The former CMO of Jive Software, Sam Lawrence, spoke to a crowded room at Interactive Austin this morning. His message was on the lessons needed to specifically apply in order to make social media work in your business. How We Say What We Say One of the challenges social media evangelists face is based on [...]

This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. The fact that we started off as a services company is what allowed us to get started and to avoid having to rely on outside funding. But it was transitioning to a product company that allowed us to grow and scale, and to ultimately [...]

Ask anyone who got into an internet-based business prior to 2000, and you’ll hear nostalgic “good old days” stories, the way my grandparents talk about ‘when Kennedy was President.’ It’s hysterical to hear, and it saddens me endlessly to think about how long ago that was, but it really was an exciting time — and [...]

People who did not meet me until at or around my 25th birthday would never believe it, but in school, I was the Queen of Slackers. Truly. School was too easy, too routine and I spent too long doing it to be able to breath new life into the experience. I could dodge classes, do [...]

I had a couple of discussions this week that got me thinking back to the early days of my career. Aside from leaving me feeling older than I care to think about, it did spark a pleasant memory or two that I’ve been mulling over since. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how early career choices [...]

It’s been years since the evangelism for Agile development started truly gaining momentum. Super sexy buzzphrases phrases like “reduce time to market,” “improved ROI,” and “lower development costs” have all been invoked to support the case for adopting an Agile methodology over the old-school Waterfall approach. The fact is, most experienced professionals have lived through [...]

As noted in my previous blog post on this topic, the first quality I believe is necessary in a great speaker is for them to be educational in some way. In my recent bout of conferences, I have seen speakers who fall all over the quality spectrum, but the ones that were truly good ensured [...]

Last night I was reading a very interesting Harvard Business Review article by Umair Haque called Five Problems Venture Capitalists Should Have Solved (But Didn’t). Admittedly, I know very little about the world of venture capital (hence the reading), but this made me think of a panel I attended at SXSWi and he raised a [...]

Over the past few months, I’ve been more closely aligning myself with the Enterprise 2.0 community of professionals. Though I have been in technology for my entire career, and in Web 2.0 for at least part of that time, and implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions quite extensively in recent years, I had not previously made a [...]

At South by Southwest, Brazen Careerist author and CEO Penelope Trunk was quite emphatic that, when starting a new business, having a geographically distributed team is rarely possible. She said this on her panel, as well as again when we spoke in person. She was a strong advocate of the notion that, for the first [...]