Category: Team Building

We all have privileges. 

If you are reading this now, you are privileged in many ways. Some of these advantages you have been born with, while others you fought to receive. Some, as we are reminded by today’s “Strike for Black Lives,” have been won through collective action. 

While I am a minority, I understand I have privileges that Black people don’t. In 1965, an Immigration Act was passed that enabled Indian Americans, especially those with specialized professional skills, to enter into this country. If you were proficient, smart, and skilled, America welcomed you–a starkly different invitation compared to how Black slaves were brought into the country.

Yet, when 9/11 occurred, I sat in my middle school classroom suddenly wanting more than anything to be White. While we watched the news blaring from the TV, I didn’t want any of my classmates to turn around and see

One of the characteristics that every good investor looks for in an aspiring entrepreneur is resilience, or the ability to learn from and bounce back after a failure.

You don’t have to have previous startup problems to show resilience – everyone should have a story of tackling a tough challenge with minimal success, but using the failure to move on and achieve an objective.

With startups, almost every entrepreneur I know has failed at least once, often several times, but never gave up, and ultimately achieved their goal. Evan Williams, for example, before co-founding Twitter, started a podcasting platform named Odeo. The platform couldn’t compete with Apple’s podcast section of iTunes, so he recast his efforts into microblogging, and the rest is history.

The challenge is how you can enhance your own ability to bounce back, and highlight that attribute to your team and outside constituents, including investors

Elon Musk has had plenty to share with business owners over the years, and he’s spent plenty of time thinking outside the box. But a comment he made a couple of years ago in a letter to employees may be one more business leaders should consider in a world disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the ‘chain of command,'” Musk wrote to his employees in 2018. “Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.”

Musk went on to say that “a major source of issues” in companies come when communication doesn’t flow freely. As he told his Tesla employees, it “must be OK for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.”

Two years later, the world looks decidedly different for most companies.