917. You Can't Do It If You Don't Know It

“I realized that, while I loved working with high growth companies and the challenges that came with it, they were inherently unstable, they didn’t have great cultures, and there were a lot of things that weren’t attractive to me. So, I built a company that worked with those companies, but built that company in a very different way that was more aligned with my kind of vision and values and with the type of flexibility and diversity that I wanted.”

1. ”I went abroad to Prague for six months between my sophomore and junior year in college. I had an internship there in a consulting firm and something really clicked. I realized I loved learning, but what I had been learning in school up to that point wasn’t what was interesting to me. When I came back from Prague I sort of created my own major and I almost got straight A’s junior and senior year. It didn’t matter how hard the course was. I was taking stuff that I was engaged in and interested in. I had more opportunity to really focus on things like business and marketing where I felt my acumen and my passions lined up.”

2. ”What I’ve learned, and actually what that teacher said when I was five, is I need to personally get my hands dirty, do things, play with cause and effect. So I ended up continuing with consulting after school and I just loved it. It’s a great career as a framework for learning. You’re just thrown into situations in which you have to understand all the variables, and you have got to get up to speed and quickly understand an industry. Those were all things that I really enjoyed doing.”

3. ”Now I’m the CEO and also founder of a great company called Acceleration Partners, which we are busy growing, and we are helping people build their businesses through partner and performance marketing. But a big focus for us is how we build our company, getting that kind of consistent growth as an organization by building a culture and doing things in different ways with unique programs that we’ve tested and run, and that have helped our company.”

4. ”I spend a lot of time speaking and writing and sharing a lot of best practices–that I have learned in our organization–with other organizations, particularly to get people to focus on what they can do better and how they can help lift up and elevate others. I see a lot of time being spent doing the opposite–focusing on the negative, what they don’t control, trashing others, bringing them down. It really takes the same or less energy to do the opposite.”

How to Make Virtual Teams Work, by Robert S. Glazer

Elevate, by Robert S. Glazer

Performance Partnerships, by Robert S. Glazer