Managing a company

2011.06.02 - BigThink - Richard Branson: Advice for Entrepreneurs
- What is your advice for entrepreneurs?
  - I think the most important thing about running a company is to remember all the time what a company is. A company is simply a group of people. And as a leader of people, you have to be a great listener, you have to be a great motivator, you have to be very good at praising and looking for the best in people. People are no different from flowers; if you water flowers, they flourish; if you praise people, they flourish. And that's a critical attribute of a leader.

2016.10.18 - NYMag - The Kink in Elon Musk's Hyperloop
- There are a bunch of examples of mismanagement here.
- Wasting the employees' time
  - BamBrogan and other overworked, time-strapped engineers found themselves spending hours giving tours to Friends of Shervin such as Kelly Rohrbach, the Sports Illustrated model best known as Leonardo DiCaprio’s ex-girlfriend. When singer Katy Perry visited the Hyperloop offices, she spent hours there: A half-dozen other Pishevar portfolio companies were present to pitch her to invest as she met with them one by one. Another day, BamBrogan recalls, a bulky guy showed up saying Shervin had sent him to take a tour: BamBrogan thought maybe this was a potential investor, until the man revealed that he worked as a doorman at the nightclub 1Oak. How long had he known Pishevar? “He came in last night,” the doorman told BamBrogan. “He was supercool. I was chatting with him for a while.” (Pishevar denies that he invited the man in for a tour.)
- Putting your personal interests ahead of the interests of the mission / company
  - It started to occur to some of the staff that perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the buzz Pishevar was building around Hyperloop was Pishevar himself. He dated the representative assigned to the company by the public-relations firm Pramana Collective, which charged a monthly retainer that grew to $40,000.
  - David Pendergast, a former lawyer with the white-shoe firm Davis Polk who joined Pishevar’s company this past January, and William Mulholland, the company’s VP of finance, were tasked with overseeing an $80 million funding round, and they were confounded by the board’s insistence that the company use as its exclusive banker an outfit called Fideras — which seemed to be just Lonsdale’s younger brother Jonathan and a partner. Jonathan was in his 20s; the Fideras website, only recently set up, mentioned his youthful chess prowess and his interest in karaoke.
- Overhyping your product
  - As Pishevar readied his presentation for the event, BamBrogan talked him out of using a clip of President John F. Kennedy saying “We choose to go to the moon” with an image of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the lunar surface. Still, Pishevar told the crowd that Hyperloop heralded a return to Pangea, the early-Jurassic supercontinent when all the world’s landmasses had been knit together as one. “We’ve got a couple dozen engineers, they’ve been working a couple months to make a linear electric motor that we’re going to show off tomorrow, and you’re going to talk about Pangea? You’re killing me, bro. You’re killing me,” BamBrogan recalls. “I was like, what are you going to save for the actual Kitty Hawk moment? Jesus coming out of the cave?”
- Threatening employees
  - In any case, that evening, at 11:28 p.m., security cameras captured Afshin Pishevar walking with grim purpose toward BamBrogan’s desk, one hand clutching what looked like a rope. The next morning, BamBrogan arrived at the office to find that rope, one end looped and knotted, on his chair. To BamBrogan, it looked like a noose, and a clear threat.