Last year, I was catching up with a former colleague who had just received funding for his startup. He told me excitedly that he expected to be retired and living in a villa in Tuscany in five years... even though his company did not yet have a product or any customers. Wait, what?

Discovered on Linkedin Pulse. Originally published in CMO.com.

62 percent of employees consider culture as the number 1 hurdle to digital transformation. This is one of the many startling statistics uncovered in my latest culture research report with Jerome Buvat, "The Digital Culture Challenge: Closing the Employee-Leadership Gap."

Private enterprise has shown an unparalleled capacity to generate prosperity and produce goods and services that meet people’s needs and improve their lives.

Recently, I broke some major company news … on Snapchat.

You had a world-changing vision. A hunger. You have moved mountains to turn an idea into a real business. Now that your business is taking off, how do you as the entrepreneur transition into the role of CEO?

This is a question I’m asked a lot by entrepreneurs who are starting their first business and are at the stage where they need to go from being a one man band to a small startup with employees.

Thought leadership content has long been considered a difference maker in business-to-business marketing. Now there's data to back that up. A new Edelman survey of decision-makers powered by LinkedIn shows such efforts, when done well, can positively impact every stage of the buying process. 

It’s no surprise that the most successful companies have great leadership teams at the top. Dubbed Silicon Valley’s “oddest couple” by The New York Times, together Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg have driven Facebook’s astronomical growth and supported one another along the way.

Kirill Tatarinov grew up in the former Soviet Union, the son of a government computer architect. The family didn't swallow state propaganda: His grandfather once spent ten years in a soviet gulag.