Entrepreneurship

Middle-aged founders are more successful

The top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years have founders that started their companies, on average, when they were 45 years old. In other words, when you look at most successful firms, the average founder age goes up, not down. Overall, evidence shows that

Growth

Attitude is more important than IQ

Your attitude may help more than your IQ, and intelligence is not the most important factor in achieving success. People can be divided into two categories; those with a “fixed mindset,” and those with a “growth mindset.” “With a fixed mindset, you believe you are who are and you cannot

Team

Avoiding hiring mistakes

When hiring, if you’re looking for a way to clone yourself to shrink your task-list, stop. You already have you and don’t need another you. No one wants to hire the wrong person, and it's tempting to hire someone that reminds you of yourself. Hiring the

Leadership

Wondering where you stand as a leader?

If you wonder where you stand as a leader, you should question how you measure up against the standards and behaviors of the best leaders. Below are some subjects you should face to answer the question: 1. Do you give others the glory? 2. Do you understand how to meet

Entrepreneurship

Determine if your business idea is any good

When exploring a new business idea, it's hard not to grapple with one fundamental question: Is my idea worth pursuing? Your decision on whether to pursue the idea should be based on consideration of the following questions: 1. How unique is your idea? You can look at whether

Changing Jobs

Pressured to prove yourself in a new job?

When you start a new job, there's a lot of pressure to prove yourself. Here are some tips on how to best handle: Think positively: You may feel insecure, especially at first, and you may even suffer from imposter syndrome. Don't let self-doubt get the better

Grit

Warren Buffet's advice to succeed

Warren Buffet's most straightforward advice that made him successful. 1. Get rid of your bad habits and behaviors; most of us have a sense of what's holding us back from reaching our full potential. 2. Don't risk what you have to get something you

Strategy

Tear yourself away to think strategically

Many leaders want to make more time for strategic thinking and understand that being strategic is essential to their organization’s success. Yet, many leaders say they lack the time for strategic thinking. One issue is the cultural pressure to put in long hours. Tethering yourself to your desk may

Self-awareness

Learn to mistrust impressions

As leaders it's important to recognize that not all illusions are visual, there are lots of cognitive ones that can fool us each day unless we pay attention and distinguish between impressions and beliefs.

Leadership

Authentic leadership

If you think a job title gives you the power to influence and inspire others, you're holding yourself back, restricting your growth, and falling short of achieving your full potential. One trait above all else influence and inspire others. Authenticity. The reason authentic leaders move us is that

Self-awareness

You may be smarter than you think

Academic degrees do not necessarily make a person smarter, and the most intelligent people are not always the people with the highest degrees. Below are some signs indicating you're smarter than you think you are: 1. Other people seek you out for your advice. 2. You enjoy solving

Expectations

Success is about how far you've come

If you’re ambitious, you're going to feel like a failure from time to time. Lofty goals lead to inevitable moments when you aren’t yet living up to your expectations. We also live in a world that reinforces this feeling where we equate material possessions with success.

Team

Building a talented team

Great talent is both hard to find and can be really expensive. So, how do you build a team of talented people who share the same values and passion as you? How do you compete with everyone else who can outbid you? Here are three lessons: 1. The best employees

Well-being

Friends at work make you happy

We spend between a third and a half of our waking hours at work. As a result, our relationships with people at work can become among the most important relationships in our lives. And, having good relationships with colleagues is one of the strongest predictors of people’s happiness at

Changing Jobs

Be careful with quick wins

When you step into a leadership position at a new company, there’s pressure to get off to a quick start. Yet the best way to succeed, paradoxically, is to slow things down. No matter how sophisticated and mature you may be, rushing too quickly toward early wins can deprive

Expectations

Push back on short-term thinking

The pressure on leaders to deliver quarterly results is greater than ever. Many argue that they have no choice but to cave to the demands to boost profits quarter after quarter. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Most of the pressure stems from company's boards,

Leadership

Projecting confidence

People don’t just follow anyone; they follow leaders who have command of the business and the stage. Below are five ways to look and sound like a leader people will want to follow whenever you’re presenting: 1) Dress 25% better than anyone else in the room. Evidence shows

Entrepreneurship

Make the most of investors

Most companies see investor relations as a one-way street and few have a structure in place to best utilize investor feedback. Investors can be a powerful strategic resource, providing not only capital but also less-biased insight into the threats and opportunities that a company encounters. Smart entrepreneurs partner with their

Growth

Shift your mindset to grow

Most companies manage growth like rocket launches. An enormous amount of planning goes into anticipating every possible scenario and removing every potential risk. Once launched, it's micro-managed to ensure that everything goes according to plan. This might have worked in the past when markets moved incrementally. But in

Productivity

Go ahead and complain

Why do we complain about other people? Because it feels good, requires minimal risk, and it’s easy. Complaining changes the balance of negative/positive energy and, for a brief moment, we feel better. It’s a pretty reliable process. Addictive even, which is the problem (beyond the wasted time)

Leadership

Change leadership

Successful change-agile leaders respond to changes by seizing opportunities, including throwing out old models and developing new ways of doing business. They try to make change thinking contagious, embedding it into everything they do from daily interactions to strategy. Below are five behaviors that, together, create a competitive advantage: 1)

Culture

Dynamic core values

Core values shouldn't be set of promises that make the management team look good, they should be a set of real beliefs. Often, core values are a hype and serve no real value. Teams simply write a list of idealistic words on a page and then forget about

Culture

Stop your best people from leaving

“We have a great culture.” We have all heard it. We have all said it. But what does that mean? Culture is often referred to as “the way things are done .” There are really three elements to a culture: Behaviors, systems, and practices, all guided by an overarching set of

Entrepreneurship

No. 1 rule of business is 'stay in business'

The No. 1 rule of business is "stay in business," and running out of capital breaks that rule. Therefore, the most valuable person to have on a team, when starting or running an early stage business, is someone who either has plenty of capital or has the ability

Leadership

Be a human first and leader second

About 70% of leaders rate themselves as inspiring and motivating, and a survey by Forbes found that 65% of employees would forego a pay raise if it meant seeing their leader fired. Gallup engagement survey found that 82% of employees see their leaders as fundamentally uninspiring. We are all driven