Showing posts with label Psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Psychology. Show all posts

Thursday, March 31, 2011

To You I Offer Buddhism And Yoga

Reclining Buddha headImage via WikipediaMinority Majority Nation?
Gender Talk And Pragmatism
TechCrunch: What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology.: By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it, and I have never read anything on the topic. It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown. ....... this is the most personal and important battle that any CEO will face. ..... no CEO ever has a smooth path to a great company. Along the way, many things go wrong and all of them could have and should have been avoided. ..... If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100. This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging for a straight A student. It is particularly challenging, because nobody tells you that the mean is 22. ...... At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that you’d be associated with that kind of incompetence. Seeing people fritter away money, waste each other’s time, and do sloppy work can make you feel bad. If you are the CEO, it may well make you sick. ....... Every problem in the company was indeed my fault. ....... Being responsible for everything and getting a 22 on the test starts to weigh on your consciousness. ....... CEOs often make the one of the following two mistakes: 1. They take things too personally 2. They do not take things personally enough ...... Ideally, the CEO will be urgent yet not insane. She will move aggressively and decisively without feeling emotionally culpable. If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself. ...... In your darkest moments as CEO, discussing fundamental questions about the viability of your company with your employees can have obvious negative consequences. On the other hand, talking to your board and outside advisors can be fruitless. The knowledge gap between you and them is so vast that you cannot actually bring them fully up to speed in a manner that’s useful in making the decision. You are all alone. ....... asking oneself anything 3,000 times turns out to be a bad idea ...... if you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO ...... Make some friends ..... it is extremely useful from a psychological perspective to talk to people who have been through similarly challenging decisions. ...... Get it out of your head and onto paper ..... I wrote down a detailed explanation of my logic ...... Focus on the road not the wall—When they train racecar drivers, one of the first lessons is when you are going around a curve at 200 MPH, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. ........ A Final Word of Advice – Don’t Punk Out and Don’t Quit As CEO, there will be many times when you feel like quitting. I have seen CEOs try to cope with the stress by drinking heavily, checking out, and even quitting. In each case, the CEO has a marvelous rationalization why it was OK for him to punk out or quit, but none them will every be great CEOs. Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweat, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary founder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say: “I didn’t quit.”

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

What Makes An Entrepreneur Tick?

Stills from videotape of :en:Bill Gates' depos...Image via Wikipedia

What Have VCs Really Done for Innovation? TechCrunch Back in 1986, when Bill Gates was still making sales calls, he pitched my group at First Boston on why we should bet the farm on Windows. Despite the risk involved, we gave his fledgling startup the deal. This wasn’t because of his financial backers (he didn’t even drop any names), but because we believed in his vision and nerdiness. ....... VC’s follow innovation, they don’t lead. They go where they smell blood.
From Nothing To Something. How To Get There. forget everything else and just get your product out the door
For one there are few of them. But not that few. Every business owner is an entrepreneur. They create and sustain jobs. They are in every sector. The bold ones build the companies of tomorrow. Since most people work in the private sector to feed their families, we can say entrepreneurs are our guiding light. But what makes them tick? The failure rate is high, but many still try.

Partly it is a personality type, I think. Some people go for it, most don't. And there are all kinds. Few are big, most are small. The entrepreneurial spirit can also take over jobholders. I would think the best companies encourage that spirit.

But there is no crystal ball. It is hard to pick the winners early in the game. And, of course, the trailblazers become legends in their own lifetimes.
  1. Bill Gates On The Chrome OS
  2. Bill Gates, Chrome OS, Natal, Wave
  3. Bill Gates: Behind The Curve On Chrome OS
  4. Bill Gates Drove Up Traffic To This Blog
The Holy Grail of the Unconscious New York Times he started to view the human soul — not just the mind and the body — as requiring specific care and development, an idea that pushed him into a province long occupied by poets and priests but not so much by medical doctors and empirical scientists. ....... the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists. ...... the mangrove swamp of his inner world ........ the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become. .......... “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.” ......... Jung had become disillusioned with scientific rationalism ........ “the spirit of the depths,” a field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by dreams. ........ humanity shares a pool of ancient wisdom that he called the collective unconscious
Paul Krugman: Reform or Bust
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