Lunch Talk: Sequoia Capital's Doug Leone on Luck & Taking Risks

Sequoia Capital Managing Partner Doug Leone addresses risk taking in his Stanford GSB View From The Top talk on November 4. He also discussed the venture capital industry, what his team looks for in entrepreneurs, and more.



tags: entrepreneurship, vc, risk, management, investment

Quote of the Day: Bad Talent Management.

Here's a 3,000-year-old recipe how NOT to run your company or country:

The man who stays put gets the same share as the man who fights his best. Cowards and brave men are given equal respect. The same death awaits the man who does much, and the man who does nothing.
All I have suffered by constantly risking my life in battle has left me no better off than anyone else.

- Homer. The Iliad.

tags: quote, control, management, startup 

LunchTalk: (@Google) Best and worst bosses.

Stanford Professor Robert Sutton weaves together the best psychological and management research with compelling stories and cases to reveal the mindset and moves of the best (and worst) bosses. This book was inspired by the deluge of emails, research, phone calls, and conversations that Dr. Sutton experienced after publishing his blockbuster bestseller "The No Asshole Rule."

link

tags: lunchtalk, business, management

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

I'm almost finished reading the new biography of Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. The book is a good read; it contains a lot of first-hand information, which is useful in reconstructing a creative process. One thing strikes me as odd though. The author and many other characters in the book say that Jobs was a complex man. I think this is incorrect. Jobs acted on a simple principle: to get done what he wanted to be done, he had to push people, including himself, to the limit. There are just two variables in this process: Jobs' ability to push (or manipulate) and the person's limit. He always chose what he called the A team, so that the team could produce, and he drove people on the team to perform at the top of their abilities.

A good illustration would be the early episode with Steve Wozniak when he designed a super circuit board in four days instead of weeks because Jobs gave him this impossible fake deadline. It's a recurring pattern of behavior: pushing somebody to the limit without being afraid to break the person. Some did handle it for a while, many did not. That is also why Jobs easily took credit for other people's work and ideas because he felt it was to his credit to push them above what they thought was possible. Some appreciated it, many didn't.

tags: creativity, business, method, management

What is wind?

Warren Buffet on business management success:

It is comforting to be in a business where some mistakes can be made and yet a quite satisfactory overall performance can be achieved. In a sense, this is the opposite case from our textile business where even very good management probably can average only modest results. One of the lessons your management has learned - and, unfortunately, sometimes re-learned - is the importance of being in businesses where tailwinds prevail rather than headwinds.

Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. Chairman's Letter. March 14,1978

quote, business, evolution, system, management,

It might be that creative environment is just a sign that the organization is lead by a smart person. Because stupid bosses tend to bully their employees:

new research showing that leaders who feel incompetent really do lash out at others to temper their own inferiority.

"Power holders feel they need to be superior and competent. When they don't feel they can show that legitimately, they'll show it by taking people down a notch or two," says Nathanael Fast, a social psychologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who led a series of experiments to explore this effect.

Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02452.x

tags: control, psychology, creativity, management,

The network's patents are available royalty-free to any party that agrees not to file infringement suits involving its own patents "against the Linux environment." Under the network's terms, that environment includes not just the kernel at the heart of the open-source operating system, but also higher-level components including the open-source MySQL and PostgreSQL databases that compete with Oracle's own core products.
http://news.com.com/Oracle+bands+with+open-source+patent+group/2100-7344_3-6170717.html

Patent aggregation/pool as a way to stave off competition.