New Years Resolution

Over the past several months, I have been the worst kind of blogger. I have a blog and it has been completely inactive, which in all reality is a bigger sin than not having a blog at all. So, as part of my New Year's resolutions, I have resolved to take my blogger responsibilities seriously and blog much more frequently than I have this past year. Given that its January 8th, you can see that I am slightly behind on my resolutions - but I'm getting there.

One of the challenges I have had with this blog is my own stubbornness regarding the medium. Blogging requires short and frequent posts whereas I think I'm writing for the Wall St. Journal. This is because I like to provide thoughtful insight into topics which requires both time and a passion. Lately, both have been in short supply. After all, who wants to hear anymore about the recession/depression, bailouts, job losses, etc. Also, there has already been enough written about surviving the market and positioning your company to survive the recession. Lately I have zero interest in putting time and energy into providing the world with yet another opinion on these topics (I'll save that or the newsletter). Therefore, another resolution is to not only blog more but to attempt to stay away from many of these depressing topics that are consuming the media and the blogosphere.

The third resolution I made regarding my blogging activity is to ensure that I am providing value to those of you who decide to read my meanderings. So, I promise that I will provide insight and links that will either enhance your business and/or your personal knowledge. Starting that today, I want to provide you with a link to a great study that was just released by Vell & Associates entitled "Characteristics of Successful Technology CEO's". While the report is geared towards technology companies and those with revenue exceeding $100 million, there are some great insights that small business owners can take from it. Items that I found interesting:

• MBA degrees didn't correlate to better performance in companies with revenues exceeding $1 billion. As the report notes "An MBA is a useful early indicator of business savvy – and perhaps drive, but as executives build their experience, results should be a larger factor in selecting candidates than whether they have an MBA or not"
• An Ivy league degree does correlate to better performance, so perhaps there is something to be said for spending $50,000 a year to send junior to Harvard.
• Only 29% of companies had a CEO who had prior CEO experience. An interesting response and one growing entrepreneur companies should consider when they think they need a seasoned CEO to get the company to the next level.
• Companies who had founders at the helm were top performers.

There are lots of other interesting pieces in the study, so I would recommend giving it a good review.