"Death of a Salesman." “Tim starts next Monday!” said the CEO at our startup. He had called my mobile over the weekend to share the good news. I was thrilled. Tim was a new Sales executive we had hired to scale up our Sales team and our revenues with it. I had interviewed him and found him to be a very competent professional with deep Sales experience, and on top ...

Leadership Matters. I was a new manager at Oracle when I found out I had been selected as part of a group to get to meet face-to-face with Ray Lane, Oracle’s COO and #2 to Larry Ellison at the time. He gave a short presentation and took questions from the audience and I was amazed at his ability to thoroughly address any question ranging from detailed issues in specific ...

A Very Rough Landing. She came in with the reputation of a corporate “rock star.” We’ll call her Paula. She was considered a key player at a highly successful applications company and widely credited with helping to build up an Alliances program that had exceeded its target metrics for six years in a row and in some ways was the envy of the industry. People talked in the hallways ...