Yesterday was the first of three pieces on creating a tangible 60-second pitch. Today is the second. For this I’ve used two points made by Mel Perchesky (don’t know who this guy is but his advice is good).

Mel says:…

Forsaking the metaphysical (1,2,3), today we get into the tangibles of a 60-second pitch. For this I leaned heavily on the advice of Bill Joss and an article in Fast Company called Perfecting Your …

Yesterday I laid out Brad Feld’s/Chris Wand’s 13 questions for entrepreneurs and said they would lay the groundwork for a ripping good pitch. Trouble is, once you do that work, all you really get is a ripping big pile of …

While I’m busy fooling around with book lists, Dave Pollard’s dropping gems. He’s not only framed-up my initial idea but already started putting on the drywall. I guess that’s what you get for sharing ideas with bright guys.

I …

I’m on the hunt for guidance on the all important, little exercised art of 60-second pitching. Yesterday’s initial landscape got me started but I still need to put the pitch together.

In June of last year Brad Feld scooped from …

One of my friends is a teacher. He’s told me many times that the best way to learn something is to explain it to someone else. Well I want to learn to do a 60-second pitch, so here goes.

Over …

Update: Dr. Ronald S. Burt from the University of Chicago backs up everything written here and adds his idea about “structural holes” — the notion that people can find opportunities for creative thinking where there is no social structure. My …

What’s with the wheelbarrow?

Related to metatags are memes.

Definition

From Wikipedia:

“Meme, (rhymes with “cream” and comes from Greek root with the meaning of memory and its derivative “mimeme”), is the term given to a unit of information

On the heels of my heartfelt yop – Frickin’ amazing vs. the long tail – as if guided by benevolent deities, I found “What really works.” With bemused resignation I note the publication date of July 2003 – if I …

Philip Pullman, Common sense has much to learn from moonshine in the Guardian:

“It’s when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because

I keep a ongoing list of sift technologies: Little apps that are miraculous, instantaneous information sorters.

Andrew Grumet has made several that enjoy eminence in this category.

The one with the most quiescent potential is “Similar Feeds.” Type …

Maybe this is an old idea. Maybe I’m the last kid on the block to get it, but it seems to me that “frickin’ amazing” is the new normal and it’s not getting us much.

Read the marketing gurus. They …

Oh hey, this looks pretty good! Aggregation a la PEI.

Robert Paterson and Jevon MacDonald have started Marketing Filter and it has the promise of being an helpful sift technology.

Some interesting points are raised in the comments. In …

In Presence: Human purpose and the field of the future, Peter Senge and others asked leading scientists and business and social entrepreneurs, “What question lies at the heart of your work?”

Jumps out out at you eh?

Makes you …

When I started sift I was working with two entrepreneurs that seemed to be working about 12 hours daily.

Being so busy, these guys weren’t able to keep up with the massive amount of information available to them. My idea …

About 100 people (give or take 50) read this blog everyday. And I don’t have a clue what you’re coming here to see.

Outside of John Husband, Kevin, Alan, Evelyn Rodriguez, John Jantsch (only because I poked fun of him), …

Negotiation is the art of making someone offer as a gift that which is your chief design to secure and for many bootstrapping entrepreneurs it’s a core competency.

James K. Sebenius in “Six Habits of Merely Effective Negotiators” (HBR, April …

I’m a bit late putting this up but Chuck Frey at the Innovation Weblog posted a helpful review of, you guessed it, innovation in 2004.…

From the book, Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, by Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria:

Lawrence and Nohria spin together lessons from biology and social sciences to describe a theory of human nature. The lessons they highlight …

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“The wonderful thing about France is how all her perfections harmonize so fully together. She has possessed all the skills, from cooking to logic and theology, from bridge-building to contemplation, from vine-growing to sculpture,

Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution

“Today you can buy knowledge by the pound — from consultants hawking best practice, from the staff you’ve just hired from your competitor, and from all those companies that hope you will outsource everything. Yet

Brad, at Feld Thoughts, writes about the importance of business measures. I’m glad he did because it confirms some recent suspicions I’ve been having.

Let’s compare three of my favourite entrepreneurs. The first is a lawyer who loves …

1) Don’t work with bad clients.

2) Don’t work with bad people.

The great temptation for every entrepreneur is to take every dollar you can get and hire any cheap brain you can find.

Seth Godin covers this in …

Nice checklist for entrepreneurs by Guy Kawasaki.…

Scott Kisner, a contributing editor at Fast Company, has an interesting piece on what he calls “pure entrepreneurship.”

He says pure entrepreneurship “is often driven by a belief that a major shift is coming — and thus it’s hard to …

“Why are you choosing this?”

That’s such a gorgeous question.

It’s complete answer either reveals:

– all the information included in decision making,
– the criteria by which choices are being made,
– the rank of alternative paths to action,…

A few days ago I shared supper with the CEO and one of the executives of a small company here in town.

The executive asked me to join them and discuss their company’s strategy — they’re navigating through a growth …

In the comments for Optimists die, I wrote something about hiring “sift bandwidth”. That got me thinking of advertising and in particular billboards.

There’s a billboard not far from my place that seems to be one of the most …

Sharp post by John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing (by the way don’t go to his main page with Firefox, that pop-up he has is super annoying – bad marketing John! Update: John fixed his pop-up!).

In a post …