Sift the archives

This category covers issues in business and strategy for entrepreneurs, SMEs and large corporations.

Integrity is fragile, critical and expensive.

Strong process is core to small business success.

It’s only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.

What does the Singularity invite us to ignore?

Drayton Valley is like many small Alberta towns except, its turning bad to good.

Were wicked problems once wicked goods. What flipped?

For impact investment to thrive, the castle needs a foundation.

Drive investment: deliver results, be precise, embrace complexity and create clarity.

What changes when we get more makers?

When life is busy, advice is a third-level need.

How to avoid getting scammed by foresight vendors.

How pressing, playing the odds, and driving results changes the game.

To enjoy consistently superior performance, you need to know where to focus your practice.

Strategic fit, between the character of place and local industries, increases investment success.

For small companies, awkwardness is an oft unappreciated asset.

Which rituals for business would remind us of what matters most?

Seeking innovation in only new places means giving up on the value and principles intrinsic in old technologies.

Help us choose our logo. List your three favourites and the reason for your choices.

Small businesses, gazelles, and large corporations all face enormous pressure to grow. This pressure exists whether or not growth is a good idea.

Innovation gets an awful lot of attention these days. But most of the fanfare is focused on starting new things. What about finishing? Who’s got that job?

The best writers arc their stories to intriguing and unexpected ends. Can we arc businesses too?

Within my small circle of aquaintences, Blue Ocean Strategy is popular again. Reading it through for the third time (the last time was more than a year ago), the book is so smooth and so rich compared…

In an offline note a good friend challenges the concept of new, tailor-made companies. Instead he asks, “What about companies that need tailors … companies that need a new dress, ugly companies, those ones that need new shoes…

I keep running into amazing people. Each one stuck in a job that uses a tiny part of what they’re great at. Here’s a plan to use a bit more.

Here’s an unsolved riddle: How do we get the minds of widely dispersed, brilliant people to focus on critical problems/opportunities? How do we synchronize greatness?

Dave Pollard brought this up a few days ago. He writes:

“……

Innovative brilliance is fortuitous. It’s an accident. The challenge is moving beyond serendipity and to intention.

How do we invite brilliant people to try and fail quickly, over and over again, in very small ways?

Might seeking a future be short-sighted if it keeps us from seeing where we are?

From Les invasions barbares (2003):

“Intelligence isn’t an individual trait. It’s collective, national, and intermittent.

Athens, BC – Euripides premieres his Electra. Two rivals attend, Sophocles and Aristophanes. And two friends, Socrates and Plato.
Intelligence was there.

…

Time away brings introspection.

Long hours in a canoe give lots of room for thought.

While I sort through those ideas – here is a compilation of favourite ideas from the past. It’s a series of posts about purpose,…

As investors we ask a lot of questions. It’s the part of the job I enjoy the most.

I’ve always been attracted to important questions … this work has cemented that interest.

Here’s a question I found a while ago.…

So, I’ve been fiddling lately. Toying really. Poking and prodding. Dilly-dallying. A bit itchy actually. I’d like to play a little. Something related to biomimicry I think.

Biomimicry or biomimetics is the study and imitation of nature. Taking inspiration…

A good friend and I were chatting about personal branding, it started with the regular hoopla: posture, piercings, language, work ethic, body odour, etc. Gradually we got to talking about how we perceive ourselves and how we each perceive the…

Retro post: No. 99

Philip Pullman 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 the world itself is

…

Retro post #89

There are at least two ways to effect change.

One is to complain liberally and bitterly until noone can stand it
and the move is made. Many bloggers live here.

Another is to criticize by creating…

Answer both of these questions based on intuition alone. Who’s going to win the NFL playoffs this year? What is the future of your company? Bet you’re ready to answer both but only willing to put one answer on the…

Eccentricity comes from the Greek phrase “to prick”. I dream of working with eccentric people that dance within chaos and fragmentation.

Retro post #91

Great find by Johnnie Moore, John Kay’s article on Obliquity is excellent. Kay writes that goals are often best achieved when pursued indirectly – this is the idea of obliquity.

Like Johnnie it…

There’s an unobservable line between ambition and growth. Where movement can be too early, just right, or too late. When does growth stop and stagnation take over? When is a switch premature?

I don’t think the answer is outside us.…

Before pitching, or flipping, try pinging.

Ever looked at your CEO? Ever watched the Prime Minister when he isn’t speaking? I don’t mean: glanced at his shoes or hair style. I mean really looked – actually observed.

Did you see her eyes darting around the room,…

Retro post: Revised based on “Look!” from November 30, 2004.

John Oliver (past President of DowElanco Canada Inc., a joint venture between Dow Chemical and Eli Lillys), once told me what he looks at when considering novel products.…

Retro post: September 12, 2004

(A Billy Collins poem. Rated PG)

Purity

My favourite time to write is in the late afternoon,
weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.
This is how I go about it:
I take a…

Action is directed by ideas. Action realizes what thinking has designed.

Jared Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Guns, Germs and Steel. In it Diamond describes one of the key principles of innovation: technology begets technology.

Using examples of neighbouring New Guinean, North American Indian, and Mexican…

Creating art and creating brilliant business can be a long, tedious process. But both require a set of intentions instead of a series of responses.

There’s been a big dust up between Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, and Werner Vogel (CTO Amazon).

The hubbub brings to a point several interesting dynamics:

1. Bloggers are…

Invest in knowing what perfect is and then spend the time to build it.

“To-do” versus “To-be”

To see further, stand on giants.

I’ve hit a snag with the Foundation Series. It reads like crap.

I’m still wobbly on what I ought to say so I default to obfuscation. Orwell said it best, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”…

Christopher Alexander in an interview with Kenneth Baker:

“If you start something, you must have a vision of the thing which arises from your instinct about preserving and enhancing what is there. … If you’re working correctly,

…

Every new seat at the power table must weather the intense scrutiny of all ordained power holders.

Perched precariously between a growing power holder and the ensconced, legacy power holders – every neophyte endures just one important question: Are…

To get inside with a power holder: see where they are vulnerable.

To see where they are vulnerable: stop watching them.

Just as you stopped watching the speaker, now stop watching the obvious power holder. Hiding behind a quiet…

The fledgling power holder is continually distracted by the need to build more.

That’s why they’re so negligent. They are looking way up above them and don’t see what’s happening where they are. This leaves them vulnerable, though they usually…

Debt is easier to generate than equity. This is as true for corporate-types as it is for entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs always max out their lines of credit. Max out yours.

In this case your credit is bandwidth. The time and resources…

The first job of every entrepreneur or corporate dilettante is to know your banker.

The mistake made by entrepreneurs is assuming their key resource is ideas. And corporate-types always mistakenly assume it’s knowledge.

For entrepreneurs the key resource is…

How being exclusive creates wide-ranging success.

Just finished reading Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

I enjoyed the book. One of the entrepreneurs I work with, the career coach,…

Top seven steps to the important art of pitching ideas.

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…