[This is part 1 of a 3 part series on the evolution of leadership theory—the history, most recent thinking on the topic, and what to look for when trying to identify it, including a look at charisma, executive presence and their contributing roles to successful leadership]

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As retained executive search consultants, we are constantly interviewing and assessing executive talent for our clients.  After interviewing these candidates, our clients often reference key characteristics they found (or didn’t) in an executive that are not found in their resumes—charisma, executive presence, or other purported leadership behaviors that are generally thought to be important to success.

But clients continue to ask questions about these traits that sit in the invisible spectrum.  Is charisma an essential ingredient to leadership? If so, for all sizes and types of companies?  Are there other types of leadership where charisma isn’t present and are they successful and in what types of circumstances? What about management versus leadership?  How do we define the differences, and when is a manager better suited than a leader?  And what’s up with “executive presence”? Is that just another term for leadership, or is it different? How? Are these differences important?

All great questions.   And—although we won’t be able to answer them all here in appropriate depth and breadth—we’re going to try to lift the curtain a bit.

With the book and now movie, “Moneyball,” the question of what to look for and what to measure in picking leaders for organizations should be rethought.  In “Moneyball,” the fulcrum of the book is based on a different way of measuring the potential and future performance of pro baseball players.  In the book, the Oakland A’s general manager turned upside down what had been considered the gold standard for sports talent assessment by baseball scouts in favor of a much less obvious and intuitive set of statistics.   Pro baseball would never be the same.

So, adapting this concept, it’s worth reviewing some popular (mis)perceptions of what makes a leader.

First principles—What does an organization need: Leaders or Managers?

Leaders/leadership by its own definition indicates the following situational characteristics—

Where one is now is not where one should be.  Rather

1) One should “follow” someone or something to another place, in theory a “better place”

2) This “better place” is both NOT self-evident (convincing is required), AND

3) It requires effort to get there, and is not frictionless, calorie-free, or zero-cost.

Managers, on the other hand, are most often those who create efficient operating systems once the “better place” has been reached.

Charisma as an essential ingredient to successful leadership—True or False?

The world “charisma” comes from the Greek word for “gift.”  Charisma is better thought of as a skill that enhances leadership effectiveness by dint of a superior ability to influence others to change their initial positions, perspectives, or opinions.

I was first offered a deeper insight into the concept of charisma in leadership by the teachings of Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School.  Dr. Khurana has done extensive research and writing on the topic, from articles in Harvard Business Review (“Curse of the Superstar CEO”, HBR 2002, http://hbr.org/2002/09/the-curse-of-the-superstar-ceo/ar/1) to complete books on the topic (Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs http://www.amazon.com/Searching-Corporate-Savior-Irrational-Charismatic/dp/0691074372).  More popular business authors like Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, wrote about “Level 5 Leadership” and addressed charisma in relation to this “top leadership level.”  Collins has been quoted as saying, “Being charismatic and wrong is a bad combination,” and “I’d go so far as to say that [The Level 5 leaders Collins chronicled in the good-to-great success case studies in his book] were uncharismatic for the most part.”  (http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap-Others/dp/0066620996/ref=pd_sxp_grid_pt_0_0)

Regardless of good or bad use of charisma, there is still a great deal of additional research and writing on the topic.  Clearly we associate the effects of charisma with enhanced motivation, inspiration and intellectual stimulation it engenders in the listener.  But can it be taught?  One branch of research surrounds this argument.   If you read the works of Professor Robert House at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, he deconstructs “how” charisma works.  From House’s work, one could infer that charismatic behavior may be both “born in,” but also taught with enough study and practice (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/papers/674.pdf).

The Dangers of Charisma

What are the pitfalls of charisma in the corporate context?

• Charismatic executives tend to suppress individual thinking and leadership development in subordinate teams.  Leaders with charisma can create a culture of “followers,” rather than young, budding leaders and the next generation of a company’s executive team.  Narcissistic tendencies don’t allow others to flourish instead creating dominant monolithic thinking, “I don’t even argue with him anymore because I always lose.”

• This in turn leads to challenges for succession planning.  Often charismatic leaders leave a vacuum of next generation leaders, having created instead a strong set of followers.

• Life of the party isn’t always “engine of achievement.”  Charisma can be used to achieve personal goals as the primary objective, at the expense of organizational goals.  There is no question it is always best to have alignment of personal and organizational goals so that by achieving one, the other is also achieved.  However, this mandates that the charismatic leader be programmed to strive for a “win-win,” vs. a “win-lose.”   In fancy organizational behaviorist language, this ends up being the difference between those leaders who have “higher activity inhibition” and those who have lower levels.  If a leader has lower activity inhibition, they tend to seek win-lose outcomes with the “win” side being the individual over the organization.

What can the charismatic leader do to counteract negative repercussions?

The charismatic leader needs to ensure that they either surrounds themselves with others who have strong self-confidence and ideation, or that the charismatic leader makes a great deal of effort to cultivate an environment open to sharing other opinions, perspectives, and ideas rather than defaulting to “the charismatic boss.”

As referenced earlier, charisma is really more situationally valuable.  Typically, charisma is most valuable when change is the goal.  Innovation, revolution, new paradigm adoptions are the best projects for the charismatic toolbox.

Some popular examples of positively and negatively directed charisma include the following:

Good = Sir Ernest Shackleton, and the failed Antarctica expedition he saved | John F. Kennedy | Martin Luther King

Bad = Hitler |Jim Jones and the 909 deaths in the Jonestown massacre in 1978 where Jones as dogmatic cult leader got all his followers to commit mass suicide

A few additional interesting links to resources on charisma and leadership

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/01/15/207161/index.htm [lighter reading]

http://www.aom.pace.edu/amj/february2001/waldman.pdf [heavier reading]

Planning for executive staff additions or replacements seems to be higher on CEOs’ New Year’s resolutions again in 2011. Just a year ago, in December 2009 and January 2010, CEOs broke out of their executive hiring deep-freeze and search activity showed unprecedented momentum.  CEOs had been holding their breath for all of 2009, witnessing Wall Street carnage, plummeting consumer spending, and massive macro-economic uncertainty.  Just as consumers in the 2010 Christmas season finally decided to spend more,  boards of directors and CEOs are counting on better economic conditions in 2011 and executive hiring is again back on the corporate shopping list (see recent growth-stage CEO survey, Q4 2010, http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/q4-2010-ceo-survey-of-growth-stage-companies/)

So, what to be aware of when looking at executive talent acquisition this year?

Here are 5 tips:

1)     Candidate shelf-life is shorter than you think

Just as the warning on automobiles counsels that “objects in mirror are closer than they appear,” a similar mantra exists for talented executives.  Recession is a great retention tool, and has allowed many CEOs to keep their executives with little fear of their departure.  However, today’s market for executive talent is heating up.  We’ve read the articles about companies poaching Google talent, but this is not exclusively in Silicon Valley, or with the big tech behemoths.  Talented executives may be willing to consider a move, but they are savvier than ever, will look to try to identify several opportunities to evaluate in parallel, and pick the best perceived fit in a narrow time window.  Companies who in 2008 and 2009 had the luxury of interviewing twice as many candidates as normal due to temporary supply/demand imbalances no longer have that extra time on their side to interview more, or take longer to make decisions.  Candidate shelf-life is finite.  And the market window is shorter than we might think for any given talented executive.

2) Q1 2011 bonus payouts make candidate resignations difficult

Candidates may have a hard time giving notice in Q1 due to pending 2010 bonus payouts.   There are often 2 options—

a)     The finalist candidate will accept the new company’s offer, but won’t give their notice until after bonus checks have been cut (sometimes coming as late as February or early March)

b)     Finalist candidates will ask that their new companies include in the offer a signing bonus that helps to “keep them whole” on any bonuses they are walking away from.  This can quickly get expensive for the new employer, with numbers ranging from $50,000 or $100,000, to $.5M or more, depending upon the position, the compensation package, etc.

3) Relo has always been hard, but today’s real estate values make it much harder

Many executives are upside down in their residential real estate.  Again, this creates a two option decision for the new employer—

a)     Increase the boilerplate relocation package to include relief on any equity deficit the executive faces in selling in a down market.

b)     Be more flexible on where the executive can live.  Yes, there is no question that a best practice is to have the executive live within an easy drive of corporate HQ.  However, with ubiquitous email access in trains, planes, and automobiles, there is an every growing body of evidence that “local” isn’t the only choice for executive domicile.

4)  Equity is often no longer the great equalizer

When the public markets allowed IPOs more readily, and there was generally more liquidity for fast growth and mature companies alike, the tradition of 10-20% base salary increases  in moving from one company to another became subordinated to “how much stock/equity can I get?”  That popular refrain has been replaced by a much more pragmatic and balanced approach to executive compensation, where cash is again king.  Except in rare circumstances, executives want to have some of their incentive on a cash basis, balanced off with an equity upside. (for example of CEO Equity Compensation Calculator, see http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/ceo-equity-compensation-calculator/)

5) Executives know now more than ever what their peers earn

Whether it be due to frequently published executive compensation surveys, unprecedented numbers of databases providing comparables earnings info, or newly imposed Sarbanes-Oxley disclosure rules on public company executive compensation, executives are much more sophisticated about what their worth on the open market may be.  They also share much more readily with their peer group.  Employers in 2011 should be cognizant of this when crafting a package, and care should be taken to engage the executive in what they feel their worth is, and the data/information they are using to establish that value. (for example, see http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/venturebacked-executive-compensation-study-vp-levels-west-east/)

6)     [bonus tip] International is more important than ever in ‘11

Yes, China and India may both represent great offshoring opportunity and new revenue markets, however talent from these markets are an equally or more important asset.  Just sending US citizens abroad as ex-pats doesn’t cut it anymore.  Hiring foreign nationals with experiences in certain international target markets is key to breakout performance.  An Indian national with several years experience selling/managing in Asia is a wonderful combination of skills and experience critical in driving companies through the next level of global growth (for more, see http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/collision-course-between-executive-leadership-succession-and-global-demographic-trends-in-coming-decade/)

Survey of 50 of the Fortune 500 companies reveals how long executive searches take, the average number of candidates interviewed,  how many of them actually get completed, and what percentage of those candidates are female or minority.

As executive search consultants, we often get asked a series of questions by our client companies surrounding the executive search process.  Many of these questions are driven at gathering market intelligence around our executive recruiting.   The aim?  To create some third-party benchmarks to help companies understand whether a search has gone about average, better than average, or (gulp) “below the mean.”  Keep in mind, these could be internally run searches done in the “DIY” fashion.  Or searches executed by in-house recruiting departments or human resources staff.

Historically, there has been precious little data generated by third-party sources with enough statistical heft to garner much credibility.

One of the sources that at least aims to collect good data is created by David Lord, who heads the Executive Search Information Services organization.  David is a veteran observer and analyst of the executive recruiting industry, and has run a roundtable of senior talent executives from Fortune 500 companies for the last 20 years or so.  For further information, see www.davidlord.com.  Some of the data that ESIS collects is via an annual survey of those senior human resources executives who participate in these roundtables.

For our clients, we often reference ESIS data when made available.  At our request, below is a data table we created from some of the information ESIS kindly provided that shows some longitudinal data over the last 4  years, 2006, 2008, and 2009.

Trends worthy of note?

Search completion times have come down by almost a month from near 5 months down to 3.5 months.  Good news for all, the company, the candidates, and the search firm.   It will be interesting to see if this flattens out, or jumps back up for 2010 due to tightening talent pool on the supply side as the economy began to pick back up this year.

Number of candidates interviewed per hire dropped from 6.5 to ~5.  This could be an indication of a company’s increasing confidence in what they’re looking for, or an indication of sense of urgency around key hiring to help companies as they struggled through a very tough 2009.

Female and minority hiring at the executive level has improved, but not as much as many would have thought. Women executives were hired 29% of the time in 2009 versus 23% in 2006.  Compared to the workforce percentages of women to men, this is still inversely proportioned.  Minorities have seen a nominal increase of 1% more hired over  the last 5 years, which–when considering rounding errors– is effectively no increase at all.

Search completion rates have remained flat, with 4 out 5 searches engaged getting completed. Over the last 5 years,  search completion rates have hovered around 80%.  This is reported by corporations only, so subject to different numbers search firms might proffer.

Retained executive search statistics, 2006-2009

For deeper data, please contact ESIS.

Additional footnotes worthy of note:

1) For some reason, executive search firms specializing in the financial services sectors and related areas often calculate their “days to complete” numbers counting only business days, excluding weekends and bank holidays.  This can often make comparing normative data a bit more troublesome

2) Days to completion numbers are calculated using the date of accepted offer of employment, not candidate start date/first day of work.  This is done because resignation periods vary widely and would undermine data integrity.

What do they mean when they ask?  There’s actually a lot of nuance in the question-when are skills and experience most important to success in the role versus pure talent and aptitude?

• •    Just because a CEO is moving from one industry to another, does s/he lose his ability to successfully lead?
• •    If a VP Sales has been successful at one stage of company growth, can s/he take that same sales toolbox and be successful in another stage company, say either emerging-stage or mature-stage?
• •    Can a VP Engineering be equally effective managing in large companies and small?
• •    Do companies look for the same types of leadership in good economic cycles as well as bad?
• •    How does an executive’s move out of their wheelhouse of skills and experience impact their compensation and/or level in a new industry and company?

These questions are only a few of the factors that impact the answer.    The following discussion is aimed at trying to lend some clarity and context to question.

Let’s take a look at the hour-glass graph below to lay down some of these factors against our “expert or athlete” question:

1)     Level of management: The first factor is where an employee sits in the organizational chart.   In general, skills and experience are most critical at the “waist” of the hour-glass graph-mid-to-upper level management, starting at manager, through director- and VP-level.  At the top and bottom of the hour-glass, aptitude often ends up as the greater emphasis in “hireability.”  This may be fairly intuitive for many.

a.     Entry-level: When you first get out of school, employers often hire for a combination of attitude and intelligence and look for those who exhibit room to grow or “headroom.”   In fact, at entry-level, skills and experience for those roles are often a liability.  Employers may feel someone is overqualified, or a “flight risk” if that employee finds another better-paying and/or higher level position at another company.

b.     CEO-level: When you achieve P&L/CEO status, employers often will place more emphasis on the track record a CEO has in leading a company versus a tenured career history in a specific industry area.  Can a CEO move from rust-belt manufacturer to biotech?  Likely not.  However, there isn’t the same granularity of fit applied at the CEO-level as at the middle-management layer.  If a CEO has been broadly successful in in a number of software companies, it often becomes less important what type of software, or what industry vertical that software was developed for.  Certainly some screening is applied to industry, with some of the below more general industry characteristics takingi precedence-

i.      Experience in selling to similar customer base, B2B vs. B2C or government

ii.      Experience raising equity capital from venture capital or private equity

iii.      Experience creating exits for investors that have generated good returns for those investors

iv.      Experience taking a company from one industry into other industries, popularly referred to as “crossing the chasm”

c.     Mid-to-upper management:   Mid and upper management are where skills and experience over mere aptitude are often most sought after by employers.  Those who are hiring at this level will often even emphasize industry skills and experience above managerial experience, giving the edge to a candidate with industry-relevant background and a lesser degree of leadership experience, assuming that management is a learned skill and can be taught or picked up on the job.  Is this right?  That’s not the focus of our discussion here.  Rather, our goal here is to describe corporate hiring  norms from our observations.

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2)     Stage of company:  Does stage of company impact whether you hire a best athlete or domain expert?  Common practice dictates that yes, the later stage more mature company can be successful hiring a “best athlete,” where a faster-growth company needs to hire a candidate with more domain experience relevant to that industry.  Why?  The theory goes like this-

a.     Fast-growth companies: The faster a company is moving and growing, the less time there is to cross-train an employee on anythng. This applies to all candidate characteristics: level of industry knowledge, stage of company experience, and management experience.  In fact, if a fast growth company needs a VP, if anything that company may want to over-hire, looking for an executive who has managed larger teams over broader geography because it’s only a matter of time before this fast-growth company will experience its next growth spurt, and hiring an executive who’s seen what’s around that corner before is priceless in order to smooth out the growing pains inherent to all fast-paced companies.

b.     Slowing-growth companies: As a company matures,  hiring in a “best athlete” may make a lot of sense.  First, there is time to train up the executive being hired on the domain areas in which he or she has little/no experience-industry, geography, etc.   Also, best-athlete executives often like to learn new things, and be in continual learning-mode.  If they can take their business athletic ability and learn a new sport/industry, it keeps them motivated, excited, fresh, and leaning into the role rather than what can be called “career-coasting,” where an executive is just doing the same thing for a different company-same industry, same title, same goals, etc.

3)     Large versus small companies: Similar to fast-growth versus mature companies above, common wisdom dictates that large companies can support the “best athlete” better.  Often, large companies have an established internal employee training group tasked with taking new and existing employees and helping to round them out, whether that be by offering management or leadership training, functional skills education, or industry knowledge and education.  Smaller companies rarely have this pre-existing infrastructure.  Yes, an executive can go outside the company for supplemental business education by taking courses offered by industry trade groups and universities. However, the fear by the employer is that it will take time, cost precious budget resources, and detract from the time an employee has to give to achieving critical company goals and objectives.

4)     Impact on hiring of macro-economic cycles:  It’s worth noting that the prevailing economic cycle creates another impact on whether a company may be willing to consider a best athlete versus a domain expert.   From our experience, in a growing economy companies are more willing to consider best athletes for the following two reasons:

a.     Supply/demand of domain experts-In a flourishing economy, demand for talent often outstrips supply.  We saw this in the Internet bubble where talent available was so scarse that it became a serious constraint on new company formation and venture creation.

b.     Cost of domain experts-as a growing economy impacts the supply-demand equation, this also drives up price.  Even if you can find the domain expert, it may simply be considered too expensive, and the company instead decides to take a “wean-and-train” approach to filling the need,  favoring the hire of a best athlete.

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Related to the question of experience versus aptitude is how this may impact executive compensation and management level for the employee considering a change out of their area of domain expertise and into the new.

Below is a bull’s-eye diagram that represents what we believe to be the inverse relationship in play.  When an executive decides to change any of the following characteristics in their employer, they are likely to move out at least one ring:

• •    Impact of size of company on title/level: If an executive wants to move from a smaller company to a larger company and they were a VP at the smaller, they should expect that they will move out a managerial ring, from VP in a smaller company to a director-level or even manger-level title.
• •    Impact of industry shift on compensation: If an executive wants to move from one industry to another (say software and/or tech to cleantech / renewable energy), often this will have to come at the expense of a reduction in compensation. Of course, if this is a CEO candidate, compensation may be less impacted than if it’s a middle management employee.
• •    Impact of functional shift on compensation: If an executive wants to move from sales to marketing, or technology development to sales, or any of those to an operations-focused role, this too is likely to negatively impact compensation.

If you try to combine more than one shift above into two or more, expect that with each compounding factor you’re likely to move out another ring on the bull’s-eye.

Impact of industry & function shift on compensation & level

Becoming the leading content provider of geospatial imagery for mapping & monitoring applications

Our Client has its roots in rocket science… literally.   Since the first image was collected from space over 30 years ago by classified government imaging systems, only a limited number of people have been permitted access to highly detailed photos of the Earth, and the industry was tightly regulated.  Since its deregulation in the 1990’s, The firm is changing this historical usage of Earth information through the commercialization of high-resolution satellite imaging and an innovative approach to conducting business with customers, partners and resellers. The company was founded in 1992 to launch satellites into space for the purpose of taking high-resolution photos of the earth for defense and intelligence, government, and commercial use.   In early 2000, the US government awarded its first significant contract for satellite imagery, to our client.  Currently the company offers the world’s highest resolution commercial satellite imagery, the largest image size, and the greatest on-board storage capacity of any satellite imagery provider.  In addition, the company’s comprehensive ImageLibrary houses the most up-to-date images available.

In 2004, the firm struck an exclusive portal agreement to supply much of its satellite imagery to Google’s new product launch, branded Google Earth. This deal served as both validation for a broader explicit push as well as anchor tenant into the non-federal government, commercial sector.

Continued growth in 2009 is punctuated by an IPO in May, and the launching of their third imaging satellite, WordlView 2, in October.  With this satellite joining the prior two, the firm has the most powerful ability to add global imagery to its imagery library faster than any other company on the planet.

The company is headquartered near Boulder, Colorado, with other offices and facilities in key geographies throughout the world.

Market Opportunity

Popular business and technology soothsaying magazines have trumpeted mapping as the next “killer app.” Even as far back as 2005, the MIT Technology Review dubbed it “Killer Maps” in their article–

The mapping revolution could, in short, change the way we think of the World Wide Web.  We’ve long spoken of the Web as if it were a place—with “sites” that we “go to”—but as places go, it’s been a rather abstract, disembodies one.  Now that’s changed.  Geotagging means the Web is slowly being wedded with real space, enhancing physical places with information that can deepen our experiences of them and making computer into a more “continuous” part of our real lives….  [Google Maps and Google Earth] make paper maps and previous generations of online mapping tools seem primitive.

Image-enhanced mapping – typically associated with markets based on GIS and GPS – have now begun to penetrate the mainstream lexicon.  Use of satellite imagery is definitely no longer the exclusive province of the intelligence community but is broadly used by business and the consumer as well.  [Even somewhat capricious mapping use has taken off like wildfire, as evidenced by the overnight popularity of photo posting sites like Flickr that tag location coordinates to each image.]

Based on market data from ASPRS and Frost & Sullivan, the estimated global addressable market for sub-1 meter imagery (including aerial) is $680M.  The combination of strong underlying growth in the traditional (GIS-based) market, and new emerging web-based applications will increase the addressable imagery market to more than $1B in 2010.  Very high resolution commercial satellite imagery is expected to be the major growth driver, taking share from aerial imagery providers.

Our Client has established itself as the clear leader in providing satellite imagery to the commercial market, and is well-positioned to continue to increase the penetration of satellite imagery in this market.

The Products, Sales Channels, and Customers

Uses

In the commercial world, our client’s imagery is used for 3 primary purposes: mapping, monitoring, and the increasingly popular web mapping and location-based services.

Products

The diversity of the company’s products enables the company to respond to a variety of customer needs for numerous applications. Standard offerings include:

• Basic Imagery
• Standard Imagery
• Panchromatic Imagery
• Multispectral Imagery
• Pan-Sharpened Imagery
• Color Infrared Imagery
• Mosaics
• Stereo Imagery
• Digital Elevation Models
• Geometric and Ortho Corrections
• Imagery-Derived Information Extraction
• Data Fusion
• Direct Imagery Downlinks
• Library Data and New Data Acquisition by Request

The Position

The Vice President of Product Management will be responsible for managing the overall product plan and budget for both the government and commercial groups worldwide.  This position reports directly to the CEO.  Due to the deep technical nature of our client’s satellite data capture mechanism, the VP Product Management will work closely with the  VP Technology Development.  The position and associated team is focused on driving new products into both commercial and government markets, including but not limited to U.S. defense and intelligence, oil & gas, telecom, utilities, online mapping & portals, consumer navigation, and the broadly defined corporate enterprise sectors.

As the Company is headquartered in Colorado, this position will be based at Headquarters offices.

The successful candidate must possess excellent organizational skills and the ability to communicate effectively with multi-continent distributed sales and marketing teams.  Specific product management leadership background is in the broad-based areas at the intersection of software and web-based content.  The successful executive will have significant experience in leading world-class product teams and delivering ground-breaking products to market successfully.  A background in business content products and data processing services is highly desired.  Background with SaaS or similar product strategies would also be a plus.  A track record of defining products from inception through successful market adoption is a key requirement.

Highlights of the VP Product Management responsibilities include:

• * Direct team of product managers and segment managers responsible for defining, documenting and releasing new products and product enhancements
• * Drive consensus on overall product strategy and roadmap
• * Refine and improve overall process for creating and prioritizing market, product and technology requirements
• * Drive voice of the customer programs, vetting of market requirements and competitive research with a vertical focus on enterprise, consumer and international civil government markets
• * Provide thought leadership to product development team tasked with creation of geospatial content product / platform technology plan
• * Create and manage product and platform launch plans in coordination with product marketing
• * Foster teamwork and create a positive work environment both inside their team as well as cross functionally
• * Lead and develop a dynamic and creative product management infrastructure that fits the needs of our business and the products we provide our customers
• * Drive internal discussion about strategies, ideas, new opportunities and the best methods for achieving success in a changing marketplace
• * Consult with customers on their needs and provide feedback to other departments supporting sales efforts
• * Forecast, track and report on product management performance (MRD/PRD) timelines using internal tools and applications
• * Conduct internal product development progress meetings and reviews with the executive team
• * Travel as needed to ensure that clients’ product needs are understood and met or exceeded
• * Participate actively in business planning and budgeting process

Functional Expertise, Focus and Ideal Candidate Profile

The diagram below illustrates the intersection of competencies critical in the new Head of Product Management:

Staff & Global Office Locations

Commercial Business Unit offices exist with headquarters in Colorado, Boston area, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.

Compensation

Compensation will be competitive with the position’s requirements, comprised of three basic components– base salary, bonus driven by a combination of achieving team and company management-by-objective milestones, and stakeholder position.

Head of Product Management

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
In September of 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up their first workspace in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Palo Alto, and over the last 10 years Google grew to being one of the world’s best known companies. Susan was employee number 18, and currently is responsible for managing Google’s monetization and measurement platform products including AdWords, AdSense and Google Analytics.

One of the most visible members of the senior management team is Marissa Mayer. Hired as employee number 20 and the first female engineer after receiving her Masters in Computer Science, Marissa is responsible for the consumer-facing (UI) side of Google, and has been called the Chief Experience Officer.
The opportunities for Directors of Product Management will report directly into Marissa Mayer or Susan Wojcicki , and will be responsible for working across Google in the innovation, creation, management, release, and lifecycle of new products that extend the improve the quality and measurability of search and advertisement monetization. They will establish short and long term product goals and strategies to build and manage a product roadmap to support Google’s goals and strategies. They will initiate and prioritize projects within engineering; track product development; develop product launch plan, and also engage closely with the engineering team to help determine the best technical implementation methods and reasonable execution schedules.

Product Management at Google is an engineering and deeply technically focused organization that is full of visionaries and entrepreneurs. They apply their core technical abilities to understand the capabilities and possibilities of computers, and then leverage insight and imagination to create new products that will allow users to gain better, faster, and more accurate access to information. They are fascinated with new products, and obsessed with making the best possible product for the largest possible audience serving the most important needs. They represent the visionary, the communicator, the leader, and the technologist all-in-one. Essentially, the Product Management team ensures that Google has the best worldwide product offerings by analyzing, positioning, packaging, and promoting their solutions
across a variety of countries and markets where Google does business.

Areas of core expertise for this PM role:

• 10+ years of product management experience.
• Exceptional technical / engineering / computer science credentials.
• Innovation and visionary product track record.
• Balance of core technical training with broader business and market experience.
• Track record of success.
• Experience managing teams of engineers and product managers.
• Entrepreneurship, with ability to excel within a larger corporate structure.
• Be able to excel with a wide variety of other functions, including engineering, finance, marketing, legal, etc. and be the center of that process.

Characteristics of great Googlers include:

Click here to apply

INmobile.org released their first collective intelligence research paper today, titled “Harnessing Collective Wisdom to Forecast the Near Future of Mobility.”

INmobile.org – Harnessing Collective Wisdom to Forecast the Near Future of Mobility Aug 2009

The Idea in Brief

A problem presents an opportunity: Periods of economic slowdown such as the one we are currently operating within offers us the unique and incredibly valuable opportunity to reflect upon past periods of expansion and prepare strategically about the upcoming period of recovery and growth.�This practice should be universal but often is not and too often the methodologies used are flawed, outdated, or both. The remarkable opportunity for assessment and planning may in part be unintentionally squandered when companies continue to rely upon the same perspectives and methodologies that have disappointed in the past regardless of where they are in the economic cycle.Previous techniques to forecast vary historically based upon cost and theory.Some rely upon internal perspectives, outside or analyst input, and market data.Often they range greatly in their level of sophistication, objectivity, and conjecture.While many remain valuable, they are perhaps too often relied upon.Here we begin to offer a more innovate and arguably more accurate means to acquire that knowledge.It is the tool of collective intelligence.

The idea of collective intelligence: Collective intelligence can perhaps be best understood as the intelligence which results�from the competitive collaboration of a group of individuals. Published in 2004, The Wisdom of Crowds � Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki argues that the aggregations of information in groups results in decisions that are better than those which could have been made by any single member of the group. In Surowiecki�s book, he argues that under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent and often smarter than the smartest individuals within them. When faced with a cognition problem such as, Who will win?, the idea of posing it to 100 experts was suggested as a collective �wisdom of the smart crowds exercise.As we currently seek to gain more informative and credible insights into the next five years of mobile technology, we should begin to take hold of this incredibly useful and adept tool called collective intelligence and apply it to the task.

The power of INmobile.org: INmobile.org is a private, global community of senior executives focused on mobility and convergence.This vital community of global wireless industry leaders enjoys both on-line and in-person events. Its private forum is fueled by a genuine and generous exchange of ideas, informed observations, timely information, empirical knowledge, and analysis.

The opportunity taken:In order to harness the collective intelligence and predictive abilities of INmobile.org, we interviewed one hundred senior executives from within this on-line community.We independently asked these executives the identical question during a one on one conversation and under similar circumstances.No previous conversations or predictions were referred to during these interviews in order to avoid the potential problem of group think.Based upon this methodology, it is our expectation that the whole of the INmobile.org community represented by these one hundred executives will show itself to be significantly more than the sum of its many parts.

The question:We posed the question, What industries will be most affected by the growth of wireless technology over the next five years? This question was suggested during the INmobile.org member reception held on March 31^st at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, NV.�Over 200 senior executives attended the private reception where the concept of �capturing the collective intelligence� of INmobile.org was initially discussed.

The executives who answered:�The identification and selection of the 100 interviewees was done in two stages.The initial selection targeted fifty senior executives to represent the vital components of the mobile ecosystem with the broadest and most relevant perspectives for this specific question.These included mobile carriers, handset OEMs, OS vendors, and mobility focused venture capital and private equity.A call to action was then sent out to the INmobile.org membership requesting additional participants in this research project. Those additional participants provided increased geographical reach and diverse areas of mobility.Telephone interviews were conducted from April to June of 2009 and were conducted by either Matthew Corbett or Mark Newhall.

The results:Consensus predicts industries most likely affected by mobility because the predictive likelihood is heightened if and when a majority of experts independently think the same industry will be affected. These findings have been aggregated and documented in the report.

For more imformation, contact Matthew Corbett at mcorbett@bsgtv.com or at 1-617-266-4333 x241.

www.bsgtv.com

www.inmobile.org

Executive Recruiters Boston Search Group and IdealWave Solutions Merge to Form BSG Team Ventures

Bringing Unparalleled Mobility and Social Media Expertise IdealWave Deepens Firm’s Commitment to Building Trusted Advisor Relationships with Clients

Boston – August 1, 2009 - BSG Team Ventures, formerly Boston Search Group, an international retained executive firm serving emerging and high-growth companies, today announced a merger with IdealWave Solutions, a nationally recognized executive recruitment leader in the mobility and convergence sector.  IdealWave couples deep expertise in the enterprise mobility and social media industries with a unique team-based approach that yields quick results with highly personalized service. The combined company, BSG Team Ventures, will be headquartered in Boston, with offices in Silicon Valley, New York and London.

As many other retained search firms are shrinking or closing down, BSG Team Ventures is taking advantage of the opportunity to grow stronger.  The merged entity will be uniquely positioned to identify and recruit top Board Director, C-level and VP-level talent for both emerging and established companies across its now seven practice specialties – mobility and convergence, cleantech, technology and media, medical devices, biotech, education, and not-for-profit.  While the executive search industry has been slow to harness advanced technology to optimize domain expertise, market involvement, and the candidate development process, BSG Team Ventures has turned to innovative social networking technologies to cultivate a large and growing community of mobile industry executives working for some of the most high-profile companies in the world.

“Combining forces to create BSG Team Ventures marks the beginning of an exciting adventure and a natural evolution for our business. With BSG we have found a partner whose commitment to innovation, client service, and results mirrors our own,” said Mathew Corbett, founder and managing director, IdealWave Solutions.  “I look forward to drawing on our combined 17 years experience in retained search and mobile industry expertise to grow the firm, provide increased capabilities to our clients, and expand into new markets.”

INmobile.org: Engaging the Global Mobile Community

The brainchild of Corbett, a longtime social media evangelist, INmobile.org is one of the largest industry-specific social networks on the Web, comprising more than 2,500 mobile industry executives who gather in one place to learn, share ideas, and network with peers.  Combining online networking with offline executive receptions at top mobile industry conferences, INmobile.org is both a key facilitator in helping BSG Team Ventures’ clients stay abreast of market and technology trends, and an invaluable tool in keeping BSG Team Ventures fully engaged with top leaders and decision makers globally.

The mobile industry is especially well poised for continued growth.  “Even more exciting than the internet phenomenon is this mobile phone phenomenon,” according to Dr. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, in a speech given to the Economic Club in 2008.

“Our merger with IdealWave comes at a pivotal time for our firm as we look to expand to new markets and set the highest bar for innovation in the executive search process,” said Clark Waterfall, founder and managing director, BSG Team Ventures.  “With decades of combined executive search and strategic organizational development experience, we’re confident that together with IdealWave we can continue to achieve the highest levels of client satisfaction in the industry.  We couldn’t be more thrilled with the addition of Matthew Corbett and Mark Newhall as partners to the firm.”

About BSG Team Ventures

BSG Team Ventures is an international leader in retained executive search and human capital consulting for emerging and high-growth companies. Its mission is to build deep, trusted-advisor relationships with its clients, and to do so with a keen appreciation for the unique requirements of entrepreneurial ventures.  Via its presence in Boston, New York, Silicon Valley and London, BSG Team Ventures has completed hundreds of leadership searches on behalf of its clients in its practice specialties that include technology, media, cleantech, biotech, medical devices, education and non-profit.

About IdealWave

IdealWave is the leading executive search partner for companies involved in or effected by mobility and convergence. Established in 2001 and headquartered in MA, IdealWave has worked with many of the most exciting companies innovating within mobility and convergence. The company was launched by Matthew Corbett and Mark Newhall.  For more information please visit www.idealwave.com.

Contacts:

BSG Team Ventures

Clark Waterfall: Managing Director cwaterfall@bsgtv.com

Matthew Corbett: Managing Director mcorbett@bsgtv.com

Address: 224 Clarendon Street, 4^th floor, Boston, MA 02116

www.bsgtv.com

A few months back in the New Yorker Magazine (May, 2009, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell ), Malcolm Gladwell penned a really interesting article on the subject of how underdogs-when they change the rules of the game-can beat stronger, bigger rivals. This is a story told many times over, starting with the Biblical story of David beating Goliath, which Gladwell uses in his article as the first of two fulcrums to work the concept out. The other fulcrum he uses is a girls basketball team on the West Coast that had as its coach a successful entrepreneur, Vivek Ranadivé, accustomed to innovating the rulebook to a start-up’s advantage as founder, Chairman and CEO of TIBCO Software, $1+B enterprise value publicly traded start-up success.

In the case of Gladwell’s article, the girls basketball coach was not given any special “talent” as an asset to build around. In fact, kids’ teams at younger ages are most often randomly assembled, with no “draft picking” involved. So, Randivé had to play with the hand he was dealt. He ended up with no tall girls, nor good shooters, just moldable clay, where a winning strategy would have to prevail over a special selection of talent.

In professional sports as well as business, however, coaches/CEOs get to pick their teams. And for business, there is no more crucial time to think about executive team-building than now. According to most analyst reports, markets are preparing for growth. The strongest competitors in each industry were the first to streamline operations at the beginning of the downturn and make sure their financial houses were in order. Now these leaner and meaner companies are looking to leapfrog their competition as recovery sets in. If a rising tide floats all boats, the top companies in each industry sector are looking for a way to rise at a faster rate than their weaker rivals. A recent McKinsey report framed this competitive dynamic, saying:

Roughly one in three industry leaders was toppled during the previous recession as attackers used the downturn to their advantage. Recent big acquisitions in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and information technology suggest that the current slump will be no different.

Our research shows that while all companies in an industry typically suffer during a recession, the performance gap between strong and weak rivals tends to widen. This gives strong players more opportunities to reshape their competitive environment. [http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hbr/hbr-now/2009/07/trend-to-watch-industries-taki.html]

But, how should these companies go about accelerating around the executive curve into the straight-away of economic expansion?

Sticking with basketball as a parallel for what one business can do to accelerate their rise over their peers, is it possible to consider hiring a superstar in a key area of the business?  A Michael Jordan of the Bulls, or Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics, or L.A. Lakers’ Kobe Bryant?  However, what should the latest definition of “superstar” be in light of all the change the recession has wrought in the business landscape?  McKinsey’s article went on to chronicle 10 key changes in the global competitive topography that are “must-be- aware-of’s” when re-engaging in strategic planning for the recovery in 2009 and beyond.  In July’s issue of Harvard Business Review, one answer is to bring on an executive with what Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky call “adaptive leadership” ability-

The current economic crisis is not just another rough spell. Today’s mix of urgency, high stakes, and uncertainty will continue even after the recession ends….

Instead of hunkering down and relying on their familiar expertise to deal with the sustained crisis, people in positions of authority-whether they are CEOs or managers heading up a company initiative-must practice what the authors call adaptive leadership. They must, of course, tackle the underlying causes of the crisis, but they must also simultaneously make the changes that will allow their organizations to thrive in turbulent environments.

Adaptive leadership is an improvisational and experimental art, requiring some new practices.

[http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/07/leadership-in-a-permanent-crisis/ar/1 ]

The adaptive leader has a greater agility than other leadership types. The adaptive-leader type also allows for optimal breakthrough performance coming out of a down cycle.  Generic adaptive leadership is not enough, however.  You still need to figure out where you topgrade your executive team to best capitalize on the upside afforded in an executive change.  Do you seek this new “adaptive leader” for marketing, strategy, operations, sales? General management of one business unit that’s high growth versus another that’s slower growth but lower risk? Or is it in new product development, R&D, or international/global specialization?  At the risk of overplaying a metaphor, coming back to basketball for a moment, it’s interesting to note that each successful professional team has often been built around one “superstar” player, but not always playing the same position.   There are 3 traditional positions in basketball-guard (2), forwards (2), and a center.  Magic Johnson was a guard (point guard to be specific) and he took the Lakers to several championships.  A current L.A. Lakers superstar, Koby Bryant, as well as the Boston Celtics Paul Pierce are also guards.  However, Larry Bird and Julius “Dr. J” Irving were forwards.  And not to leave out the third successful superstar permutation, Shaquille O’Neal, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Patrick Ewing were all “superstar” centers who repeatedly drove their teams to pennant victories.

Once you identify where the biggest impact can be made via topgrading your current executive team, and you pre-select for a leader with proven adaptive leadership skills and experience, the final question presents itself-where are adaptive leaders most frequently bred?  Where should you look for them, what ecosystem have they been building there leadership toolbox within?

Our experience indicates that a disproportionate  number of adaptive leaders come from professional backgrounds they’ve honed in two specific stages of the company lifecycle-

At our firm, where we specialize in recruiting adaptive leaders, we’ve broadly referred to the executives who are best equipped at leading the green-highlighted columns above of emerging and growth-stage as “Builder-Leaders.” However, whether we refer to them as “builder-leaders” or “adaptive leaders,” their experiences creating and growing companies in these stages are the foundational criteria for success for those companies looking to outpace their competitors as we come out of a down cycle and head into the next growth phase.

The winning formula for extra-ordinary company performance in this next economic expansion is a combination of good internal executive assessment as to which role(s) will give you the biggest step-function impact if you topgrade them, and a key attribute of “adaptive leadership” in the new executive you bring. This is the very same leadership characteristic Malcolm Gladwell’s Vivek Ranadivé demonstrated when he was coaching his daughter’s basketball team to compete and win against the rest of their basketball league.

Position: General Manager, Simbionix eLearning

Reports to: CEO, Simbionix USA

Location: Denver, CO

Website: www.simbionix.com

“Virtual reality simulation in surgical training has become more widely used and intensely investigated in an effort to develop safer, more efficient, measurable training processes…If executed properly, virtual reality offers inherent advantages over other training systems in creating a realistic surgical environment and facilitating measurement of surgeon performance.” – E. Seymour and J.S. Rotnes, Surgical Endoscopy (2007)

“If we’re going to make a mistake, let’s make it on the simulators first.” - Dr. Karl Illig, Chief of Vascular Surgery at Strong Medical Center, Rochester, NY, on why physicians are eager to start using the new Simbionix PROcedure Studio simulator

“If the learning actually matters, use simulations. If it doesn’t, don’t worry about it.” - Clark Aldrich, founder of SimuLearn, industry visionary, and author of numerous articles and books on simulations and e-learning

SIMBIONIX IN THE NEWS

http://www.simbionix.com/News.html

http://www.simbionix.com/PROcedure.html

THE COMPANY

Surgical simulators have been developed in the past few years to enhance the training of physicians, reduce the number of animals and cadavers, and provide flexible training scenarios and preoperative planning. Despite their potential benefits, and the fact that they have precedence in flight simulators, there are very few simulators in current use globally. Simbionix as a leadership company in this growing industry is changing the medical training landscape.

As a world leader in the field of medical education and simulation technology, Simbionix offers the most comprehensive medical training experience available, using the latest software and hardware technology. The company’s state-of-the-art technology provides surgeons, interventionists, nurses, and technicians with a robust platform to learn and master critical skills to ensure procedural efficiency and promote quality patient outcomes. The systems offer a range of basic and highly advanced procedures, and incorporate detailed and complete metrics for skill assessment.

The user is free to practice skills and perform procedures until the required proficiency is attained. In addition, difficult and uncommon procedures may be practiced at any time. This maximizes consistency to optimize learning, providing a clear advantage over relying solely on previous ly available patient training methods.

History and Products

Established in 1997 by a small group of individuals with a multi-disciplinary background in marketing, software programming and 3-D graphics, the company developed the GI Mentor™, the industry’s first computer-based simulator for training endoscopic procedures skills.

Since then, Simbionix has successfully launched a complete line of medical simulators that provide medical professionals with hands-on training in a comprehensive array of Minimally Invasive Surgery procedures. This includes the URO Mentor™ — the industry’s only simulator for endourology procedures; the PERC Mentor™ for percutaneous access procedures; the LAP II Mentor™ — a multi disciplinary simulator for laparoscopic skills and surgery procedures recognized as the industry gold standard; and the ANGIO Mentor™–a multidisciplinary simulator that provides hands-on practice in an extensive and complete simulated environment of interventional endovascular procedures. Today Simbionix has progressed to the “next” generation of simulation, developing and launching PROcedure Rehearsal Studio, the first “patient specific” simulation in the industry.

Simbionix simulation products have been validated in several scientific studies and the company cooperates closely with both industry and leading medical institutions such as Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and other international institutions to develop the most advanced simulators for the training and assessment of medical professionals.

About Simbionix eLearning Division

Recognizing the ongoing trends in the certification of clinicians in a range of MIS procedures that are becoming more complex, Simbionix acquired eTrinsic, a leader in education content development. Together with the Mentor platforms, Simbionix began providing a comprehensive solution (called the MentorLearn platform) for the training and eventual certification of physicians in advanced surgery skills in a safe and controlled environment, increasing patient safety and procedure efficiency.

Currently, the medical course content division of Simbionix (now branded as a division of Simbionix) specializes in developing online medical education products for professional education, including training modules and assessment tools. This division’s products are designed for manufacturers of medical devices, who use the company’s products to launch their own products and train their customers as well as sales representatives, physicians, and clinicians.

Simbioniox’ medical eLearning division combines its proven content development process with an understanding that adult learning is fundamentally different from learning created for the captive audience of children. Adult learning for physicians, clinicians, and medical device employees requires the information design to be more practical, more concise, and extremely intuitive and realistic to the end user. With this in mind, the course content division uses proprietary learning methodology developed over years, allowing the learner to apply his/her knowledge in a practical and hands-on way in the course of the online learning experience.

COMPANY INVESTORS

About River Cities

River Cities Capital Funds is a venture capital firm based in Cincinnati, Ohio with an office in Raleigh, North Carolina.  It has raised nearly $400MM in four venture funds since being founded in 1994, and has backed over 80 portfolio companies, located mainly in the Midwest and Southeastern regions of the U.S.  River Cities invests behind exceptional management teams in expansion stage companies in healthcare and information technology that have unique technology or services and strong market positions, with a special emphasis on recurring revenue business models.  For more information, please visit www.rccf.com.

About Early Stage Partners

Early Stage Partners is an early stage venture capital firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. The company invests in promising opportunities in instrumentation and control technology, life sciences, advanced materials, energy, information technology, and electronics. The company’s principals have over one hundred years combined experience in early stage company formation and development, with a significant network of relationships throughout the United State that can be used to attract management, develop strategic partnerships, and provide later stage funding. For more information, please visit www.esplp.com.

THE CHALLENGE

As part of its post-funding expansion plans, Simbionix will be hiring a senior executive to drive its new direction into the eLearning world and training market sector in Denver. This General Manager will have overall responsibility for developing a commercial business plan and establishing, building, and managing a successful global eLearning business focused on a wide range of medical training markets—medical school, hospital, and clinics, as well as publishers and other re-sellers—and leveraging Simbionix’ world-class simulation archive of courses and equipment. The goal of the company is to develop a recurring revenue model.

Reporting to CEO, the new General Manager will work with the CEO and his leadership team to quickly build Simbionix’s eLearning division into a $20M – $50M operation. The new GM will use his or her previous expertise and knowledge of the eLearning world to identify and develop a new eLearning market sector for the company that integrates its core medical simulation technology.

Critical to his/her success will be the ability to combine the company’s core medical simulation products within the eLearning environment, assess market trends and opportunities, and move aggressively to create a new businesses that exploits these opportunities. This requires not only strategic vision but also the ability to establish an appropriate sales distribution model and possibly develop partnership and joint venture relationships. Success will be measured by a combination of growth, profitability, and ultimately enhancement of company value.

Reporting to the new GM will be a current staff of fewer than twenty employees, including project managers, data base experts, graphic artists, other technical employees and sales representatives.

Specific responsibilities and expectations include the following:

• Develop an eLearning business plan and commercial model that includes a re-occurring revenue component
• Identify market opportunities associated with the Simbionix core simulation business, integrate these, and develop a comprehensive business plan for creating revenue streams in medical training for each of these markets
• Leverage previous contacts within the eLearning/Training space to develop partnerships and possibly joint ventures that could jump start entry into these various markets
• Establish an effective eLearning Sales and Distributions organization focused on these markets
• Move quickly to implement these plans and strategies within the limitations of resources and budgets
• Manage this businesses profitably while achieving rapid growth in revenues
• Operate as “Pied Piper”—recruiting and mentoring talent into the organization from previous companies as well as other eLearning companies
• Work effectively and harmoniously within a matrix organization with the team in Denver, Israel, and, most importantly, the CEO in the Company’s HQ’s in Cleveland, as well as other senior managers.
• Ability to present well and coherently

It is important to note that the company has more than ten years of technology development and twelve years of operating history delivering world-class core simulation products and training solutions to the medical market.

THE CAREER OPPORTUNITY

To an experienced builder-leader executive, this opportunity offers several attractive features:

• Opportunity to establish and manage a profitable, rapidly growing division, with significant ownership stake and company value strongly influenced by the GM’s performance
• The opportunity to create an enterprise, not just optimize what someone else built—to help lead and grow a cutting edge, state-of-the-art eLearning business
• The opportunity to join a small executive team and have “a seat at the table” as the company charts its future
• Strong, committed investors and Board that is willing to fund growth
• The opportunity to gain both domestic and international experience since the company is a true globally-focused operation with an installed base and activities in more than 35 countries around the world
• The opportunity to work in the attractive, thriving city of Denver

THE IDEAL CANDIDATE

The ideal candidate currently is the General Manager, COO, President, or other senior operating executive of a company that provides eLearning/training solutions. He or she has P&L responsibility and has demonstrated the ability to identify eLearning market trends and products, proven knowledge of the distribution and marketing of eLearning products, and has built a profitable eLearning business.

It is preferable—though not essential– that the candidate have experience with hospitals, clinics, medical schools, and/or other healthcare organizations. What is essential is that he or she have a demonstrated understanding of distribution of web-based training solutions and content (publishers and others), to commercial or, more broadly, to corporate and academic markets.

Specifically, this individual has—

• Significant experience and success managing an eLearning business, ideally from a “best of breed” company
• A strong record of performance taking a company from <$5M to $20M or more as operating manager with P&L responsibility
• An ability to develop a strategic commercial business plan and implement it
• A keen understanding of eLearning distribution
• Experience with functional areas such as product development (IT), product management, marketing, sales management, and business development
• Outstanding general management and leadership skills developed in a fast-paced, dynamic, multi-tasking environment
• Experience in the global eLearning arena
• (Ideally) Experience working in a matrix-type organizational structure with vertical and lateral relationships between colleagues in the US and abroad (in this case, Israel); this requires flexibility and adaptability in a cross-cultured company
• An entrepreneurial spirit–whether within a small or large company; not a “big company mentality”
• A leadership style that is open and transparent, with no BS or hidden agendas
• A team player mentality, with understanding that success comes from his / her integration into the parent company, and in developing close working relationships with the CEO and other senior managers
• A willingness to relocate to Denver if not already located there
• A college degree

This involves a range of personal attributes– flexibility and adaptability; a great work ethic; strong leadership skills with supervision; an ability to develop a strategic commercial plan and implement it; an ability to analyze and evaluate one’s own (and other’s) performance and to develop plans to improve performance; excellent presentation skills; willingness to take responsibility for both success and failure; a thick skin; self-confidence; a positive attitude about self, company, marketplace; and a strong desire for success.

COMPENSATION

Compensation will include salary, bonus, and equity in line with the individual’s experience.

TRAVEL

Travel may be as much as 30 percent initially in addition to any commuting.

Please use the following link to apply:

http://155.212.246.208/JobDescriptionMultiple.asp?WebJobPostingsID=180&chkbox180=chkbox180