February 2, 2020
Hear me out. Yes, I teach entrepreneurship at Princeton and it’s not uncommon for professors to see their discipline as the one indispensable part of the curriculum. But I don’t think I’m engaging in special pleading when I say that…
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January 19, 2020
The notion of the “alpha” personality, identified long ago by experts in animal behavior, remains a useful term for a human type that is all too familiar: an unusually assertive, aggressive person with a strong need to dominate a group.…
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January 6, 2020
Survey an underperforming team to understand what’s wrong and you’re likely to find that it’s “communications.” Ineffective leaders are often poor communicators. And when they try to fix the problem their instincts often take them in the wrong direction. Instead…
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December 15, 2019
The word entrepreneur is used so often in so many different contexts these days that pinning it down is virtually impossible. Everyone has their own definition, and the one you adopt—or unconsciously accept—can determine your aspirations, dictate your behavior, and…
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December 1, 2019
Want to know which of your teen-agers might grow up to become a successful entrepreneur? Look at their SAT scores and their rap sheets. That’s the implication of some widely discussed research published three years ago in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, one…
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November 17, 2019
Manipulation has a bad rap. Nobody likes being on the receiving end of manipulative behaviors like bullying, name calling, passive aggression and the like. Or the more seductive and insidious forms of manipulation that we associate with used-car salesmen, political demagogues…
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November 3, 2019
The recent IPO odysseys of Uber and WeWork are more than a couple of isolated stories of entrepreneurial overreach. Uber’s IPO fell far short of its predicted valuation of $100 billion. WeWork (recently rebranded as We), after slashing its valuation…
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October 20, 2019
There are only two ways to create value in an enterprise: through new projects or excellent processes. Leaders must not only understand the difference but also know how to lead both activities. Confuse the two—or just misunderstand the differences between…
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October 7, 2019
Due to the upsurge of underage vaping, the federal government, several states and cities are moving aggressively against Juul and other companies in the e-cigarette industry, and the company has removed its CEO. (A recent spate of deaths associated with vaping has greatly…
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September 22, 2019
Many successful entrepreneurs of the moment inspire fear and anger. The litany of their sins is long: They sell our personal information to people who use it to manipulate us. They create dangerous products, like e-cigarettes, and market them to minors. They devastate worthy industries, such as the newspaper business and independent book selling, and invent repugnant industries, such as internet porn. And as ten…
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