The theme recently has been all about drastically improving teams’ impact. In a tech climate where companies are no longer growing like crazy, and startups are expected to create a *gasp* business, efficacy is on everyone’s minds. Luckily for us, this more organic and sensible industry enables us to drive…

You know what gets people interested? A good hero story. You share about a crisis at work, how dire the situation was, and how you found the right thing to do or saved the day just at the right moment. In working with leaders, I’ve realized that too often, these…

We all know those leaders who seem to always be maximizing their time and learning nonstop. There’s no new book they haven’t read or a trending article they haven’t already filed in their read-it-later queue. Name the acronym, and they’ll tell you its meaning-even if you just made it up…

A few weeks ago, I spoke in front of a group of founders of early-stage startups. The conversation centered on the difference between how startups “looked like” during their careers so far and how different things are for them now. What they “learned” earlier seems no longer relevant, given the…

I can’t help but cringe when clients ask me about relaying R&D metrics to the CEO or the board of directors. These KPIs, which usually have no business being discussed in those forums, are often something tech executives bring up themselves, not realizing that doing so is handicapping their own…

Everyone and their dog nowadays seem to be working on “strategies.” However, virtually none of the startups I work with have a clearly defined strategy. Instead, they often suffer from a complete disregard for long-term vision (“We’re a startup, who knows?!”), or they think they’re strategizing when in fact, they’re merely coming up with partial work plans. This creates a void in your organization. And as we’ve learned in high-school physics, this void then creates a pressure that’ll end up vacuuming other stuff to fill it up. You can, as a leader, make things better.

As part of the quest to help tech executives maximize their leadership potential, a recurring theme is the dreaded concept of politics (cue spooky sound effects). Not all that you think is politics is, in fact, so. Further, sometimes, you just have to learn how to play the game. Let’s break it down and help you lose that fear. Political Aversion For many people with a technical background, any notion of politics provokes utter disgust. We like to think that all our decisions are usually based on merit and rationality. Therefore, anything that might be seen as “political” is immediately frowned upon. However, this often stems from a skewed viewpoint.

This one is for those founders who don’t have a technical founder that wants to lead R&D/Engineering and also for the hired VPEs/CTOs who want to understand their bosses better. Running a startup, especially in the first 3–4 years, without a technical cofounder is a bit like deciding not to…

This might be a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think most tech organizations have way too many specific and niched-down roles too soon. Some companies feel like a weird scene from Downton Abbey where there was a different servant to take care of every utensil and minor task…