Tough Things First: Leadership Lessons from Silicon Valley's Longest Serving CEO

Tough Things First: Leadership Lessons from Silicon Valley's Longest Serving CEO PDF Author: Ray Zinn
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional
ISBN: 1259584186
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Silicon Valley pioneer Ray Zinn, CEO of top microchip company Micrel for 37 years, shows entrepreneurs and executives how to lead and succeed by tackling the Tough Things First In high school, Ray Zinn’s track coach told him he was too short to run the hurdles. Ray took this as a challenge and, after months of hard training, became the fastest hurdler on the team. That drive and self-discipline is, to Zinn, the essence of the entrepreneurial spirit. It’s what pushed him to achieve the impossible, founding a Silicon Valley microchip company—without venture capital—and turning it into a global empire with an enviable 37-year track record as CEO. Tough Things First, the distillation of Ray Zinn’s astonishing career as CEO of Micrel, is a comprehensive head-to-toe training program for entrepreneurs and leaders—based on hard-won lessons in business and in life. Zinn’s tough-love approach gives you the guidance you need to: • Find your vision, set your goals, and make them happen • Build your business like you’d train your body: with heart, soul, mind, and passion • Master the psychological disciplines that will sharpen your focus and drive • Create a corporate culture that engages employees and inspires confidence • Put people first and push them to achieve their personal best • Tackle the tough jobs today—and ensure your success tomorrow Zinn tells you what it takes to succeed in a world where markets are constantly changing, new technologies are emerging, and small startups are going head to head with industry giants. He shows you how to be a good leader and what you can do to make yourself even better. He reveals why discipline is the first and most important step—for the entrepreneur and the organization—and why people are your single most valuable resource. He offers practical, no-nonsense advice on processes and procedures, finances and growth creation, changing markets and new technology. But that’s not all. The key to your success, Zinn explains, lies in your mind, your body, your vision, and your heart. This book shows you how to develop these interconnected skills, how to integrate them into your life and work, and how to handle the tough things first. As the trailblazing founder and CEO of Micrel, Inc., one of the world’s leading microchip companies, Ray Zinn bootstrapped his company, achieved consistent profitability, and delivered a total equity value of more than $800 million at its acquisition. In 37 years of leading this publicly traded microchip empire, he saw it through the dot-com bust and Great Recession—with only one unprofitable year—relying on his discipline as a leader, passion as an inventor, and training as an athlete. In 2015, Zinn stepped down as Micrel’s CEO and is in the process of launching a Silicon Valley accelerator that will help business visionaries build profitable, enduring companies.

Tough Things First: Leadership Lessons from Silicon Valley's Longest Serving CEO

Tough Things First: Leadership Lessons from Silicon Valley's Longest Serving CEO PDF Author: Ray Zinn
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional
ISBN: 1259584186
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
Silicon Valley pioneer Ray Zinn, CEO of top microchip company Micrel for 37 years, shows entrepreneurs and executives how to lead and succeed by tackling the Tough Things First In high school, Ray Zinn’s track coach told him he was too short to run the hurdles. Ray took this as a challenge and, after months of hard training, became the fastest hurdler on the team. That drive and self-discipline is, to Zinn, the essence of the entrepreneurial spirit. It’s what pushed him to achieve the impossible, founding a Silicon Valley microchip company—without venture capital—and turning it into a global empire with an enviable 37-year track record as CEO. Tough Things First, the distillation of Ray Zinn’s astonishing career as CEO of Micrel, is a comprehensive head-to-toe training program for entrepreneurs and leaders—based on hard-won lessons in business and in life. Zinn’s tough-love approach gives you the guidance you need to: • Find your vision, set your goals, and make them happen • Build your business like you’d train your body: with heart, soul, mind, and passion • Master the psychological disciplines that will sharpen your focus and drive • Create a corporate culture that engages employees and inspires confidence • Put people first and push them to achieve their personal best • Tackle the tough jobs today—and ensure your success tomorrow Zinn tells you what it takes to succeed in a world where markets are constantly changing, new technologies are emerging, and small startups are going head to head with industry giants. He shows you how to be a good leader and what you can do to make yourself even better. He reveals why discipline is the first and most important step—for the entrepreneur and the organization—and why people are your single most valuable resource. He offers practical, no-nonsense advice on processes and procedures, finances and growth creation, changing markets and new technology. But that’s not all. The key to your success, Zinn explains, lies in your mind, your body, your vision, and your heart. This book shows you how to develop these interconnected skills, how to integrate them into your life and work, and how to handle the tough things first. As the trailblazing founder and CEO of Micrel, Inc., one of the world’s leading microchip companies, Ray Zinn bootstrapped his company, achieved consistent profitability, and delivered a total equity value of more than $800 million at its acquisition. In 37 years of leading this publicly traded microchip empire, he saw it through the dot-com bust and Great Recession—with only one unprofitable year—relying on his discipline as a leader, passion as an inventor, and training as an athlete. In 2015, Zinn stepped down as Micrel’s CEO and is in the process of launching a Silicon Valley accelerator that will help business visionaries build profitable, enduring companies.

Connecting the Dots

Connecting the Dots PDF Author: John Chambers
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0316486531
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Silicon Valley visionary John Chambers shares the lessons that transformed a dyslexic kid from West Virginia into one of the world's best business leaders and turned a simple router company into a global tech titan. When Chambers joined Cisco in 1991, it was a company with 400 employees, a single product, and about $70 million in revenue. When he stepped down as CEO in 2015, he left a $47 billion tech giant that was the backbone of the internet and a leader in areas from cybersecurity to data center convergence. Along the way, he had acquired 180 companies and turned more than 10,000 employees into millionaires. Widely recognized as an innovator, an industry leader, and one of the world's best CEOs, Chambers has outlasted and outmaneuvered practically every rival that ever tried to take Cisco on--Nortel, Lucent, Alcatel, IBM, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard, to name a few. Now Chambers is sharing his unique strategies for winning in a digital world. From his early lessons and struggles with dyslexia in West Virginia to his bold bets and battles with some of the biggest names in tech, Chambers gives readers a playbook on how to act before the market shifts, tap customers for strategy, partner for growth, build teams, and disrupt themselves. He also adapted those lessons to transform government, helping global leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to create new models for growth. As CEO of JC2 Ventures, he's now investing in a new generation of game-changing startups by helping founders become great leaders and scale their companies. Connecting the Dots is destined to become a business classic, providing hard-won insights and critical tools to thrive during the accelerating disruption of the digital age.

EMPOWERED

EMPOWERED PDF Author: Marty Cagan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119691257
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
"Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love yet work for their business. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work: they are valuable, usable, feasible and viable. This book is about the idea and reality of "achieving extraordinary results from ordinary people". Empowered is the companion to Inspired. It addresses the other half of the problem of building tech products?how to get the absolute best work from your product teams. However, the book's message applies much more broadly than just to product teams. Inspired was aimed at product managers. Empowered is aimed at all levels of technology-powered organizations: founders and CEO's, leaders of product, technology and design, and the countless product managers, product designers and engineers that comprise the teams. This book will not just inspire companies to empower their employees but will teach them how. This book will help readers achieve the benefits of truly empowered teams"--

Zen of Zinn

Zen of Zinn PDF Author: Ray Zinn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692068618
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Leadership, management and life wisdom from Silicon Valley's longest serving CEO.

The Founder's Dilemmas

The Founder's Dilemmas PDF Author: Noam Wasserman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691158304
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

My Start-Up Life

My Start-Up Life PDF Author: Ben Casnocha
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119177804
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Ben Casnocha discovered he was entrepreneur at age 12 and hasn't slowed down since. In this remarkably instructive book, Ben dissects the entrepreneurship "gene," explaining that everyone has inherited it if they have an idea to make the world a better place. In Casnocha's case, he found a better way for city governments to communicate with constituents on the Web. Six years later, Comcate has dozens of municipal clients, a growing staff, and a record of excellence. This book is the story of his start-up, but also a conversation with his mentors, clients and fellow entrepreneurs about how to make a business idea work?and how to have the time of your life trying. From Pat Lencioni to Marc Benioff of salesforce.com, Ben has won over the best and brightest of the business world?now it's your turn!

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

The Hard Thing About Hard Things PDF Author: Ben Horowitz
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062273213
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in. Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.

Amp It Up

Amp It Up PDF Author: Frank Slootman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119836417
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller The secret to leading growth is your mindset Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman is one of the tech world's most accomplished executives in enterprise growth, having led Snowflake to the largest software IPO ever after leading ServiceNow and Data Domain to exponential growth and the public market before that. In Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity, he shares his leadership approach for the first time. Amp It Up delivers an authoritative look at what it takes to transform an organization for maximum growth and scale. Slootman shows that most leaders have significant room to improve their organization's performance without making expensive changes to their talent, structure, or fundamental business model—and they don’t need to bring in an army of consultants to do it. What they do need is to align people around what matters and execute with urgency and intensity every day. Leading for unprecedented growth means declaring war on mediocrity, breaking the status quo, and making conflicted choices daily, all with a relentless focus on the mission. Amp It Up provides the first principles to guide that change, and the tactical advice for organizing a company around them. Perfect for executives, entrepreneurs, founders, managers, and leaders of all kinds, Amp It Up is a must-read resource for anyone who seeks to unleash the growth potential of a company and scale it to heights they never thought possible.

Starting Small and Making It Big

Starting Small and Making It Big PDF Author: Bill Cummings
Publisher: Bill Cummings
ISBN: 0999895117
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


INSPIRED

INSPIRED PDF Author: Marty Cagan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 111938754X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
How do today’s most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you’re an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author’s own personal stories—and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.