It’s important to acknowledge those who help foster your abilities and empower you to pursue the life you want. This Thanksgiving I wanted to share my gratitude to my many teachers, mentors, role models, and friends who have influenced my life and given me their support.

In his book The Monk and the Riddle, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Randy Komisar asks “What would you be willing to do for the rest of your life?” Take a detour from the Deferred Life Plan and learn what builds a truly successful business: passion.

My Gen-Y colleague Dan Schawbel has strategically positioned himself as a personal branding expert over the last few years, and he continues to impress me on nearly a monthly basis. Among his many projects, Dan founded an online magazine called, fittingly, Personal Branding Magazine, and their new quarterly issue is out on November 1st. From the beginning, Dan has partnered [...]

The financial sector is failing. The dollar is already a lame duck in currency markets, and the Fed just printed up another trillion dollars (God knows where that will come from!) so Wall Street can pay their C-level executives. The presidential campaign is like a bad joke, and the absence of laughter in the crowd is deafening. And then there’s [...]

For any readers in the greater Sacramento area, there is a great business networking opportunity on Tuesday, June 17th at the Mondavi Center at UC Davis: The New California 100. Billed as the Central Valley’s first leadership summit, the event will honor the top 100 companies in Northern California that generate more than $50 billion in revenue and employ more [...]

My friend Tim Walther has just released his first book, Seeking True North: The Pathway to Freedom, Beauty and Success with co-writer Erick Erickson! Tim is an accomplished climber and mountaineer, a leadership expert and motivational speaker, and longtime friend of my housemate Paul Dickey. Tim and Paul were my travel buddies in Barcelona and Ibiza this winter. Tim’s business, [...]

“If you have a really great business that makes money hand over fist, you could probably have lousy values. You know, somebody who just fell into the right place at the right time. But it really helps to have values. Like Google, today’s darlings. They didn’t have a clue how they were gonna make money for quite a long time. [...]

You need people that understand the power of different perspectives across cultures and domains. …I often say that the single most important leadership skill for the next couple of decades, at least for those that wish to advance new ideas, will be how to recruit, manage and leverage diversity. —Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics [...]