while I continue to write this series. I am not talking about consultants who are hired to help hone and build out a strategic vision for an organization; nor am I talking [ Read More ]
Strategy is sexy. Operations is not. This is often a problem in the modern business world: everyone wants to be a strategist. Aside from being seen as the best place to get to experiment with the new, fun stuff, it’s also usually seen as the side of the business with all the perks — travel, [ Read More ]
I’ve had an interesting few weeks. My husband and I have been dealing with a lot of things at home, hence my absence from blogging for much of the past month, and I have started a new project with the New Media (a.k.a. “web”) team at KXAN-TV here in Austin. Between getting settled into the [ Read More ]
I had a couple of discussions this week that got me thinking back to the early days of my career. Aside from leaving me feeling older than I care to think about, it did spark a pleasant memory or two that I’ve been mulling over since. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how early career choices [ Read More ]
At South by Southwest, Brazen Careerist author and CEO Penelope Trunk was quite emphatic that, when starting a new business, having a geographically distributed team is rarely possible. She said this on her panel, as well as again when we spoke in person. She was a strong advocate of the notion that, for the first [ Read More ]
Today seems to be the opposite of my previous two days. After deliberately taking everyone’s advice on taking a ‘go with the flow’ approach to the SXSW experience, somehow today has proven crazy-ass busy. 10:30 panel: Beyond Aggregation This was a great panel where we got to hear wonderful speakers, including blogger Louis Gray, discuss [ Read More ]
As I look at job postings on Dice and Monster, I have been noticing a disturbing, yet unsurprising, trend emerge: an increase in the number of employers seeking candidates who can function as both project managers and development leads on projects. Naturally, difficult economic conditions demand a re-evaluation of spending habits. And, in cases where [ Read More ]
Last week I wrote that we are rarely good about telling the people in our lives how grateful we are, and, realizing that applied to me as well, I figured that this was as good an opportunity as any for me to correct that when it came to three important influences in my life. As [ Read More ]
I recently got a phone call from a dear friend who found herself very conflicted about an unexpected career opportunity that hit her from out of the blue. After a few minutes of talking, I was a little confused why she seemed to be so conflicted, because — with one or two minor exceptions — [ Read More ]
A recent study conducted by BlessingWhite shows that a full one-third of over 2,000 supervisors interviewed “don’t have time to coach” their direct reports. While I find nothing inherently surprising in that statistic, I do find the reasoning behind it fundamentally flawed: the reason that supervisors “don’t have time” is because they have not made [ Read More ]