May 1, 2016
By the end of stage one of enterprise maturity, you have refined your original idea, prototyped your product or service, and found real customers for that initial offering. You’ve accomplished the principal task of the first stage -- customer validation.
This week's post on the Entrepreneur website takes the reader in stage two, your principal task is operational validation -- getting up and running as a rudimentary business.
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May 1, 2016
An important part of the first stage of organizational maturity is finding your company's target audience (discussed in detail in Startup Leadership).
In this week's post on the Entrepreneur website, I explore how to find your audience.
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May 1, 2016
In Startup Leadership, I discuss the core concept of the four stages of enterprise maturity. Every enterprise must pass through each stage in order to pass to the next. Attempting to skip a stage invites financial and managerial disaster.
This week's post on the Entrepreneur website takes the reader through the four stages in detail.
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March 8, 2016
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of aspiring entrepreneurs will show up this month at the SXSW festival in search of funding for their startups. Some will succeed and go on to create fast-growing, promising companies.
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December 3, 2015
November 11, 2015
The key to startup success is not a good idea, but skilled entrepreneurial leadership that gives a good idea the legs it needs to get off the ground.
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September 22, 2015
"For entrepreneurs, it’s hard to know when to call what you’ve started a success; after all, the danger lies in the many definitions of success. Those who adopt a misleading definition are at risk of working very hard to win the wrong race."
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July 23, 2015
Try this bit of free association: Say what comes immediately to mind when you hear the word “entrepreneur?” I’m willing to wager that it’s something along the lines of the Silicon Valley model: the brilliant, innovative, aggressive, independent, and technically savvy young male disrupting an entire industry and building a multi-billion dollar enterprise overnight.
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July 13, 2015
First it was The Social Network, the frenetic film about birth of Facebook. Then The Internship, a cinematic valentine to Google with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. Then a biopic of Steve Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher, then the sitcom Betas from Amazon. Lately, it’s HBO’s Silicon Valley, a very funnysend-up of the Bay Area start-up world from the creator of Beavis and Butt-head.
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June 3, 2015
To transform an idea into a self-sustaining enterprise, you must possess self-awareness, understand the basics of enterprises, know how to build relationships, how to leverage motivation, and how to lead change. A personal leadership strategy, or PLS, is a plan of action for acquiring and mastering those basic skills.
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