A former colleague recently reached out to me with the following question:

"I'm interested in getting board experience but am not sure where to start. I've served on a local non-profit board but wondered if you have suggestions for finding opportunities to serve on company/corporate boards?"

Like many, this person is senior with many years of experience and is likely planning their exit into semi-retirement. For people in this position, Boards can be an attractive way to ratchet back from a…

Happy New Year 2012. Before last year fades into our collective memories, I want to recap some lessons that I learned (or re-learned) in 2011.

Over the holidays I was performing some admin on my website. The task was to implement a Blog feature to allow anyone to add comments without having the hassle of joining my website. While I was doing this task, I also looked back over the past eighteen months at the recurring themes about which I had written.

Not coincidentally, these themes mapped to…

This topic has come up repeatedly with clients over the past few weeks. Many companies, especially start-ups, suffer from longer sales cycles than they plan for or can afford. There are many reasons that can often be bucketed into categories as follows:

• Immature or unproven value proposition
• Immature or unproven vendor
• Lack of references and proof points for the solution
• Lack of customer understanding of the solution's capabilities and impact
• Solutions that are new or paradigm shifting…

I met last week with a friend who is the CEO of a billion plus dollar software company. We were discussing the challenges of finding great talent which lead to discussion on how to recruit this scarce resource when you do find it. We were primarily talking about recruiting people to fill mid to senior leadership roles and he was sharing stories of the great people that he has hired in the past year. This was a counterpoint to many CEO's that I have met who bemoan the lack of available talent…

There is a lot of noise made about Silicon Valley and why it is such a successful place for incubating and growing start-ups. Many attribute that region's success to availability of investment capital, role models, mentoring resources, the critical mass of talent and its entrepreneurial culture.  Conversely, many point to Ontario's fledging tech start-up community and bemoan the lack of the above as excuse why our start-ups struggle. While I agree that many of the above factors make it tougher…

This week, I had the privilege of attending a Director's Dinner event organized by Howard Gwin and Derek Smyth of OMERS Ventures, Chris Chapman and Dan Wilson of KPMG's National Technology Practice and Digital Puck.ca . As I sat in this event with 40 other  CEO's and Director's  representing many of the tech stars in the Canadian high tech ecosystem, I reflected on a comment that Howard often makes, that "senior people only go to events where other senior people are".  The room was an all-star…

I was leaving a client's at 6:30 one evening and stopped to chat with one of the folks still at work. She was completing a monthly reporting task that is analytic in nature but somewhat subjective in how you chose to report the data. It is one of those administrative tasks that needs to be done but the time taken to complete it can easily expand to longer than a couple of hours without a corresponding increase in either accuracy or value.  Her frustration at completing this task reminded me of…