CEO Blog

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

His thesis is that most businesses sell in the $10-30M range so it is best for angel investors to push for a sale at that point which can provide a great return for the angels and for the entrepreneurs rather than holding on, raising VC funds and trying for the big IPO or $100M+ sale. It is managements job to make them above average.

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CEO Blog Blue Ocean Strategy Exit Strategy 189

N2Growth Blog

FEBRUARY 8, 2019

Maybe you’re prepping for the IPO. If people still need to come to you for instructions on how to do something, that’s a sign that you need a clearly stated process so that anyone designated to handle a task can handle that task. You’re not managing your energy well. Effective time management begins with good energy management.

Delegation 201

Delegation Maturity CEO Execution 201

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 16, 2018

With billions of dollars poised to change hands and the spotlight on, Nasdaq managers scrambled to diagnose the problem, dialing into an emergency conference call to troubleshoot. Despite the check’s warning that something was amiss, managers decided to push forward anyway. But when 11:05 arrived, nothing happened. Learn to stop.

Crisis 11

Crisis IPO Film How To 11

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 24, 2015

Conversely, the business may be an “unpolished diamond” that was neglected by its former management for too long and whose value is just waiting to be unlocked. Does the business have a complete, balanced, and cohesive management team? Are the management team and owners prepared to abandon business as usual?

Chemicals 8

Chemicals How To Kahneman Reputation 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 30, 2014

But sometimes, executives manage to overcome all of these structural challenges and push the right types of ideas regardless of the barriers. The typical enterprise software startup that IPOs is at least 7 years old (to say nothing of those that try and fail). In the year before Google IPO’d, it did about $962 million in revenue.

Long-term 11

Long-term Innovation Company IPO 11

Harvard Business Review

JULY 21, 2014

Here’s how to create a persuasive pitch. That could mean illustrating the effects of a proposed customer management system with testimonials from actual customers, or describing how the data-sharing project you want to expand helped keep employees connected during a major outage. Craft an emotional story. The price tag?

IPO 9

IPO Audience Chief Information Officer Case Study 9

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 30, 2016

If you want your business to grow sustainably at scale, you need to figure out how to make big investments that will best differentiate you in your core. “Talent management is easily over a third of all executive time when you count it all,” one long-standing company employee told us about how the company is run.

Supply Chain 14

Supply Chain Company IPO Talent Management 14

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 9, 2018

Tom often hogs the spotlight in meetings unaware of how that alienates his peers. And…well…I don’t know how to put this, but he has noticeable body odor that’s a real turnoff.” Take Jim, a front-runner CFO candidate for a leading medical device manufacturer on the verge of an IPO.

Career 15

Career CFO Sample Execution 15

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 3, 2012

Such regulations, if they succeed in increasing the information flow between managements and markets, are also good news for investors in general. Individual investors should be disabused of the notion that investing in IPOs like Groupon's is a safe and responsible path to financial security.

IPO 10

IPO Conflict of Interest Information Marketing 10

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 31, 2014

It’s still the users whose creating and sharing gives Twitter its value as a business, but their activities are now mostly channeled and managed by the company itself. billion in its 2013 IPO) that investors have plowed into it. Could Twitter have chosen not to follow the standard VC-to-IPO path that has brought it to this pass?

Marketing 9

Marketing IPO Venture Capitalist Fashion 9

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 10, 2013

After all, China produces 600,000 engineering graduates each year, and as a former Google product manager I thought knew how to attract them. When I started recruiting talent for my new company, before candidates asked about our strategy, they asked how much money we had. They wanted to know what my plans were for IPO.

Engineering 9

Engineering IPO Real Estate Price 9

Decker Communication

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

And to succeed in today’s ever-changing, tech-enabled, global business climate, all leaders need to know how to influence. Ken Blanchard is a friend of mine (and the very successful author of The One Minute Manager ) who knows well the changes in leadership over the last 40 years.

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Decentralization Blanchard IPO Call Center 81

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 2, 2016

In classic microeconomic terms, where firms previously focused on how best to manage transaction costs, platforms require top management to creatively cultivate transaction surplus. How should leaderships invest to make their users – not just their platforms – measurably better?

IPO 8

IPO Human Capital Insurance Business Model 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 4, 2016

But as a venture scales and becomes more complex , more operational and commercial sophistication is required to manage it. Also, there is a difference between managing scale and getting to scale. Founders tend to use their personal charisma and technical smarts to rally their teams, and that can work while a business is small.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist Sample IPO Long-term 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 7, 2016

” When a data breach happens, there is nothing worse than trying to figure out how to manage the crisis on the fly as it is still happening. Here’s a generalized scenario similar to cases we’ve experienced: A hot new mobile technology company lands one of the most successful IPOs of the year.

Planning 9

Planning Company Crisis Brand 9

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 30, 2017

This work underlines how, to succeed, the new Uber CEO must move quickly to win at both the inner and outer games of growth. However, after its IPO, Amazon’s losses were in the millions, not the billions. Win at the Inner Game: Rid the Company of Barriers to Growth.

CEO 12

CEO IPO Energy COO 12

Harvard Business Review

MAY 16, 2016

As if that weren’t tough enough, another challenge for corporate leaders is how to make sense of strategic alignment at both the team / business unit level (or division or department, however it is classified) and at the enterprise level. How well does your organization support the achievement of your business strategy?

Banking 14

Banking Strategy Film Operations 14

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 12, 2011

For HBR's April issue on failure, I penned a piece on the experience of going through a failed IPO. Second, for a book we're writing on the DNA of entrepreneurship, my co-authors Richard Harrington, Tsun-yan Hsieh, and I have developed a checklist on how to reflect on failure. In one context or another, you've likely failed, too.

Short-term 15

Short-term Long-term IPO Middle Management 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 24, 2013

I know how to find great people to hire. It was the CEO''s incredible persistence (and experience) in all aspects of selling — sales organization, compensation, pipeline management, and selling skills — that not only saved Voltaire from oblivion, but eventually propelled it to a NASDAQ IPO.

Entrepreneur 8

Entrepreneur IPO Open-book Marketing 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 31, 2013

Consider slide 5, which highlights just how much advertising opportunity there is on mobile devices ( if only we could figure out how to do that ). And think about how your personality shines through in your tweets. BONUS BITS: How Things Work (or Don''t). billion internet users across the globe. — Andy O''Connell.

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Dunning Kleiner Kaplan IPO 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 6, 2014

The solution, we decided, was to acquire a local company that had already gained traction in the market and that could provide us with proven local management as well as help us with web search, which had become a priority after we bought U.S. The company was owned by management, venture capitalists, and SoftBank.

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Chief Financial Officer Operations Learning-by-Doing IPO 10

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 10, 2016

At a major CEO summit focused on globalization that I participated in last year, much of the discussion about strategy centered on how to avoid getting “Ubered,” or, better yet, how to “Uber” others. And I should add that it isn’t just techies who take this perspective.

Network Economy 8

Network Economy Globalization Discount Constraint 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

It had appeared in a special online supplement of Businessweek on the subject of diversity, and it concerned the company's efforts to increase female and minority representation in management. Charles Begley, GlobeBank's managing director of diversity recruiting, was already reading it onscreen, dumbfounded. "We This is a business.

Case Study 8

Case Study Diversity Taylorism Taylor 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 10, 2011

The heated arguments our politicians and public intellectuals have been having about how to reboot the economy just address the symptoms, not the deeper malady: Our industrial-era economic institutions have become, in our tiny, fragile, crowded world, a cage. So how do the powers that be break out of that cage and resolve these dilemmas?

Globalization 15

Globalization IPO Decentralization Price 15

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 4, 2013

And I recall well, at the start of my career, how flattered I felt to be asked for a meeting or some advice — thrilled to be looked at as enough of an expert to be of help. Kathryn Minshew may simply be a better time manager than I am. So when an entrepreneur makes a cold approach to a VC, it marks him as an outsider.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist IPO Career Follow-up 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 7, 2018

” But achieving decentralization requires a meaningful investment in capital in order to attract a distributed network of users and network managers that maintain the decentralized ledgers (or nodes). As Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin notes , “Once you adopt a richer economic model…decentralization becomes more important.”

Cost 8

Cost Decentralization Finance Entrepreneur 8

Tim Milburn

MAY 8, 2014

How can you tap into the power of a setback — and make it work for you? In Ambition: How We Manage Success and Failure Throughout Our Lives , Gilbert Brim observes that “sometimes we don’t know we are losing until the very end.” And do you remember Facebook’s disastrous IPO? Perhaps so.

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Gilbert Public Relations IPO Handbook 130

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 19, 2011

The news had just hit that Danny Lewin — the co-founder of Akamai Technologies, its charismatic CTO, a former commando in the Israeli Special Forces, and MIT mathematics genius who led the company from a math class to an IPO and a market cap of $30 billion — had suddenly died. They think.Danny.was.supposed to be.,"

CTO 9

CTO Lewin IPO Mentor 9

Harvard Business Review

MAY 30, 2013

If anyone knows how to succeed in intrapreneurship, it''s George. A good management team will be dedicated to creating product market fit, otherwise the business will flounder. Investors are involved for the long haul, understanding that startup managers will have to experiment and fail along the way to a successful IPO.

Company 9

Company Ries Maturity Innovation 9

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 19, 2017

went public in June, then saw its stock price fall 70%, making it the worst performing IPO of a major company so far in 2017. Likewise, what is the right set of metrics that company executives should use to manage their subscription businesses in order to hold themselves fully accountable to their stakeholders?

IPO 8

IPO How To Metrics Bottom-up 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 21, 2016

He’s just trying to manage the chaos and avoid catastrophe. Norwegian made a promising first move under its new management: It began offering guests what it called Freestyle Cruising, which provided multiple dining and entertainment venues with flexible times, as opposed to the industry model at the time of single venues with set times.

Company 10

Company IPO Price Loyalty 10

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 1, 2015

Since the last financial crisis, many new regulations have been implemented to protect shareholders, increasing the pressure on management to meet earnings expectations by prioritizing short-term over long-term. For many consumer tech companies, this post-IPO pressure on financial returns is too high.

IPO 8

IPO Company Maturity Short-term 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 6, 2017

The company started as a single store, but about a decade later it was a national chain on the heels of filing an IPO. When we have a lot of resources, there’s no need to get creative with how to use or maximize them. Several years ago I sat down with the CEO of a fast-growing retail business. His answer blew me away.

Creativity 8

Creativity Budgeting IPO Merchandising 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 10, 2015

In 2014, for example, 18 IPOs raised a record-breaking $9.8 So how do Israeli ventures scale up? to build the satellite office and to personally oversee the recruitment and management of American executives who can lead the sales and marketing efforts. It took some time to gain momentum and learn how to attract local talent.”

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist Entrepreneur Marketing IPO 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 13, 2012

Beyond the allure of today's latest fads and fashions, beyond the advice I and others can give you about money, sex, and power and how to get it all, fast, here are four essential, timeless truths. That the job of managers isn't just to "deliver product" — but to impact lives. Life is shorter than any of us truly expect.

Media 8

Media Fashion IPO Brand 8

Kevin Eikenberry

JANUARY 12, 2017

Careerbuilder was initially a service that helped companies launch job listings and then managed the inbound application volume. Subsequent investment and growth would lead to an IPO in 1999. In other words, how to get the attention of the passive candidate? Careerbuilder hit the market in 1996.

Price 101

Price IPO Content Marketing 101