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The Resource Center has all the info you'll need From content to user feedback, the resource center has the information you need for every level of the entrepreneurial process.
Real estate and insurance are cornerstones of a construction company founder's strategy for building and protecting both business assets and personal wealth. With the help of a financial advisor, she's sustaining her vision of leadership: to understand value, share profits and give back to the community.
This topic expert provides a step-by-step process for understanding a sales reps' potential for results, their motivation factors, and developing a comp plan that fits those characteristics. Strategy, combined with communication, can help sales reps meet their goals and their companies' profit goals.
This entrepreneur and former banking executive shows how she used market research to discover the opportunity for an unexpected new venture. She researched ways around obstacles, identified solutions, and stayed creative--until one day, she found herself at the helm of a very successful business.
Entrepreneurs of a certain age need to accommodate the changes in attitude on the part of the younger generation or risk becoming dinosaurs, writes the author, who turned to entrepreneurship after a career in the U.S. Army and at a major corporation. Today's young people are technologically savvy, casual about dress and deportment, and forward about expecting to advance at a younger age, he says. He includes tips for adjusting one's management style to help -- rather than change -- the new generation.
An entrepreneur turned mergers and acquisitions specialist advises owners selling a privately held company to secure representation and educate themselves about the process.
Lonnie Smith is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Intuitive Surgical. Mr. Smith joined Intuitive in June 1997 from Hillenbrand Industries, where he was Senior Executive Vice President. Mr. Smith joined Hillenbrand in 1978 and during his tenure he was also a member of the executive committee, the office of the president and the board of directors. Mr. Smith has also held positions with The Boston Consulting Group and IBM. Mr. Smith received his BSEE from Utah State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Kim Smith is co-founder and CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund, which she established in 1998 to transform public education by supporting education entrepreneurs. In NewSchools, Kim created a new "hybrid" approach to investing in social entrepreneurs. NewSchools uses grants, loans and equity investments to support a portfolio that includes nonprofit and for-profit entrepreneurs who are building sustainable, scalable education ventures. Kim began her career as a consultant specializing in business-education partnerships. In 1989, she became a founding team member of Teach For America (TFA). She then put her TFA experience to work in the post of founding director of BAYAC AmeriCorps, a consortium of nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area working to develop young leaders in education. Kim's background includes marketing experience with Silicon Graphics' Education Industry Group, where she focused on the online learning industry, and her role as the founding director of a trade show venture. Kim holds a bachelor's degree in political science and psychology from Columbia College and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In 2001, Kim was featured in Newsweek's report on the "Women of the 21st Century" as "the kind of woman who will shape America's new century." She is a member of the 2002 Class of Henry Crown Fellows of the Aspen Institute. Kim has also served on many education venture and advisory boards; these currently include EdVoice, the National Council on Teacher Quality, and the Stanford University School of Education.
Lonnie Smith, President and CEO of Intuitive Surgical, discusses Intuitive's path from start-up to market dominance in the field of surgical robotics.
The toughest and most important job of an entrepreneur is to select the people to bring into his or her company. The author suggests a way to do this: listen for the electricity.
In every company there are a series of critical paths-courses to a conclusion that employees have to run, under intense time pressure, to keep the company meeting goals and hitting objectives so that it keeps moving forward. If someone is blocking the critical path, then that person has to get out of the way. If he or she cannot find a way to get out of the critical path, then the CEO has to step in and clear the way so that the race can continue.
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