Good blog from Ben about “A” players (top talent).

“As CEO, you know that you cannot build a world-class company unless you maintain a world-class team. But how do you know if an executive is world-class? Beyond that, if she was world-class when you hired her, will she stay world-class? If she doesn’t, will she become world-class again?”

The blog talks about ways to determine top talent. But the CEO and the rest of teh C-Suite have to (1) be A Players themselves; and (2) more importantly, be good managers.

What makes a good manager? Well, Don’t Micro-Manage. (That won’t scale). Managers remove obstacles so A Players can perform at their best.

“Finally, what about being loyal to the team that got you here? If your current executive team helped you 10X your company, how can you dismiss them when they fall behind in running the behemoth they created? The answer is that your loyalty must go to your employees—the people who report to your executives. Your engineers, marketing people, sales people, finance and HR people who are doing the work. You owe them a world-class management team. That’s the priority.”

Reminder: tell your current employees that they are A Players, too! Or they will work in fear and perform at their worst.

Sophos has a bunch of free security tools that you can give to your clients (to make your life easier!)

I don’t agree with all the picks but here are the highlights of the Wireline Stars of 2013:

Lumos: “One of the biggest initiatives Drinkhall is driving this year is the telco’s “edging out” network expansion strategy, one that includes the buildout of 100G optical wavelength routes connecting Richmond to Ashburn and Lynchburg in Virginia.”

“Complementing the ongoing network buildouts are a growing set of new services, including colocation, Ethernet, fiber to the tower (FTT), and hosted VoIP services.” Notice that every company has had to add numerous services to keep revenue growing. What services have you added in the last year?

Even Sprint has reinvigorated its wireline shop with IAAS and Cloud services – none of it in-house! All of it through strategic partnerships. Note that.

For Google, it isn’t about a 1 GB Fiber-to-the-home network, it is WHAT can you do with that network! Tele-medicine is high on the list, especially considering that the population is getting older and older.

How are you utilizing wireline to crush it?

Lost arts like presenting and productivity: by Nicholas Bate.

Some great advice from Entrepreneurs, including “Keeping in contact with clients is the most important thing”

“Top managers realize their core objective is: make my people more valuable vs. focusing on the numbers. The BYPRODUCT: They hit BIGGER goals.” – Keith Rosen

5 Pricing Studies – like Comparisons or Selling Time Over Money. Worth the read!

Comparison of broadband pricing.

9 things that block cloud sales

“”Hardware OEMs are increasingly turning to service partners to access the customers, at the same time that independent software vendors are using the SaaS model to go to the customer directly,” she said. “This is bad news for VARs, integrators and distributors, many of whom are trying to either become cloud service providers themselves or move into a cloud brokerage model.”

. The cloud threat.

Cbeyond rolled out TotalCloud and TotalAssist and Cloud Enablement. What is that?

Cloud Computing: Revolving The Business Industry And The Working Environment

10 rules for a great small business (they call it start-up, but I say it works for any small business.)

The new cool thing in telecom is WebRTC.

“WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is a media engine and set of APIs (free and openly available at webrtc.org) that bestows upon web browsers Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities—particularly low-cost, high-quality, voice and video services and P2P file sharing.” [WebRTC for Dummies]

Another good article that explains it is here. Basically, WebRTC uses browsers and java script to enable real-time collaboration.