CEO Weekly Outlook

What can strategic acquirers learn from a teenager selling baseball cards? Turns out quite a lot. One key takeaway: Don’t overcomplicate things.

Plus, the Harvard Business Review finds that leaders’ perceptions of their own skills don’t always correlate with those of others.

Business Insights

• Take initiative to become a leader
• Work-life balance is important for non-parents too
• Busy people are less productive
• Let employees rewrite their job descriptions
• Employees like managers who underrate themselves
• CEOs aren’t talking about their long-term vision
• Fortune names its businesspeople of the year

Transaction Toolbox

• Don’t overcomplicate acquisitions
• 7 tips to prepare your company for sale
• Exit strategies are more complicated in California

Forum Features

• Value your company in 5 minutes with this free Excel template
• Convertible debt is popular — but is it right for you?
• Download a free NDA template
• How one fast-growing company is approaching strategic acquisitions

Middle Market Move of the Week

CB Insights — a company founded to help track investment in private companies — itself raised 10 million dollars in financing from San Francisco private equity firm RSTP. The data-purveyor demures to add much more detail about its own business — CB Insights, which has more than 60 employees, says only that it’s profitable and that it’s revenue tripled in 2014. Read the press release.