larrycornett

I had the good fortune during my career to participate in leadership coaching for the first time when I was a VP at Yahoo. I had certainly heard about career coaching over the years, but had never really considered trying it. My experience with companies in Silicon Valley has been that the majority used to take a "sink or swim" approach to management and leadership. You either were a "natural" and got it or you struggled and failed (often becoming the worst nightmare of your employees). Luckily, most companies are increasingly offering some management and leadership training through their HR departments. This is certainly better than nothing, but generalized corporate workshops rarely help you become your best and you don't really get the long-term mentoring that you need to help you resolve and learn from the conflict that you will personally encounter as a leader. Sometimes, though, you are lucky enough to have had a great manager who took you under his or her wing, gave you honest feedback and guidance, and helped coach you as you took those first steps down the path of managing and leading a team. But, unfortunately, those types of managers and leaders are still fairly rare.

Great review of a report that researched over 3000 technology startups to understand why some startups succeed, while others fail

I answered an interesting question on Quora today about creativity and innovative thinking. I've encountered this question in its many forms several times over in my lifetime. I remember one of the earliest being when I was in high school. The principal and a few teachers formed a very small research committee that included 5 of their top students, which included me (I wore glasses and looked smarter back then). The goal was to create a program to spark, encourage, and guide the creative power of the students in the school. We were seeking the holy grail of trying to find a program and process that was already successful. We discovered that no one was completely successful, although there were some interesting aspects of the different programs. Fast forward to my career in Silicon Valley and history has been repeating itself at every company where I either worked as an employee or consulted.

Everyone wants to find a way for their employees and their organizations to be more innovative.

I was in NYC last week and had the pleasure of speaking with the folks from The Shoshin Project about the current trends within the Tech industry. Specifically, we talked a lot about the impact of social media and how it could potential disrupt traditional information retrieval (i.e., Web Search). I believe that social media's popularity and technology may push aside traditional search by helping users tame the information overload beast that the "stream" has become.

I logged into Facebook today and saw what I thought was an email from one of my friends. It was not. It was actually a threaded conversation between two of my friends and not meant for anyone else's eyes. Ouch. Facebook has slipped up and violated our privacy again.

Here are the details explaining what the designer who creates the winning logo will receive:

* 1 ticket to the Warm Gun conference
* On-stage mention of the winning logo design and designer by Dave McClure
* Mention in the program guide with the designer's website and contact info
* Blog post on the Warm Gun site authored by the designer on a topic of choice (perhaps describing your design process for creating the logo)

Well, as reported by Fast Company today, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone stated they have now reached ~800 million search queries per day. That supposedly puts them above the combined query volume of Yahoo plus Bing. This story has spread like wildfire across the web, with everyone jumping on and claiming that Twitter is now �oethe World�s Fastest Growing Search Engine”. Really? Only if you don�t dig deeper into how those searches are counted. Only if you don�t really understand Search and the difference between a query a human being enters into a search box and an automated query that updates tweet results on a topic every few seconds.