Last winter I was invited to give a talk at the Open Source Leadership Forum, which was held at a very nice resort at Squaw Valley. The audience were hardcore techies, but I talked about my book and about dysfunction in startups and venture capital. Recently the organization put the talk up on YouTube, and much to my surprise it has been getting some attention.
The biggest challenge of the talk was that I wrote it thinking I had 40 minutes […]
I was fortunate yesterday to have an op-ed piece published in the Sunday New York Times. The headline was, “Jerks and the Start-Ups They Ruin.” My basic argument is that the problem with tech bros is not that they’re jerks, it’s that they don’t know how to run companies. They’re not very good at business. Some privately held venture-funded tech unicorns (eg Uber) now have presumed market valuations bigger than the market value […]
Ever since I published Disrupted, people have been writing to tell me their own stories about kooky workplace culture. Here’s one that just came in over the transom, from a person who works in a tech company in San Francisco:
I ran into our office manager in the elevator lobby today and she was all upset. I asked “what’s wrong?” She says: “It’s dog day tomorrow, and the pillow cases I ordered for the dog pillows aren’t the right size.” Dog-pillow […]
I want to share one image that I showed during my talk at SXSW about “Ending Bro Culture in Startup Land.” It’s a simple graphic. I made a list of the top 16 tech unicorns in the United States, and grabbed a photo of each company’s CEO, then put them on a slide. VCs swear they’re not “pattern matching” when they make investments, that they’re open to diversity, that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. I think it’s a case of, […]
I’ve been on the road a lot lately giving speeches. In late February I went to Squaw Valley and spoke at the Open Source Leadership Forum, more or less about “Disrupted” but also on the new economy business model — “grow fast, lose money, go public, cash out” — and the implications that has for society. Yesterday I was in Orlando talking to AIIM about my book but also about startups and […]
Paul and Linus.
A few weeks ago I gave a talk at the Open Source Leadership Forum, hosted by the Linux Foundation. The conference was fantastic. I brought my son (he’s 11) and we both got to meet Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. My son attended a talk given by Linus and I think (or hope) it inspired him a great deal. (That’s my son Paul standing with Linus, at the […]
I’m posting this as a kind of placeholder where I can put links to my recent columns in Fortune magazine. I’ll update as new columns appear.
What Old Companies Are Doing to Attract Young Talent. How GE, IBM and others are trying to reposition themselves and appeal to Millennial workers. It’s not about ping pong and beer pong. It’s about purpose.
Job Hunting After a Certain Age? Erase Your Past. The CEO […]
Yesterday my book hit an interesting milestone — Disrupted got its 700th review on Amazon. That’s a lot of reviews! To put this another way I think it is 698 more than my previous book received. More interesting is that the 700th review is one that really moved me:
“This book is important to me.” I can’t tell you how it feels to write a book and have someone say that about your […]
As the Boston Globe reported this morning, I’ve just struck a two-book deal with Hachette Book Group, the company that published Disrupted. The first book is called Lab Rats. The best thing about the deal, from my perspective, is that I will keep working with Paul Whitlatch, the editor who worked on Disrupted. One thing I’ve learned over a long career in journalism and writing is that a good editor is […]
Maryjane Fahey at AARP asked me to participate in a year-end round-up where they asked “disruptors” what their best year was. And the result is this fantastic slideshow featuring a bunch of really interesting, accomplished people, and then me. Anyway — it was nice to be invited. And I don’t hate the photo. I almost always hate the photo.