Category: Leadership
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Small Is The New Big – VC Edition
One of the significant trends that is happening in business, is that the opportunity for people to create new small businesses that make a living but stay small is growing. The cost of distribution, the cost of creation, and the cost of reaching a small target audience are all approaching free. The ability for these…
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Fertile Fallacies
Recently while reading George Soros’ book on the Crash of 2008, he discusses something he calls “Fertile Fallacies” which I found quite interesting. The basic idea is that there is some knowledge that seems very true and early experiments in that information continue to confirm it’s veracity, but eventually the fallacy catches up with you…
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Focus Management
How many times has someone asked you about an action that you committed to and you responded: “I’m sorry. I haven’t had time to get to that yet”. Many of these tasks would take only 5 minutes or less to do, so are you really saying you didn’t have 5 minutes to perform this…
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Kings & Marketing To Perceived Desire
Earlier this spring, NBC announced a new show called “Kings”. They advertised it heavily, trying to build momentum for a show about what life might be like if we lived with a modern monarchy. I saw the ads and had little interest in watching (or even DVR’ing the show) and I wasn’t alone. The show…
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Target Your Customer Not The Public
Yesterday, my colleagues and friend sent out a link with the title: highly effective marketing. On top of being one of the best software architects I have ever worked with, my friend is also an avid guitarist and wood worker. I watched the video with zero knowledge of wood working and was shocked by the…
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Seeing Through The Facade
Everyone has a front, a facade, a face they put forward for the world to see. It’s how they want to be perceived by those around them. If the front differs from reality, reality will be discovered. This is particularly true with companies that have many customers who have a megaphone (i.e. the internet). You’ll…
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The Sandpaper Effect
There are many occasions where the first time something mildly annoying happens, we simply let it pass. It might even be novel or amusing, but gets increasingly less so as time passes. A joke that is told once is funny, second time, meh. Third, forth, fifth, sixth times it just gets increasingly annoying. The same…
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The Unsung Hero
Heroes are people that come to the rescue in the face of seemingly unavoidable disaster. The customer was going to kill the account, but the hero works all day and night to meed the deadline no one thought could be met. There is much celebration, the hero rides on the shoulders of his colleagues But…
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Diversification Mediocrity
I just read an insightful blog entry over at GigaOM on the Impact of Diversification on humans – namely that it leads to mediocrity. In a world, where people are increasingly focus limited, we end up either honing our focus on a specific investment or work, or we simply toss seeds wide because they can’t…
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How To Create Great Boards
[This was an essay on the blog, now turned into a post] The board is responsible for making sure that it fairly represents the shareholders interests in seeing the company move forward. Most of the articles talk about their being good governance techniques such as attendance, reviewing the material before the meeting, etc., that are…