On one level, medieval castles don’t make sense. They’re imposing, sure. But can’t an invading army just march right past them, laughing all the way? Castles are not a fully fortified frontier, like the trench lines in World War I. They’re not a walled city that encloses territory that is crucial in itself. Those types…
Early-stage SaaS founders: You’re setting your VP of Sales up to fail by putting them in a hole before they even start. Want to dig them out? Here’s what happens: You start your hiring process for your first VP of Sales. With your time focused on hiring, foundational work to gear up the sales team…
I felt both pleasure and a measure of frustration watching The Darkest Hour, partly for reasons that are unfair to the movie as a work of art. The Darkest Hour is the story of Winston Churchill and Great Britain around the time of the fall of France in World War II. It centers on Britain’s…
Doing the fundamentals well can be devastatingly effective. With that in mind, I sat down to summarize the basics of a good early-stage sales meeting. My primary audience is those who are new in some sense. These could be salespeople who are new to the profession, companies that are creating a new sales process, or…
I hate articles that are just a list of tips. They’re often lazy and frequently idiotic, so when I decided to write an article with advice for how to switch careers from law to a business role in the tech sector, I wanted to write something comprehensive with a clear thesis. I’ve failed, and I…
A little while back, I took a road trip around California. I headed south from San Francisco down the coast to Santa Barbara, inland up into the San Gabriel mountains, and north through the high desert and the Central Valley back to San Francisco. A storm was pummeling the the Pacific Northwest the day I left and the…
Daniel Hannan has published a paen to the Magna Carta, a charter of rights and freedoms signed by King John of England in 1215 after he faced a revolt of his barons. Hannan adopts Lord Denning’s view that the Magna Carta was “the greatest constitutional document of all time, the foundation of the freedom of…
III. Operations The goal of operations is to allocate scarce resources to the highest value uses. This means defining priorities, concentrating resources on those priorities, and excluding sources of distraction and waste. A. Defining Priorities 1. The Sales Equation Start by understanding what levers you can pull to influence your team’s performance. You can think…
In The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor provide a blueprint for creating new growth businesses through disruptive innovation. They argue that solely pursuing sustaining innovations that serve customers in the same way but with higher performance leads to stagnant revenue and commoditization. Customers become satisfied with product performance as technology advances and come…
I often wondered how racing teams decide whether their drivers should use faster but less durable tires that require more pit stops to change tires during the race or slower but more durable tires that require fewer pit stops. I made an Excel model to analyze this strategic decision. The answer hinges on parameters relating to the interplay…