Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

In a country still focused on youth it’s good to remember that Rob Hull was no spring chicken when he founded Adaptive Insights in 2003, was rejected 70 times by VCs and survived the 2008 recession. Adaptive is now a software unicorn that seems to have no interest in chasing spring chickens when hiring — just great talent of whatever age — and ranks 3.9 on glassdoor.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Who does a company, with explosive growth, founded and built by old folks in their forties and fifties all with extensive executive management experience, turn to when moving to the next level?

The company hasn’t disclosed exact revenue figures, but it says it grew new annual recurring revenue by more than 50% in 2014, and claims more than 2,500 companies, including Coca Cola, Toyota, and AAA use its software. It’s raised $100 million in funding from investors like Salesforce, Norwest Venture Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

The company is Adaptive Insights and the guy is Tom Bogan, an even older guy, with even more experience.

A guy who is (gasp) 63 years old.

Gasp, because according to a recent study, old people shouldn’t even go out in public.

When a large sample of Facebook groups created by 20- to 29-year-olds was examined by a team based at the Yale School of Public Health, three-quarters of the groups were found to denigrate old people. More than a third advocated banning old people from public activities like shopping.

Of course, one assumes that the ‘old people’ to which they refer aren’t their relatives.

(I’d like to hear them on the subject 10, 20, 30 and 40 years from now.)

There is enormous value in having ‘been there/done that’ through multiple economic cycles, cultural change, globalization and technology evolution/revolution.

But to take advantage of it you need to be comfortable enough in your own skin to admit you need to learn — like Mark Zukerberg and Larry Page.

Image credit: Adaptive Insights

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

I said Tuesday that I wasn’t holding my breath in hopes of change when it comes to harassment in the workplace.

I blamed two main reasons, one societal and the other legal, but KG sent me an article yesterday that diminish the likelihood even more.

The articles cite an annual survey done by First Round on various topics, such as hiring, compensation, funding, etc. Last year they added diversity and inclusion and this year they added questions about harassment.

The companies are venture-backed and from all over — the Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles and other parts of the US.

Every year, we survey as many venture-backed startup founders as possible to figure out what it’s like to run a technology company right now. This year, we got more responses than ever before — 869 — giving us an even more precise pulse on what entrepreneurs think, feel, fear, and value.

These founders are the bosses of tomorrow’s tech sector, which doesn’t bode well.

As you can see they aren’t kids who are likely to change their attitudes when they “mature.”

55% have been in business for three to five years. Nearly 60% have an all male board and slightly more than half say their team is “mostly male.”

Actions speak louder than words and most don’t have any formal policies regarding diversity and inclusion or harassment.

Maybe I’m missing something, but there’s nothing about the majority of these new “leaders” that changes my mind regarding the likelihood of real change.

Image credit: HikingArtist and First Round

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts 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.

Three and a half years and nothing’s change. Not that I expected it to, but one always hopes. That said, my opinion hasn’t change. The only thing any of the men recently outed as harassers and worse are sorry for is being caught — not for their actions — which will make it harder to do it in the future, although I’m sure they will — people have very short memories

Join me tomorrow for a look at one of the major reasons nothing has changed and is unlikely to in the future.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

The more they stay the some.

Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Both of these go a long way to explaining the unchanging culture that fosters gender harassment in the workplace, most prominently in STEM fields.

…666 responses, three quarters of them from women, from 32 disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, biology and geology. Almost two-thirds of the respondents said they had been sexually harassed in the field. More than 20 percent reported being sexually assaulted. Students or postdoctoral scholars, and women were most likely to report being victimized by superiors.

Does a woman or minority in a leadership role actually have more ability to help level the playing field? Not hardly…

…when minorities and women behave in a way that calls attention to their race or gender characteristics — i.e. by advancing others like them — it separates them from other white male leaders, causing them to be devalued by their peers.

Schmoozing and small talk are considered lubricant in business negotiations, but they don’t work for women.

Men who engaged in small talk were likely to get positive ratings on questions about trust, overall impressions and solid foundations for a future relationship, (…)  When it came down to final offers, they were willing to give the men who chit-chatted nearly 8% more than they offered women who engaged in small talk.

Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, has a new book about startups and the Valley called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. There are exactly four women mentioned in the book and one is his wife.

In the first 90 percent of the book, I counted three females: a human resource staffer, a woman whose husband ran NetLabs, and Horowitz’s wife Felicia, a woman with “award-winning green eyes” whose focus seems to be family and her husband’s success. He doesn’t present a real-life female peer until four pages from the end, when he hires Margit Wennmachers, a marketing guru-turned-venture capitalist whom he dubs “the Babe Ruth of PR” and “Sultan of Swat.”

There are many anecdotal stories from women founders on the varied ways they are hit upon by potential investors, but this one in Forbes is first person sourced.

I met the author several months ago and was floored by the stories she had to tell about her dealings with mostly male investors. Like many men (as she writes), I knew women in tech faced a certain degree of chauvinism and harassment, but I’d had no idea it was so barefaced and routine, in an industry that thinks of itself as egalitarian and forward-looking.

In the real world, however, it seems that traction is the best way to stop investors from hitting on you.

Payal Kadakia, the founder of ClassPass, thinks it’s the fact that her startup has started to gain significant traction and now investors who once had an upper hand actually want a piece of her business. And they don’t want to say or do something that could mess up their chances.

In a 2009 post about repentance I wrote, “Repeating the behavior makes it obvious that there is no real remorse and that you see getting caught as the true offense.”

Or, in the words of Friedich Nietzsche,

“The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we may have ‘improved’.”

Flickr image credit: Wesley Fryer

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Fortunately, the folks with whom I usually spend it are out of town. I say ‘fortunately’, because in my current mood I would be hard-pressed to cover my true feelings.

While the narrowest definition of “my world” keeps chugging along, with nothing causing woe, my full world is, as the saying goes, going to hell in a hand-basket.

Or, more accurately, on a well-greased slide made of hate.

I understand hate up close and personal, as opposed to an intellectual or conversational concept.

Over the years I’ve built up layers of armor starting around age 5

So it’s difficult to believe I was naïve enough to agree with a friend, whose email detailing the problems inherent in political correctness became a post in 2015.

Being a black man, I prefer a racist that’s honest about who he is and what he is. I prefer working for such a person because I know what to expect. I presume it would be the same for you as a woman regarding sexists. These days no one is a racist, we just have “unconscious biases” that prevent us from taking unpopular positions and that ensure that the powerful can continue to exclude the less powerful.

Politically correct environments rob me of information, choice, and the ability to navigate astutely to attain my objectives.

What a difference two years and one election makes.

Kevin no longer wonders who is a racist — it’s very obvious.

And I get to end my life amidst the same hate I grew up with.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More technical problems made this post very late. My apologies.

Be sure to ready Ryan’s post tomorrow; he’s far more upbeat than I.

Have a wonderful turkey day and I’ll see you all Friday.

Image credit: Purple Slog

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 some of the best posts during that time.

We haven’t participated in Blog Action Day for a couple of years; we were somehow deleted from their mailing list and I didn’t check, because I just plain forgot.

Today’s Golden Oldie is KG’s post from 2013. What he said was important then and still is, if not more so. Things have gotten worse, not better. (Check out the previous comments.)

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Human Rights – something that is often talked about but little is done to define or uphold.

What is human rights?  It seems so right yet appears such a fable.   Most of the time we hear about human rights from some government official speaking about how some other government is negligent.  Yet it is never defined.

Is it privacy rights?  The right to use the internet without being monitored?  Is it the right to healthcare and education?  Is it having food, shelter, safety from violence?  Or is it to uphold human dignity?

We never quite know since it is never defined properly, or has so many definitions as to become worthless.  Is it the right for poor African Americans to be treated fairly under the law?  Male African Americans?  Why does the US with ¼ of the population of China have more than three times the amount of persons incarcerated?  Mostly black and Latino males?  Is this human rights?

Confusion is maybe the name of the game – as long as we don’t know what it is, it is a useful tool for controlling our thoughts and actions.  Who is it that want to make us act without thinking?  Who is it that defines another human being as an enemy and want us to take hostile action towards him/her?

Are there universal human desires?  For such things as food, safety, love, nurture, communion?  If there are, why are they not fulfilled?  Why do we allow ourselves to be derailed from attaining these and passing them on to others?  Is there any doubt that today we can easily feed the world and no one needs to go hungry?  Or that we can eradicate most of the common diseases that kill children?

We choose not to.

Isn’t there a gift in giving?  Why does it suit us to hoard “things” – money, land, items and safety?  If we recognize the universal desires and needs of our fellow humans, why don’t we work to get and give?  What is it that prevents us?

Ultimately, we want to receive from others, but need to be aware that giving is also receiving.  Can we reasonably expect to receive without being generous?  What is the origin of our selfishness?  Don’t we know better?

Neglecting to provide food to the hungry, clothing to the naked and safety to the threatened is antisocial behavior and lack of empathy.  Which of us have any remorse about this behavior?

Our conduct is very similar to the definition of psychopathy – “a personality trait or disorder characterized partly by enduring antisocial behavior, a diminished capacity for empathy or remorse, and poor behavioral controls” (Wikipedia).  All wealthy people and governments have the possibility to address the needs of human rights.  I define almost all of us living in North America and Europe as relatively wealthy, as well as large, affluent, segments of the developing world.

For whatever reason, we choose to exhibit this behavior.

Is there such a thing as human rights?

To psychopaths?

KG Charles-Harris is CEO of Emanio and a special contributor to MAPping Company Success.

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.

Curation has gotten much worse over the last two years since this was written. Facebook curates your news feed based on your profile and online actions, so you see mostly items — whether real or fake — that are in line with your worldview. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter and most other sites show you “targeted ads” based on the the cornucopia of personal information at their fingertips.

The result is a world that is narrowing and, in doing so, becomes more harrowing.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Earlier this month I shared a conversation with a founder who believes he can lead only one type of person.

It wasn’t that surprising, because the more things are curated the more we hear from and cleave to people like ourselves.

There’s no question that curation reinforces opinions, while eliminating conflicting ones, narrows people beyond from where they started and acts like fertilizer to unconscious bias and outright bigotry.

But isn’t college supposed to help change that by exposing students to people with different beliefs, experiences, attitudes, etc.?

Several years ago a couple of startups gave the college-bound a way to curate their roommates, so they could be sure not to be exposed to ideas, attitudes or upbringing not in sync with their current thinking.

Mangers have been doing this for decades by thoughtlessly hiring people like themselves, so they can stay within their personal comfort zones.

Now college students are taking the concept much further with the demand for “safe spaces.”

Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material. (…)

Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School commented, “Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity,” But “if college students are children, then they should be protected like children.”

This need for safety and zero-level tolerance for discord makes me wonder what will happen to the current college generations when they venture into the workplace, let alone the rest of the real world.

Image credit: Deb Nystrom

As many of you are aware the news this week has been dominated by the allegations against Harvey Weinstein and his sexual harassment and assaults on a variety of women.

As we learn more about what has occurred a new movement has started, #metoo. Women who have been harassed, assaulted, or worse are speaking up. Some for the first time.

As I have read through some of the posts of my personal friends and spoken to my wife, I am realizing this is much more rampant than I thought.

It has lead to some interesting discussions at work with my colleagues that I never imagined I would have. Most of the women I have spoken with have a story. Perhaps it was flirting that went beyond welcomed attention, an off-hand comment and in one case full-on assault.

It was heartbreaking to hear, as well as enlightening.

One thing I learned today, though, is the other ways women in the workplace have to cope.

In two separate conversations today I learned how my female colleagues have had to deal with aggressive men, misogamy or simple brush offs.

I am in the IT sector and the women in the technical roles have dealt with from not being taken seriously to not being trusted simply because of their gender.

I write all of this as a testament of how we as a society must do better.

I am still amazed that we can pick out the differences amongst each other, differences that we have zero control over, and tear one another down.

The fact that we allow gender to dictate how we should treat one another is shocking.

I am not naive enough to think that we can all just get along, however if we claim to be enlightened, then perhaps we should act like it.

Image credit: @UltraViolet

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 is said that hindsight is 20/20, because we can see the whole as opposed to the part in which we are involved. It’s mostly an accurate statement, but only if we can set aside our many biases. If not, we will see what we expect to see, whether it fits all the facts or not,

The problem is, of course, we are no better at seeing our own biases than we are at seeing all parts of a situation as it is happening, which makes 20/20 vision of ourselves elusive.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

A few weeks ago Wharton professor Adam Grant wrote Dear Men: Wake Up and Smell the Inequality focusing on why men can’t seem to wrap their heads around gender inequality.

In corporate America, 88% of men think women have at least as many opportunities to advance as men.

This is the finding of a major new study—almost 30,000 employees across 118 companies—by LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Company.

Just 12% of men felt that women had fewer opportunities to advance in their organizations.

Today, KG Charles-Harris sent a link to an article by Marshall Goldsmith about suck-ups, with an underlying focus on how easily we see traits in others, but not in ourselves. (I call it ‘but me’)

Almost all of the leaders I have met say that they would never encourage such a thing in their organizations. I have no doubt that they are sincere. Most of us are easily irritated–if not disgusted–by derriere kissers. Which raises a question: If leaders say they discourage sucking up, why does it happen so often? Here’s a straightforward answer: Without meaning to, we all tend to create an environment where people learn to reward others with accolades that aren’t really warranted. We can see this very clearly in other people. We just can’t see it in ourselves.

And that brings us to MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

MAP, in case you’ve forgotten, is what underlies and drives all our thoughts and actions.

While not seeing things in ourselves may be fundamental to our MAP, that doesn’t mean we can’t change it.

To do so is a choice, yours and no one else’s.

Choice is the most valuable thing that any of us have and it’s the most painful to lose.

Remember Dumbledore? He summed it up perfectly.

“It is our choices that show us what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, p 333)

Image credit: Peter O’Connor

Sometimes — more like most of the time or at least too often — we all say things without thinking through the full ramifications, especially those gleaned from experiences we’ve never had or opposed to what we think.

Yesterday I mentioned a startup CEO who said he was concerned about hiring more women, “It just seems like such a huge risk as CEO,” which brought the social media house down on him.

Although he apologized, etc., I noted that his words and actions probably didn’t do much to change his mind.

After reading the post a friend from back east wrote me his thoughts as a man-of-color/founder/CEO.

Sadly, everything he says is true and has been for decades — and I say that from first-hand other-side experience.

In the 80s and 90s I was three things that weren’t supposed to align: a successful tech (hdwr and sftwr) recruiter who was female.

Back then it was assumed that, as a woman, I acquired most of my clients in the same way Hollywood starlets got parts — on my back.

But, as I always said, if that were true I wouldn’t have had time to go to the office, let alone recruit anyone.

Here is the email; my only editorial change was to delete the name of the incubator.

Miki,

When I expressed skepticism regarding real change, you said that it’s better because now people are speaking about it. I replied that it will probably be worse for women in general, because now they will be seen as a risk factor. Unfortunately this is my own experience — I am afraid of mentoring women because they will often take it the wrong way, as several have interpreted my well-meaning advances as attempted pickup. It’s just not worth it.

Most recently, I saw a young black woman at an incubator I was visiting and decided to pay attention to her in a purely social way to make her feel welcomed. There were NO black people there, and since I am viewed as somewhat of a star and important, I believed it would be a boost for her. I never had a conversation with her, and the contact stayed on the level of smiles, fist bumps, etc.

While I was in SF, I received an invitation to a Y-Combinator invite-only event on women and leadership that I could not attend. I approached the woman and told her about the event and asked if she was interested in going. She said, “Absolutely!” and I said — “Send me your email and I’ll introduce you to the people who are leading this effort within YC.” She wrote her email address on a piece of paper and I made the introduction. 

Unfortunately her email bounced. I tried several different approaches. Then I went to her a few days after the event and said that I tried to make the introduction, and that her email had bounced. She looked at the piece of paper that she’d written her email on and confirmed it was incorrect without correcting it.

It then dawned upon me that she’d purposely provided me with the wrong email address, probably because she interpreted my friendliness as sexual advances. The sad thing is that I subsequently observed her whispering with other women and looking over at me, and that other women were avoiding contact with me. 

I then resolved that it’s just not worth it. I’m never going to make friendly advances to a woman in a work situation in the US again.

I do it all over the world, and have mentored men and women in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the US, but here is the only area where I’ve had negative experiences doing so with women (several). I’ve never had, or been interested in, a sexual relationship with any woman at work, in any country where I’ve worked or lived (except my partner who was my teenage girlfriend). 

The inflamed, sexualized nature of everything regarding female/male relationships in the US work environment does much to damage women’s advancement.

Which men will take the risk of staying late to mentor a woman after everyone has left the office — not me. Which men will take a woman out for drinks to have an informal chat about the politics at work — not me.

Which men will associate informally and socially outside of work with women they work with — not me. The reputational risk is simply too great. 

Who is the loser? Obviously both men and women, since there is greatness among them both.

Culturally it is more difficult to mentor women in the US than in Pakistan. Who would have thought…

The following came as a PS about an hour later.

Sexual advances are something most women, and some men, have to learn to deal with.

This has always been the case, and there have always been successful women. There are more successful women now than ever before.

The worst thing that can happen is to scare away the men that genuinely mean well.

Haven’t you ever asked yourself why women in more misogynistic societies are surpassing US women in societal and professional advancement to an increasing degree?

May it be because there is no cost to supporting women for those men who choose to do so? In fact, there is often great benefit, as they will have access to a more motivated and competent pool of people.

All that said, I am not recommending turning a blind or benign eye to the kind of behavior and toxic cultures that have been making headlines.

Image credit: VEX Robotics

There’s no question that tech, just like every other industry, is highly biased. It’s become a major issue not because it’s new, but because tech drives much of the economy, which puts it in the spotlight. Added to that, more women and people of color are and speaking out publically about what they have to deal with.

Tech’s main excuse for its lousy diversity numbers is a lack of talent, so they focus on kids to fill the pipeline — but all that really does is provide 5-20 years of avoidance in dealing with the real problem

Consider the hard data.

Among young computer science and engineering graduates with bachelor’s or advanced degrees, 57 percent are white, 26 percent are Asian, 8 percent are Hispanic and 6 percent are black (…)  technical workers at Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter, according to the companies’ diversity reports, are on average 56 percent white, 37 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic and 1 percent black.

Those numbers certainly don’t add up.

The real problem is culture (duh!) — why spend eight-or-more (usually more) hours where you’re actively not wanted?

Yolanda Mangolini, Google’s director of global diversity, recognizes this problem.

“We know that it’s not just about recruiting a diverse workforce. It’s about creating an environment where they want to stay.”

True, but, in fact, the greatest company culture possible won’t cut it.

Even more important than company culture is the boss’ individual culture.

For hard proof there is Mekka Okereke, the black engineering manager who runs Google Play and seems to be missing (or controls) both conscious and unconscious bias.

That team is 10% black, 10% Latino, 25% women and 50% female managers, and has become a role model for other managers,

Obviously, Okereke doesn’t just hire strong talent; he provides an environment in which they can learn, grow and excel.

That’s what a good boss is supposed to do.

But it’s the great ones who actually do it.

Image credit: Andrew Wippler