About a third of S&P 500 companies are family-owned. Wonder what CBS’s Les Moonves thinks about that? The CEO has been fighting the Redstone family’s National Amusements Inc., which controls CBS and Viacom, for ages. The latest boardroom drama would rival any show CBS is pitching for next fall. Shari[…] Read On
The real reason the great experiment called America turned out as well as it did can be summed up in a single word: competition. Competition for customers, competition for talent, competition for jobs, competition for political office. When we compete on our merits, it brings out the best in us. The[…] Read On
I bet if you ask 10 people how to rate a CEO, you’ll probably get 10 different answers. There really is just one way, though. You rate them the same way you rate athletes, entertainers, doctors, attorneys or anyone else, for that matter. Including yourself. One word: Performance. In the[…] Read On
Friends often ask me why I do what I do. By any measure I had one hell-of-a career. I went out on top. Why bother blogging and consulting? Why not just retire to some pristine island in the pacific, lounge on the beach, write my memoirs and work on the[…] Read On
I am what a good shrink might call a master at compartmentalization. In case you’ve never heard the term, it’s an unconscious mechanism that enables people like me to make believe that things we don’t want to exist really don’t exist, all so we can focus on our own narrow[…] Read On
There are situations when delegating is bad and micromanaging, or being hands on, is good. The key is to know how to identify those situations. When advising CEOs who tend to be overly controlling, I often invoke the words of venture capitalist Fred Wilson: A CEO does only three things.[…] Read On
Entrepreneurship is not the glamorous career path it’s been made out to be. It’s not about big ideas and lofty ideals. It’s not about hopes and dreams. It’s not about guts and glory. It’s not even about invention and innovation. And it’s certainly not about a search for fame and[…] Read On