Most of Facebook Inc. (FB)’s more than 800 million users are women. You wouldn’t know it from looking at the board, whose seven directors are all men.

The disconnect puts the social-media company at odds with others in the industry that have at least one female director, including LinkedIn Corp. and Google Inc., and from most big public companies in the U.S. Just 11.3 percent of the Fortune 500 had male-only boards last year, according to Catalyst, a New York-based nonprofit that researches women and business issues.

“We’re long past having to defend or explain why women should be on boards, given all the data that shows how companies with female as well as male directors perform better,” said Anne Mulcahy, former chairman and chief executive officer of Xerox Corp. and a director at Johnson & Johnson Co., Target Corp. and Washington Post Co. “It’s unfortunate when companies with a large percentage of women constituents don’t reflect that in their boardrooms.”

A Catalyst survey of Fortune 500 companies found that those with three or more female directors outperformed those with fewer between 2005 and 2009, achieving on average 43 percent better return on equity. As Facebook prepares to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering, the composition of its board shows its business strategy is faulty, said Susan Stautberg, co-founder of New York-based Women Corporate Directors, which promotes female board membership.

“It doesn’t make sense for a company that claims to be so forward looking to not have any women directors,” she said. “If they just have an old boy’s network in the boardroom, they won’t have access to diverse ideas and strategies.”

Read Full Article in Bloomberg.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Fund raiser. Dishwasher. Product manager. In the world of Silicon Valley start-ups, where I’m based, a CEO has many duties. Of course, as your company grows and evolves, you’ll likely delegate a number of those duties. But there are three primary tasks you must own yourself in 2012 if your team—and your start-up—are going to succeed.

1. Hire for good cultural fit

You know the saying, “You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family.” Consider hiring a little like picking your professional family, but in this case you do get to choose.

And choose well, you must.  Last year at Wordnik we hired 12 new people, while seven moved on, bringing our total to 20. Those 12 extra people can either raise the bar or crater the company.

On paper, plenty of candidates matched the experience for the jobs available, but that’s not what I’m most concerned about. I want a good cultural fit.

I find I often spend more time doing reference checks on candidates than I spend interviewing them. The first thing I ask references is if the job candidate lived up to his or her previous references, both in terms of performance and cultural fit. By asking this simple question, it reduces the theoretical risks inherent in blind reference checks and it gives me a broader view on someone’s work history.

One thing to keep in mind: A start-up’s core cultural and philosophical principles evolve as the company grows. Someone who was a great fit for a company of five or 10 may not be for a company of 25 or more. This is why you must be an integral part of the hiring process. And every person you hire, regardless of the role, should meet with everyone on the management team at least once.

Read Full Article in Inc.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

It’s been incredibly illuminating to disseminate Peter Drucker’s mandatory, The Effective Executive. This is part 4 – our last installment in the series. This part focuses on decision making – how to make decision making and the results one should look for as a result of their decision. Hope you’ve enjoyed the series.

1.      Converting the decision to action; no decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone’s work assignment and responsibility. Until then, there are only good intentions.

2.      Finally, feedback has to be built into the decision to provide a continuous testing, against actual events, of the expectations that underlie the decision.

3.      The effective decision maker assumes that the traditional measurement is not the right measurement. Otherwise, there would be no need for a decision. Whenever one analyzes the way a truly effective, a truly right, decision has been reached, one finds that a great deal of work and thought went into finding the appropriate measurement.

4.      There is definitely a need for dissent, an alternative, as long as it makes sense.

5.      Above all, disagreement is needed to stimulate the imagination.

6.      There is one final question the effective decision-maker asks; “Is a decision really necessary?” One alternative is always the alternative of doing nothing.

7.      One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done. This also applies with respect to opportunity. If the opportunity is important and is likely to vanish unless one acts with dispatch, one acts-and makes radical change.

8.      Du Pont has been doing so much better than any other of the world’s large chemical companies largely because it abandons a product or process before it begins to decline. Du Pont does not invest scarce resources of people and money into defending yesterday.

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

In the Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals series about Peter Drucker’s must read business manual, The Effective Executive, we have already learned about the mix between intelligence and character – about vision, now in part 3, we learn about the hard and soft skill-sets that a really good manager will need to be successful.

1.      Effective executives lead from strength in their own work.

2.      If there is any one “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

3.      A great deal could be said about the analysis of priorities; courage rather than analysis dictates the truly important rules for identifying priorities; pick the future against the past, focus on opportunity rather than on the problem, choose your own direction-rather than climb on the bandwagon, and aim high, aim for something hat will make a difference rather than for something that is “safe” and easy to do.

4.      Effective executives do not make a great many decisions. They concentrate on the important ones. They try to think through what is strategic and generic, rather than “solve problems.”

5.      The elements of the decision process; the clear realization that the problem was generic and could be solved through a decision which established a rule, a principle; the definition of the specifications which the answer to the problem had to satisfy, the boundary of conditions, the thinking through of what is right, the solution that will fully satisfy the specifications before attention is given to the compromises, adaptations, and concessions needed to make the decision acceptable, the building into the decision to carry it out, and the feedback  which tests the validity and effectiveness of the decision against the actual course of events.

6.      The effective decision maker, therefore always assumes initially that the problem is generic; and if the event is truly unique, the experienced decision maker suspects that this heralds a new underlying problem and that what appears as unique will turn out to have been simply the first manifestation of a new generic situation.

7.      The decision process has to have clear specification as to what the decision has to accomplish.

8.      One has to start out with what is right rather than what is acceptable precisely because one always has to compromise in the end.

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

As a coach, I help entrepreneurs through the issues that keep them from their dreams. For the most part I see these individuals as driven, passionate, unstoppable human beings. But after my recent discussion with one entrepreneur, the bar has definitely been raised.

Monte Lee-Wen entered the United States from Canada with few resources and little money. But he had a dream, and that was enough to keep him going. It wasn’t long after coming to the United States that Monte built his commercial real estate company, growing from four employees working out of his home, to more than eighty employees occupying an impressive office building in Austin, Texas—all self-funded! He even made the Inc. 500 list in 2009 for revenue growth of 670.3 percent in the previous year.He then went on to make the Inc. 500 list in 2010, moving up to the 20th fastest growing company in all of Austin. Outstanding results for any business person, but what I find particularly amazing is that this young entrepreneur achieved all of this against some very significant odds.

Now 35, Monte was just 28 years of age when he established The PPA Group, a commercial real estate investment company. He maintained his company’s growth during the downturn in our economy while most commercial real estate companies were crumbling. And, as if that wasn’t challenging enough, Monte achieved all of this while battling a life-threatening illness. In fact, he suffered a temporary loss of his voice during surgery and proceeded to close the biggest deal of his career without being able to utter a single syllable aloud. Today, after months of rehabilitation to recover his ability to speak, Monte’s voice is strong, and he has a message to share.

Read Full Article in Inc.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

It is hard to find a company– let alone one here at the Consumer Electronics Show – that doesn’t love to talk about the importance of innovation.

But how do you do it?

In a keynote panel this morning, executives from Xerox, Verizon and Ford tackled the topic. There were a few of the common overused platitudes about the top theme, such as the importance of failure, etc. But the experts also shared some tips.

Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox, was quick to mention the importance of improving America’s education system, lest it fall further behind other countries in the key ares of math and science.

When it comes to running a company, she said looking to other companies for help is key. “You figure out how to cooperate in a very competitive world,” she said. She mentioned Xerox’s move to partner with security companies instead of choosing to build those services themselves.

Read Full Article in Wall Street Journal.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

It’s bound to happen. You close a handful of small deals with other start-ups and medium-sized customers who quickly sign your form contract. Now you’ve landed the “Whale”–a huge enterprise client. You send your form customer contract over to the Whale’s legal team. The contract comes back to you, bleeding with red ink–or worse yet, the Whale insists on throwing out your contract and using “their paper.”  Is the deal in jeopardy?

Absolutely not. There are, however, a few things that you can do to help the deal close quickly and avoid getting stuck in the legal abyss.

Stay the Course.

The mere fact that the Whale’s legal team does not like your form customer agreement should neither offend nor concern you. No matter how much time you spend with your counsel developing and improving your form customer contract, it is quite possible that a Whale’s legal team is going to mark it up or tear it apart.

Why? Well, legal review at a large corporation is a lot more intense than at a start-up. There’s a significantly lower tolerance for risk and a bigger appetite for using all available resources to minimize that risk to a ridiculously small level. There is also a great deal of internal pressure put on in-house counsel to justify their salaries.  Those forces often result in very heavy-handed lawyering, like nit-picky revisions and demanding alternative language that has the exact same meaning as yours.  If you accept this reality and temper your response accordingly, you can get your deals closed a lot more quickly.

Read Full Article in Inc.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Sydney Finkelstein, the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, published “Why Smart Executives Fail” 8 years ago.

In it, he shared some of his research on what over 50 former high-flying companies – like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Rubbermaid, and Schwinn – did to become complete failures.  It turns out that the senior executives at the companies all had 7 Habits in common.  Finkelstein calls them the Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives.

These traits can be found in the leaders of current failures like Research In Motion (RIMM), but they should be early-warning signs (cautionary tales) to currently unbeatable firms like Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), and Amazon.com (AMZN).  Here are the habits, as Finkelstein described in a 2004 article:

Habit # 1:  They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment

This first habit may be the most insidious, since it appears to be highly desirable.  Shouldn’t a company try to dominate its business environment, shape thefuture of its markets and set the pace within them?  Yes,but there’s a catch.  Unlike successful leaders, failed leaders who never question their dominance fail torealize they are at the mercy of changing circumstances.They vastly overestimate the extent to which they actually control events and vastly underestimate the role of chance and circumstance in their success.

Read Full Article in Forbes.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

At least that’s what the dry statistics keep telling us. Industrial production, G.D.P. — the kind of figures that Washington and Wall Street sweat over — suggest that the economy is on the mend.

Yet if we go beyond the Beltway and the Battery, to where most of American life is lived, the numbers don’t always add up. Yes, the Great Recession officially ended in 2009. But many millions of Americans are out of work or cannot find full-time jobs. Home prices are wobbly. The foreclosure crisis drags on. And the Occupy movement’s campaign against “the 1 percent” has underscored the ravages of income inequality.

It was, as always, a year of ups and downs in business. Washington said the nation’s AAA rating was safe, but Standard & Poor’s concluded that it wasn’t. Europe insisted that its currency was sound, but investors worry that it isn’t. Wall Street seemed perpetually on edge. After so many wild days, the American stock market ended 2011 about where it began.

On this side of the Atlantic, aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2008-9 are still reverberating, though the worst has passed. Now, how Europe’s economic troubles play out may determine whether job growth here finally picks up enough to make up for all the lost ground — and whether that 401(k) is richer or poorer next Jan. 1.

Where to go from here? And how to face the challenges ahead? Sunday Business asked the six economists who write the Economic View column to do a little blue-sky thinking on issues as varied as the Fed, Europe and housing. You won’t find stock tips. But if 2011 was any guide, the best advice for 2012 may be this: Hold tight.

Read Full Article in New York Times.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

We asked a group of leading business thinkers what books make their must-read lists. Fiction, nonfiction, even drama made the cut, each offering an oft-surprising business lesson. Here are some of their top picks:

Warren Bennis, management professor, University of Southern California; Author of Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership

Henry IV, Part 1, by William Shakespeare

“Falstaff was sent to help Hal become ‘kingly’ – [he was] the first executive coach of all time. Falstaff tell Prince Hal that if you want to lead people, you better understand their world. I read it at least every other year, and always learn something.”

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, by Ron Suskind

“It’s about a rookie taking on what is probably the most significant, complex job in the world [U.S. President] – a leadership development story.”

***

Sally Blount, Dean, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, by Francis Fukuyama

“Fukuyama lays out a comprehensive, yet simple framework for understanding how humans join together for collective action and what they seek to achieve from the process of participating.”

Read Full Article in New York Times.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation