This issue has come up with a number of my coaching clients recently. So I thought I’d jot down my thoughts about personal vs impersonal decision-making. As an organization gets larger, there should be an effort to treat everyone fairly. Rules and policies are created so that everyone knows what…

Tom Petty said, “the waiting is the hardest part.” But I would like to suggest that the starting is the hardest part. …

By the time my business coaching clients come to me, they’re usually having trouble sleeping. Sometimes their marriages are falling apart. Their stomach or their back hurts. Or maybe they’re just feeling overwhelmed. I used to joke that the greatest thing about running my own company was that I couldn’t…

When I first started a company, I was uncomfortable talking about the money. I justified it by saying that we were shielding our employees from the business of the business. It’s the owners’ job to worry about the ups and downs of the company. We, the owners, were the ones…

I started a company because I was a good web developer. Most founders start a company because they’re good at doing something — whether it’s baking bread, fixing cars, or creating websites. But as an individual, there’s only so much bread you can bake, cars you can fix, or websites…

It’s really effing hard being a leader. One of the hardest parts is that you usually need to look like you know what you are doing. Sometimes you know what you’re doing. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re doing. And sometimes you think you’re one when you’re actually the other. …

When talking about building a company, I often talk about finding the right puzzle pieces to grow your business. You need to find the right people, the right processes, and the right philosophies to make your business fulfilling, productive, and successful. But “puzzle pieces” probably isn’t the right metaphor. It…

I was running a business for 3 or 4 years before it dawned on me. I felt like we’d created a special company. But I wasn’t sure how all of these great people had come to work for us. I attributed a lot of it to luck. Serendipity? Maybe culture…

Javascript is not a compiled language. It was designed to be portable and simple, interpreted and compiled by the browser at run-time — sometimes referred to as just-in-time (JIT) compilation. Yet, over time, Javascript has become a full-fledged application programming language, used first in server environments (usually in the form…