Francoise Brougher, former vice president of SMB global sales and operations at Google, has joined Square as business lead to aid in the company’s growth operations.

Brougher, who spent eight years at Google, was most recently entrusted with leading global teams in charge of acquiring, growing, and retaining small advertisers. An MBA from Harvard business school, Brougher also served as vice president of business strategy at Charles Schwab & Co. for five years.

“Francoise is a perfect fit for Square,” said Square co­-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey. “Her accomplishments in growing and managing large, global teams, and her focus on building simple, scalable solutions that empower millions of people, will have a huge impact on our company and our customers.”

Square, maker of credit card readers for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, has hired over 200 employees, and raised over 325 million in venture capital since its launch in 2009.

As Square sets forth to establish an international footprint, with Canada being its first foray, Brougher’s global experience could come in handy.

“Simple technologies have an outsized impact when they are made available to everyone,” said Brougher in a statement. “I love helping small businesses around the world find the tools they need to grow and be successful, so I’m thrilled to join Square, which has made this its mission. I am very grateful to my colleagues and friends at Google for what we’ve achieved together.”

Bob Lee, chief technology officer at Square also came from Google.

Attune is a provider of technology solutions for the fashion and lifestyle industry. Today, the company announced a $20 million round of investment to expand its offerings “across all areas of the fashion and lifestyle value chain” to help brands to streamline and manage their operations and optimize their performance.

“At a high level, our services and solutions enable the fashion and lifestyle supply chain to operate much more efficiently,” said CEO Vajira De Silva in an email. “This is a massive industry where competitive advantage is determined by the ability to deliver high-quality products that people want, at a price they want to pay, while turning a good profit. And, since fashion trends constantly shift, achieving these basic goals is far more difficult than it is in other less dynamic industries. We make it possible for organizations across the fashion and lifestyle supply chain (designers, material suppliers, manufacturers, retailers, etc.) to work much more efficiently with each other so they can drive out waste and improve overall responsiveness to market opportunities.”

Customers include Lacoste, Hanes, K Swiss, Reebok, Tommy Hilfiger, G-Star, Levis, and other well-known, international brands. De Silva said that there is an enormous need for greater supply chain and industry-specific IT solutions. Attune specializes in the fashion and lifestyle industry and has offerings for brands, manufacturers, textile manufactures and retail that help them implement SAP to run their businesses.

De Silva founded Attune in 2006 after serving as the CEO of Rapier Consulting where worked extensively with MAS Holdings, a large clothing manufacturer in South Asia, to implement SAP. He founded Attune to bring this expertise to other brands, and the company is now active on five continents with 200 employees. MAS Holdings invested the entirety of this round, and along with the deal, Attune will merge with Sabre Technologies, a software services provider.

Photo credit: Shutterstock/Attune

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Chris Taylor is an executive with TIBCO Software and a former U.S. Navy pilot.

We live in a time of disruption. The average lifespan of a corporation is dropping fast, and technology and culture are changing at a remarkable rate. We can see disruption as a negative force, or we can see it the way a classically trained fighter pilot sees it — as an advantage.

Fighter pilots have a mythical place in our minds. But the romance of barrel rolls and “coming up on his 6″ belie the difficulty and danger involved in controlling the high-performance cockpit. The training is arduous and most candidates never make it off the ground.

Those who reach their aircraft learn a few things the rest of us may not know. First, since the 1950s, American fighter pilots have been trained to understand and follow the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. This process is the disruptor’s handbook.

Second, every sortie is studied in retrospect, as a critical part of rapid cycles of improvement — part of a culture of nameless, rank-less debriefing.

Executing OODA loops

Air Force pilot John Boyd first introduced OODA. At the time of the Korean War, American pilots were flying an aircraft that was less maneuverable than their opponent. Boyd observed that despite the Russian-made MIG-15’s advantages, the American F-86 won a majority of dogfights simply because the Americans had a better field of vision and hydraulic controls that were faster and easier to use.

Of the four steps in the OODA Loop, American pilots had clear advantages in observing and acting, the first and last stages of the Loop. They were in a position to disrupt their adversary’s process by having better information and faster execution.

Disrupting the OODA loop

This same advantage applies no differently in today’s business landscape, a ‘dogfight’ of its own. Of course, business teams stand in place of the solo pilots in this metaphor, but the behaviors and benefits are the same.

Terry Deitz lived the OODA Loop as a U.S. Navy F-14 pilot. He now coaches executives and their teams on how to make their workplace more effective and competitive as part of Afterburner.

Deitz says, “In warfare and in business, the speed at which the OODA Loop is executed becomes the largest factor in disrupting the enemy in the battle space, and the competition in the business space.”

Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Roy Schulte offers that disrupting your opponent often comes from using a systems approach that shortens your own OODA loop so that you can ‘turn inside’ the adversary’s process. Schulte talked about OODA Loops at TUCON 2012, a gathering of TIBCO customers and partners last September in Las Vegas.

Schulte showed how each of Boyd’s four activities maps directly to an engineering or management discipline and an associated category of technology:

1. Observation maps to the discipline of gathering data on what’s happening in a company and its environment. As raw data increases exponentially, this is now a double-edged sword and requires the use of ‘big filters’ before meaningless data (“noise”) enters the workplace and muddies the view. Managers need to monitor a wide variety of data sources and understand how to apply the right filters to each. This runs the gamut from B2B data to physical sensors and social media.

2. Orientation maps to the discipline of event management and the associated tools that process streams of incoming real-time event data. Organizations need to actively monitor the environment by calculating key performance indicators, making predictions, preparing real-time business dashboards displays, and issuing alerts to enhance the situation awareness of decision makers. This takes a combination of software tools and human judgment to put incoming information into context with past experiences and their understanding of how the business works to quickly and better predict what to expect next.

3. Decision-making maps to the discipline of decision management. Rule engines, optimization tools, and other kinds of prescriptive analytics (when applied in real time) are used to make better, faster, and more-repeatable decisions at less cost when the environment indicates. Many decisions can be ‘pre-loaded’ and anticipated.

4. Action maps to the business process management (BPM) discipline. It may lead to the use of BPM technology, such as workflow or process orchestration engines, at run time to control the flow of work and trigger the execution of human or automated activities at the right time.

Leading-edge businesses benefit from executive management strength and increasingly powerful analytics software in each of these areas. The pressures of mobile, social, and big data make the situation urgent for the rest.

The power of the debrief

Deitz goes on to explain that there is a key additional contributor to of success that is key to Afterburner’s version of the OODA Loop. It is called the “Flawless Execution cycle” and involves four steps: plan, brief, execute, and debrief.

Deitz says, “As disruptive as the OODA Loop is, what the modern day executive can do to boost his [or her] performance greatly is to add a nameless, rank-less debrief. It can be the most effective and disruptive tool they have.”

Today’s fighter pilots rely heavily on the ability to review every mission as peers, without assigning blame, as a way to very quickly improve performance and minimize avoidable mistakes. In today’s corporate world, cloud, Software as a Service and other techniques give us a lower cost of experimentation than ever. That also gives us the ability to ‘fail fast’ and pivot when necessary. But trying and failing requires an honesty that many organizations struggle to find. Making cycles of attempt and failure happen quickly is also a new way of thinking that benefits greatly from the fighter pilot’s relentless debriefing culture.

Deitz emphasizes his point with this additional comment: “90 percent of the businesses out there have neither the processes in place nor the proper culture to debrief. Do you want to accelerate your version of the OODA loop to supersonic performance? Create the culture and processes to put that knowledge capture back into your next mission at Mach speed.”

Replacing the Industrial Age

Disruption isn’t just a phase we’re going through. Disruption replaces the industrial concepts of the 1800s and 1900s with faster cycles of change coming with lower levels of investment and risk. The nimble business — behaving as an innovation lab, operating in tight iterations, and striving to be faster than the adversary — replaces the traditional factory.

The executive’s role is crucial because he or she creates and sustains a culture that allows nameless, rank-less debrief. That has to come from the top. But the people executing the OODA loops in business — the pilots — are mostly managers, supervisors, and individual contributors in operations departments.

The OODA loop depends on four kinds of mental (and sometimes software) models:

• Models of what facts are relevant and what to look for (observe),
• what they mean in context (orientation),
• what to do about them (decide), and
• how to execute the response (act). 

Managers then

• develop those mental models (plan),
• communicate them (brief),
• carry them out (using OODA loops in the execution phase), and then
• revise and improve them (debrief) in the larger cycle.

Those who see disruption as their advantage and understand the twin values of the OODA Loop and debriefing will occupy the mythical place held by people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Chris Taylor flew for the US Navy before finding a home in hands-on technology 17 years ago, first with Perot Systems, Accenture, and ILOG (now IBM) before becoming a marketing executive with TIBCO Software.  He lives in Southern California, often speaks on technology at tech conferences and events, and manages SuccessfulWorkplace.com, “A place for new ideas in a fast-changing world.” He can be found at @FindChrisTaylor.

Fighter jet image: Wikimedia Commons

This guest post was written by Mitch Rosich, a partner at Athenian Venture Partners.

I’ve worked with many IT companies over the course of my career. Between two decades of experience in product and engineering development and a decade in venture capital, I’ve experienced working with a variety of leaders, some more effective than others.

IT startups need a lot of positive ingredients to get off the ground, including a sustainable vision, focused and realistic goals and, perhaps most important, a deep management bench. Since it is just starting to build towards the future, the IT startup needs a leader with a set of attributes that can contribute to leading the company to success. In the startup stage, the company is constantly evolving and lessons are being learned, and the CEO must be able to show the way during this change, sink with the ship, or be cut loose so that the right leadership can steer clear of the perils being faced.

Based on working with dozens on C-level executives, here are some characteristics that I have identified that contribute to producing an effective IT startup CEO:

• Experience growing a small, preferably venture-backed, company
  The reality is that the skills needed in a large company don’t always translate into success at a small start-up. We have found situations where CEOs who operated effectively within the infrastructure of a large organization cannot manage within the fluidity of a more bare-boned organization. Conversely, CEOs with start-up experience tend to be more adaptable without an established framework already in place to ground them and guide them.
• Demonstrated execution ability
  A start-up is all about execution and getting to the end goal as quickly as possible. Some CEOs are strategic, and some are tactical.  A more strategic CEO may be able to look at the big picture, yet not be able to get from where they are at present to the end goal. This ability to execute plans is absolutely critical in a small company environment.
• Ability to attract and retain top talent, and experience leading such talent
  The saying “A managers attract A talent, and B managers attract C talent” is absolutely true. This takes knowledge and experience on the CEOs part, but also respect. Management teams want to work for CEOs whom they respect and admire. Certain CEOs have this reputation, and they draw others in. This is absolutely critical. In a small company, a CEO also has to be willing to pare down the poor performers. No one can ever be 100 percent perfect with hiring. While leadership respect is earned through good hires, others in the organization gain as much or more respect when ineffective employee situations are dealt with quickly and professionally.
• Vision and ability to adapt and change if the vision is off-target or market conditions change
  Plans are very rarely perfect the first time around. With a start-up, effective CEOs must have a unique vision, and see things that others don’t. They must be able to solve problems in unique ways. However, even visionaries are rarely 100 percent correct in what they perceive the market conditions to be, and what will drive customers to their product. A good CEO must listen to what his or her customers are saying, and accept that their vision may have to change and adapt to such customer-driven market conditions. In other words, the CEO must recognize the need to change, and be willing to change.
• Ethics, integrity, confidence and ability to earn trust and respect
  Small companies are inherently transparent – everyone sees what everyone else is doing, from top to bottom. Similar to ineffective job performance, questionable ethics and integrity also can’t be hidden from the rest of the team.  Because the expectation amongst most start-up employees is that everyone is working hard and fully committed to the company’s success, if integrity is compromised in any way – particularly by the top leader – the effect is more profound. Too often, the people with true integrity leave, and the ones without it stay – resulting in a corrupted culture often heading down the path of disaster. Sometimes VCs find out about this in diligence – for example, during document review in which ethical breaches by the prospective portfolio company are uncovered – which will most likely result in the VCs walking away from the deal.

Mitch Rosich began consulting for Athenian Venture Partners in 2000, joining the firm as a partner in the IT investment practice in 2002. In addition to a decade of technology venture capital experience, Rosich has over two decades of industry experience in product and engineering development, and in the management of 3 start-up technology companies, including Omnia, which Rosich and his team sold to CIENA for $498M. Rosich has been awarded 11 computer technology patents for software and hardware, 8 of which have been used in commercial applications. Currently, he represents Athenian as a director on the boards of Manta Media and Comet Solutions, and as an observer on the board of Sendio.

The new tools allow HootSuite users to take conversations “offline,” sharing something from Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere on the web to a select group of internal company personnel. They also allow quick real-time chat and promise to galvanize company employees into brand ambassadors.

One of the goals, HootSuite founder Ryan Holmes told me, was simplicity.

“Our product is now three and a half years old,” he said. “It started as a tool for our team to help manage social media, but we’ve grown a lot. We spend two to three hours a day in the tool, and when we leave it’s to jump into email … to send something we found on a social network.”

Source: HootSuite

HootSuite Conversations

HootSuite Conversations skips the email step, keeping the discussion in a web native social tool where any results of the conversation can immediately be shared out to social networks as desired.

“As we look at where we’ve come from,” Holmes says, “Social is now spreading across the whole business. We need better tools for managing that.”

The strategy from HootSuite seems to be to concentrate all of a users’s social activity in one tool. It’s not a serious competitive threat, if any threat at all, to a true intranet or inside-social tool, although one quote in the press release from a Pepsi exec seems to indicate that organizations can use it to communicate with their employees.

However, HootSuite — even with Conversations —  is not currently the kind of tool that everyone in an enterprise will ever need or have. What it does is simplify the communication for social media or marketing teams, especially if the team needs to collaborate on social media messaging before releasing tweets or status updates.

And the new functionality probably will perk up a few ears in the social enterprise space.

Source: HootSuite

Sending messages out that originated inside the organization

photo credit: ohhector via photopin cc

VentureBeat: Why’d you buy Seesmic?

Ryan Holmes: As I went into discussions with Loic around where they were at, it seemed like an opportunity to help migrate some of their users over – specifically the business users. Seesmic has a broad spectrum of small, medium, and enterprise users in their user base.

We still have to determine exactly how many. We’re not really looking for casual or consumer users.

VentureBeat: What about Loic? Is he staying?

Holmes: He’s helping us with the transition, helping us with buzz. As you know, Loic’s a PR force of nature. [Laughs]

He’s very well networked in the Bay Area, and we’ve been frenemies over the past couple of years — more friends than enemies — and we’d go for jogs, laugh and share war stories.

VentureBeat: So he could join HootSuite in some capacity?

Holmes: That’s correct.

VentureBeat: I know you’re not releasing the price, but can you give us the neighborhood?

Holmes: There’s been a lot of speculation on that, but we’re not commenting. Some have guessed in the $15 million range to the low millions, but we’re not releasing the number.

However, the more Seesmic users we convert over to HootSuite users, the higher the price will be.

VentureBeat: Will you be keeping Seesmic’s San Francisco office?

Holmes: We’re definitely starting an office in S.F. We have offices in London and N.Y. and Australia, but historically, I and my team have been going down to San Francisco every week or two.

I look forward to being down there more and more frequently, but we’re keeping engineering, marketing, and inside sales in Vancouver.

VentureBeat: And the people who are currently working at Seesmic?

Holmes: We’re trying to assess who would be an interesting fit for us — they have some very smart people. There’s a couple I want to reach out to and see if there’s a fit within HootSuite.

VentureBeat: What technology from Seesmic do you think you’ll use?

Holmes: We’re going to keep the products up for the next foreseeable while, but we will migrate the users over eventually.

There’s some interesting technology there, but this was not primarily a tech acquisition.

VentureBeat: Anything else you’d like to share?

Holmes: With Twitter’s four-quadrant positioning, we’re probably going to see some more roll-up … we’re going to see some people in the other quadrants looking for what they do with their products and companies over the next while.

We may see more people selling their companies.

Fortunately, we’ve always been focused on the quadrant they’re not directly interested in, the analytics and engagement side of the space.

photo credit: Hamed Saber via photo pin cc

Integrating with Zendesk will enable users to easily move a customer service-related tweet or status update to a ticketing and tracking system, Mark Holder, HootSuite’s director of integrations, told VentureBeat.

The integration with Storify could be used by marketing personnel to create comprehensive, auto-updating lenses into evolving issues or projects. And connecting with Evernote helps anyone working with social to quickly save an important post into their own personal database.

The new integrations are a big step for the Vancouver-based company in two directions.

First, they take HootSuite deeper into the enterprise, integrating into corporate systems like Zendesk, and pushing the reach and impact of social beyond the marketing and customer service teams to product management, development, or fulfillment teams.

Secondly, they’re the first integrations that are not third-party-created apps that operating solely within the flow of social messages inside HootSuite. Instead, they are plugins that take content from the stream of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ messages inside HootSuite and deliver it to external, third-party applications.

In a statement Ryan Holmes, HootSuite’s chief executive, said that “with the addition of app plugins, we’re making it possible for our users to monitor their social media properties from the dashboard, then delegate messages for additional handling in external, third party applications.”

HootSuite is excited by the potential, Holder says, and these will soon be joined by more plugins that can take advantage of additional tie-ins with external applications. New apps would likely be in the areas of customer support, CRM, digital marketing, publishing, and content curation, the company said in a statement.

I asked Holder how many of those almost five million users he expected to start using the new integrations.

“What we’ve seen on all our integrations is that we get enormous pickup – 10-15 percent of new HootSuite users install apps within the first week, and I would probably expect 10-15 percent of our users to install these apps within the first week.”

Some screenshots of the new integrations:

And an explanatory video:

Image credit: VLADGRIN/ShutterStock, Andre Blais/ShutterStock

So Apple had a disappointing quarter, even though it was surprisingly good compared to last year and the company is paying its first dividend to investors since 1995. Naturally, investors punished the company by stripping more than five percent from its stock price in after hours trading.

It’s times like these that I’m tempted to ask: Aren’t you people ever satisfied?

“Yes, only in the U.S. could this be called a bad quarter, but Wall St. is Wall St,” said Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg, in a tweet.

I had a similar reaction reading about the curiously “mixed” legacy of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs in Wired. According to this story, some people are troubled by Jobs’ reputation as an overly-demanding tyrant almost as much as they’re inspired by his legacy as a genius entrepreneur.

Apparently these folks are doubtful about whether they should emulate the man who created two incredibly successful companies, rescued one of them after others nearly wrecked it, then went on to completely rebuild a handful of industries, including personal computers, MP3 players, cellphones, media distribution, and tablet computers. Why? Because he could be kind of demanding.

Make no mistake, Jobs casts a long shadow across Silicon Valley and the rest of the tech world. Apple is like the pole star for innovation here, a role that Hewlett-Packard once held but relinquished years ago in a string of ill-conceived acquisitions and embarrassing scandals. It is both a model for other companies to emulate and a vast source of technological talent and wealth that helps feed the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

But it’s not so easy to find anyone who is actually disturbed by Jobs’ jerky side. Most everyone recognizes, I think, that Jobs was a flawed human being, and that in some ways those flaws were also essential to his success. His uncompromising nature made him a terrifying figure to some; Apple employees were often afraid to get in the elevator with him.

“He just had the volume turned up really high,” said Don Thorson, the chief executive and co-founder of Swipp, when I asked him about his experiences working with Steve Jobs. Thorson was at Apple from 1984 to 1989, and while he didn’t work closely with Jobs, he viewed first-hand how the man’s intensity led others to excel.

“For me and my colleagues, he gave us permission to be our very best,” Thorson said. “His default position was that there’s something left in the tank. And you should give it to me, because I’m the guy who’s going to appreciate it.”

Aaron Levie, the founder of Box, told a similar story to Wired. “My lesson from Jobs,” Levie said, “is that I can push my employees further than they thought possible, and I won’t rush any product out the door without it being perfect.” That approach, Levie acknowledged, comes with some “collateral damage,” presumably hurt feelings and damaged relationships.

“Steve Jobs was the one guy who looked at that big picture and could see how to transpose it to one that suited him, his company, and his customers,” Chris Tolles, the CEO of Topix, told me. Tolles competed with Jobs in the early days of music distribution online, when Tolles was at AOL Music and Jobs was just starting to build the iTunes Music Store. “He was able to work with partners and break the Gordian knot of getting music into the hands of consumer and setting the seeds of making Apple the world’s most valuable company, whilst doing exactly what the music business feared the most, yet in turn probably giving them the best deal they were going to get.”

Most people choose not to pursue work with the same intensity. I think that’s wise. Not everyone has the same consuming passion to change the world, and without that, a Jobs-like intensity could easily turn into pointless tyranny. If your goal is simply to make a billion-dollar company, I suggest you put the tantrums on a shelf and focus on what really matters. (Hint: It’s not money.)

Similarly, Marissa Mayer’s plan to take a “few weeks” of working maternity leave strikes me as nuts. If I did that, I’d regret it forever. I already spend too much time away from my kids. But you know what? I don’t have Mayer’s technical talent, obsessive drive, or apparent lack of a need for sleep.

I think we should let the Marissa Mayers and the Steve Jobs of this world be as crazy as they need to be in their efforts to make a dent in the universe. But expecting everyone to work around the clock while placing relentless demands on all those around them? That’s the real tyranny.

Subscribe to Dylan’s Desk and get this column in your inbox every week! Want to see what you’re missing? Check out my past columns.

Top photo: Matt Yohe, via Wikipedia

The company provides a unified interface where social media managers can monitor and manage their activity across multiple social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Additional social networks can be added via apps in the HootSuite App Directory, enabling users to manage YouTube, Flickr, and others.

Instagram is a big integration for HootSuite, as the service continues to grow in popularity, currently adding five million users a week. And SlideShare is a major platform for sharing presentations and PowerPoint decks.

Plus, since HootSuite already helps its clients manage their LinkedIn presence, and LinkedIn purchased SlideShare for $119 million earlier this year, it was a natural next step.

In a statement, chief executive Ryan Holmes said the company picked these networks to add to the App Directory because they enable the sharing of rich media content that aids engagement:

“We’re excited to welcome these popular social networks because they’re centrally focused around the easy sharing of multimedia content.”

The Instagram app will allow users to view and search photos, read what others have written, add comments, like photos, and share them to other social networks. Similarly, the SlideShare app helps users upload, find, and share content

The App Directory is one of the ways HootSuite distinguishes itself from competitors such as SproutSocial and Involver. Perhaps the only competitor with something similar is Radian6, with its Extension Gallery. Mark Holder, HootSuite’s director of integration partners, told VentureBeat that “roughly 10-15% of new users install at least one app within the first week.”

Created in December of last year, the App Directory features apps for integrating email marketing, surveys, RSS feeds, and more into users’ social media management activities. There’s even an app to manage Orkut, the Google-owned Brazilian social network.

The additions of Zuum and Edocr are a bit surprising.

Zuum is somewhat interesting, as it is a platform for social media marketing strategy, which is somewhat competitive to HootSuite, but it also provides insight into guaranteed-to-be-engaging content, helping social media managers know what kinds of content they should post.

Edocr, on the other hand, is a tiny business-document sharing site focused on lead generation, with only some thousands of monthly visitors. I’ve asked HootSuite why it chose Edocr and Zuum, and I’ll update this post when the company replies.

[ Update: the response was inconclusive. According to Holder, "Instagram and SlideShare have been among the top requested apps from our Free, Pro and Enterprise clients.” ]

I did ask the company when full Google+ integration is coming to HootSuite, but there is no specific timetable yet. Holder had the following to say via email:

We are not able to provide a specific date at this time as to when Google+ will be available to all HootSuite users. HootSuite was selected as an official partner by Google+ Pages, and we are currently working with their team to gather data from our current Enterprise clients actively using the integration.”

HootSuite is based in Vancouver, Canada, and has almost 200 employees. In March of this year, the company raised $20 million from OMERS Ventures.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Tim Cook has yet to launch a revolutionary new product since he took command of Apple last August, but, little by little, he’s been shaping the company in his own way — moving it beyond the idol worship of Steve Jobs, and towards more transparency and efficiency.

In a new magazine piece, Fortune dove into Cook’s Apple and discovered that, even though things are now different from the Jobs era, change isn’t necessarily a bad thing for Apple.

“In general, Apple has become slightly more open and considerably more corporate,” wrote Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky. “In some cases Cook is taking action that Apple sorely needed and employees badly wanted. It’s almost as if he is working his way through a to-do list of long-overdue repairs the previous occupant (Jobs) refused to address for no reason other than obstinacy.”

For all of his creative genius, Steve Jobs wasn’t always the easiest person to work with. Cook, not being a product guru, is instead taking more time to listen to investors and Apple employees. Fortune recounts how he attended an investor meeting in February: Cook simply listened (without even checking e-mail), and then gave controlled remarks at the end of the session. That’s a stark contrast to Jobs, who rarely attended investor meetings.

Cook is also less of a terrifying presence to Apple employees, according to Fortune he’s taken to dining with random Apple workers in the company’s cafeteria. Like a good shrink, Cook seems to be listening more to Apple investors and employees, though that could mean some changes in the company’s famously engineering and design-oriented approach to building products.

“I’ve been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management,” Max Paley, a former Apple engineering VP, told Fortune. “When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it. It shows a shift in priority.”

We likely won’t see just how different Tim Cook’s version of Apple is until the company unveils the iPhone 5 (or whatever it’s called). We’ve heard that Jobs was actively involved with designing the next iPhone, but now it’s entirely up to Cook to make sure that vision becomes a reality.

In an effort to be more nimble with its decision-making (and less of a lumbering corporate giant), Sony today has announced a new business structure, which it’s calling “Sony One.”

The initiative is Spearheaded by the company’s new CEO Kazuo Hirai, who has been vocal about his plans to revamp the company, and will also position digital imaging, gaming, and mobile as Sony’s new core business. Sony announced massive loss of $2 billion in February (the day after it appointed Hirai, no less), so the company clearly needs to shake up its management process somehow.

The new One Sony structure will begin on April 1, 2012 (perhaps not the best day to convince the public your business isn’t a joke). After missing out completely on the iPod era of portable music devices, now Sony is aiming to make up for lost time with a stronger lineup of smartphones, which it announced at the Mobile World Congress in February. Gaming is still a cash cow for the company, and it remains one of the better digital camera companies (I love my Sony NEX-5N), so the choice to emphasize its business around the company’s three hottest product categories seems wise.

As part of the changes, Sony EVP Shoji Nemoto will now oversee the overall technology strategy and R&D operations, while EVP Kunimasa Suzuki will oversee product strategy (including mobile), as well as take charge of guiding Sony’s user experience moving forward. Hirai, meanwhile, is tasking himself with overseeing Sony’s home entertainment business, because the company desperately needs to find a way to save its ailing TV division.

Photo Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Jay Elliot has a unique insight into what makes Apple so successful. He worked closely with Steve Jobs in the 1980s, setting up the company’s operational and managerial structure. Based on those years, he’s written a book: The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation.

Elliot stopped by the VentureBeat studio this week to talk about his book, the irreplaceable nature of Jobs’ leadership, and how to structure a company that can continue to succeed through generation after generation of new technologies.

Hint: It’s all about the products.

Related articles

• Inside Steve Jobs’s brain: Author talks about the “crazy secretive” CEO (video) (venturebeat.com)
• Steve Jobs’s most ambitious product: Apple, Inc. (venturebeat.com)
• Why Apple employees avoid getting in the elevator with Steve Jobs (venturebeat.com)
• Steve Jobs and the age of great turbulence (venturebeat.com)
• Eric Schmidt: ‘Steve Jobs Gave The Best Performance By A CEO In 50 Years’ (techcrunch.com)
• Bono praises Steve Jobs as a generous (9to5mac.com)

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/swf/player-ec.swf

(Can’t see the video? Click here.)

Seesmic

The company helps users to manage their social networks both on the desktop and mobile devices, including Windows, Macs, iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Through a single dashboard, users can add their Facebook, Twitter and other social networks as streams and monitor or engage in real-time. Seesmic made a bunch of product updates in 2010, including adding support for multiple accounts on Android and acquiring social posting service Ping.fm.

The investment by Salesforce.com makes sense as the two companies have been working together recently to integrate Salesforce Chatter, a collaboration tool for enterprises, with Seesmic. Users will now be able to see Salesforce.com customer’s comments on Facebook and Twitter.

Seesmic has a host of competitors offering very similar services, including Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Yoono. Though none have integrated with an enterprise collaboration tool like Salesforce Chatter.

The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2008, has secured a total funding of $16 million. Past investors Omidyar Network, the firm created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Wellington Partners also participated in the round.

Users looking for an accountant, whether for taxes or other services, can visit the site and search by geographic area. Users can choose to contact one of the listed accountants by email or phone.

After both parties agree to work with each other, a payment is processed through the site. The user then has 2 weeks to upload all their needed documents to TeaSpiller for the accountant to access and begin the process.

With more than 1 million accountants in the U.S., the company has begun the process of using its search and indexing algorithms to find and add them automatically to the directory. Each accountant includes their own profile, similar to a resume, that includes an overall rating, comments/reviews and fees. Additional information like licenses, work experience and education are also included.

TeaSpiller plans to make money in two ways: giving accountants “pro” accounts for added features, like bumping their profiles higher in search results, and taking a cut of each transaction through the site.

The company has several competitors, including CPAFinder.com and AccountantsWorld.com, both of which act as directories for searching and finding accountants. While the search function works similarly, TeaSpiller offers more information on accountant profiles, including ratings and reviews, as well as the means for managing payments and documents online. TeaSpiller also doesn’t charge accountants to be listed, while the competitors charge rates of around $400 a year.

The New York City-based company was founded in 2009 by Amit Vemuri, a former vice president of product development strategy at online travel comparison site Travelocity. No funding has been secured to date.

I’ve been founding and helping run technology companies since 1999.  My latest company is Fabulis.com.  Here are 57 lessons I’ve learned along the way.  I could have listed 100+ but I didn’t want to bore you.

1. Build something you are personally passionate about.  You are your best focus group.

2. User experience matters a lot.  Most products that fail do so because users don’t understand how to get value from them.  Many product fail by being too complex.

3. Be technical.  You don’t have to write code but you do have to understand how it is built and how it works.

4. The CEO of a startup must, must, must be the product manager. He/she must own the functional user experience.

5. Stack rank your features.  No two features are ever created equal.  You can’t do everything all at once.  Force prioritization.

6. Use a bug tracking system and religiously manage development action items from it.

7. Ship it.  You’ll never know how good your product is until real people touch it and give you feedback.

8. Ship it fast and ship it often.  Don’t worry about adding that extra feature.  Ship the bare minimum feature set required in order to start gathering user feedback.  Get feedback, repeat the process, and ship the next version and the next version as quickly as possible.  If you’re taking more than 3 months to launch your first consumer-facing product, you’re taking too long.  If you’re taking more than 3 weeks to ship updates, you’re taking too long.  Ship small stuff weekly, if not several times per week.  Ship significant releases in 3 week intervals.

9. The only thing that matters is how good your product is.  All the rest is noise.

10. The only judge of how good your product is is how much your users use it.

11. Therefore (adding #’s 11 + 12):  In the early days the key determinant of your future success is traction.  Spend the majority of your time figuring out how to cultivate pockets of traction amongst your early adopters and optimize around that traction.  Traction begets more traction if you are able to jump on it.

12. You’re doing really well if 50% of what you originally planned on doing turns out to actually work.  Follow your users as much as possible.

13. But don’t rely on focus groups to tell you what to build.  Focus groups can tell you what to fix and help you identify potentially interesting kernels for you to hone in on, but you still need to figure out how to synthesize such input and where to take your users.

14. Most people really only heavily use about 5 to 7 services.  If you want to be an important product and a big business, you will need to figure out how to fit into one of those 5 to 7 services, which means capturing your user’s fascination, enthusiasm, and trust.  You need to give your users a real reason to add you into their time.

15. Try to ride an existing wave vs. creating your own market.  If you can, catch onto an emerging macro trend and ride it.

16. Find yourself a “sherpa.”  This is someone who has done it before — raised money, done deals, worked with startups.  Give this person 1 to 2% of your company in exchange for their time.  Rely on them to open doors to future investors.  Use them as a sounding board for corporate development issues.  Don’t do this by committee.  Advisory boards never amount to much.  Find one person, make them your sherpa, and lean on them.

17. Work with the best possible people for your project, regardless of where they are located.

18. Co-locate as best possible but be willing to travel to remote offices to make multiple offices work.  Online collaboration maxes out at 3 to 4 weeks apart, which means you need to commit to traveling almost monthly to make remote offices work.

19. Work with people you like to be around.  There’s no sense in going to war with people you don’t like.

20. Work with people you trust like family.

21. Work from home as long as you can.

22. Position your desk in a way in which you are staring at your co-founders and they are staring at you.  If you aren’t enjoying looking at each other each day, you’re working with the wrong people.

23. Use a tool like Yammer to share internally what you’re working on.  It’s easier for many people (especially developers) to post a status update than to write an email.

24. Use a file sharing service like basecamp for your team.  It’s impossible for everyone to keep track of every file sent to their email in-box.  Use basecamp so there’s a history and central repository.

25. Figure out quickly what you are personally really good at and focus your personal time around those activities.  Let other people do the other stuff.

26. Surround yourself with people who fill your gaps.  Let them do the stuff they are better at.  Don’t do their jobs.

27. Work with people who are smarter than you at certain things.

28. Work with people who argue with you and tell you no.

29. Be willing to fight like hell during the day but still love each other when you go home.

30. Work with people who are passionate about solving the specific problem you are trying to solve.  Passion for building a business is not enough; there needs to be passion for your customer and solving your customer’s problem.

31. Push the people around you to care as much as you do.

32. Be loyal.  Cultivate and coach people vs. churning through them.

33. You’re never as right as you think you are.

34. Go to the gym and/or run at least 4 times per week.  Keep your body in shape if you want to keep your mind in shape.

35. Don’t drink on airplanes unless you are on a flight of longer than 8 hours. It ruins you and wastes your time.

36. Choose your investors based on who you want to work with, be friends with, and get advice from.

37. Don’t choose your investors based on valuation.  A couple of dilution points here or there wont matter in the long run but working with the right people will.

38. Raise as little money as possible when you first start.  Force yourself to be budget constrained as it will cause you to carefully spend each dollar like it is your last.

39. Once you have some traction, raise more money than you need but not more than you know what to do with.  This is tricky.  Don’t skimp on fundraising because of dilution fears.

40. Spend every dollar like it is your last.

41. Know what kind of company you are trying to build.  There are very few Googles and Facebooks.  A good outcome for your business might be a $10M exit or a $20M exit or a $100M exit or no exit at all.  Plan for the business you want to build.  Don’t just shoot for the moon.  From a money-in-your-pocket and return on time spent standpoint, owning 20% of a $20M exit in 2 years is much better than owning 3% of a $100M business in 5 years.

42. Related to #41, understand whether your business is a VC business or not. A VC business is expected to deliver 10x returns to investors.  That means if you’re taking money with a $5M post-money valuation, the expectation is that you are building for a minimum $50M exit.  $10M post-money valuation = $100M target.  That’s not to say that you might not sell the company for less and everyone involved might be happy with that outcome, but that’s not what you are signing up for when you take VC money with such a valuation.  Know what the implications of taking VC money are and what it means for expectations on you.

43. Make sure your personal business goals are aligned with the goals of your investors.  The business will only succeed if you are motivated.  Investors can’t force the business to succeed.  And they certainly can’t force a CEO to care.

44. Conferences are generally a waste of time.

45. Smile.  Laugh.  Wear funny socks. I wear funny socks to remind myself to not settle for boring and to be creative.

46. Do something, anything that shows you’re not just a robot.  Let people get to know the real you.

47. Hang a lantern on your hangups.

48. Wear your company’s t-shirts everywhere.

49. Do your own customer service.

50. Tell a good story.

51. But don’t lie.  Ever.

52. Find inspiration in the people around you.

53. Have fun every single day.  If it’s not fun, stop doing it.  No one is making you.

54. It’s true what they say in sales, you’re only as good as your last sale.

55. Make mistakes, but learn from them.  I’ve made hundreds.

56. Mature, but don’t grow up.

57. Never give up.

Do you see a pattern? The time-waster changes names, but the pattern of online idleness never goes away. Maybe it’s time for managers to think about harnessing this phenomenon rather than fighting it.

VentureBeat has written increasingly about the phenomenon of gamification — the application of game-design principles to products and services far afield from the conventional gaming sector. It’s being applied to everything from building websites to serious efforts like improving healthcare. Why not put gamification to work at the office?

Popular social networks like Twitter and Facebook have game-like elements: the constant flow of updates can feel like a stream of cascading Tetris bricks, each one demanding a response: Quick! Like that comment! Retweet that post! Foursquare, the fast-growing location-announcement service, has long incorporated elements of gaming, like badges and points, even though they carry nothing more than bragging rights — much like having the high score in a game.

Indeed, the biggest complaint about Foursquare and FarmVille is that they are games that aren’t fun — networked rituals of obligation, performative acts of online status-seeking, abstract clicks in a circular, self-involved world that ultimately lack purpose.

And yet the millions of people drawn into these pseudo-games find them addicting. Zynga, the maker of FarmVille, employs behavioral psychologists to make sure its games hook people in just the right way. FarmVille may feel like work — all that harvesting and planting and gift-giving — and yet people keep doing it.

It’s a boss’s dream, in short: Getting people to perform repetitive tasks out of a feeling of obligation in a way that somehow feels rewarding.

The visual design of productivity software, too, could draw inspiration from the world of games. Web-based dashboards could present messages, alerts, and tasks in a serendipitous, time-driven way that feels like clicking through a first-person shooter — and maybe pull in teammates the way online multiplayer games do. Imagine organizing your department into a raid through that quarterly earnings spreadsheet!

There are many practical lessons managers could gather from studying social games and services. But there are a few obvious ones that jump out:

• Small but frequent rewards
• Mutual obligations to teammates
• Data that comes in short bursts rather than long documents

The more that work feels like a game, the less we’ll hear about the time workers waste on online diversions. Indeed, social-game makers may have to commission studies by network-monitoring software vendors on the cost to the American economy of the distractions of work.

How else could we design work to make it as attractive as social games? Leave your ideas in the comments.

OpenPages’ software highlights any inconsistencies in risk and performance goals — such as overly aggressive revenue goals for an emerging market like Latin America — and gives management a comprehensive view of the business opportunities and risks associated with the expansion.

OpenPages had previously partnered with IBM for the Operational Riskdata eXchange, a consortium of banks formed to collect loss-event data and meet operational risk guidelines outlined by standards set by an international banking committee.

The Waltham, Mass.-based company had previously raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Goldman Sachs, Matrix Partners and Sigma Partners among others. Allianz, Barclays, Carnival Corporation, Duke Energy and SunTrust are among OpenPages’ clients, according to the company’s website.

IBM has invested about $11 billion in analytics research and interpretation, which included hiring about 6,000 consultants and seven full-time analytics centers.

[Photo: epSos.de]

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Sprout Social

Sprout Social gives customers a single Web-based dashboard to manage and grow all their social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. The tool monitors the web for social brand mentions and then alerts the user of potential customers. A contact center and promotional tool then allows users to engage those potential customers. Engagement features include being able to cross-post across all networks and schedule messages. An analysis tool allows users to track the progress of their outreach.

The company joins a whole host of social media management and monitoring tools, including Radian6, Visible Technology and Scout Labs, which was recently purchased by Lithium Technologies. Though Sprout Social appears to have a leg up on the competition as it pairs social monitoring with promotional tools to turn potential customers into actual customers.

The Chicago-based company, founded in 2009, previously raised an undisclosed amount from Lightbank, which also invested in Facebook application Where I’ve Been and Poggled, a social aggregation site.

A problem large companies face is how to have honest lines of communication between employees and the highest rungs of management. With several hundred or maybe thousands of employees for every key senior leader, it can extremely difficult to find out what’s happening on the ground with a product launch.

“People are often over-optimistic about how a project will progress,” said Mat Fogarty, chief executive of Crowdcast.

Fogarty’s company Crowdcast is a pretty novel solution to gathering intelligence in big companies with crowdsourced bets. It’s launching a dashboard today that lets managers pose questions to employees, and learn from their anonymous answers whether a project will meet its target.

If a manager, for example, asks a question like, “How many users will we have in 30 days?”, employees can anonymously make bets on what will happen. If they’re right, they’re rewarded with virtual currency that can be translated in benefits like reward carts.

The company uses financial incentives and gaming mechanics like leaderboards to get employees to participate. Employees can adjust their bets up until a deadline, giving a managers a constantly changing barometer of where projects are. They can also turn around and ask more detailed questions if they want reasons why a project ifs behind.

Crowdcast is funded by Alsop Louie Partners and has clients including GM, Electronic Arts and Hallmark.