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Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, once wrote, “Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.” But we all know that such thievery happens often, even if unintentionally. The situation has worsened since Grove ran Intel. My colleagues at Bain recently used innovative analytics tools from VoloMetrix to examine the time budgets of 17 large corporations. We discovered that companies are awash in e-mails, with many executives receiving 200 per day. Some 15% of an organization’s collective time…

Entrepreneur Entrepreneur - How design changes the way investors see your startup A few weeks ago during a moment of self-reflection, I noticed a recurring theme throughout the top deals in our pipeline and became suddenly aware of my tendency to value startups with well-formed user experience and user interface (UX/UI) design elements over more technical elements. My initial reaction was to think of ways to weigh this aspect of the evaluation less (don’t be influenced by the pretty). However, perhaps there is a deeper meaning for this gut intuition. A great user experience correlates to a deep understanding of…

Earlier this week, cloud provider Joyent did a surprising thing: It shared its finely tuned cloud software, SmartDataCenter, under an open-source license. But while it might seem like the company is giving away its high-value intellectual property at a time when Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have made the public cloud market ultra-competitive, Bryan Cantrill, the company’s chief technology officer, actually has some very smart justifications for the move, which he spelled out in a blog post. The way Cantrill sees it, disclosing core technology with the public can have a direct impact on sales, marketing, and talent. And because every technology…

If you’re a job-seeker and you’re frustrated, I don’t blame you. The hiring process is broken. Black Hole recruiting has been shown to be a dismal failure. Whose bright idea was it to try to hire brilliant people by reducing them to keywords? That’s idiotic. The only surprising thing about keyword-search-based recruiting is that it’s still hanging on all these years later. Is it corporate and institutional leaders’ inability to admit they made a mistake installing big stupid applicant tracking systems, or just inertia? Either way, job-seekers get a lot of sympathy from me, as long as they’re taking responsibility…

Many of the people I’ve interviewed for job openings over the years had a nasty habit of talking too much. I would check my watch to signal my boredom and try to hurry things up. But to no avail, they kept on talking – and talked themselves out of the job. Here are 9 ways to dramatically improve your chances of getting the job, by saying less. 1. The 90-second rule: None of your answers should be more than 90 seconds long. Brevity demonstrates your ability to be succinct, to the point. The interviewer needs you to do this, so that…

Last month I had the privilege of introducing two of my heroes, Premal Shah, President of Kiva and Charles Best, Founder & CEO of DonorsChoose.org, as our Keynote speakers at the 2014 VolunteerMatch Client Summit in Detroit. We asked them to have a conversation with each other about how technology is reinventing giving and engagement. As they were talking back and forth and sharing their stories, I was struck by how two gifted leaders go about educating, engaging and inspiring an audience to get involved. Needless to say, they are both very good at it. Here are five things these good leaders do.…

The customer is always right. Right? But is a customer who is always right always a satisfied customer? Customer satisfaction is a key issue for every company wishing to increase customer loyalty and thereby create a better business performance. An important question is therefore: What is the relationship between customer satisfactions to loyalty to Profitability?  This paper is to look in the importance of customer satisfaction and loyalty in this vibrant business environment. Why it's imperative for companies' to measure and create marketing strategy with a core focus on customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Introduction: Customer satisfaction is a term frequently…

Leaders tend to be closely identified with the organizations they lead. So much so, in fact, that it’s easy to overlook the fact that leaders can change jobs just like anyone else. And most do, sooner or later–even founders tend to eventually move on from the organizations they created, nurtured and led. (I should know–I recently moved on from running the international healthcare organization I started 15 years ago at Johns Hopkins Medicine to take on the challenge of helping to grow partnerships nationally and globally for Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital.) Moving into a leadership role at a different…

TalentSmart has tested more than a million people and found that the upper echelons of top performance are filled with people who are high in emotional intelligence (90% of top performers, to be exact). The hallmark of emotional intelligence is self-control—a skill that unleashes massive productivity by keeping you focused and on track. Unfortunately, self-control is a difficult skill to rely on. Self-control is so fleeting for most people that when Martin Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed two million people and asked them to rank order their strengths in 24 different skills, self-control ended up in…