These last few months have obviously changed everyone’s lives in a significant way. From what I can tell people are either doing substantially better or substantially worse. I’m luckily counting myself part of the former group! I’m doing so well I’m even posting to my blog! Regular readers know how rare this has become lately. This has been such an…
Last week I went to a Cake show here in Dallas. It was as awesome as I expected, but hilariously, and somewhat pathetically, the lead singer threatened to cancel the second half of the show when he was experiencing some pretty menial difficulties. It got me thinking of all the characters I’ve encountered in music. I’ve played in several hobby…
Firing people sucks terribly. It’s a sign that you screwed up and the other person screwed up as well. Even worse is laying someone off, where they are not at fault at all, and sometimes it’s entirely because of you. I’ve frequently thought it would be useful to write a post on firing people, but I’ve always kicked the can…
When I first graduated college I had virtually no marketable real world skills. What I did have though was drive, and an endless amount of time and energy. The way I made myself valuable at that time was to be willing to work 80 hour work weeks to get things done in a small but growing business. Every time someone…
One of my favorite parts of being in management is that you’re exposed to so many different people from different walks of life, different backgrounds, and different mindsets. In e-commerce especially, I feel as though I’ve been exposed to people that I had never been exposed to growing up in Austria or going to college. E-commerce requires everything from the seasoned…
There was a conflict last month that prevented me from having this meeting, and therefore this post, but I’m back again with the latest round of leadership thoughts. To get the full context of this series start at #1. Never complain. This is just a good life practice regardless of what position you’re in. People that complain are seen as lazy, negative,…
Earlier this year I shared some accolades and attention our company received from various sources. We haven’t slowed down so I thought I’d share the latest! We are number 40 on the Inc. 500! This one is obviously huge and has gotten us lots of attention. Our 5,907% growth rate over the last three years has not gone unnoticed. The…
Back again with 3 talking points from my monthly leadership meetings. To start at the beginning and get the full context click here. Manage to trends, not incidents. I mean this in reference to negative performance, not positive. Instances of positive performance should be celebrated shamelessly. Unfortunately, for many managers the easy route is to catch people making mistakes, and then instantly…
This is the second month where I’ll cover some leadership principles that are good to keep in mind and discuss on a regular basis. For the full context and the first post in this series click here. We discussed these points at my office and I hope you can benefit from them too! Catch employees doing something right. This one…
It recently occurred to me that although we have a leader of some sort working on making every department better in our company, we have no one explicitly working on making those leaders better. At first I shrugged it off because I couldn’t imagine the hubris of someone who is instructing others on leadership that was not near retirement age with…
