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Category Archives: management
Managing your boss
There are shelves of management books about how to manage people that work for you. I don’t know of any management books about another very important skill: how to manage your boss. Or, if you are CEO, how to manage … Continue reading
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How do you get a CEO job?
How do you get to be CEO? I’ve done it a couple of times now and I’d be happy to do it again. I assume we are talking about a startup of some kind rather than a large company. But … Continue reading
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The career-path train doesn’t stop every day
When I lived in France there was a program called “La piste de Xapatan” in which contestants had to negotiate a series of challenges before whizzing down a zipline and running up a hill to catch a train. But “le … Continue reading
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Patents
Patent law is a controversial subject and keeps popping up unexpectedly (for instance Ron Wilson writes about a case at Applied Materials here). I talked about it here in the context of CDMA and Qualcomm. The basic “tradeoff” in having … Continue reading
Posted in eda industry, management, semiconductor
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Hiring and firing in startups
Startups have unique problems in human resources. For a start, they don’t have human resource departments or even, in the earliest days, anyone to even do the mechanical stuff of making sure the right forms are filled out. You have … Continue reading
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Board games
I talked earlier about changing the CEO in startups. The board in any company really has two main functions. One is to advise the CEO since the board often has complementary experience. For example, older venture capital investors have probably … Continue reading
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CEO: a dangerous job
Why do so few startup CEOs last the distance? The Bill Gates, Michale Dell and Scott McNealys who take their companies all the way from the early days as a tiny startup all the way up to enormous multi-division companies … Continue reading
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Emotional engineers
People sometimes say that salespeople are emotional, unlike engineers. I think what they mean is that salespeople are (stereotypically) extrovert so if you mess with them they’ll make a noise about it. Whereas engineers are introvert and will just brood … Continue reading
Posted in engineering, management
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Strategic errors
In the time I was at VLSI, we made a couple of strategic errors relating to EDA. It is perhaps unfair to characterize them this way since it is only with hindsight that the view is clear. First a bit … Continue reading
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What should Cadence do?
Cadence is at an interesting crossroads right now. The current management team is trying very hard to re-establish Cadence as a technology leader and rebuild partnership relations with their long-term customers, many of whom have been deep partners since the … Continue reading
Posted in eda industry, management
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