Hugh Molotsi

Our book, The Intrapreneur's Journey - Empowering Employees to Drive Growth is now available to order on Amazon . Thanks to all the wonderful people who generously supported our journey in creating this book including our numerous kind Kickstarter backers.

Watch my presentation on the Future of Work at the 2018 Lean Startup Conference in Las Vegas.

First published on LinkedIn . On Thursday July 26, 2018, Facebook set a dubious record: The value of their shares plunged 19% erasing $119 billion in market value – the biggest single-day loss in market cap ever for any public company. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal loss was $16 billion! Almost at the same time, Amazon posted a quarterly profit of $2.5 billion pushing its stock up over 4% as their market valuation inched tantalizingly close to $1 trillion! Jeff Bezos is by far the richest man in the world with a personal net worth of over $140 billion. In my non-expert opinion, I feel the market may have overreacted to Facebook’s recent issues. That being said, the contrast in Amazon and Facebook’s fortunes did bring to mind how optimizing internal metrics that aren’t about customer value can eventually bite you. Although financial metrics (revenue and profit growth) are the ultimate scorecard for publicly traded companies, investors and employees often look at other met...

This article was first published on LinkedIn . In organizations, one of the most common complaints you’ll hear about is decision making. These include some variants of decisions taking too long to be made, poor decisions being made, or the right people not being consulted. Ironically, because we are all intimately involved in decision-making processes (as drivers of decisions or stakeholders), we all play a part in the problem we're complaining about! So how can we shift from just complaining about poor decision making to doing something about it? A great framework to learn and use in your work life is Decision Making Modes. Decision Making Modes define the approach decision drivers engage with their stakeholders. The five decision modes are: Tell, Sell, Test, Consult, and Join. As illustrated in the diagram above, the level of collaboration between the decision driver and her stakeholders increases as you move from left to right. One immediate benefit for a ...

This article was first published on the Lean Startup Co. blog. Perhaps the most underutilized assets in most companies are the ideas in their employees’ heads. It makes sense that the people spending most of their day working on products or with customers are bombarded with insights on new and better ways to serve those customers. But in too many companies, employees are not empowered to do anything with their ideas. Instead, decisions on what ideas to explore are made by senior leaders. But these senior leaders don’t have the same proximity to insights because they spend most of their working day meeting with other senior leaders. We call this the Insight-Decision Divide . Bridging the Insight-Decision Divide requires companies to develop a culture of innovation where every employee is empowered to work on their own ideas. Foundational to empowering employees is giving them time to innovate. If employees’ time is fully subscribed to their day jobs, they won’t have time ...

Fred Reichheld, the inventor of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), defines bad profits as earnings at the expense of customer relationships .   These are profits from customers who feel misled, mistreated, ignored or coerced.   Customer relationships are harmed by blatantly bad experiences like a parking valet returning your car with a damaged fender and refusing to accept responsibility.   But customer relationships are also harmed by the more mundane – raising prices, charging for support, or removing features. Why are bad profits bad?   Because these bad experiences turn customers into detractors.   And detractors won’t be shy about telling others to stay away from your products.   What Reichheld has taught us is that an offering with a negative NPS (more detractors than promoters) will have a hard time growing and is primed to be displaced by a competitor. But if bad profits are so bad, why do so many companies use them?   That’s b...

The 21st century economy requires 21st century skills which include software development and high-end digital knowledge. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the US economy will need as many as 100,000 new information technology workers per year over the next decade. Right now, only about 60,000 of these workers enter the workforce each year (see US economy faces impending skills gap ).  Clearly, traditional four year colleges are not keeping up with demand and the college route is not a practical path for everyone. The good news is that coding academies and boot camps are providing an alternative path generating software developers, product managers, and designers in as little as twelve weeks. This week, a delegation of South African government officials and business leaders visited Silicon Valley. The delegation was led by Honorable Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams , the Deputy Minister of Telecommunications and Postal Services. On the delegation's agenda was learning whi...