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.

Passion. Everybdy talks about it; builds companies around it; it infuses cultures — personal, company, country. But, like most powerful emotions, it’s a two-edged sword.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Last spring I wrote that passion sustains me and keeps my writing, but that even passion needs a day off now and then.

But what happens with there is no day off; when passion is continually cranked up?

When passion runs wild it can lose touch with reality.

You can see the aftermath of unchecked passion in companies whose positional leaders were so focused on their vision that they allowed nothing to stand in the way and the political leaders who are more focused on spreading their ideology than fixing their country.

Passion unchecked yields freely to fanaticism.

Fanaticism obliterates humanity.

Flickr image credit: JM3

The entrepreneurial mantra that weaves through every startup vision and recruitment effort focuses on how X product/service will change the world.

This particular passion applies whether it’s a cure for cancer, a big data application, a new messaging app, social network or dating app.

How does one truly change the world?

Or is it a phrase with no real meaning?

Even if one does change it does the change make the world better?

Better by what yardstick and whose standards?

Change isn’t always a positive.

What is your responsibility if you do change it?

In his graduation speech at USC, Larry Ellison said, “You will change the world and the world will change you.”

For better or worse, change is the only true constant.

Flickr image credit: Inspiyr.com

What drives a company’s success as it grows?

Its people.

What drives a company’s culture?

Its people — all of them from CEO to entry-level grunt.

Since Southwest started in 1971 has grown to 47,000, but what is truly amazing is its employment record over those 45 years.

The most astonishing factoid about Southwest is that it has not had a single layoff in its 44 years—a stunning accomplishment in an industry that leads the economy in bankruptcies, re-organizations, mergers and companies that have disappeared. Think Eastern and Pan Am.

SWA was number 13 on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work in 2015 and nearly 180,000 people applied for work. What criteria does SWA consider most important?

“We have a passion for what we do and we look for people that share that passion. Our mantra is, we hire for attitude and we train for skill. Since our early days we seek people who don’t just have the skill, but also have the passion and the attitude to take care of each other and to take great care of our customers. We work hard to identify that. Many people want to be a part of a team like this. But many times we’ll have employees that say, “You know what? This just isn’t for me and it’s not the right fit.”

Southwest’s CEO Gary Kelly has been with the company for 29 years, the first 15 as CFO, but doesn’t claim hero status.

In an eye-opening interview Kelly talks about the importance of SWA’s culture as a competitive edge and how it’s been maintained over the decades.

If you’re going to have a team, you’ve got to invest the time to create the relationships. The bigger the company gets, the more effort it takes. We use a variety of techniques to do that. Right near my office is a group called Internal Customer Care that keeps track of important things happening in our employees’ lives. (…)I get a pile of thank you notes and in turn I send out thank you notes. It’s creates a very human connection. It’s basic, but very meaningful. That’s why we put the heart symbol in our logo. We’re not the American Heart Association, but our employees believe in the heart and when we deviate from living by the golden rule, people call each other on that. It makes for a very powerful culture.

In short, management spends time walking as opposed to time talking.

Read the interview. While you/your company may not have the money to match Southwest’s benefits, you can certainly create the relationships.

Flickr image credit: Keith Laverack

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

I found several useful/interesting reads yesterday and thought I’d share them with you.

If you’re wondering what’s hot (security) and what’s not (social and dating apps) take a look at the thoughts of Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz after recently listening to 146 pitches in a row.

Investing in startups is like bird-watching, (…) For venture capitalists, Moritz advises not to look at the flock, but at each individual startup. “Each one is different, and I try to find an interestingly complected bird in a flock rather than try to make an observation about an entire flock,” Moritz has said.

That said, some trends appear when the looking at the group as a whole.

Moritz is also the PayPal board member whose penny-pinching advice saved the company in 2008 and every founder should be following it now.

“That focus was instrumental in PayPal’s survival,” Roelof Botha said. “We could have been spending money willy-nilly and fallen by the wayside by accident.”

Tenacity is lauded in the startup world; the idea is that passion and never quitting are the hallmark of successful founders, but the story of François Reichelt proves that Kenny Rogers offers a more common sense approach.

“Know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em.”

Last are two links that provide useful tools for you.

First is a way to find company emails when you have the name.

Oleg Campbell has automated the process of hunting for someone’s corporate email with a nifty new Chrome extension built on top of Gmail. It’s called, descriptively, Name2Email.

Second is tech lawyer David Tollen’s Tech Contracts book and website, with helpful information and free forms for SaaS, software licensing, and other IT agreements.

It’s a plain-English how-to guide on IT contracts for lawyers, contract managers, salespeople, IT staffers, and executives.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Emily White is a long-time friend of mine.

We met at the end of the last century over our startups.

Like me, Emily isn’t a twenty-something-guy-in-a-hoodie.

She founded OnlineHR, one of the earliest social networks, in 1999. Then 47, “I didn’t know what I didn’t know.”

Emily is back with a vengeance as an entrepreneur, although she never really left. She reached into her past to pay the bills, while searching for her next startup idea.

In search of that next unidentified problem and solution, White returned to social work 30 years after earning a masters degree. Working for five organizations—all of them related to geriatrics, a personal interest and expertise—over the course of seven years, she “saw the problem was in care transition.”

In doing so, she also tapped into her passion for better senior care and combined it with technology to find a viable, affordable solution in the booming healthcare arena.

All of that led her, at the age of 61, to two 20-somethings, both MIT graduates, with a big idea. In 2014, White joined GeriJoy as co-founder and vice president of strategic alliance. GeriJoy is a tablet-based chronic care management and virtual caregiving tool backed by real health advocates. Bottom line? GeriJoy leads to lower hospital readmission rates. (…)GeriJoy has already successfully reduced emergency room readmissions for users and, in tests, had good results with people who are experiencing various forms of dementia. The combination of a human interface and artificial intelligence puts GeriJoy at the forefront of healthcare tech start-ups.

Contrary to popular media, nearly a quarter of startups are founded by the over 55 crowd.

Leaping in to entrepreneurialism as an older adult, White is not alone. According to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, 1996-2011, 23.4 percent of American entrepreneurs in 2013 were people between the ages of 55 and 64, up from 18.7 percent in 2003.

Read the full story here.

Image credit: Emily White

What kind of boss/colleague/subordinate are you?

Does William Butler Yeats’s line “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” fit you?

Sounds like a bad thing, but actually it’s a great attitude to cultivate.

Look at the two parts separately.

Let’s take the second part first; I believe “while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” refers to people who espouse a certain approach or methodology so emphatically that nothing sways them that there may be a better way or even that a different method will accomplish the same thing.

“The best lack all conviction” could be taken to mean being totally wish-washy with no firm beliefs, but taken together with the second part I think it means being open to new ideas/approaches.

In other words, the first is open to learning and the second is a ‘my way or the highway’ type.

Who would you rather work with?

If you want the first, be sure not to model the second.

Flickr image credit: Tom Henrich

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Passion is good.

But passion unchecked yields freely to fanaticism.

Fanaticism paves the road to a closed mind.

Fanaticism in business leads directly to ‘not invented here’ syndrome.

Software giant SAP is known for its passion; not for its ability to play well with others, especially startups.

An attitude that is coming home to roost and motivating co-founder Hasso Plattner to change.

It was  “jealousy,” he said, and a “not-invented-here” mentality. “We always worked with other companies, but when they did not do exactly what we wanted them to do, then we developed all kinds of animosities.”

Now, the growing popularity of HANA, SAP’s new database, along with realization that the world has changed is driving change at the software giant.

Along with the normal things large corporations do to connect with startup—venture arm, pitching forums, hacking contests—Plattner is opening a 24-hour café complete with food, coffee, alcohol and even stand-up comedy.

“You know University Drive … the main drag …  in Palo Alto [Calif.]? We have acquired a nice location there and we will open the HANA Cafe by [our tech conference] Sapphire, so in three months.

“… We created it for these [startup] companies. They can come in. They can connect there. We’ll have all the electronic connections to 1,250 companies in the world. They want to have contact to Beijing, they can. … Startup companies can collaborate there. … This is what we want to support.”

SAP plans two more, in Berlin and Shanghai, all running 24 hours a day and fully connected.

New world. New product. New attitude.

The results won’t be in for months, but if stogy SAP does change it will be proof positive that any company can.

In the meantime you have a great, new place to work and hangout.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Have you ever take a step backwards from the point you are adamantly arguing and looked objectively at the end results of the two positions?

Ask the true believers of any question and they will assure you that the end result of their approach is vastly different from that of their verbal/ideological/actual opponent.

But is it really different?

Consider, for example, Malcolm Berko’s acerbic explanation of capitalism and socialism.

In a capitalist society, man exploits man, whereas in a socialist society, it’s the other way around.

Basically, the difference between the two is just a matter of degree. Russian politicians, with the approval of the government, rip off state-owned businesses and become millionaires or billionaires. In the process, the Russian citizen gets screwed.

In the U.S., JPMorgan Chase, Enron, Countrywide Financial, the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters, MCI WorldCom, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America rip off the consumer, and in the process, the politicians become wealthy and the American public gets screwed.

In actuality, the same actions yield the same results; only the terms used have changed.

But try telling that to someone who is passionately for or against.

Words equal spin and spin can suck you in; a good thing to remember considering everything going on, not to mention the upcoming elections.

Flickr image credit: moonrat42

I read about a lot of startups, but the ones that really resonate with me are the ones that are doing more than creating a business.

I can’t write them all up, so I though I’d give you the links to a few favorites along with my reasons.

For Israel and Palestine, entrepreneurial passion may do what so-called diplomacy has failed to do.

Even by Middle East standards, the scene in a Dead Sea restaurant, situated within a “green zone”–a no-man’s-land claimed by neither Israelis nor Palestinians–was surreal.

What do you get when you combine an Israeli Special Forces commando, an Arab investor and a religious Zionist? An ultra hot startup called Webydo.

Webydo has removed software code developers and programmers from the picture – enabling professional graphic designers to create sites on the fly for ten times cheaper, and far faster.

I am a dedicated recycler, so you can imagine my feelings when my grocer stopped taking plastic bags for recycling. When I asked why he said that China wasn’t accepting them for recycling, so there was no place to send them. Terrific! We use all that energy to send them to China, so they can ship back whatever they made from them.

I much prefer a solution being developed by Sierra Energy called the FastOx Pathfinder.

The centerpiece, a waste gasifier that’s about the size of a shower stall, is essentially a modified blast furnace. A chemical reaction inside the gasifier heats any kind of trash — whether banana peels, used syringes, old iPods, even raw sewage — to extreme temperatures without combustion. The output includes hydrogen and carbon monoxide, … can be burned to generate electricity or made into ethanol or diesel fuel.

As you can see, the apps that entrepreneurs and investors seem to love aren’t on my interest list; they mostly solve the imagined problems of “affluent and hyper-connected 20-somethings in cities with great cell service and ample Wi-Fi” who prefer impersonal sex-without-strings, bargains and inane pastimes.

But there’s finally an app a parent can truly love—especially when separated from their children in a war-torn country—from an entrepreneur who had the sense to avoid the bleeding edge.

According to UNICEF,  RapidFTR’s ability to photograph, record and share information about lost children has reduced the time it takes to reunite families from over six weeks to just hours. The app was not particularly complicated, from a technical standpoint, but Mr. Just wanted to make sure it was something aid organizations would actually adopt.

Personal annoyance, in this case with charging wires, has always been an innovation driver, but stubbornness and a silo-breaking mentality also help. And even after all that, Meredith Perry still had a difficult time getting uBeam funded—well, of course SHE did.

Her idea, she discovered, meant marrying the fields of sound, electricity, battery technology and other subspecialties. (…)  Each expert seemed to dwell in his own private silo, so that whenever she crossed from one discipline to another, she would run into the same wall of constricted thinking.

Finally, on a lighter note, another woman is out to abolish the need for the underwire that provides all that lift that women tolerate and men crave.

In this case, 3-D has nothing to do with 3-D fabric printing, but rather with the way the Curvessence technology used in the brand’s lingerie works. Cohen says the nylon polymers sculpt to conform to a woman’s torso, and “remembers” its shape over time, slowly returning to its original form if it is temporarily stretched, for instance.

Flickr image credit: Seth Waite

Many managers I’ve known see themselves as coaches building winning teams and often base their management style on coaches they’ve known or who are known to win—not always a good thing.

Now there is yet another coach who is anything but a role model.

But more far more deplorable than Rutgers’ Mike Rice’s actions are outside lawyer John P. Lacey’s comments about the abuse and the message they send.

On Friday, the university also released a 50-page report that John P. Lacey, an outside lawyer, prepared last year in response to the abuse allegations. It made clear that Rutgers officials were aware that Mr. Rice’s outbursts “were not isolated” and that he had a fierce temper, used homophobic and misogynistic slurs, kicked his players and threw basketballs at them.

But it described Mr. Rice as “passionate, energetic and demanding” and concluded that his behavior constituted “permissible training.” It found that he aimed to “cause them to play better during the team’s basketball games.”

His methods, “while sometimes unorthodox, politically incorrect, or very aggressive, were within the bounds of proper conduct and training methods,” the report said.

Since when are adults kicking kids and throwing things at them “within the bounds of proper conduct?”

It’s bad enough that abuse happens, but far worse when the very people charged with evaluating it give it a stamp of approval.

More proof, if anybody needed it, that winning is everything and anything done to increase the odds of winning is OK.

So thought the banking managers whose actions brought down the global economy.

So believe all those, students, as well as adults, who cheat to get ahead.

Anything goes, just don’t get caught.

And if you do, blame it on your passionate desire to win.

YouTube credit: Ron Goldstein