It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies are a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.
It used to be said that a person was “influential” — these days they are “influencers.” Are the terms synonymous? Can they really be used interchangeably? I don’t think so, and plan to enlarge on the differences over the next two days.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Influence isn’t about your online ranking or the strength of your brand, although they contribute.
Influence is about effect.
The effect your words or actions have on those exposed to them.
Yesterday I linked to an article in which Penelope Trunk said that it’s a bad idea for founders to be of different genders and because of her influence dozens of founders are probably rethinking their startup plans.
There is a common arrogance among influencers to generalize their opinion and present it as fact applicable to all. Typically, the more successful the influencer the greater the arrogance.
But from day one every founder has influence, before success and beyond the expected, so even a casual word can cause trouble.
A founder CEO I know, whose original education years before was engineering, had a habit of occasionally strolling through engineering to see what was going on.
One day he commented that he wouldn’t do a design the way the team was doing it. It was a casual, throw-away comment, one he had forgotten five minutes later, but it devastated the design team.
The CEO had no clue to the havoc he wrought and it took the vp of engineering, who was co-founder, hours to settle them down. He then told the CEO not to talk to the team and banned him from the department.
What those on the receiving end of influencers need to realize is that no matter how brilliant or experienced someone is they are still voicing an opinion.
And as valuable as the opinion may be, it should never be swallowed whole, because opinions are subjective.
They are the product of that individual’s MAP, which itself is a product of upbringing and experience. Even someone else having exactly the same background and experience would not have identical MAP because each person processes differently and has different inherent characteristics.
Influence comes with responsibilities—how well do you handle yours?
Laura Castaneda
WA July 1, 2017 These women do themselves a disservice by choosing to appear bare legged, in shorts and casual clothing for this article. Rather, all three ought to have posed in business professional clothing. Women say they want to be accepted as professionals and peers while simultaneously choosing to participate in age old ways of competing: showing some skin. They have even chosen to do it for this article which is about the very acts photos like these encourage. Women who want to be treated equally should hide their sexuality (skin) in the business setting. It’s always been accepted that women who stoop to short skirts and low cut blouses at work are not to be taken seriously. What has changed to make that untrue today, exactly? Magical thinking?
What skin? One woman has on cutoffs? Her partners are in jeans and a skirt (no stockings) and all have on T-shirts. Typical Silicon Valley startup garb.
The comment reminds me of the ageless rape defense: dressed like that she was asking for it.
But do the people with the least power have to shoulder responsibility for weeding out misconduct by people with the most?
Ryan Pew, who writes Ryan’s Journal here on Thursday, is a former Marine and a millennial father of three girls. I asked him what he thought.
As a father of girls, by my very nature I want them to succeed without their gender being an issue. I understand the differences between the sexes but do see us as equal. However I have also seen how, as a man, you see other men who believe otherwise and are not afraid of speaking to a woman a certain way. One of these posts talks about how one of the VC’s was pushing alcohol and then used that as leverage when he tried his moves. Sounds very frat boy to me.
Hey, Ryan, it IS frat-boy, AKA, bro culture.
What I’ve never understood, and I’ve asked directly, is why these jerks think what they do is “NBD, business as usual,” but condemn anyone who treats their wife/mother/daughter/friend/etc. the same way.
Hi. My name is Brad. You may not have heard of me before, but don’t worry, I’m rich. (…) Obviously I’m a smart guy, but one thing I can’t for the life of me understand is: why do all these women keep accusing me of sexual harassment? (…) And yeah, I use my position of power to get laid, but who wouldn’t? (…) Do I want them to fuck me? Sure I do. Will it affect whether or not I fund their company? Yes, it will. Does that mean I don’t respect them? No! Well yes. But it’s not personal, it’s business.
From ‘77 to ‘97 I was a tech recruiter and can’t count the times I was hit on by VCs and managers. I’m here to tell you that harassment isn’t about sex any more than rape is.
It’s about power, control, money, and insecure male egos that are terrified of women who dare.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
I get so tired of people being labeled “self-made,” whether by the media, their circle or themselves.
There is no such thing.
I can hear your thoughts across the miles. “Who is she to say there’s no such thing as self-made. Just because she didn’t do it doesn’t mean I can’t.”
I agree, I’m nobody, but Arnold Schwarzenegger is a well-known somebody and he says the same thing.
I always tell people that you can call me anything that you want. You can call me Arnold. You can call me Schwarzenegger. You can call me ‘the Austrian Oak.’ You can call me Schwarzy. You can call me Arnie. But don’t ever, ever call me the self‑made man.
It took a lot of help. None of us can make it alone. None of us. (…) And I have to say that it is important to acknowledge that, because people make it always sound that you did all this yourself.
I didn’t. I did it with a lot of help.
Yes, I was determined. Yes, I never listened to the naysayers. Yes, I had a great vision. Yes, I had the fire in the belly and all of those things, but I didn’t do it without the help.
Here’s the full video in case you think I made it up.
Now stand in front of the mirror and say three times, “I am not self-made.” Repeat twice daily until you believe it.
Have you noticed that people in general are more wrapped up in themselves than ever before?
Whether in words or pictures, they document and share what they eat, where they go, what they do and with whom they do it, not just with their friends and known acquaintances, but with the world in general.
…narcissism levels have been rising for decades, which means that our world is increasingly self-centered, overconfident, and deluded.
And the next sentence really rang a bell.
Furthermore, these increases appear to be exacerbated among leaders, since those in charge of judging leadership potential often mistake confidence for competence.
Our politicians aren’t the only place where narcissism is running wild.
Narcissists are found at the helm of more and more companies of all sizes, but are especially prevalent in the financial sector and in tech.
In 2008 financial bosses with more confidence than competence brought the global economy to its knees.
Tech abounds with narcissistic founders and very few of them will stand the test of time, as have Jobs and Bezos.
Nor is narcissistic behavior limited to top bosses; it is found at every level of management, as well as every level of contributor — from new grads through the most senior contributor.
And lets not forget kindergartners through college.
We cannot make it alone, but we care too much about ourselves to genuinely care about others. This tension between our desire to get along with others and our desire to get ahead of them represents the fundamental conundrum of human affairs.
Much as I loathe the hype around “leaders,” it’s up to the positional leader to manage the get along/get ahead dichotomy if they are to have a successful organization.
I find it ironic that so many of those who preach the importance of data sets and evangelize data-based decisions, again, especially in tech, manage to ignore the hard data on what type of leader succeeds best.
Unfortunately, our admiration for charismatic leaders comes at a price: perpetuating the proliferation of narcissistic leaders. And while the existence of incredibly successful CEOs, such as Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos (and Rockefeller, Ford, and Disney before them), may suggest that narcissism is a beneficial leadership quality, most overconfident, entitled, and egotistical CEOs are not just ineffective but also destructive — even when they manage to attain a great deal of success. For example, narcissistic CEOs overpay when they acquire firms, costing their shareholders dearly. Their firms tend to perform in a volatile and unpredictable fashion, going from big wins to even bigger losses. They are often involved in counterproductive work behaviors, such as fraud. They are also more likely to abuse power and manipulate their followers, particularly those who are naïve and submissive.
Whether you are a boss or a worker, read the article; it’s short and will provide insights into your own actions, as well as those of your boss or the boss with whom you are interviewing.
“What if you could combine the service-model approach of Andreessen Horowitz, and the founder-first community building offline and online approach of First Round Capital, with the processing power and reach of Silicon Valley Angels, and the discretion of Floodgate and the judgment of Sequoia? No one else can make the claim that they are even building those pieces. That’s what we’re doing.”
But a lousy manager according to his people.
…a demanding boss who needed to sign off on all decisions including investments, yet rarely made himself available to do so.
Four years later it’s the story of how fast a privileged background, super-size chutzpah, plenty of swagger, negligent management skills and questionable actions can bring you down.
And the very gifts that enabled Rothenberg to start his fund and carve out a name for himself in the crowded valley venture scene — his youth, his Stanford and Harvard degrees, and his dense social network and splashy events — may have set the course for his fiasco.
Read the story.
Look in the mirror.
Review your track record and actions.
Eradicate any similarities.
Hat tip to Anand Sanwal for pointing me to this story.
It’s amazing to me, but looking back over a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written. Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.
I wrote this post back in 2009 and since then the number of narcissistic leaders in all walks has exploded. It’s literally a global epidemic, with tech leading (pun intended) the way, although the current crop of politicians is still out front. Read other Golden Oldies here.
“Leaders tend to be narcissistic, but you don’t have to be a narcissist to be a leader.” –Amy Brunell, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University’s Newark campus.
“…narcissistic behavior is a “trait predicting charismatic leadership. People who are charismatic and charming… They think they’re entitled to it. They think they’re smarter than other people and they can get away with it.” –W. Keith Campbell, head of the psychology department at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Narcissism isn’t necessarily bad, but it is growing. When psychiatrists deemed it a bonafide personality disorder in the 1980’s it affected 1% of the population; in 2008 the number stood at around 6.2%.
Most politicians are narcissists, as are many media personalities (neither is surprising), but it seems that more and more business leaders fall in that category also.
There are 7 component traits that are measured.
Authority
Self-sufficiency
Superiority
Exhibitionism
Exploitativeness
Vanity
Entitlement
Although I have no proof, I bet that most, if not all, Wall Street honchos would score fairly high on these traits.
“A study published in December in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that people who score high in these traits are more likely to be leaders, but these individuals don’t necessarily perform any better and potentially may become destructive leaders.”
So much for the much-ballyhooed ‘charismatic leader’.
Then come back and share your score and whether you believe it fits you.
My score was 11, but if I had taken it 30 years ago I think it would have been at least 5 points higher. (Age is either mellowing me or I’m more realistic:)
There are no right or wrong answers and even if you score off the narcissism charts that doesn’t mean you’re ‘bad’—as with any trait it is how you handle it in everyday life that matters.
I’ve seen many definitions of leadership in the course of my career, but none so accurate as the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th US president.
Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.
Simple, right?
But harder to implement.
Years ago, in a personal setting, I was acting like a prima donna when someone I respected turned a mirror to my behavior.
Not only did I think my behavior was despicable, but I also learned of the destructive power of ego.
My ego.
It was a wake-up call for me.
To counteract it in the future, I created a little mantra that I repeat to myself relatively often.
“Ego is the enemy that confuses what I want, and destroys what I create.”
Ego is THE enemy.
More dangerous than laziness, ignorance or stupidity.
More perfidious than cowardice or fear.
And, sadly, more common across society with every passing year.
A couple of days ago KG sent me a link to an article questioning previous research, which found that bosses asking questions engender positive reactions and asked me what I thought.
But a 2015 study suggests that there’s one glaring exception to that phenomenon. According to the findings, men in leadership positions wind up looking less competent when they ask for other people’s help.
As usual, I found KG’s thoughts well worth sharing. I include mine mainly to add clarity to the flow.
Me: With regards to the “clever experiments” I don’t think a bunch of MBA students, who are often all-knowing and judgmental, are a good guide to managing an age-diverse team.
KG: Possibly, but as I’ve remarked in the past, the general culture appreciates “strong” leadership. See Bush II or Trump as examples. Or Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison.
Me: True, but leadership still plays out within each specific culture and doesn’t always travel well. Also, your examples are the top dogs; there are leaders at every level and I don’t believe it plays out the same.
KG: Within a culture, little dogs follow top dogs. If the top dog displays certain behaviors, then the little ones will follow suit — we’ve all seen this in organizations.
The issue is that if it is expected that leaders are more than other humans, then we have a false view of leadership.
It is good for stroking the egos of those who are in leadership positions, but it leaves them exposed and ignorant. It should be unnecessary to appear as a demigod to be an effective leader in any culture.
In certain situations a leader must cut through and make decisions, either with limited visibility or high risk. In addition, there are many situations (especially if the group is in crisis) that a dictatorial style may be necessary. These, however, should be limited both in time and scope, because if they are prolonged they will end up damaging collaboration and initiative.
The truly great leaders, both from history and present day business, are those who are good at asking questions and keep asking questions. Genghis Khan was known for his insatiable curiosity and desire to learn, and he was also the most successful military commander in history.
In effect it is our laziness and fear that makes us want to create demigods — beings who know better, with more power and understanding.
We want them to tell us what to do, rather than having to think ourselves, because thinking takes work and research. It is simply easier to hand it over to someone else who “knows better.”
Having done so, we are surprised when our leaders are corrupt, their promises broken and our lives affected negatively.
Can we continue to absolve ourselves of responsibility? Isn’t a leader just another human being with the same levels of fallibility and constraints that any other?
Maybe they are in different areas, but I have yet to meet another human that is good at everything or sees everything.
And even if these people exist, they will still be constrained by their perspective, which is determined by their position in the organization, background, etc.
Only by humbly asking questions, and daring to do so, will a more complete picture emerge.
This is because everyone has a piece of the puzzle, and sometimes this has to be cajoled out.
This is the true art of leaders, because the great ones then make decisions with better information and achieve better results.
What was your work history before you became a founder?
Many founders don’t have senior management experience, let alone CEO/President or COO experience.
Some are young; others were non-executive managers, team members or individual contributors.
Which is OK, if they recognize that having the title and filling the shoes are two different things.
That’s not just my comment; it’s what award winning journalist Soledad O’Brien, founder and CEO of Starfish Media Group, said about herself.
Another challenge was that I was successful in my previous role because I really worked hard and took a lot of responsibility for making things good. But that’s not actually a great skill for being a boss. The job of the boss is to help other people reach their goals and their dreams.
At what point will I actually grow into this job, because I have the title? At what point will I actually be making decisions like someone who is the C.E.O. of the company? I would say it took a solid year before I felt good about it.
And I’m willing to bet, based on her own words, that she has little interest in hiring “stars,” who are usually full of attitude and ego.
You hire for character and teach people skills. And environment is very important to me. It’s important to me that people aren’t unpleasant and that they treat each other respectfully. It’s hard to be creative when there’s someone or something that’s really irking you.
So are you a person of integrity who makes the environment a really nice space? I will watch how they treat the person at the front desk versus me.
Whatever kind of startup you have, take a few minutes to read the O’Brien interview.
Then look in the mirror and accept that no matter what your background is you probably have a steep learning curve before you become your title.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
This is a short post, because one of the linked articles is long and both are critical reading if you are, or planning at some point to be, a founder.
Founded in 2007, Powa Technologies is the perfect poster child for everything an out-of-control founder can do — from raising just over $200 million in debt and equity in less than three years, giving Powa unicorn status, to sending it down the drain.
At best, the collapse of Powa looks like a wildly overambitious attempt to force consumer behavior to match the ideas of a self-styled visionary. At worst, Powa seems to be a case of willful ignorance and a failure to acknowledge serious shortcomings, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to investors and hundreds of jobs for staff.
NGINX (pronounced “engine X”) started as an open source project in 2002 and became an actual company in 2011. Today powers 49% of the top 1,000 busiest websites in the world, including NASA, GoGo Inflight Internet, WordPress.com and Wikipedia. Since then it has raised only $41 million in 4 rounds and although its core product is still open source, it is generating substantial revenue from its paid services.
To actually make money, Nginx has a few menu items. First, Nginx Plus, an actual paid-software product that goes beyond the free version and offers customers deeper tools for managing their web apps.
Second, it has a consulting business, where its team of experts go in and help customers install and manage their Nginx-based architectures. That’s especially important as companies move toward microservices, which can be a bold new world for companies used to building software the traditional way. That business is growing quickly, Robertson says, with 300% more revenue in 2015 compared to 2014, though Nginx doesn’t disclose specific financials and he declined to comment on whether it’s profitable.
However, neither the investment nor the revenues have led to the typical lavish, San Francisco startup style.
Still, Nginx is keeping things fairly lean. Even with all of those users, its headcount only broke 100 recently, Robertson says, and the company tries to avoid “bloat” by adding only those features that users really need.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Influence isn’t about your online ranking or the strength of your brand, although they contribute.
