December - 2017

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Don't ask me why I'm leaving: why exit interviews don't work

Don't ask me why I'm leaving: why exit interviews don't work

If you want to know why people leave your business, don't wait until they've resigned before you ask them. It’s happened. One of your highest-performing team members has just resigned and it’s caught you by surprise. Once you recover from that news and regain your composure, you’re going to do two things next, neither of which is going to work. First, you’ll try to talk her into staying. Whichever way you frame and nuance this discussion, you’ll end up offering the departee

The main cause of start-up failure

The main cause of start-up failure

Some months on, I still find Jawbone's demise earlier this year unsettling. Not because the business ultimately failed, but because it received investments totalling a staggering $951,000,000, over the course of sixteen profitless years, on the way to that failure. That kind of money buys a lot of copies of The Lean Startup, the Silicon-Valley's designated Fail-Fast bible which, evidently, few people involved in Jawbone had found time to read. During those long years, it must

Four Reasons Yoda Failed as a CEO

Four Reasons Yoda Failed as a CEO

If you work in or near the technology sector, you'll inevitably have had someone at some point exclaim "Do or do not, there is no try!" when discussing the feasibility of a difficult project. In popular culture, we've grown used to the notion that Yoda was a wise and powerful leader. But just how good was he? (yes, I know he wasn't real, but go with me on this!). Was the little green guy a good CEO and should we try to emulate his approach? The short answers are No and No. Yo

Ending the Unconscious Sexism of the Tech Industry

Ending the Unconscious Sexism of the Tech Industry

“Are you… a feminist?” This was a colleague's opening question to me, delivered after a long pause, during a meeting between us several years ago. This was not how I had expected our meeting to begin and, taken aback somewhat, I paused an equally long time before replying “Yes… and don’t you think that I should be?” Eventually, he approached more directly what was on his mind. I had recently promoted a woman to a relatively senior position within the organisation and there ha

Silos are bad for business, but "Hero-Silos" are fatal

Silos are bad for business, but "Hero-Silos" are fatal

"Hero-Silos" form when we publicly elevate the importance of one business function far above its peers. The frequent outcome is to undermine the success of the whole organisation. What drives us to create Hero-Silos in our businesses and why are the consequences so devastating when we do? Sections of the investment banking industry have long known that the really big money only gets made in the space between what is legal and what is clearly not, where ethics would otherwise

Recruitment Moneyball: How to stop hiring the wrong senior people

Recruitment Moneyball: How to stop hiring the wrong senior people

Why do so many senior hiring decisions later turn out badly? Although it's tempting to pin the failure on the candidate, it’s really our fault as hiring managers when we make the wrong senior hire. So where are we going wrong? After product-market fit, the availability of leadership is the constraint that most governs the rate at which a business can grow effectively. In a fast-growing business, we always have more leadership needs than we have leaders who can fulfil them. T

Start-up success: How much does location matter?

Start-up success: How much does location matter?

If you apply the popular wisdom of the tech industry to the case of The Beatles, then it’s clear that the band could never have been successful. It’s simple: they came from the wrong city. In 1962, Liverpool wasn’t a major hiring centre for great bands. The musical talent and expertise to become internationally dominant just wasn't to be found in Liverpool the way it was in California, New York and London. If you are part of a tech business that’s not located in Silicon Vall

Could what happened to Uber also happen to your business?

Could what happened to Uber also happen to your business?

An investor once assured me that culture didn’t matter, that only winning mattered. He was wrong. Winning is not an alternative to culture. Winning is what a strong, healthy culture enables you to keep doing. Most experienced leaders intuitively understand this relationship and correspondingly pay close attention to defining and nurturing the cultures of their own businesses. After Uber’s recent challenges, it would be tempting to accuse the company of neglecting its own cult

The best leaders know when to be led

The best leaders know when to be led

…the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. ” Herman Melville, Moby Dick When I was a young software developer at the start of my career, I was assigned to a maintenance role on a troubled software program that my company had inherited. Every few weeks, senior executives from our company headquarters would come to meet with executives at my and other involved sites to pon