Another great story from Brand Autopsy on the The Container Store. John Moore calls this a JumboShrimp story: companies that get bigger by being smaller.

He says The Container Store gains their edge over larger competitors through persistent effort …

Tribal business is short-form for a movement away from mammoth corporate type jobs toward minute, niche-oriented lifestyle changes.

A great example of this is described in a November 2004 MSN article.

The author paints the picture of Bill Wilson, …

Hugh MacLeod writes often about marketing and what he’s called smart conversations.

I posted the following comment to Hugh’s riff on the market’s willingness to pay premiums:

“The smarter the market, the harder it is to charge a premium.” Right.

Related to tribal business:

In the 21 September 2004 edition of Reveries, Tim Manners describes little global giants. He quotes Barnaby Feder from the New York Times,

“Big companies are good at identifying the intellectual property that is needed

Too much order – no ability to adapt.

Too much chaos – no ability to learn.

Tribal business (1, 2).…

Edward O. Wilson says that the greatest challenge today is the description of complex systems. Scientists break down systems but reassembling systems is far more difficult. Wilson says the power of prediction will be the true measure of success.

The …

I’m re-reading Edward O. Wilson’s book, Consilience. He describes the biological conception of scale that I tried to illustrate below. He breaks up the magnitude of action by space and time. So, for example, brain synapses are minute, ultra-fast, …

Hugh McLeod writes a hopeful piece about the future of corporate blogging:

We want the corporate tipping point to arrive for two main reasons:

1. It validates those of us who got in there early … in the belief that

Robert Patterson highlighted a young company in PEI: silverorange . Amongst other things these guys are part of Mozilla/Firefox’s image team.

Their CEO Dan James published a letter to his team that expresses a rare understanding of humanity – his …

John Moore at Brand Autopsy (love that photo) has a great post today: Peddling the Soup Peddler. This is the type of post I’d like to emulate in the future.

Ingredients for the soup post:

· Short story

I’ve been pondering the relationship between entrepreneurs/young companies and the ideas presented in James Surowiecki’s, The Wisdom of Crowds, and Malcolm Gladwell’s, Blink. Without further synthesis, I’d argue there isn’t one.

Sir Francis Bacon said that “the mind, …

I haven’t been blogging long, but throughout these novice days I’ve picked some of the fads of the craft. One is: Blog it once and never revise it.

I understand why you wouldn’t want liberal revision. Changing the blog threatens …

I’ve been reading a fabricated debate at Slate between James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, and Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink. I’ll be revising this post, I wanted to get it up while I mull …

sift leverages knowledge and thinks on behalf of entrepreneurs.

Knowledge is only valuable when it’s useful. And most entrepreneurs soon discover the paradox of newly emerging opportunities: you know more about your industry than anyone else and you don’t know …

Dear entrepreneur,

If you’re someone I want to work with, you don’t have time to read this. I’ll keep it short: If you want to keep innovating, you need my help.

My guess is around three years ago you had …