Posts tagged “entrepreneurism”
Overview of Business+Strategy Posts
This category covers issues in business and strategy for entrepreneurs, SMEs and large corporations.
When awkward is best
For small companies, awkwardness is an oft unappreciated asset.
Creating tailor-made companies
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.
Synchronizing greatness
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:
“……
Invite and inspire brilliance
How do we invite brilliant people to try and fail quickly, over and over again, in very small ways?
Up on a soapbox
When do we get to play? Why does brilliance need an excuse?
I am …
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…
Creative execution
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…
Killed by ninjas
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…
Intentions
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.
Breeder wanted
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…
People first. Marketers … later.
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.”…
Yes (and other lies): Know thy enemy
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…
Dollars and scents: Bagging the loot
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…
Dollars and scents: Picking the lock
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…
Dollars and scents: Debt and investing
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…
Dollars and scents: Know your banker
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…
You&Co: Foundation Series
I’d like to start working through some parallels between entrepreneurs and corporate/bureaucratic types.
Before extending the role of any aspiring corporate player, there’s something to be said about the foundation that it’s built on — a common paradigm needs to…
You & Company
I’ve been thinking about the things corporate salary-type folks could learn from entrepreneurs. It’s actually an old idea of mine … not really an idea I guess … more of a recognition — entrepreneurs have lots to teach innovators within…
sift experiment … evolved
[posted January 16, 2006]
Below is the purpose I had for sift when I started this experiment.
I’m still all in on those ideas but I think the purpose is quickly evolving away from purely entrepreneurs and purely business. Just…
How to get paid more
Here’s a chore: Define what you’re worth for a day.
Don’t turtle and say it’s your wage; or if you’re an entrepreneur, what you pull down — you’ll miss too much.
Include your thought time, all the stuff you decide…
Integral to strategy
Strategy is a mindful, present response to hope.
The difference between hope and strategy: hope is a prerequisite to strategy but not a sufficient condition. Action is also required but also insufficient. The equation must also include…
In every entrepreneur
In the heart of every entrepreneur is an island.
The saddest things I’ve done, as an investor, is convice an entrepreneur the island isn’t there.
Swear as necessary
[All technical words italicized for easy skimming]
I’m no plumber but I like to pretend sometimes. In our new house the tub’s hot water tap leaks (leaked, past tense began 3 minutes ago). And feigning competency I decided to solve…
Three ingredients in a leader
Beyond bellowing bunters and mussed hair, what makes a good leader? Who draws in the cash when everyone else is furiously writing proposals?
Three must-haves: trustworthy, deeply knowledgeable, and all-in.
1. Being trustworthy covers a multitude of sins. A mistake…
I’d rather talk about $1 Million
Back to perfect, one million one-dollar products vs. one million dollar products, and all these entail:
- - the kind of client
- - the kind of product
- - the kind of work
- - the kind of peers
- - etc.
In…
Skeleton of a plan
Johnie Moore on Hugh on marketing:
1. The tone of invitation. No hard sell, just the presentation of an interesting idea to take or leave as you please. No grandiose posturing.
2. The sprit of experiment. Selling isn’t
…
Blackjack & entrepreneurs
In the theme of all things gamble — Steve Pavlina on blackjack:
Novices miss golden opportunities.
“Novice blackjack players will almost invariably play their hands too conservatively. They’ll stand too often when they should hit, and
…
Usable you
Keith thinks it’s a great read for consultants — I think it’s a great read for entrepreneurs.
With exploding personal networks, niche-marketing, and tribal companies entrepreneurs need to starting acting…
VC without the C
I’ve been given several great career options recently. Two were particularly fetching:
1. Stay in government but raise the game to another level — Start helping the highest level bureaucrats identify, learn about, and build strategies on long-range issues facing…
In defense of free
If you are an entrepreneur, you need to pay attention to this post.
There is open source business like the business experiment and then there is open door business like Google, Red Hat, and Flickr —…
Science’s remaining opportunities
Science has posted 125 big questions that remain to be answered. 25 of them are described in some detail.
“It is not a survey of the big societal challenges that science can help solve, nor is it a
…
Forgetting to remember
I love used bookstores; the messier the better. The owner can’t possibly know the value of all the books when they’re piled willy-nilly around the joint. I feel like a thief, pawing through the dark corners, earnestly listening for the…
Convergence or perfect
I just spent three weeks in Alberta with my wife’s family. While we were there her grandmother passed away. At and after the funeral we spent a lot of time marveling at the impact of that little lady’s life. …
Shifting gears
I used to plant trees in the summer to put myself through university. It’s tough work but it pays well.
Tree planting is one of those few jobs that are so hard, so miserable, and so deeply testing that…
Incentives and idea generation
This is fun stuff. Olivier Toubia, a Ph.D. candidate at the Marketing Group (MIT) has an article on Idea Generation, Creativity, and Incentives.
He writes:
“Idea generation is critical … However, there has been relatively little formal research
…
Designing viruses
This article is a really tight overview of the principles of design.
I just keep saying this over and over but: designers have lots to teach entrepreneurs.
Design works because it’s a natural interface with the ways we…
Free up time, use your brain
A friend just handed me a chapter from Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline. In it Peter writes:
“At one of our recent programs, I talked to a manger who has worked in both U.S. and
…
Entrepreneurs are like scientists
Last Fall I bought a copy of Seed magazine to read their piece on Revolutionary Minds: 18 icons and iconoclasts who are redefining science. The story on mathematician, Erik Demaine, tattooed itself on my mind and…
Love and meekness
There are two aspects of business that are immeasurably important but poorly understood. These are meekness and love.
Two of the companies I work with pay me to “think on their behalf – about the company’s strategic direction.” Know what…
Toilet paper syndrome
So, I’ve got a baby right? And like nearly every other adult on the planet I’m always putting my face about one inch from his cute little nose.
When I’m with him, I’m always right up close and when…
Blue Ocean Strategy
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,…
What do you want to read?
Ok, I’m back.
During the break — in between changing diapers, burping babies and battling a wicked cold, I’ve been thinking about this blog. What’s it for? Who cares? What now?
I asked a few months ago who was reading…
Doula for start-ups
We used a labour coach. Maybe your company needs one too?
Abductive thinking — not about kidnapping
I love design, even if my vanilla background and black text don’t prove it. In grade five I discovered that Ms. Faulkner gave A’s for illustrated stories and B’s for the plain text version. By 13 I knew that ladies…
60-second pitch: The three biggest mistakes
This is the last of three street-level bits of advice on pitch giving. Previously covered are 10 points for outlining your pitch and the first 10 seconds of the 60 second pitch. The three mistakes discussed…
Put the pitch together
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…
Business book list for entrepreneurs
An aggregated, curated list of business books.
13+ questions for pitchers
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 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… 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 –… 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… 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… 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… 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,… 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 apply to… 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, … 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… 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… 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… 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… When I was in graduate school I read an article describing the innovation methods of a successful entrepreneur. He keeps a hate list. It’s a list of everything he and his friends hate with all the violence of a bang-your-knuckles-when-your-wrench-slips… Two days ago I sat down for lunch with a new friend. He recently gave up a secure job for a chance to do something new and more challenging. He’s has a lot more experience than me in almost every… Found on Bnoopy: a discussion of the Scotsdale Paradox. Scotsdale was a high ranking US officer captured and imprisoned during the Vietnam War. He said the first to die in the prison were the optimists. They… Intellectual entrepreneurship is hard to understand – the key is hiding it inside practical entrepreneurship. I watched this video clip a few minutes ago and immediately decided it is important. It just isn’t clear why. Here’s where I’m at so far: This guy, James Jones, has made a triple play on valuable of information.… 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 reminds me of… It sells not just because TED is cool but getting to see that guy and see TED and see the people raving is way more persuasive than reading about it. How expensive could it be… I’ve worked with several entrepreneurs. It surprised me to realize how few of them write well. Writing well would come in handy on a blog – of course. But writing emails, presentations, proposals, and business plans each require a steady… I followed the crowd of slavering Hugh fans to Creating Passionate Users cause, you know, I want to be cool too. Blind enthusiasm is being replaced by a healthy criticism of Hugh’s, and now Kathy’s, arguments. Headlines like… Hugh has a good post on the “ignorance premium.” He’s arguing that the fat bank of ignorance marketing is shrinking as other economies come online. I’d say he’s bang-on. This ticket is losing value – but I doubt… Today’s National Post reports that half of Canada’s 2.5 million entrepreneurs are hoping to retire in the next 15 years. A whopping 500,000 plan to retire in the next five years. That’s nearly half of Canada’s small business owners… Make the pool bigger. Look out, not in. Look in the dark, not the light. 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… 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 …
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… 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… 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… I live in Ottawa. Today President Bush came to visit. H-O-L-Y C-O-W! Cops: everywhere. Helicopters and airplanes all over the place. Super cool snipers sneaking around rooftops. Dogs, barricades, security checks, blinders, tents to get in and out of cars,… One of my clients helps people make career decisions and he’s great at it. He’s also a great entrepreneur. A few years ago he was a top 40 under 40 entrepreneur. Two nights ago we were draining glasses in… In Davidson’s analysis, the subjects were given more than enough pieces to… Research says people of average intelligence benefit from help when solving problems requiring insight. Unless entrepreneurs are bright across the board, this suggests sift is verifiably relevant. In “The Further Reaches of Human Nature” Maslow starts the trend of naming, knighting, trademarking words. He toys with new names for metacounseling: helping people reach their full human potential. For size he tries “ontogogy” which means trying to help… Teach people to listen to their own tastes. Most people don’t do it. Nicholas Negroponte is founder of MediaLab and one of the founders of Wired. In a recent interview he described the evolving direction of MediaLab: “The biggest criticism I hear is, ‘Nicholas, you’re not crazy … The current state of Russia’s scientific community is a brilliant study of the power of purpose driven (or lack of) enterprise. In the 2 September 2004 issue of Nature they’ve included a brief glimpse into the Russian Academy… In another article in the 2 September 2004 issue of Nature Gautam Desiraju describes the process through which he discovered the birth of crystal engineering which today is one of the principle challenges of modern chemistry. His story…Copy cat
Conditions of success
Frickin’ amazing vs. the long tail
What question lies at the heart of your work?
Information overload
Core Competency: Negotiation
Acquire, bond, learn and defend
Proportion
Business by numbers
Leeches and bullion
Checklist for entrepreneurs
Pure entrepreneurship
Stages of entrepreneurial growth
I hate this = $$$
Big little steps
Optimists die
Intellectual entrepreneurship
Info triple play
Forward sideways
TED sells like Leia
So, this sells.Barborous writing
Be instead of do.
Ignorance is bliss
Scratch this niche
Principles for innovation
John Moore and JumboShrimp
Little global giants
Entrepreneurial perspective on change
Blinking at the crowd
Wheelbarrow: The wisdom of blinking
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…sift deliverables
Open letter to entrepreneurs
Machine guns are to Google as _______ are to profit
Entrepreneurial “how to”
Who’s an ox?
I think I missed my own point last night. The sift experiment isn’t about finding bright answers. It’s about finding the right pieces. Not Einstein? Use sift.
Ontogogy = sift
Potent principles
Lunacy for hire
Valuable knowledge is useful
Madness & curiosity