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Developing a compelling strategy is the most critical success factor in startup and early stage Biotech organizations. It defines the company’s breakthrough innovation and how it plans to successfully compete in the marketplace. While developing a winning business strategy in general is a difficult process, it is infinitely more challenging for a startup or early stage Biotech company. It is [...]

Why is self-awareness so important? Bill George in his book True North reports that seventy-five members of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council nearly unanimously chose self-awareness as the most important capability for leaders to develop. In his book, Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Coleman lists self-awareness as the first element in describing the leader’s role. Successful leaders do two [...]

The majority of leadership advice these days is to learn to be a servant leader and I agree wholeheartedly. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that while important, it only represents one dimension of leadership. The other two critical leadership dimensions are strategic leadership and performance leadership. My definition of leadership is a simple one but, in many [...]

Having managed over 1000 scientists and engineers in several different companies over my career, I have always been amazed at the wide differences in productivity that existed among my staff members. In some cases, staff with similar talent and training differed by an order of magnitude in their ability to get things done. From my experience, I believe that highly [...]

Anthony P. Graffeo Ph.D. I don’t think that too many people would willingly follow anyone they couldn’t trust. Leadership cannot be sustained without trust, and trust is only gained slowly over time by what you do and how you behave. Unfortunately, it can also be lost in an instant. Paying attention to these three activities will go a long way [...]

I have interacted with many managers who have previously attended several management courses and yet still underperform. In coaching some of these managers, I have concluded that they have heard and understood the principles of good management often times from very reputable international sources. What they are missing is the “how to” unless they have been fortunate to have worked [...]

It seems that the advice de jour these days for managers is to hire smart people and leave them alone to do their work. If taken literally, this is very poor advice! To give these advisors the benefit of the doubt, I believe what they meant to say was don’t micromanage, which is good advice. But using the language “leave [...]