“Classic entrepreneurs who built companies from scratch dominate the list of the best. Shockingly, only one woman — Estee Lauder — made the top 50 of Professors Anthony J. Mayo and Nitin Nohria’s list of top 100 business leaders.”

Another one of my favorite sessions at SXSW Interactive 2006 was Zero-Advertising Brands, where we got to watch Maggie Mason talk to the guys from skinnyCorp, the makers of Threadless among other creative commerce/community hybrids. One of my favorite things about talking to folks that really get the user-generated web, is that when they tell you their secret recipies, it all sounds so easy. Here’s George from Flickr in the Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps talk: ‘We listen to what our users say, and then iterate the design.’ See? Easy.” Also, here’s a good quote from Ben Brown over at Evhead.

We are very proud to be mentioned in Dave Kurlan’s great new book, Baseline Selling: How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball (Kurlan talks about XPLANE as a great resource for marketing and sales professionals on pages 108-109). Here’s what people are saying about it: “Every sales manager committed to creating a no excuse, high performance sales cultures needs to read this book. There are valuable insights for coaching both the novice salesperson as well as the seasoned professional.” … “Sometimes you just need to be reminded about the basics, and Dave Kurlan does that very well. His comparisons to the game of baseball are brilliant. For instance: every year, at the beginning of each season, even Major League players go to spring training, where they are schooled–again–on the fundamentals of the game, and they get in shape. Similarly, sales people–from ‘rookies’ to veterans–also need the same things.” –Reviews from Amazon.com. Check it out!

“Unsurprisingly, top-down mandates seldom work. ‘Here is your new content management system. All content will now be published with this centralized system. Signed, The Management.’ I often found myself consulting with organizations with similar problems. ‘We spent all this time and money installing a CMS, but everyone still publishes static HTML pages. How do we force them to use it?’ You don’t, of course. As SocialText has learned, people use the simplest thing that works, and they look to their peers to find those tools.”

“John Nesheim, in his best-selling book High Tech Start Up: The Complete Handbook for Creating Successful New High Tech Companies, concludes from his research that there are 14 stages in taking a venture from idea to IPO, as follows… Chapter 3 of High Tech Start Up, reprinted below, describes the main focus activity, time required, typical participants, help needed, major costs, main risks, output and ROI for each of these stages. Although written for a hi-tech company, this discussion is also generally applicable to most other new ventures.”

“I recall Kate, a TV executive, who returned from maternity leave to a new boss. She was, she found, tainted by association. When her projects (initiated under her old boss) turned out to be wildly successful, it made matters worse and she found herself ostracized. Anything that made the old strategy look good made her new boss look bad. Caught in the crossfire of regime change, the better she did, the worse she was treated. Ultimately she had no choice but to leave.”

“Here’s a quiz to determine your ‘entrepreneurial quotient.’ My intent is to test a person’s knowledge of entrepreneurship. However, scoring high doesn’t mean you’re the next Steve Jobs, and scoring low doesn’t mean you’re not. Some answers are debatable, so there will be many comments. #10, in particular, is tricky so read it very carefully.”

“I gave a talk at ETech on Monday called ‘Entrepreneuring for Geeks.’ I’ve given this general talk a few times now — how can the more technically minded among us move into making companies of our own? I really enjoy the talks because I really enjoy entrepreneurs; at least, I enjoy the ones who are really excited about making something fantastic through their efforts. ‘Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?’ Right. I started out this year’s talk with a set of “proverbs” I’ve collected or thought up over the years.? (Thanks a.wholelottanothing.org!)

“A little over a year ago, I met with Dave Young to talk about joining him at Joyent. I was intrigued from the start, but he hooked me with a 15-minute diatribe against the inanity of seemingly never-ending ‘public betas’ for web sites. It was a rant that could have come out of my own mouth. In short, we both agreed that permanent ‘betas’ are bullshit — as are any public betas that last more than a few weeks. You’re either ready to ship, or you’re not. Slapping a ‘beta’ badge on your logo doesn’t cover for any actual flaws or shortcomings in your software. It’s this decade’s equivalent of the 90’s ‘under construction’ GIF animation.”

Let’s say that you’re a programmer working on a wildly successful open source project in your free time… In general, you feel strongly that nobody should commit a broken build… and that it’s important to get as many people reviewing the code as possible… If you’re also a professional developer at your day job, then you may have tried to bring some of those great practices to work with you. If you have, then these excuses will sound very familiar: ‘We have a business to run.’ ‘Those ideas might work in a perfect world, but we need to concentrate on our code.’”

“It takes money to make money. Use these heavenly hints to attract the early-stage funding you need to get your new business off the ground.”

“Ready to leave the company fold but don’t want the door to hit you on the way out? Here’s a guide to making a graceful exit.”

“Since managers are usually responsible for getting work done through others, we often don’t recognize when inactivity, apathy, procrastination, and other non-performance viruses creep into our work habits. Our peers may be producing at high levels, but we find ourselves coasting. Sometimes, subordinates may even point this out to their manager, as many comments alluded to in an earlier post. So what’s going on when the manager is the poor performer?”