Dean Niebuhr: As the cofounder and CTO of GovWorks you grew with the business and the product actually turned out very well as you've indicated. Someone actually carried on even after GovWorks itself died. The other thing you mentioned earlier today when we were talking was that in your consulting role you've been able to take some companies and find some parts of those companies which really are doing quite well but the rest of the company was enough to pull it down. So the question is, as a leader of an organization how do you pick out; we've talked about the relationship leadership, the kind of goal-oriented leadership, but this is one that's like the leadership that sorts the trees out from the forest. How do you pick out those things which are the most important and also maybe which ones which have the litmus test of killing you as a company? How do you sort those out? You mentioned one even at lunch time about one of your venture capitalists who knew they had you on a Friday when you knew about the personnel budget, you had the payroll. How do you see those things, in hindsight, how do you see those things from a leadership to be able to take that conceptual leadership approach?

Tom Herman: I think one of the important things in crisis management and a lot of the work that I do with Recognition Group revolves around crisis management is building a trusting relationship with the organizations in which you're working. So, for example, a lot of times when companies are approaching bankruptcy or when there's a serious crisis within an organization the employees are not given as much information about what's going on as they really need. And remember, if an organization is approaching bankruptcy there's a lot of people out there who have kids and spouses that are dependant upon that organization for their daily bread. They deserve to know this organization is in hard times so that they can make plans personally and try to live appropriately with the risk that they're facing. A lot of times I'd go into organizations in crisis and be shocked to find out that the CEO or the executive management hasn't really told the employees that, ‘you know what? You could really be out of a job next week'. One of the most important things that you can do is to open up immediately. I think of one situation in particular where an organization was not going to make payroll; it was like a Thursday or Friday. They weren't going to make payroll and they were going to have to basically close the doors on Monday. We came in as an organization, Recognition Group, to help with crisis management. In fact, what we were asked to do was to wind down the company. But, we determined very quickly, over the course of a long weekend, that the best way to wind down the company was to keep a core group of employees that were going to be able to fulfill some outstanding contracts in order to bring in that remaining revenue instead of having a huge liability that resulted from not completing the contracts and to tail out the business over the course of several months. That was going to probably create the best return for the investors. So, the CEO was let go on Friday and my partner and I were installed as the COO and the CEO on Monday and the first thing that we did was bring all the employees together and we said, “Listen, we're not going to keep any secrets anymore. Here's the situation. Here's the ledger. Here's the balance sheet and we're in trouble. I guarantee you that a lot of you are going to lose your job. However, I think that we have an opportunity to pull through.” We were able to very quickly determine that there was a core business there if a lot of the extra and expensive assets like the huge fish tank that was in the CEOs office that cost somewhere on the order of $500 a week to maintain…

Dean Niebuhr: We have no fish tanks here. (Laughs)

Tom Herman: If some of these extra expenses were reduced and, quite frankly, if a lot of people who were not working on productive projects were let go there was going to be a core company of value. So, we were able to, in the course of a couple of months, open up to the employees, tell them what needed to happen; the more honest we were with them, the more honest they were with us. We were able to determine very quickly who the key employees were, which were the key contracts which needed to be maintained and fulfilled and we ended up saving the company. We shed most of the employees and we were able to sell off a small portion of the company with a core of excellent corporate clients and a core of employees that were able to service those clients. We sold it to another organization in a similar line of business and the investors were happy and the employees were happy. It was amazing the feedback we got back from the employees, even the ones were let go, how they appreciated the honesty that they had not seen from the previous management. That is so often the case. There's so much secrecy that's unnecessary.

Dean Niebuhr: One of the things I also hear you talking about is entrepreneurship appears to accelerate maybe the development and use of leadership skills whereas if you work in a corporation you may get a little portion but you're not getting the full gamut of having to test that leadership ability. One thing that we're interested in here as an educational environment is how do we take that and try to develop that within a business school? How do we get faculty and students involved in developing that entrepreneurial leadership kind of skill?

Tom Herman: I love that question. And I love talking about this topic. Leadership has so many facets and a great leader within an organization is likely to have had experience in many different parts of the organization. I think a great CEO probably has some basic understanding of the technology within an organization; probably has worked as some type of Chief Operating Officer or general manager; probably has some pretty strong financial skills; probably has done some marketing, they have a really broad understanding of all the things that go on within the business which they have been chosen to lead or they have created and therefore are leading as an entrepreneur. I think that in an educational environment there's a lot of stuff that can be learned from teachers but certainly I believe fundamentally in the power and value of experiential education. When you start a business of your own; when you bootstrap and whether you're going to raise money or not there's still going to be a bootstrap phase at the beginning as you're thinking about all the different aspects of your new business. You are required to think very creatively and very concretely about marketing, about finance, about organizational structure, about every facet of a business and you have the opportunity as a young person potentially; if you are older you may have already had some of these experiences in the real business world; but as a young person if you have a creative idea and you don't have a lot of business experience and you have a lot of drive to make it happen then you get thrown into the school of hard knocks, as Don likes to call it, and you learn about things because you have to. I think that those skills are different from what you learn in theory in school. It's very similar to learning a language. You can study study study study a language but you're not really going to know that language until you're immersed in it.