I keep returning to this meme because it just sounds right. I was reading one of Mark Cuban’s Tweets (or whatever they are now called) last week where he was riffing on qualities he looked for in a great leader. Now, he was talking politics, and I want to remove that context for the moment, because what he is saying has larger implications.

Leadership is something that I am somewhat familiar with: I have run numerous publications over the years, usually as editor-in-chief where I had to hire the staff. Back in 2012, I was selected to a special leadership training program with a cohort of 60 others, drawn from various organizations here in St. Louis. My wife was selected for an earlier cohort and encouraged me to apply, and it was a fantastic experience. I got to meet business, government, and non-profit leaders as they spoke to our class. We tackled some pretty thorny issues and had some amazingly frank discussions, and formed many  enduring friendships.

Cuban’s list gets to the core of what becomes a great leader most. His thesis is that a great leader is someone who he would hire, and understand and appreciate their values. He breaks this down into several categories, with the overriding aspect whether they are lifelong learners, especially in a world that is constantly changing. Being one of these learners, I never really thought that was necessary condition, but as I think about the best leaders that I have known and worked for over the years, I would agree with him on this and the other items on his list:

• Will the subordinates who worked most closely to this leader come back to work for them in subsequent jobs?

I am proud to say that I have hired several people multiple times over our careers. This is an easy one to spot: the same crew follows a great leader from posting to posting. I wrote about the original crew that I worked with at PC Week back in the mid-1980s when Sam Whitmore, one of the editors, said it was like being in the Beatles. I once wrote about this group of five guys who have started numerous companies over a 20 year span as an extreme example of this.

• Does this leader take credit or give credit to others?

I have had some really lousy bosses who were credit stealers. And some great bosses who wouldn’t hesitate to give credit where it was due. Another easy one to spot.

• How a leader treats people who can do nothing for them.

One of the aspects of leadership that I have enjoyed most is developing someone’s skills and having them leave my operation and go on to do great things. I can think of several people that I hired that have blossomed and had amazing careers, and I like to think that I had something to do with that. But that is more a condition of being a great mentor, rather than buying your way into what Tom Wolfe once called “the favor bank.” Wolfe used the concept as a way to build relationships of trust, but it can also go awry if abused.

• How does a leader handle the criticism that comes with the job?

If you have a thin skin, you aren’t going to last long in any leadership position. You have to roll with the punches.

• Does a leader hire their staff for loyalty or ability?

This is harder to spot, because sometimes you don’t realize the loyalty connection until it is too late. With one job, I got fired because one of my subordinates was more loyal to my boss than to me. With another job, I eventually quit because this loyalty connection was undermining my ability to lead my team.

• Does a leader create stress or reduce stress for the people around them?

Another easy one to spot. I wrote about this situation a couple of years ago when I suggested it was time to fire your jerk boss. At one publication where I wasn’t in charge, our leader was really great at creating chaos and pitting one staffer against another, just to see who would triumph. There was always a fire drill, and the fires were always five alarm ones too. It was like everyone had PTSD, it was so stressful. Conversely, a great leader will do the necessary blocking and running interference from their bosses, so the staff is insulated and get the actual work done. This goes hand-in-hand with how a leader handles criticism.

Thanks Mark for such words of wisdom.

Several news developments that I reported on for SiliconANGLE this week:

• 1Password announced new support for passkeys, sort of. They haven’t completely implemented everything you need to run passkeys for a collection of users (say for a business) in their password manager, but they are trying.
• Also, in that same story, I cover Yubico’s going public, Swedish-style. The company has deep roots in that country, and they did it using a SPAC, which is only the second time that has happened in Sweden.
• A new study from two Oxford UK companies has found that ChatGPT-4 is quite gender biased. The researchers examined 13 different AI models.
• Finally, my report on the various news nuggets coming from the annual Crowdstrike user confab Fal.con (a play on the company’s main product name).

I recently got to see “Author Anonymous,” a very funny mockumentary movie about a bunch of writers and how their group dynamics change when one of them (played by Kaley Cuoco of Big Bang fame) experiences success. It reminded me about how badly many fellow members of my fellow writing fraternity are when it comes to pitching potential stories to prospective editors. Here are my top ten mistakes you can make.

• Make incomplete pitches.

Make it hard for the editor to understand what you are trying to do, why your pitch is important, what is your angle or expertise, or whatever. Put as much information as possible into your pitch

• Don’t waste an editor’s time with inane queries.

Editors are busy people, make each email count. Try to figure out stuff on your own. Silence is golden.

• Do follow your editor’s instructions.

Some of my editors have very specific instructions on how to assemble a draft for them. How hotlinks should be represented, or whether they like or hate in-line images, or whether they want subheads or suggested Tweet language or whatnot. Try to obey these instructions and keep them straight so you won’t waste their time in this fashion.

• Don’t look at the website and understand their target audience.

This one is easy to fix: read and review the site and understand who they expect their readers to be.

• Don’t know what articles have already been published.
  Make sure what you are pitching already hasn’t been covered on the site.
• Don’t pitch something that you have already written for some other pub.
  This is a big no-no. Editors want unique content, unless they tell you otherwise.
• Don’t have any clue on when you can actually finish a draft or hit a self-imposed deadline.
  When you are pitching a story, make sure you have the bandwidth to actually write it and finish it, because usually the next question is going to be when can the editor have it in hand?
• Do understand the meaning of deadlines in general.
  And respect that deadline too. This isn’t some approximate timeframe. Don’t hold up the rest of the production process because you are late delivering your copy.
• Don’t submit a story without any accompanying art, suggested Tweets, or other information that the editor requested.
  It isn’t just your text that is important, but the other information that supports your story is critical too.
• Don’t whine about how much time revisions will take you.
  I know some editors are a major pain with serial revisions. Just don’t work for them again if they offend you or tie you up in knots with all sorts of back-and-forth emails. But your goal should be to finish the assignment at least to your standards. Now, I have worked for editors that like to subtract value, or think of themselves as writers, but that will be for another post.

Last week eWeek began its series called PC Week at 30. It wasn’t quite 30 years ago when the venerable publication began chronicling our industry. I spent two and a half years working at the publication, and was there during John Pallatto’s first tenure (John wrote the piece above).

But rather than write another column about the way-back tech, or my first byline, I want to take a moment to pay tribute to the people who made up PC Week. Many of the original PC Weekers went on to bigger and better things in the tech industry, and I am proud to count myself as part of them. Here are just a few of them and where they have been since their tenure.

• Mike Edelhart was my mentor and the person who originally hired me on at PC Week. Mike went on to run Zinio and a number of other startups and now is working with Bill Lohse, a former Ziffie, on various conferences.
• Gina Smith was one of our cub reporters who broke many scoops and was a lot of fun to be around. She went on to a startup working with Larry Ellison and working with Steve Wozniak on a book as well as being a tech TV start.
• Greg Spector, who was the West Coast Bureau chief when I was there and went on to found and run a number of PR firms. When I started at PC Week I was living in LA and spent a lot of time in the Bay Area and got to work with Jane Morrissey and Karyl Scott. Jane is running communications for Virtela now and Karyl, after years of working for Nokia, is back on her own.
• Dan Lyons was another cub reporter who would go on to write the “Fake Steve Jobs” columns and more recently briefly run the editorial operations of ReadWrite, where I worked in 2011. He is now blogging for HubSpot.
• Barry Gerber was running the IT department of part of UCLA when I hired him to help me write reviews for PC Week. We would go on to do some ground-breaking testing of network products, and Barry and I would work together on several other publications. He is now running the editorial operations at Tom’s Hardware.com.
• Peter Coffee was working in aerospace IT when I hired him to come to PC Week, where he had a long and illustrious career writing many insightful analyses of application development tools before the cloud ever existed. He left to work for Salesforce.com, where he is still as pithy and interesting as always.
• Sam Whitmore was running the news operations for PC Week when I arrived, and he and I had a rocky relationship at the start. He eventually left the pub to start his own business, where he has been quite successful and where we have become friends.
• Dale Lewallen was working in IT at an LA-based bank when I hired him to be one of our reviews team. He went on to work for several Ziff publications, writing deep technical dives with a thoroughness and zeal that few could match. Sadly, he literally died on the job at an early age.
• Bob Scheier and I started at PC Week at nearly the same time, and like Sam he left to start his own consulting business and has continued to write about computers and business.
• Paul Bonner was my partner in crime at PC Week: we had a lot of things in common and we covered a lot of the same topics for our beats on corporate networking. He left the Boston area and moved to Austin, where he now works in software development for the electric utilities industry. Ironically, one of my first jobs in tech — back when PC Week was founded — was developing software for the electric utilities industry.
• Chris Shipley was a cub reporter back then and went on to run the Demo conferences for many years.

As you can see, it is quite an impressive group. Back then we had a staff of more than 50 people, and that included a full copy desk and art department too. Looking over some of my preserved back issues, I am proud of what the team accomplished. Happy birthday PC Week!

Can it be 40 years ago that Bob Metcalfe and his PARC colleagues began their work on what would become Ethernet? Yes, happy birthday. While the worldwide celebration continues, you might want to read one of his columns that he wrote for me when I was running Network Computing magazine in the early 1990s. Here is one written in July 1991 about his early days at 3Com and betting against Novell.

met1 metp2