Terry Starbucker

SEPTEMBER 16, 2012

Passion - The best way to figure out the importance of this one is to recall a time in one’s life or career where it didn’t exist – that happened to me, and it’s like draining all the oil out of an engine and still trying to go 100 miles an hour. This curiosity has pushed me forward in opening up my world to new ideas and experiences.

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Succession Leadership Morale Mentor 325

Terry Starbucker

MAY 4, 2014

In 2005, she started the seminal blog “ Escape from Cubicle Nation ”, which quickly became, and still is, one of the top career and business blogs on the web (and one of the inspirations for this site). In the last 8 years, she helped hundreds of entrepreneurs to start successful businesses.

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Succession Storytelling How To Blog 279

Terry Starbucker

JUNE 12, 2011

I’ve spent way too much time in my career trying to “ferret out&# truths. In fact, the reason why that scene from “A Few Good Men&# is so burned in my cranium is that in my career I’ve had to utter “I want the truth!&# It’s the quickest road to efficiency ever devised.

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Career Efficiency Team System 314

Terry Starbucker

JANUARY 13, 2013

2) Offer your employees a nontraditional career path that is based on their contributions and value-based behaviors, and not on their age or credentials. Not only does this approach ensure that employees give their best to the project, but it also provides opportunities for career growth based on smarts and competence, not on credentials.

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CEO Word of Mouth Marketing Leadership IPO 335

Terry Starbucker

NOVEMBER 20, 2016

I’ve experienced that plenty of times in my career, at one moment preaching about a “BHAG” – the Big, Hairy Audacious Goal – and just a few moments later drilling down and coming to terms on a missed quarterly target) .

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BHAG Company Short-term Long-term 391

Terry Starbucker

MAY 26, 2013

They may change shifts or make lateral moves in a company or industry to work for bosses who can become influential leaders in their lives” Note “in their lives” Not just “in their jobs” The happy worker connects the career with a fulfilled life, and a more human leader recognizes that.

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Leadership Consultative Project Industry 405

Terry Starbucker

APRIL 8, 2018

Over my career I figured out that too much complexity in an organization, and too much data, can hamper the doers. In the business world, if you are a decision-maker, above all else you need to trust yourself. Lastly, there’s the fourth element – organizational and structural simplicity.

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COO Analysis Sports Learning-by-Doing 306

Terry Starbucker

FEBRUARY 26, 2012

At that stage of my career, I was hungry for guidance on what it took to be a great leader. It was 1987, and I had just started my first big executive job at a Cable TV company in Los Angeles. As fate would have it, I was sitting in my boss’s office one morning, and my eyes happened to wander towards a poster hanging on the wall.

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Leadership Course Career Execution 419

Terry Starbucker

NOVEMBER 4, 2012

I bet you’ve probably been in one of those workplaces sometime in your career (I certainly have, and if you haven’t, consider yourself one of the lucky ones). To put these must-dos in perspective, imagine yourself as a staff employee, in a workplace without mutual trust, consistent leadership, or any real inspiration to aspire.

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Leadership Micromanagement Consensus Learning-by-Doing 416

Terry Starbucker

JUNE 30, 2013

Up to that point it had been an uneventful start to my career, since the summer is a slow time for most accounting groups. My career is toast, and I just got out of school!” It was the fall of 1982. I was 3 months out of college, working for an accounting firm in San Antonio. “What if I fail?

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Power CPA Career Mentor 321

Terry Starbucker

MAY 18, 2014

His “ chocolate and peanut butter ” moment in his career when he left a high-paying Silicon Valley job, and created the Taproot Foundation. So far, they’ve delivered over $128 Million in pro-bono services. Highlights of our chat: Why Aaron has “a thing” about Post-It notes.

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Succession Globalization Entrepreneur Technology 278

Terry Starbucker

NOVEMBER 30, 2014

I experienced this personally in my corporate career. In other words, we can’t put the business cart before the leadership horse. The leadership part HAS to come first. EVERY time. Early on, I put the business first, and it was a totally unproductive and unfulfilling experience.

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Welch Leadership Competitive Advantage Simon 320

Terry Starbucker

JUNE 19, 2016

I have lived these simple truths throughout my career, and they have never let me down. And Love is the overdrive that pulls our fortress of credibility into the rarified air of a higher and meaningful purpose as it reaches the pinnacle. I believe in them.

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Metrics Leadership Download Positioning 150

Terry Starbucker

JULY 26, 2015

I saw firsthand how that kind of management worked when I started my career, and the way it bred dissatisfaction and a lack of respect. I had succumbed to this more than a few times over the course of my career, especially on the personnel side. We needed to teach, and put the “why” behind our actions and policies.

Leadership 150

Leadership Micromanagement Policies Learning-by-Doing 150

Terry Starbucker

SEPTEMBER 21, 2014

Thinking about Teddy’s “ Man in the Arena ” also brought to mind how I’ve effectively used other famous leadership quotes in my career – here are 9 more quotes that have served me well over the years, and the context in which I’ve used them.

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Team Leadership How To Strategic Planning 403

Terry Starbucker

JUNE 17, 2012

At that point I thought my career was over. Because it’s true – what doesn’t kill your career makes you stronger. I then launched into my “pitch”, and it was disjointed, meandering, ineffective – and probably not even heard. It was so embarrassing. But there was one more embarrassment to come.

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Audience Letter Career Definition 296

Terry Starbucker

MAY 6, 2018

I’ve spent a long career seeing countless new supervisors struggling mightily with the idea of actually “managing” a staff – setting priorities, communicating the company vision, motivating, holding people accountable, and delivering the necessary coaching and corrections. More specifically, the leadership training.

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Team Building Team Training Metrics 175

Terry Starbucker

AUGUST 14, 2016

You can easily derail any career momentum by being MIA when called upon, nose down in your last Tweet about the movie you saw last night. I know it’s really, really, really hard these days to put down the handheld and stay away from texts, E-mail, Twitter or Facebook, especially on conference calls, but when the boss is talking, stay focused.

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Conference Crisis Tips Career 261

Terry Starbucker

MARCH 30, 2014

I dove in, sifting through all the great resources that the internet has to offer, as well as tapping into the concepts I had accumulated during my business career. It was curiosity that propelled me past the fear.

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Workshop Audience Price Learning-by-Doing 304

Terry Starbucker

NOVEMBER 25, 2012

” I’ve heard this sentence a few times in my career, spoken about great leaders I have known and respected. “Wow, they would walk through a brick wall for that guy!” I’ve even uttered it myself on a couple of occasions.

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Team Collins Leadership Active Listening 392

Terry Starbucker

DECEMBER 27, 2015

Fortunately, (way, way back in 1982) I started my career as a CPA and auditor, and I learned about this thing called “ Professional Skepticism “. But swallow it I did, and I rushed into my career with my skepticism meter cranked up to 10, expecting to ferret out any fraud that came my way.

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CPA Webinar Real Estate Banking 150

Terry Starbucker

FEBRUARY 9, 2014

Rich has a fascinating backstory – he found his career calling at age 13, when he typed in a two-line program into a Teletype and the computer came back and typed back “HI RICH”.

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Software Sharpe Storytelling Magazine 277

Terry Starbucker

APRIL 8, 2012

That was a famous quote from George Bernard Shaw, and it has always stuck with me throughout my career as a leader and executive. “ Success Covers a Multitude of Blunders ”. What it ultimately told me was yes, I was going to fail – multiple times.

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Shaw Consensus Cost Human Needs 417

Terry Starbucker

JULY 8, 2012

I took that child out in the workplace more than a few times in the course of my leadership career, and I’m glad I did. I like to go back there every now and then, and bring that child out to play. And not just in my personal life.

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Sample Metrics Sports Career 326

Terry Starbucker

DECEMBER 15, 2013

Indecision is a pet-peeve, and most of my biggest professional frustrations over my 31-year career involved situations where there was too much dithering over making a decision. Dithering creates inertia, and inertia is a business-killer.

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Leadership Content Mentor Career 358

Terry Starbucker

FEBRUARY 10, 2013

I’ve considered myself a “hard charger” throughout my professional career – I’ve gone many years where I didn’t take the vacations that I was entitled to, or worse, turned a few vacations into remote work sessions.

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Leadership Analysis Productivity Products 406

Terry Starbucker

OCTOBER 12, 2014

And, we knew this was a rare thing that might not ever be duplicated – something that we’d look back on as a special part of our lives and careers. We enjoyed working with each other through thick and thin, with honesty, integrity, and empathy.

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Metrics Reference Career Team 270

Terry Starbucker

DECEMBER 4, 2016

I’ve been fortunate enough over the course of my 34-year career to have arrived at what I call the leadership summit – a high place of great business success and personal satisfaction, and a fulfilling culmination of years of effort, determination, and dedication.

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Leadership Mission Statement Metrics Survey 150

Terry Starbucker

MARCH 24, 2013

Have you been in the Mediocre Zone? I’ve been there several times in my career, and it was brutal. You’ve entered the “ Mediocre Zone” All because your boss was looking over your shoulder. Just thinking about it brings back that tension [I could feel my shoulders crunching up as I typed that sentence].

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Micromanagement Career Environment Process 288

Terry Starbucker

APRIL 17, 2014

I have been in those positions in my career, asking that same question after a big mistake: To Fire Or Not To Fire? Because firing that person wasn’t going to change what happened, OR really go a significant distance towards making sure the mistake doesn’t happen again.

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Leadership Airlines Company Career 275

Terry Starbucker

SEPTEMBER 8, 2013

I can also tell you that it ran in my head more than a few times during my leadership career – and I was really glad for it. I was happy to have a nemisis. I needed a nemisis. They were catalysts for me, and I wouldn’t have been as succesful without them.

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Resistance Stress Goal Career 281

Terry Starbucker

FEBRUARY 16, 2014

There was no longer any such thing as “can’t” What a difference it made, in my career, and in my life. “We’ll find a way” “Attaboy!” ” And that was that. “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…… “ I did.

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Franchising Budgeting Engineering Learning-by-Doing 318

Terry Starbucker

JULY 8, 2018

I’ve seen Jerry and George’s story play out many, many times over the course of my career, and for those leaders (including myself) that were brave enough to do let a poor performer go, the magical math almost always played out to that productivity gain. Such is the productivity drag when a leader hangs on too long with a poor performer.

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Morale Productivity Products Skills 171

Terry Starbucker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2013

Indeed, these are short cuts on our leadership map, and early on in my career, I fell to temptation and tried just about all of them. Teaching by saying things only once. Assuming people know what you are thinking without telling them.

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Short-term Leadership Long-term Policies 319

Terry Starbucker

JANUARY 22, 2012

It was the “right stuff” of physical stamina, courage and (a lot) of ego that put those men on top of a rocket, and as I moved forward with my chosen career in the business world, I realized that there was also a blend of “right stuff” necessary to climb to the top of the leadership mountain.

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Armstrong Leadership Quality Career 357

Terry Starbucker

DECEMBER 21, 2014

Call me an eternal optimist, call me a fool, but it’s the best way to live one’s life AND have an awesome and fulfilling career with the least amount of angst. So, with that, let me amend that Post #1 line in the sand: Yes, I’m a more human leader with a glass half-full. OK, that should be good for another 9 years.

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Leadership Blog Influence Career 254

Terry Starbucker

AUGUST 26, 2012

” I used to hear this early in my career and feel pretty satisfied about it – after all, someone was praising me for getting the job done. And who doesn’t want to be praised? “Good Job!” Later on, I became a leader and discovered the real hazards of those two little words.

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Metrics Incentives Morale Career 275