April 2009
4 posts
Sun-Oracle
Sun Microsystems, my former employer, announced yesterday that it would be acquired by the Oracle Corporation. Like many of other one-time giants of high-tech, Sun and the Sun brand will soon begin to disappear. The list of once-prominent, now defunct IT companies really is long: Digital Equipment, Apollo, Compaq, Silicon Graphics, Cray, Siebel, BEA, PeopleSoft, NeXT, just to mention a few . ...
2 tags
Fathers & Sons
Working with a family-run business is different. All organizations have their own cultures and personalities: family businesses have an additional overlay of kinship and shared history complicating matters.
I was recently advising the founder’s son in a small light manufacturing enterprise in Brooklyn. This firm was under tremendous financial pressure due to misjudgments made over several...
3 tags
Shangri-La
One of the great things about meeting with a lot of different businesses is the insight you get into management styles and business culture. A few weeks ago I met with a fantastic company. Extremely well-funded, its mission is as much humanitarian as it is profit-making. Highly technological, the people who work there all graduated with sciences degrees from top universities and are extremely...
2 tags
Postcard from the Edge (3)
Our friend has left the small company where he started working just over a month ago. He explains -
“Certainly, the adjustment from large IT products corporation to a small light manufacturing group was a big one. There were lots of positives in the lack of red tape, the ability to work across functional lines and learn new skills. However, in small business even more than in a...