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Jeff Stibel to Receive Honorary Degree From Pepperdine Graziadio School of Business

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Congratulations are in order for Jeff Stibel, currently serving as the Vice Chairman of Dun & Bradstreet, who will be receiving an honorary Doctorate of Business degree from Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management.

The honorary degree is well deserved after the many accomplishments and partnerships between Stibel, Dun & Bradstreet and Pepperdine. Stibel lead the creation of the innovative Entrepreneurial Vision Partnership, a collaboration between Dun & Bradstreet and Pepperdine University, that “conducts economic research and develops specialized curriculum focusing on the needs and success metrics of entrepreneurs in the 21st century economy.” The partnership not only creates resources for teaching opportunities, but also provides immersion opportunities for Graziadio students, including paid internships in Dun & Bradstreet’s corporate programs.

In recognition of Stibel’s business achievements and work with the Graziadio School, he will be awarded the honorary degree at the 2015 graduation ceremony on December 5, where he will also give the commencement address.

Read the full press release.

Photo Credit: Nazareth College, Flickr

Growing Your Business Via a Strong Network – Stibel on “The Business Journals”

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“To grow your business, grow your network,” Jeff Stibel said in his July 30, 2015 post for “The Business Journals.”

In this article, Stibel talks about attracting customers and increasing revenue by having a strong network. He brings it back to the ant colony that he references in “Breakpoint,” noting that an ant colony knows it’s the strength of the network that matters, not the size.

To learn more about building a strong network in order to help grow a business, read Stibel’s full post here.

Photo Credit: The Business Journals, violetkaipa

Taking Stock of the Performance of Social Networks

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Jeff Stibel discusses why we are looking at social media networks the wrong way. As a society we put a lot of pressure on networks to succeed, and while they do grow tremendously in the beginning, they seem to all eventually collapse. Read more about how we can save our networks and their stocks by shifting from “growth to usability.” Read the full article on LinkedIn where it originally appeared to learn more how we can save our networks and their stocks by shifting from “growth to usability.” Image credit: MKHMarketing / Flickr

The (Imperfect) Perfect Job Interview – By Jeff Stibel

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I’ve known for a while now that my process for selecting new employees is a little unorthodox, and I let candidates know this right away. I usually start speaking before the door is even closed, so many people in the office have heard me say the same line again and again: “This isn’t an interview.”

But it’s not just a line; it’s genuine. I don’t believe that the standard interview question and answer session works. The reason is that as soon as you ask a question, you’re putting the candidate in a box. You condition people by the very nature of the question. This is a well-known psychological phenomenon. For example, if you ask “how much will you contribute to your 401(k),” the answer will be different than if you ask “how little will you contribute to your 401(k).” In the context of an interview, this phenomenon is even more pronounced: anytime you ask a question, you can bet that it’s leading. Good interviewers are best suited for television or radio, where simply by their questions they shape the story that’s being told. Good interviewers are not suited to choosing good employees.

Read the full article on LinkedIn where it originally appeared.

Photo credit:Pressmaster / Shutterstock

The Most Important Decision You Need To Make When Building A Network – Interview with Jeff Stibel

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Lane Wood was about to turn 30, and he was in a full-on identity crisis. He had recently left charity: water where he worked directly with the founder, Scott Harrison, and A-list celebrities to bring clean drinking water across the planet.

It had been an amazing, life-changing experience; especially for a former pastor from rural Oklahoma.

However, on a winter night in 2011 at a Union Square cafe in New York City, he confided in a close friend and nervously wondered, “What happens when my email doesn’t end in charitywater.org? Have I built real relationships or have I just increased my social media follower number?”

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Which relationships do we deepen, and which ones do we let fizzle or never form?

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For Jeff Stibel, a 40-year-old brain scientist, the Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp., and the author of Breakpoint, the answer lies in other types of networks that share similar properties.

In Jeff’s words, “The goods news is that we can look to biology and biological networks such as ants, bees, and even termites to tell us what happens in networks as a whole. We can see that there are very consistent, predictable cycles. Those cycles drive not just biological networks but business networks, economic networks, and social networks.”

Read the whole article on Forbes where it originally appeared.

The Logic Behind Facebook’s Recent Moves – By Jeff Stibel

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Recently, two Princeton graduate students released a study predicting the demise of Facebook by 2017, using concepts from epidemiology. No quicker had the media reported the results of the study than numerous rebuttals were posted. A few Facebook data scientists had great fun by posting their analyses showing that Princeton University would run out of students by 2021 and that the Earth would run out of air by 2060.

Read the whole article where is originally appeared.

This Is The Best Way To Process Failure

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After you fail, sometimes it helps to read the writing on the wall.
That’s what Jeff Stibel, chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation — a California company not affiliated with the more famous Dun & Bradstreet on the East Coast — came to realize.

About two years ago, Stibel and his assistant snuck into the office at night and created what they called a Failure Wall. The point was to…Read the full article on Business Insider where it originally appeared.

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