allen morgan has an interesting post about how entrepreneur/ceo's should manage boards which i will excerpt below. (these are 10 commandments from a guy he knows named john kernan). i have to admit that these sound like very good advice but also have to admit that this is why i really dont like being a ceo and working for a board. (not sure we're supposed to admit this but most every entrepreneur i know would agree too.)
i know running companies isnt supposed to be about having fun, but i also know it's really hard to keep at a job if it isnt and doing all this political crap to 'manage' my board is almost a fulltime job in itself. i have always approached board meetings as a time to help me do my job. i figure i should be using this collective wisdom to help me work on hard decisions, mostly around strategy, rarely around operations and people. i've been idealistic about boards, imagining them as a group of partners sharing common goals to win which also entails a lot of these rules. however, i've almost always been dead wrong. politics do creep into it and ignoring them just means that you arent positioned well to sell the answer you know is best. net result, we entrepreneurs believe we're above the politics and we end up shooting ourselves in the foot (often the head too) by doing the 80% work to identify the bold winning path then failing to do the 20% (ok feels like 80% too:) to sell this into our boards.
in my perfect world...who am i kidding, in my perfect world i'm richard branson or rupert murdoch or better, larry or sergei, and i own a controlling share and dont waste any time buttering up board members! until then, i'll toil as a mere mortal.
allen's rules...
1. NEVER have the board meetng "at" the board meeting. ALWAYS call every director a few days before the meeting and run every important issue by them to get their input, Also update them on company performance, especially the bad news, and let them "beat you up" privately. That way, the meeting can focus in a constructive fashion on problem-solving and building the Company for the future.
2. Maximum Powerpoint show is four slides from any presenter, especially yourself. This should be the limit of director interest in detail.
3. Provide complete access for the board to everyone and everything in the Company. They will rarely use it, but it's a great comfort to them to know you are not trying to hide anything.
4. Have your key team members do almost all the presentations. It gives them exposure and allows you to make sage comments along with the rest of the board. A perfect board meeting is when 10% of the talking is done by the CEO, 60% by the team, and 30% by the directors.
5. Carefully consider every director's input and take good notes at the meeting. These people have lots of experience and many great contacts. But you make the final decisions (and if you don't, they will start to look for someone who will).
6. Give the Directors projects in their areas of expertise. It's free consulting and they usually do a good job.
7. Get in front of the board on tough decisions like top management changes, including changes to your own role. If it's going to happen, make it your idea.
8. For VC directors, try to picture how they are describing your Company to their partners, and what questions their partners are asking. Your job is to make each director a hero to their partners (or corporate boss).
9. Remember it's Company first, team second, you last. You win when everybody wins, not when just you win.
10. Make a friend of every board member. Send them interesting deal ideas you turn up, learn about their interests, make the board a "look forward to" experience for everyone.
If you work hard, always act in good faith and in the best interest of the Company -- and if you follow these 10 rules -- most VC's will still be interested in financing your next deal, even if the Company tanks.
And if the Company is a success, they will be throwing money at you!
9 Comments:
"interesting questions to me are what role does ebay, amazon (used merch) and google play."Where's the value in a butcher shop? they all have the same products, so how do they survive? I know I pass 3 different butchers to get to the one I like, even if I'm not buying their smoked ham or hot links that the other guys' don't carry. We are still creatures of habit and convenience, so the "value-added services" will be the meat & potato of what the services will offer, not the core data. the tools you use will come down to a personal preference, and some people will pay more for their tools than others. Use a chef's knife, a Ginsu, a fancy mandolin slicer or a Quisinart, your food is still going to get chopped up and you'll eat it.
another thought on the value of the peopleweb is that WUM's (Wind-Up Merchant aka joke/spoof identity) will be easily caught out and reduced in value. Without a network wide profile of your life, a newly created WUM won't have the full background to make them seem real. The problems that this brings is that it limits the effect of pseudonym's like Publius or Alan Smithee, so it's not foolproof.
I love the thinking here Marc, it's the kind of stuff that gets me excited in the Network again.
Quote: In the affluent, manic late ‘60s and late ‘90s, we really believed we had the power to reinvent ourselves. New ideas, new freedoms, or new technologies were going to bring forth the new, improved human at last. Then we woke up from that dream on recession’s morning after and found ourselves stuck with the same old, same old: greed, lust, wrath, envy, pride, gluttony and sloth. Almost as fast as Woodstock had turned to Altamont, the Internet turned into a huge hard-core peep show.
from here
http://ambivablog.typepad.com/ambivablog/2005/02/calling_all_spi.html
The problem is that we want to go from 0 to 100 mph in 6 seconds while towing a tank.
For the above hypothesis to come true,one needs to consider the following aspects :
1. Need of Open Standards that will facilitate the movement towards peopleweb. Sites afterall have to exchange information. RSS standard is a classic example for the nascent blogging business
2. Businesses realizing the importance of adding value to the customer by adopting the open standards.(Having API's released to all, etc)
3. Since the information about the people is culled from the network, the authenticity of the info becomes prominent . Who vouches for the authenticity of the info?
4. Considering that commerce is an essential building block of peopleweb, Identity theft needs to be abated for peopleweb to move forward.
All 4 aspects will play a crucial role in deciding whether peopleweb will see the light of the day.
Curious if you think the various social networking companies and portals will deploy peopleweb features around emerging open standards, OR, a new separate company is required that then interfaces with the various social networking companies and portals.
Potentially big difference...
Glad to see you're still espousing this idea, Mark!
I agree with the others that there are execution questions and problems, but the biggest driver of the coming change, IMO, is the value that is being created by all of these profiles on the web. As I go through my existence on the web, there are little bits of me at Tribe, Friendster, Linked In, AOL, BlackPlanet, Shaadi, etc. However, each of these profiles are directed inward toward the community. Even in cases where those profiles can be searched and found, their existence by themsleves is not nearly as valuable as seeing a collection of identities scattered through the web.
The reason that I believe that creating the collection will happen is that there is increasing opportunity for arbitrage here. Any one profile in itself is not so valuable to any specific community. In fact, getting people to view a profile is positive for that community. Having a directory that would help me navigate across communities and tie together the bits of information, therefore, could be seen as generating value for each individual community in the network. Therefore, the price to access profiles should be fairly low.
OTOH, the value in bringing together these profiles - from a user perspective - is significant. The creation of a more complete identity w/ its attendant directory becomes a valuable navigation tool.
The margin between the unlocked value and the price extracted by each individual community is what will fund the effort to integrate all of these communities. It hasn't happened yet because the opportunity in the arbitrage isn't quite there. However, as the value stored away in these profiles increases, it makes this sort of 'PeopleWeb' - IMO - inevitable.
The 'open profiles' concept is extremely exciting: congratulations to you and tribe.net for going down this route.
In a blog posting on 'Digital identity: FOAF vs swarm intelligence' that I made today before I had seen yours, I mentioned an oddity concerning central vs distributed profiles in the case of wikipedia entries, using the nicely-disambiguated entries for 13 different people named 'Michael Jackson' as the example: these entries simultaneously centralize (via common wikipedia URLs) and distribute (via the chaos of swarm intelligence authoring) the ownership of the 'profiles'. Moreover, these profiles represent a peculiar case of un-owned and often un-attributed (provenance-free) personal data, editable by anybody/everybody, yet demonstrably stable, sound, and scaleable!
I'm wondering if you think such a model has any role within what you're trying to achieve with tribe.net?
It seems "open profile" is where the industry needs to go or risk being marginalized by companies like Yahoo. Essentially this is a means for Tribe, Linkedin, et al to very effectively compete. I also think it fits into the the future of identity management in that one "uber" about me, profile can be ported to other communities and the user can determine what information is presented to that community, or what can be syndicated.
My question is what role does identity verification by a trusted 3rd party play in enabling this to happen freely and securely. To be clear I mean identity verification beyond what is possbile/practical at one or maybe two degrees of seperation in a social network.
You are definitely right on with this. It seems "open profile" is where the industry needs to go or risk being marginalized by companies like Yahoo. Essentially this is a means for Tribe, Linkedin, et al to very effectively compete. I also think it fits into the the future of identity management in that one "uber" about me, profile can be ported to other communities and the user can determine what information is presented to that community, or what can be syndicated.
My question is what role does identity verification by a trusted 3rd party play in enabling this to happen freely and securely. To be clear I mean identity verification beyond what is possbile/practical at one or maybe two degrees of seperation in a social network.
LID aka Light-Weight Identity may come handy. It's a P2P way of publishing semantic information about yourself securely by NetMesh. It supports FOAF and any kind of schema.
http://lid.netmesh.org