Looking at founders, such as Larry Page, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zukerberg, you get the feeling they believe they are all powerful — more so than even governments.

It’s not a new attitude; Bill Gates learned they aren’t the hard way.

The Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, according to Mr. Smith, “learned that life actually does require compromise and governments actually are stronger than companies,” if only after a bruising confrontation.

Mr. Gates, who wrote the foreword in Mr. Smith’s book, recalled that for years he was proud of how little time he spent talking to people in government. “As I learned the hard way in the antitrust suit,” he wrote, “that was not a wise position to take.”

Lesson learned well enough that you don’t see Microsoft on the common list of big tech, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.

That lesson hasn’t hurt Microsoft, which is valued at more than a trillion dollars by investors based on profitability, not funding.

Satya Nadella, who became CEO in 2014, is credited most often for the change in Microsoft fortunes, i.e., its culture. attitude and product mix.

You don’t hear as much about Microsoft president Brad Smith, but he’s the guy who made friends with government and helps with policy.

“When your technology changes the world,” he writes, “you bear a responsibility to help address the world that you have helped create.”

Responsibility.

The thing that so many founders don’t see as being within their purview.

Unlike Microsoft, their future will be decided more in Europe than in the US.

But the revised interpretation of an old US law could change things drastically.

And that change is being driven in by a surprising source.

Join me next Tuesday to learn more about it.

Image credit: luquidat

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

A couple of years ago Dick Costolo explained why startups needed to hire “brilliant jerks” in order to succeed.

It’s stuff like that, especially from people like Costolo, that gives people permission to act like jerks.

Why?

Because people who tend to be jerks are usually delusional enough to believe that they’re brilliant.

But what about those who are brilliant (or what passes as such these days) and act like jerks?

Well, why not?

All they are doing is living up to expectations and, like Pavlov’s dog, the more free passes they get the more they will believe their actions/attitudes are OK.

In my life I’ve been around a lot of real brilliance and they had certain traits in common.

Without exception, they loved sharing their knowledge, building up those around them and helping them grow — no matter who.

That’s what truly brilliant people do; that’s why they are remembered.

The same goes for everyone who does the same.

Whereas the jerks are ephemeral and soon forgotten.

If they are remembered, it’s for what they did, as opposed to how they acted.

Steve Jobs is a good example, as is Jeff Bezos.

Think about it; what’s the likelihood that the brilliant jerks in your world are in the same league?

Image credit: HikingArtist

Jeff Bezos’ reach or, to some people, tentacles, is extensive. Just how extensive is apparent in the infographic below. It is yet more proof that one picture is worth a thousand words.

In case it’s not his empire that interests you, but his earnings, then your should read How much Jeff Bezos makes per minute.

You shouldn’t miss a look at the flip side to see the people who power the Amazon piece of his pie.

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

How do you give your team the greatest chance to succeed?

By creating a supportive culture, instead of a judgmental one.

It’s not rocket science.

Just common sense.

Unless you actually believe you are Steve Jobs/Jeff Bezos/Mark Zuckerberg.

Then you can get away with acting like a jerk.

But you better be sure.

Very, very sure.

Image credit: HikingArtist

I read two articles yesterday. They both focus on how the long-term thinking of Jeff Bezos and  Marc Benioff inform their decision making and are well worth your reading.

Bezos is famous for ignoring Wall Street for Amazon’s first two decades.

When it comes to making the most important and the most long-term decisions, Bezos has a simple rule that’s quite useful: “Focus [your vision] on the things that won’t change.”

At Amazon, this means that everything is built around their value of customer obsession.

Benioff has a different approach to making decisions, but still based on the long-term vision he embedded in Salesforce’s culture from the day of founding.

I came back with a clear vision of what the future of the internet was going to be in regards to software-as-a-service and cloud computing. I also had a much deeper sense of my spiritual self. So I said, “When I start a company, I will integrate culture with service.”

When I started Salesforce, on March 8, 1999, I said we’re going to put one percent of our equity, product and time into a foundation and create a culture of service within our company. We’ll be creating new technology, the cloud; we’ll be creating a new business model, subscription services; and we’ll create a culture built on philanthropy.

Last month Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon and a legion of executives came out publicly against Wall Street’s short-term focus.

The emphasis on quarterly earnings, and the importance of beating estimates, is warping American business and the economy, argue almost 200 CEOs who belong to the Business Roundtable, a lobbying organization. Short-term thinking leads corporations to choke back on hiring, and to starve research and development of the spending the fuels long-term growth. The pressure of quarterly earnings is one reason fewer companies are interested in going pubic, preferring the slower growth that comes with being private than the scrutiny that comes with being listed.

Wall Street’s short-term thinking never got a toe-hold at either Salesforce or Amazon, but the reasons it didn’t created significantly different cultures.

While Benioff’s obsession culminates in giving back, Bezos’ obsession comes at a substantial cost to Amazon warehouse workers, the environment and even society.

Image credit: Scott Ellis

It’s so sad. At least it is if you believe Vinod Khosla, who claims that no one over 45 has new ideas, let alone disruptive ones.

That doesn’t bode well for a new his new healthcare venture.

Amazon is forming a joint venture in healthcare aimed at employees with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway, according to a company press release.

Obviously, Khosla and his groupies forgot to tell 54 year-old Jeff Bezos that he is dead in terms of new ideas and that his co-founders, Jamie Dimon, 62 and Warren Buffett, 87, are even deader.

Not only are his co-founders old-to-ancient, one of his first hires was a geriatrician (in case you don’t know, that’s a doctor that specializes in the Medicare crowd)

Must be those dead brain cells at work, since the tech crowd, who are disrupting healthcare with bio hacks and drop-in clinics, know that speed and convenience are what’s needed.

What is it that old guys can see — and the under-40 just don’t get?

If Amazon is looking to disrupt the healthcare industry, why start with geriatrics -— a specialty that hardly seems cutting-edge? But what tech experts don’t know, and what Amazon has figured out, is that to provide high-quality health care for seniors, physicians must be innovative — and disruptive.

Cutting edge IDEO figured that out in 2016.

Just as writers must use their life experience to write with any kind of authenticity, you can’t expect innovations from people who have never experienced or noticed the problem.

When your body, and those in your social circle, work as they should 99% of the time you are unlikely to have a handle on the difficulty of managing multiple, chronic diseases, especially with severely limited resources — financial and human.

So let’s hear it for the old crowd, may they focus their efforts on the problems and challenges of which their younger brethren are barely aware.

Hat tip to Emily White for sending the article.

Image credit: Stuart Richards

Just a few days left this year, so I thought it would be a good time offer up some wise words for the coming year — actually, they are wise any time and any year.

I rarely quote those who cultivate guru status, but this from Craig D. Lounsbrough really resonates. It’s something many of our so-called leaders should embrace.

“An exceptional future can only be built on the transformation of the mess I’ve made out of my past, not the elimination of that mess.”

We all have messes, some worse than others, so stop minimizing yours or offering glib apologies and mea culpas.

Alan Cohen reminds us that there is no “right” time to start, including New Year’s.

Do not wait until the conditions are perfect to begin. Beginning makes the conditions perfect.

Beginning opens the door to success, but also to failure — or does it? (I got into a lot of trouble for this post, but I still stand by it.)

There is no failure except no longer trying. —Elbert Hubbard

Finally, a few words from two folks who have forgotten more about succeeding than most of us will ever learn.

Unlike Jeff Bezos, Tony Hsieh does a great job channeling many of Henry Ford’s attitudes. While Bezos is devoted to “delighting customers” and taking care of his professional employees, the same can’t be said for the rank and file.

A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.

Finally, it seems that too many founders and investors have forgotten, if they ever knew, what drove Thomas Edison’s inventing.

I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent it.

Useful thoughts and good guidance no matter when or where you are in your life.

Image credit: Eddy Van 3000

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

Winning takes many forms, as Ryan pointed out yesterday.

Let’s face it, we are not all going to be the next Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

But there seems to be plenty of room for us all to push a bit harder each day and surround ourselves with winners.

It is up to us to make that happen.

Not all winners desire to be founders anymore than all founders are winners.

I doubt anyone would/could/should minimize the abilities, skills, intelligence, and sheer grit that lands a person in a top senior role at a multibillion dollar tech company, such as Microsoft.

Achieving positions at that level are neither accidental nor serendipitous.

Now, imagine a future in which you are a winner of whatever kind and writing the summary paragraph of your LinkedIn profile.

What would you say when summing up what you did and how you accomplished it? What would you consider your major accomplishments?

Would it read anything like this? (Emphasis mine.)

“I am passionate about building technology that gets out of the way so you can focus on what matters most. My mantra ‘people first, technology second’ has been the driving force in my career. My focus has been leading teams and incubating new technologies and experiences to re-imagine the platform for intelligent work. In my career, I’ve helped build products, including Office, Windows, Internet Explorer, Xbox and Surface, that touch more than a billion people every day. As a leader, it’s important that my door always be open — to embrace everyone’s individual perspective, personality, style and abilities to makes my teams stronger — and creating a culture that the best ideas can come from anyone and anywhere.”

Is this someone worth emulating? Someone you’d want to hire?

Would your answer change when you learned this someone is a woman?

Because it is; she is Julie Larson-Green.

And it is the last 14 words of her summary that truly proclaim her a winner — by any standard.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Winning and competition are fundamental to our lives.

It starts early with your siblings fighting over the same toy and progresses to fighting with your spouse over the TV remote.

It is also something that enables us to push past what our preconceived limits are. I am sure you have had a time when you thought you could do no more, but then you see someone else succeeding a bit more and you push on.

The competition was what helped you achieve your goals and at the end of the day, everyone is better for it.

I have been watching the World Series, full disclaimer I am not a baseball guy, but I do love to see a winner. I happened to be in Houston for the start of the series and that determined the team I would root for, so for the past week or so I have been an Astros fan.

As I watched the series I started to get invested in the lives of the players and what had enabled them to get to this grandest of stages. It was interesting to learn about their paths to the big league and what challenges they faced.

I learned an interesting fact from my wife this morning. Her high school friend is a relief pitcher for the Houston Astros by the name of Tony Sipp. I looked up his stats and as far as I can tell he didn’t pitch a single ball, but he will get a ring.

What I found to be interesting about his life, though, was the path he took to get to where he is. He is from Pascagoula, MS, where he also played for the football team that took home the state championship in 2000, so the guy was a talented athlete that had been around success. He then went on to play at the local Junior College before transferring to Clemson. From there it was a series of double and triple ball teams before entering the majors many years later.

As I read a bit about this guy, I am realizing that he is a winner. He isn’t the big time flashy name that you hear every day, he is the grind-it-out-and-pushes-on kind of guy. He has continued to push his way to the top of his talent and been able to surround himself with others who are doing the same thing.

I am pretty sure we can do the same thing in business.

Let’s face it, we are not all going to be the next Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

But there seems to be plenty of room for us all to push a bit harder each day and surround ourselves with winners.

It is up to us to make that happen.

Image credit: Wikipedia

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

Ask most tech founders about role models and who they want to emulate and you’ll usually hear the same names —  Gates/Jobs/Page/Zukerberg/Bezos.

Rarely do you hear Benioff.

Granted, Benioff’s Salesforce’s revenues aren’t as high and the valuation is “only” $66 billion, but Salesforce sells no consumer products — ads are products — therefore has a much smaller market.

Revenues aside, Benioff is a much better leader and role model.

Not just a philanthropist, but an activist philanthropist who is not afraid to use his clout and get in the face of his peers.

Given the same clout, would you do the same thing?

A guy who believes a company’s concerns should go beyond its investors to include all its stakeholders, direct and indirect.

How far beyond yourself do your concerns go?

Tech’s been on the hot seat lately for a host of reasons, with gender issues front and center, especially equal pay.

Most, including the “role models” listed above, have been vocal in their promises to address the pay disparity.

Benioff, however, has put his money where their mouths are.

In 2015, his company did a salary study, and it turned out they needed to make some changes. So they spent $3M to level the playing field. A year later, they put salaries under the microscope again and found they had to spend another $3M to close additional pay gaps.

Now Benioff has pledged to evaluate salaries on a regular basis. For this and more, he was named a “Global Champion of Women in Business.”

And before you whine about not having enough cash to do that stop and think.

If you pay your people equally when you hire and promote there wouldn’t be a pay gap for you to erase.

Image credit: HikingArtist