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Should you co-found a company with your friend? And how do you split the equity?

If you’re talking with cofounders about launching a new business, you’re fundamentally recruiting someone to take the job of partnering with you for the next decade.  I see a lot of founders who do less due diligence than I think ideal before making that long-term commitment. Just knowing one another for a long time is...

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Are you hiring a cultural fit? Do you actually want to?

Who should you hire: the superstar with great skills who feels like a poor fit with the culture, or the person with weaker skills but who fits in culturally?  Even though I believe in hiring the stranger, cultural fit really matters. I once had an interview set up with a candidate who looked strong on...

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Partnering Strategy, Subcontractors, and Uber

You can’t hire in courtesy and managerial competence; it has to flow from company management outwards. I’m traveling to Atlanta and Boston this month, so starting to plan my logistics.  Part of what Uber’s customers pay for is an easy-to-use layer across multiple cab services in multiple cities.   I don’t mind too much paying them...

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The Speed of Trust Review

A while ago I read Stephen M.R. Covey’s book, The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything . As you would guess, Stephen M.R. is the son of Dr. Stephen R. Covey, who wrote the extremely influential book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The heritage shows. Speed of Trust is written...

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United 93 and Kitty Genovese: Courage in the Workplace

The courageous actions of passengers on the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11 flew in the face of a long-standing contention in social science circles that people won’t put themselves in danger to right a wrong, e.g., the famous Kitty Genovese case. This fact prompted Monica Worline, a professor of organizational behavior at Emory...

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Connecting the Corporate Dots: Social Networks Reveal How Employees and Companies Operate

The Wharton newsletter reports: “With the recent disclosure of wiretapping by the National Security Agency and the booming success of sites like MySpace and Friendster, social networking is much in the news today.But serious interest in social networks can also be found among academics, consultants and corporations seeking to deepen their knowledge of how companies...

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How to Prevent Technology From Impeding Communication and Wrecking Your Virtual Project

Technology has made it possible for teams with members around the world to work on virtual projects. A monthly budget for such a project can easily exceed $1.2 million and involve more than 60 team members worldwide.  Although email and other communication tools make this possible, what happens when team effectiveness is hampered by the...

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The Office Chart That Really Counts

The Office Chart That Really Counts Mapping informal relationships at a company is revealing — and useful: Two years ago, Ken Loughridge, an information technology manager living in Cheshire, England, uprooted his family and moved to the other side of the world. His company, engineering and environmental consulting firm MWH Global, was reorganizing its various...

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