Your Job is Not Your Job

If someone asked you, “What is your job?”, what would your response be?  Go ahead, take a minute to think about your answer.  I asked a similar question a few weeks ago in my post Become Indispensable: Solve Interesting Problems) Professor Fred Kofman tells a story about a question that changed his outlook on this … Read more

The Ability to Sell Yourself

How do you respond when a person says “Tell me about yourself?” It might be called confidence, it might be called belief – do you let others see the best version of you, or do they see a dull, low-intensity, passionless version of yourself? Why do we find it difficult to sell ourselves? I spent … Read more

12 Vital Questions for Any New Business

Global Entrepreneurship Week It is Global Entrepreneurship Week on 18 November through 23 November.  There are events all over the world.  The overall organisation website is: http://www.unleashingideas.org. You can find out more following twitter hashtags #GEW, #GEWSpain, #IESEGEW.  There will be plenty of events in your city led by Entrepreneurs’ Organisation, The Kauffman Foundation and many more … Read more

How Ideas Die: The #1 Reason

A person can have the great idea, but if that person cannot convince a number of people: the idea dies. Good ideas do die.  Good ideas must have good advocates.  Good advocacy and good idea makes an idea live. Ideas need advocates like humans need oxygen. The Leader as Communicator The Leader’s #1 job as … Read more

How to get Attention: The 7 Triggers of Fascination

When I step on stage to speak, I get 8 seconds before the listener decides how to categorize me: worth attention, or time to check my mobile email What are your first words? When I meet someone at a conference, a party, an event…  again – we have 8 seconds.  Catch attention, or the other … Read more

Yahoo pays Millions to Teen Coder (the real story)

The story in the tech news of the last few days is the purchase of Summly by Yahoo for the sum of $30M, making the 17-year old founder Nick D’Aloisio an instant millionaire. It sounds fairly simple. The story they want you to believe: Teen whizz writes cool app.  App downloaded by millions.  Yahoo gets … Read more

If You Can’t Explain What You Do in a Paragraph, You’ve Got a Problem

I so loved the title of Brad Feld’s post, that I just had to copy the title. This is an important one.  We live in a world of personal branding, quick online reputation checks and a lot of noise.  Authors, Entrepreneurs and job seekers get less and less time to explain themselves. This morning I was … Read more

Pitching: Get the first 10 words right

What are the first ten words of your next pitch, speech or presentation? Participants of Wayra Week Barcelona 2012 I was at Wayra Week Barcelona this week working with 30 selected startup businesses to prepare their companies for growth and investment.  All were looking to raise a round of venture capital financing for their businesses. I spent … Read more