News & Views

January 19, 2020

Why ‘Alpha Dogs’ Make Poor Leaders In Startups

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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December 15, 2019

How Your Definition Of Entrepreneur Can Limit Your Success

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

Why Entrepreneurs Say Rules Shouldn’t Apply To Them

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

Understanding How Good Leadership Requires Great Manipulation

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

How To Tell When A Startup Turns Into A Business?

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 7, 2019

Four Ways To Focus Entrepreneurs On The Common Good

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

What If We Got Rid Of All Entrepreneurs?

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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