Sunday, July 26, 2009

Nearly 100 visitors to The Leadership Program Information Sessions

Thanks to the hard work of TLP Fellows, there has been excellent interest in the Class of 2010 program, with many more attendees than we expected. It also meant that we may not have been able to provide the most informative sessions to everyone, or answered all their questions. We'll follow up and hope that we're better organized for the next one to handle the crowds.

See the newly launched website here: http://www.startupleadership.com

Top 50 Management Thinkers (Times UK)

The top 50 thinkers: (Times UK 2009)

1. C. K. Prahalad Indian management guru
2. Bill Gates Geek-turned-philanthropist
3. Alan Greenspan Ex-Federal Reserve chairman
4. Michael Porter Competitive strategy author
5. Gary Hamel Business strategist
6. W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne INSEAD professors and authors of Blue Ocean Strategy
7. Tom Peters In Search of Excellence author
8. Jack Welch Former GE CEO-turned-columnist
9. Richard Branson Iconic British entrepreneur
10. Jim Collins Good to Great author
11. Philip Kotler Kellogg’s marketing guru
12. Robert Kaplan & David Norton The creators of the balanced scorecard
13. Kjell Nordstrom & Jonas Ridderstralle Funky Business duo from Sweden
14. Charles Handy The original portfolio worker
15. Stephen Covey The man with seven successful and highly effective habits
16. Henry Mintzberg Controverisal Canadian management expert
17. Thomas Stewart Editor of Harvard Business Review
18. Malcolm Gladwell Author of The Tipping Point and Blink
19. Lynda Gratton London Business School professor and author of Hot Spots
20. Donald Trump US Apprentice host
21. Scott Adams Creator of Dilbert
22. Ram Charan Co-author of Execution
23. Vijay Govindarajan A Tuck professor and GE’s new chief innovation consultant
24. Warren Bennis Veteran on leadership
25. Clayton Christensen Innovation expert
26. Thomas Friedman Author of The World is Flat
27. Kenichi Ohmae Globalisation guru
28. Rosabeth Moss Kanter Renowned Harvard academic and author
29. Steve Jobs Apple’s iconic business leader
30. John Kotter Leadership and change guru
31. Jeff Immelt Jack Welch’s successor at GE
32. Rob Goffee & Gareth Jones Authentic leaders at London Business School
33. Adrian Slywotsky Heavyweight modern strategist
34. Marshall Goldsmith Coach to the top executives
35. Bill George Another fan of authentic leadership
36. Larry Bossidy Co-author of Execution with Charan (22)
37. Daniel Goleman The father of social and emotional intelligence
38. Marcus Buckingham Top self-help guru
39. Howard Gardner Harvard’s creator of the multiple intelligence concept
40. Edward de Bono Supreme lateral thinker
41. Al Gore Climate change campaigner
42. David Ulrich Human resources expert
43. Seth Godin An insightful marketer
44. Costas Markides Charismatic strategist
45. Rakesh Khurana Harvard thinker
46. Richard D’Aveni Hyper-competition expert
47. Peter Senge Learning organisation guru
48. Chris Argyris The originator of the learning organisation concept
49. Jeffrey Pfeffer Stanford intellectual
50. Chris Zook Bain consultant-turned-author

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO Acumen Fund






Sunday, July 12, 2009

My multicolored flag



This was made at www.wearemulticolored.com to represent the three countries I have spent my formative years (UK, India and the USA)

Cool folding chairs from Flux Design

Flux chair from flux chairs on Vimeo.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Kauffman and First Time Entrepreneurs: Statistics

What Kauffman found… !
• The average age of company founders is 40
• Dropouts are rare. 95% have bachelor’s degrees. 47 percent have advanced degrees
• 52% ranked in the top 10% of their class
• Entrepreneurs are usually the 2nd child out of 3
• 70% of entrepreneurs were married when they first launched their company
• 5% were divorced, separated, or widowed
• 60% of respondents indicated they had at least one child when they launched their first business, and 43.5 percent had two or more children

Monday, July 6, 2009

Marc Andresson launches a new venture fund !

Some interesting points he made (not sure how accurate they are but I'll mention them anyway)

1. Only 10-20 of 700 funds he knows deliver good returns

2. There are exits, just not enough: Data Domain : likely to sell for $2 billion, Pure Digital - Cisco; OpenTable IPO and LogMeIn filed for IPO recently

3. 15 tech companies launched per year can get to $100 million in revenues. They're responsible for 97% of VC returns

His model will be the Valley model. Give a small company money for up to 5 engineers. If they build a good product, give them $5-10 million. He will only invest in the Valley. He will only do tech/internet/infrastructure in the spaces he knows.

Marc founded Netscape, Ning and Opsware (earlier known as LoudCloud). He is a well known Valley angel investor with several bets that seem to be working (Twitter, Digg, Delicious). He has a great blog but I haven't visited it in a while after he stopped writing. He's also an enormously insightful panelist.

Saturday, July 4, 2009

If...with Nadal and Federer

This is my favorite poem. By Rudyard Kipling. Relevant to me personally because it has lessons for life. Also because I have a son. Voted the greatest poem in England. Narrated here by two of the world's greatest...who have filled each minute with sixty seconds of distance run. Watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is-JCJCUy18