DOCSLIB.ORG

Goodbye Career, Hello Success by Randy Komisar

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Goodbye Career, Hello Success by Randy Komisar Goodbye Career, Hello Success by Randy Komisar Reprint r00207 MARCH–APRIL 2000 Reprint Number CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change R00202 AND MICHAEL OVERDORF DANIEL GOLEMAN Leadership That Gets Results R00204 JUAN ENRIQUEZ Transforming Life, Transforming Business: R00203 AND RAY A. GOLDBERG The Life-Science Revolution AKSHAY R. RAO, MARK E. BERGEN, How to Fight a Price War R00208 AND SCOTT DAVIS BRIAN J. HALL What You Need to Know About Stock Options R00205 CHRISTOPHER A. BARTLETT Going Global: Lessons from Late Movers R00201 AND SUMANTRA GHOSHAL HERMINIA IBARRA Making Partner: A Mentor’s Guide to the R00206 Psychological Journey FORETHOUGHT A CONVERSATION WITH JONATHAN SEELIG Goodbye, B-School F00201 VIJAY VISHWANATH AND DAVID HARDING The Starbucks Effect F00202 ERIK VAN HECK The Cutting Edge in Auctions F00203 MARCEL CORSTJENS AND MARIE CARPENTER From Managing Pills to Managing Brands F00204 PETER ROSSI, PHIL DELURGIO, AND DAVID KANTOR Making Sense of Scanner Data F00205 SUZY WETLAUFER HBR CASE STUDY When Everything Isn’t Half Enough R00211 INDRAJIT SINHA THINKING ABOUT... Cost Transparency: The Net’s Real Threat to Prices and Brands R00210 DAWN LEPORE; JACK ROCKHART; PERSPECTIVES MICHAEL J. EARL; TOM THOMAS; AND Are CIOs Obsolete? R00212 PETER McATEER AND JEFFREY ELTON RANDY KOMISAR FIRST PERSON Goodbye Career, Hello Success R00207 EILEEN C. SHAPIRO BOOKS IN REVIEW Managing in the Cappuccino Economy R00209 PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMIE TANAKA BY JAMIE PHOTOGRAPHY If you want to land the job of your dreams–even if you want to become a CEO–rid yourself of raw ambition. Avoid promotions that make perfect sense. Accept work based on friendship alone. Trust your gut. Then watch what happens: prosperity of the heart, soul, and– yes– the wallet. Copyright © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. harvard business review March–April 2000 FIRST PERSON Goodbye Career, Hello Success by Randy Komisar y conventional standards, my résumé is a disaster. B Eleven companies in 25 years, not to mention a crazy quilt of jobs: community development manager, music promoter, corporate lawyer, CFO at a technology start-up, and chief executive at a video game company, just to name a few. I zigged, then I zagged, then I zigged some more. By my résumé alone, no one should hire me. Except that these days, plenty of companies would. And they do. At last, my “non- career” career makes perfect sense –to them and to me. Right now, I’m a “virtual CEO.” That’s a job title that was cooked up for my business card two years ago to describe my latest incarnation. I work with flesh-and-blood CEOs, mainly of Silicon Valley start-ups, to set strategy, raise money, and put a dynamic organization together very quickly. I work with five or six companies at a time, and I’m paid largely with equity. That way, everyone can be sure that I’m earning my keep. So far, being a virtual CEO has been a blast –fun, exciting, in- teresting. Everything you could want in a job. But how did I get here? By not having a career. Now, that wasn’t intentional. Like every other ambitious, Ivy League–educated baby boomer, I set out to have a career. I longed to impress friends, relatives, and former roommates with my titles and authority. I craved the chance to march up a corporate ladder –any corporate ladder at all. And I tried, I really did. But I just couldn’t. My whole life, I have been con- stitutionally unable to play the career game by its rules. So I ended up following another route: taking jobs that, one after another, made me happy. Jobs that sparked my passion. What a lucky accident that was. While it was in full throttle, my career made no sense looking through the windshield of the car. In fact, for many years, I couldn’t fully explain my professional path to anyone, especially not my family. But today, looking in the rearview mirror, my career makes enormous sense. After all, it ultimately landed me in my perfect job. Sometimes I feel as if I couldn’t have become a virtual CEO any other way. harvard business review March–April 2000 5 FIRST PERSON • Goodbye Career, Hello Success I’m not going to argue that a “ca- and personal. I realized that one per- I got into Brown University. After reer” like mine is for everyone. It’s son went to work, and one person that, I figured, all I needed was a not, especially with its emotional came home and laughed or cried great job, and I would be on my way and financial ups and downs – and about how work felt. So, only one to career fame and fortune. its unnerving lack of a safety net. But person had to make decisions about But there was one distinct impedi- a passion-driven career does have which jobs to take and which jobs to ment to my plan, and it was buried some major virtues that perhaps leave. There couldn’t be a distinc- in my genes. My father was not what make it a good choice for more peo- tion anymore between my career you would call a career man. He ple than suspect it themselves. First, and my happiness, or my career and never seemed to be at the same job very long. He owned a restaurant, a used-car lot, a gas station. He was Like every other ambitious, Ivy League–educated an independent sales rep for paint, lighting fixtures, and jewelry. He baby boomer, I set out to have a career. I tried, started many little ventures, met I really did. But I just couldn’t. early success, got tired of each, and left them to wither. Between those endeavors, he would sell anything it’s never dull. Scary, yes. Confound- my identity. They are all pieces of he could get his hands on: water pu- ing, often. But boring, never. You’re one life –my life. rifiers, burglar alarms, even Niger- always learning about yourself, other When you lump together career ian dried fish. people, business, and the world, and goals and personal goals to get life, My father was also, let’s say, an that feels terrific. It feels meaning- you are certain to find at first that avid gambler. The casinos thought ful. Second, a passion-driven career day-to-day existence is more confus- enough of him to regularly fly him is good for the companies you work ing. It’s definitely easier to compart- into their clutches, and when he for because you’re there for the love mentalize, to do whatever it takes wasn’t in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, of the work. You can feel some satis- to get the money at work and make he would find a good game of poker faction from giving your all to an or- excuses later to your family and in town. Risk taking was in his ganization. Third, a passion-driven friends. “After all, it’s only business. blood. Now, I realize that it is also in career, with all its fluidity and flex- I’m not really like that,” you say. But mine – although it has played itself ibility, actually happens to make over time, I’ve also discovered that out in very different ways. I like to supreme sense in the ever-changing when you stop distinguishing be- gamble, but not with money. I like landscape of the new economy. Con- tween work life and personal life, to gamble with ideas, as many at a ventional careers require that you you stop caring about a lot of things time as is humanly possible. I like put one foot in front of the other, that used to seem so important – to pour energy into them and see if steady as you go. First you get one like the title on your business card. they’ll ignite. kind of experience, then you get an- At the beginning, that feels fright- Even though I entered Brown with other. Inch by inch, you march for- ening –and humbling, too. But it also dreams of a high-powered career in ward. The noncareer career doesn’t feels authentic. Better yet, it feels something – anything – the school involve much marching. Instead, sustainable. I’m 45 now, and I feel as itself did little to send me on my way. when opportunity calls, you leap. if, finally, I don’t have to survive I mean that as a compliment. With And when opportunity dries up, you solely on adrenaline, speed, and agil- few required courses, the opportu- move on. You also tango, roll around ity. I can just follow one passion – nity to invent your own majors, and in the mud, and jump for joy. It all one job – to the next and call it life. a pass-fail option throughout, Brown depends on where you have taken left me to navigate my own educa- yourself. Father’s Footsteps tion. I quickly realized that other But the best thing about a career My career started out just as it was students were my best teachers. I fell like mine is that it isn’t a career at all. supposed to. I was a young over- into an eclectic group of free thinkers It’s a life. Several years ago, just when achiever. I grew up in a comfortable who, after a day of classes, sat around I thought my job history couldn’t get suburb of Rochester, New York, into the wee hours discussing their any more unconventional, it dawned where I excelled in school and par- passions: union organizing, human on me that I had to stop separating ticipated in all the right extracur- rights, theater, writing, music, film- Randy Komisar into two boxes: work ricular activities.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Silicon Valley Comes to Ctecno 12 De Juny De 2012, 19:30H Parc De Recerca Biomèdica De Catalunya PRBB, Barcelona
    2012 Silicon Valley comes to CTecno 12 de Juny de 2012, 19:30h Parc de Recerca Biomèdica de Catalunya PRBB, Barcelona Amb col·laboració de: San Francisco Barcelona ciutats agermanades Corporacions i inversors, ens mostraran les tendències que es duen a terme des de Silicon Valley, que els permeten ser líders globals. L’agermanament entre ambdues ciutats, potencia la col·laboració i pretén reduir la distancia conceptual per a convertir Barcelona en un hub internacional de la mà de San Francisco. Agenda Silicon Valley comes to CTecno, 12 de Juny 19:30h Acreditacions Networking 20:00h Benvinguda Ginés Alarcón President Fundació CTecno 20:05h Grans Corporacions: Cliff Reeves Aaron Crum Stefan Heuser Open Innovation General Manager, Principal, Vice President, Moderador: Microsoft Google Samsung Jerome Engel, Berkeley 20:35h San Francisco Barcelona Maria Puig Xavier Verdaguer ciutats agermanades Membre del consell, Membre del consell, SFOBCN SFOBCN 20:40h Inversors: Finançament Randy Komisar Sean Foote Garrett Gruener per a liderar el mercat Partner at KPCB Founder Cofounder global Labrador Ventures Alta Partners Moderador: Jerome Engel, Berkeley 21:10h Cloenda Carles Flamerich Director General Telecomunicacions, Generalitat de Catalunya Daniel Marí, President de l’Associació CTecno 21:30h Sopar VIP Grans corporacions: Open Innovation En un mercat en constant canvi tecnològic, les corporacions líders incorporen la innovació d’empreses emergents per ser mes competitives mitjançant la captació de nou talent i tecnologia global. Taula rodona 30min Moderador: Jerome Engel Founder of the entrepreneurship center UC Berkeley Cliff Reeves Stefan Heuser Aaron Crum General Manager Vice President Principal Microsoft Samsung Google Inversors: Finançament per a liderar el mercat global Grans inversors de Sèrie B, que cerquen empreses amb alt potencial de creixement, ens presentaran les noves tendències d'inversió a Silicon Valley.
    [Show full text]
  • Team Production in Venture Capital Investing
    Brigham Young University Law School BYU Law Digital Commons Faculty Scholarship 5-31-1999 Team Production in Venture Capital Investing D. Gordon Smith Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons, Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations Commons, and the Law Commons Recommended Citation D. Gordon Smith, Team Production in Venture Capital Investing, 24 J. CORP. L., 949 (1999). This Conference is brought to you for free and open access by BYU Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of BYU Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Team Production in Venture Capital Investing D. Gordon Smith* I. IN TRO DUCTION ......................................................................................................... 949 II. THE VENTURE CAPITAL TEAM .................................................................................. 951 A. The Entrepreneur'sInputs .................................................................................. 953 B. The Venture Capitalist'sInputs .......................................................................... 953 1. Serving as a Sounding Board to the EntrepreneurTeam .............................. 954 2. Obtaining Alternate Sources of Financing.................................................... 956 3. Recruiting Management Personnel..............................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Venture Capital As Human Resource Management Antonio Gledson De Carvalho A, Charles W
    Journal of Economics and Business 60 (2008) 223–255 Venture capital as human resource management Antonio Gledson de Carvalho a, Charles W. Calomiris b,c,∗, Joao˜ Amaro de Matos d a Escola de Adminstra¸c˜ao de Empresas de S˜ao Paulo, Funda¸c˜ao Getulio Vargas, Brazil b Columbia Business School, United States c National Bureau of Economic Research, United States d Faculdade de Economia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal Received 25 October 2005; received in revised form 10 January 2007; accepted 26 April 2007 Abstract Venturecapitalists actively participate in attracting, identifying, and suggesting managers for their portfolio companies through internal and external human resource networks. We collect and analyze survey data on the operation of this network. Theoretical and empirical analyses show that cross-sectional differences among portfolio companies should be, and are, associated with differences in the intensity with which venture capitalists network. Relevant factors include (1) the value of the information transmitted, (2) the riskiness of the activities of the portfolio companies, (3) the size of the venture capital fund, (4) the degree of difficulty in attracting executives, and (5) the reputation of the venture capitalist for successfully recycling managers. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: G24; J41 Keywords: Capital; Human resources; Venture capitalist 1. Introduction The crucial role of small businesses in creating jobs and spurring innovation gives special importance to the financing of growth companies. The central problem of financing small, growing businesses is to find a way for outsiders to supply equity profitably to entrepreneurs with limited ∗ Corresponding author. Fax: +1 212 316 9180.
    [Show full text]
  • A Business Plan? Or a Journey to Plan B?
    MARCH 2010 John Mullins and Randy Komisar A Business Plan? Or a Journey to Plan B? REPRINT NUMBER 51302 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW A Business Plan? Or a Journey to Plan B? From Apple to Twitter, some of the most successful businesses are not what their inventors originally envisioned. BY JOHN MULLINS AND RANDY KOMISAR n March 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey were working on a new venture called Odeo, a podcasting service. Odeo was in something of a creative slump, and Dorsey wondered if a short messaging service that would enable everyone in the company to communicate with others in the group might be of some help. Their solution, which the world now knows as Twitter Inc., was to build a simple Web ap- plication that would let the team stay in touch by sending short 140-character messages to the rest of the group. It wasn’t long before they realized that the new application held considerably more promise than the original podcasting idea on which they had been working. The rest of the story is history. Twitter reached its tipping point at the South by Southwest festival in 2007, Iwhere the number of tweets per day jumped to 60,000 and it won the festival’s Web Award. Whether or not Twitter will develop a viable business model remains in question, but the Twitter story is a powerful reminder that an entrepreneur’s main job is not to flawlessly execute the business idea so lovingly articulated in his or her business plan. It’s to embark on a learning jour- bucks or PayPal had stuck to their original business ney that may, on occasion, reach the destination that plans, we’d likely never have heard of them.
    [Show full text]
  • Prepare for Your Lucky Break Me the Unpredictability of Success
    ChangeThis 168.01 PREPARE FOR YOUR LUCKYRandy KomisarBREAK A long career in business 168.01 has impressed upon Komisar Randy Break Lucky Your for Prepare me the unpredictability of success. As an entrepreneur and investor, this lesson is particularly sobering. When I started, I felt that my hard work and a modicum of intelligence would propel me to certain success. Simply put one foot in front of the other. But living in the Silicon Valley casino has changed my view. Success is, after all, relative. There is much written about the short half-life of the joy experi- enced after receiving a significant windfall if others have received an even greater sum. It seems we can’t even gauge our own success without comparison to others. And, in Silicon Valley, the relative distribution of success appears largely random. That is not to say that many of the successful icons of innovation aren’t impressive; it’s to say that in comparison to so many of the also-rans they are virtually indistinguishable. And that realization alone is humbling. My job for decades has been to pick the winners and losers. There is a bit of the Heisenberg Principle at work here: when successful people place their bets, the simple act of betting alone gives the lucky recipient a distinct advantage. But as venture capital statistics attest, it’s not enough. Most venture investments fail, and even the “gurus” need something more. Now, compare that to the hype. The media is gaga for larger than life successes. They plaster their home pages with tales of huge IPOs, massive investments, prodigious founders, and brilliant 168.01 and not-so-brilliant innovations, with all the trimmings.
    [Show full text]
  • Creativity, Inc. [Entire Talk]
    Stanford eCorner Creativity, Inc. [Entire Talk] Ed Catmull, Disney/Pixar Animation April 30, 2014 Video URL: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/videos/3321/Creativity-Inc-Entire-Talk Ed Catmull, president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, shares some of his formative career experiences and offers a glimpse inside the working culture of Disney and Pixar. In conversation with Stanford Professor Bob Sutton, Catmull offers additional insights from his book, Creativity, Inc., including lessons learned from his longtime working relationship with the late Steve Jobs. Transcript Today we have a special guest, we have Ed Catmull from Pixar, so he is the President of Pixar and also the President of Dixie, I knew that, Disney Animation. Dixie is a little different company and why we're here today is to talk about... But Disney does use a lot of cups. Disney does use a lot of cups, they do, I would imagine... to talk about his new book Creativity, Inc. So Ed has - and just to give, just a little by a way of introduction and also to give a plug. I really, and I just said this to Tina Seelig who's sitting over there somewhere, I really do think this is the most useful and interesting creativity book I've ever read. And note that I wrote one. So I am putting it ahead of one of my books. And the reason it's so interesting, in addition to the fact that it's very well done, and Ed and I were just talking about the very compulsive process by which he and his editors went through to make a great book, is there is just no matching Ed's life and his path, which we're going to talk about of course: Pixar.
    [Show full text]
  • The Wave of Unicorn Ipos Reveals Silicon Valley's Groupthink
    26/09/2019, 2327 Page 1 of 1 A stampede of mythical proportions The wave of unicorn IPOs reveals Silicon Valley’s groupthink There is more to life than blitzscaling Print edition | Briefing Apr 17th 2019 | SAN FRANCISCO f you want to go unicorn spotting, take a turn around the I brand-new park on top of San Francisco’s Transbay bus terminal. This is not because it is perched on a spectacular, undulating building that itself looks quite like a mythical beast (Moby-Dick, in this case) nor because its tastefully planted fora, all native to fower-power California, ofer a particularly enticing equine habitat. It is just that, as a would-be icon of San Francisco’s business district, the park is conveniently placed for looking out on their corporate headquarters. There are 88 privately held startups worth more than $1bn each in the San Francisco Bay Area, more than in any other region in the world, and a fair few of them, including Slack, a corporate messaging service, and Instacart, a delivery frm, are hard by the Transbay terminal. You can’t quite see the headquarters of Lyft and Uber, two ride-hailing services, from its leafy roof, but were you to climb the swanky Millennium Tower next door you could. The hitch is that the park is currently inaccessible. Last September, just six weeks after it opened, cracks found in two steel beams forced the closure of the Transbay terminal’s crowning gardens as well as the rest of it. You can still climb the Millennium Tower—but you need to be aware that the city’s tallest residential building has developed an unwelcome departure from the perpendicular, something which is generating a prodigious amount of litigation and not a little mockery.
    [Show full text]
  • Of 2 2009 Factiva, Inc. All Rights Reserved. BOOK REVIEW Why Start-Ups Must Plan to Change Plans by Jonathan Moules
    BOOK REVIEW Why start-ups must plan to change plans By Jonathan Moules 789 words 1 October 2009 Financial Times FTFT London Ed1 14 English (c) 2009 The Financial Times Limited. All rights reserved BOOK REVIEW Getting to Plan B Breaking Through to a Better Business Model By John Mullins and Randy Komisar Harvard Business Press, $29.95/ £19.99 Here is bad news and good news for budding entrepreneurs who spend years trying to get their initial master plan to work. The bad news is that not only do most plan As fail, but most great companies have achieved their success by moving quickly from plan A to plan B, C, D or E. The point is made by John Mullins and Randy Komisar in Getting to Plan B. Mullins, an associate professor of management practice at London Business School, had analysed what happened to participants in the LBS entrepreneurship summer school he had been running for five years. One finding was that 60 per cent of the new businesses still operating were no longer based on the ideas that the owner-managers first contemplated. "These entrepreneurs are among the lucky few," says Mullins, who wrote The New Business Road Test (2003) to help people assess ideas for start-ups.His analysis fits with general research that suggests it takes 58 new product ideas to deliver just one success. Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm, and author at the height of the dotcom boom of The Monk and The Riddle , a popular book about entrepreneurship with a philosophical twist, writes from the investor's point of view.
    [Show full text]
  • Twitter Book for Venture Hacks by Backupify.Com
    Twitter book for Venture Hacks by Backupify.com Profile venturehacks Name: venturehacks Location: San Francisco Bio: Good advice for startups. Tweets by @nivi. Brains by @naval. We are investors (Twitter), founders (Epinions), students (life), advisors (billions). 1 / 1.053 Twitter book for Venture Hacks by Backupify.com Updates venturehacks “Internet is one of the primary export industries in the US.” – @fredwilson, http://vh.co/ci4ZsT 2010-06-10 00:03:47 (+00:00) venturehacks “When breakthrough thinking is needed, a fun… environment will generally yield better/faster results.” – @seanellis, http://vh.co/aPJg21 2010-06-09 22:58:35 (+00:00) venturehacks Steve Jobs: The definition of entrepreneurial resiliency http://vh.co/bLj8ZT. /cc @msuster @gruber 2010-06-09 18:45:02 (+00:00) venturehacks Kicklabs has great office space for SF startups http://vh.co/dxEdwL. I'm hanging out there today. Tell'em I sent you: [email protected]. 2010-06-08 22:03:45 (+00:00) venturehacks “We all meet for 3 hours, once a week, and we talk about everything we're doing.” – Steve Jobs http://vh.co/c3CVO9 @ 1:01:20 /cc @jasonfried 2010-06-08 19:10:05 (+00:00) venturehacks “Instead of looking at pixels *under* glass, it's like looking at pixels *on* glass.” – @gruber on iPhone 4's display, http://vh.co/cEQfs7 2010-06-08 01:03:55 (+00:00) venturehacks How to mind fuck people with "wide" questions http://vh.co/at5tQe. I especially like the job interview question. /by @msuster 2010-06-07 21:36:44 (+00:00) venturehacks “Everyone dialed in to the meeting, putting every
    [Show full text]
  • COOLIRIS: BUILDING an A+ TEAM Introduction It
    COOLIRIS: BUILDING AN A+ TEAM Introduction It was well past 2AM at the Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB) incubator on Sand Hill Road but Josh Schwarzapel, the young and energetic co-founder of Cooliris, wasn’t about to wrap up the night. Across the gray cubicle wall, the technical team, Austin and Kyan, were coding at full steam to finish the next product release. But the team was tired. Three months earlier when his company received its first round of funding from KPCB, Josh had readily accepted the challenge to expand beyond the original founders and build a world-class technical team. How difficult could it be for a young company with the backing of one of the world’s most successful venture capital firms, an incredible technical vision, an early product with great traction, and another product in the pipeline to attract great talent? Yet somehow it had been challenging to build the team, truly challenging. As a student at Stanford studying entrepreneurship, Josh had learned how critical a great team was to the success of a young firm. But now, in the early hours of the morning, Josh realized that his courses hadn’t taught him how to build a great team. Nonetheless, in Cooliris’s high-accountability culture, pointing the finger at the hole in his formal education wouldn’t excuse a failure. Soujanya Bhumkar, the company’s CEO, had been supportive and provided advice along the way, but Josh could sense the pressure: from the investors, from Soujanya, and worst of all from his friends coding late into the night to keep the company’s head above water while they waited for reinforcements.
    [Show full text]
  • The Yin and the Yang of Corporate Innovation by STEVE LOHR Published: January 26, 2012
    The Yin and the Yang of Corporate Innovation By STEVE LOHR Published: January 26, 2012 IN the hunt for innovation, that elusive path to economic growth and corporate prosperity, try a little jazz as an inspirational metaphor. That’s the message that John Kao, an innovation adviser to corporations and governments — who is also a jazz pianist — was to deliver in a performance and talk on Saturday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Jazz, Mr. Kao says, demonstrates some of the tensions in innovation, between training and discipline on one side and improvised creativity on the other. In business, as in jazz, the interaction of those two sides, the yin and the yang of innovation, fuels new ideas and products. The mixture varies by company. Mr. Kao points to the very different models of innovation represented by Google and Apple, two powerhouses of Silicon Valley, the world’s epicenter of corporate creativity. The Google model relies on rapid experimentation and data. The company constantly refines its search, advertising marketplace, e-mail and other services, depending on how people use its online offerings. It takes a bottom-up approach: customers are participants, essentially becoming partners in product design. The Apple model is more edited, intuitive and top-down. When asked what market research went into the company’s elegant product designs, Steve Jobs had a standard answer: none. “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want,” he would add. The Google-Apple comparison, Mr. Kao says, highlights the “archetypical tension in the creative process.” Google speaks to the power of data-driven decision-making, and of online experimentation and networked communication.
    [Show full text]
  • 14373 Management of Small Businesses Fall 2014 Syllabus and Course Overview
    BAEP423: Management of Small Business Syllabus and Course Overview Page 1 BAEP 423 - 14373 Management of Small Businesses Fall 2014 Syllabus and Course Overview Preliminary – Subject to Change Instructor Course Overview Greg Autry, Ph.D. BRI-1 (Bridge Hall basement) BAEP 423 surveys the challenges and skills required to launch and [email protected] operate a successful small business. Such businesses are growth Cell: 714.366.8920 (use with discretion, texting is preferred) focused others may be lifestyle focused. They may be non-profit enterprises or benefit corporations designed for a mission beyond Time Mon, Wed. 12:00-2:00PM profits. The objective of this course is to design businesses that are personally fulfilling as well as financially fruitful – an objective that must Location HOH2 be individually defined. Students will develop a realistic perspective of the skills they must master and the resources they must secure to Office Hours realize their entrepreneurial aspirations. Mon & Wed: I’m usually around between 2-3, but make an appointment when possible. Learning Objectives 1. Plan an entrepreneurial career that matches your life goals 2. Learn to identify opportunity and vet concepts 3. Learn to manage risk 4. Understand the basics of strategy, marketing and sales 5. Appreciate how legal structures and taxes impact your business 6. Learn the fundamentals of operations and accounting 7. Understand the overriding importance of strategic finance 8. Employees, family, management and leadership 9. Understand the trade offs in exit strategies 10. Have fun and no regrets BAEP423: Management of Small Business Syllabus and Course Overview Page 2 Specific Skill Goals 1.
    [Show full text]