What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.
I'm generally risk averse, and most great entrepreneurs I know are as well.
Hiring people is like making friends. Pick good ones, and they'll enrich your life. Make bad choices, and they'll bring you down.
That's the great irony of allowing passionate people to work from home. A manager's natural instinct is to worry that her workers aren't getting enough work done. But the real threat is that they will wind up working too hard. And because the manager isn't sitting across from her worker anymore, she can't look in the person's eyes and see burnout.
If you could taste words, most corporate websites, brochures, and sales materials would remind you of stale, soggy rice cakes: nearly calorie free, devoid of nutrition, and completely unsatisfying.
I think what really people want is just a few things done really, really well. And if you think about ever day of your life, the things you really appreciate aren't the complicated things. They're the simple things that work just the way you expect them to.
Even companies that do big business online struggle to be noticed by Google users. The Web, after all, is home to some 120 million Internet domains and tens of billions of indexed pages. But every company, big or small, can draw more Google traffic by using search-engine optimization - SEO, for short.
Whenever I speak at a conference, I try to catch a few of the other presentations. I tend to stand in the back and listen, observe, and get a general sense of the room.
We think of computers as smart and powerful machines. But your goldfish is smarter.
Unlike a goldfish, a computer can't really do anything without you telling it exactly what you want it to do.
The office during the day has become the last place people want to be when they really want to get work done. In fact, offices have become interruption factories.
I believe if you start a business with the intent of making it huge, you're already prioritizing the wrong thing. Size is important, but it's a byproduct of a whole bunch of other things that are worth way more of your mental energy - customers, service, quality.
I used to think that deadlines should be ignored until the product was ready: that they were a nuisance, a hurdle in front of quality, a forced measure to get something out the door for the good of the schedule, not the customer.
I like to think of myself as a leader whose door is always open. But I recently learned that an open door isn't enough.
By rationing in-person meetings, their stature is elevated to that of a rare treat. They become something to be savored, something special.
Meetings should be like salt - a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation.
To say that the grocery business is cutthroat would be a major understatement.
Great people want to work on things that matter. Inevitably, a great person working on imaginary work will turn into an unsatisfied person.
The reality is, risk is variable. Those in the financial world know it.
A diverse customer base helps insulate you; a few large accounts can leave you vulnerable to their whims.
