There is a category of advisor that doesn't have a clean name in the business world. Not a coach. Not a consultant. Not a therapist. Not a mentor in the traditional sense. Something more like an intellectual interlocutor — a person with enough range, enough credibility, and enough honesty to be useful in the conversations that matter most and are hardest to have. The best leaders I've worked with and observed have had at least one person like this in their lives. Often nobody

Every transaction has two narratives running simultaneously. The external one — the story told to investors, buyers, the press, the market — gets enormous attention. The internal one — what leadership tells the organization, when, and how — gets almost none. This is a mistake with real costs. Key employees leave during deal processes. Integration failures begin before the documents are signed. Culture damage that takes years to repair starts in the silence between announcemen

Growth creates organizational debt. The structure that worked at 10 people doesn't work at 40. The roles that made sense when you were figuring out the product become constraints when you need to scale the business. And the people who were right for one stage of the company are sometimes wrong for the next. Nobody likes talking about this. But the founders who manage organizational transitions well — who make these decisions deliberately rather than reactively — build more du

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Bob Clearmountain at the AES show in New York. The art of record mixing, particularly from...

The world population has just reached an estimated eight billion people. The relationship between economic growth and population growth is a

aaas layoffs, demand, b2b, venture-backed, venture capital, competition, Michael porter, profit, federal reserve, saas, salesforce

"Culture is how you get things done" says Bill Higgs, founder of Mustang Engineering, one of the 500 fastest growing companies in...