Category: Leadership
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The Naïveté of Dogma
The world is more complex than any of us can fully understand, so we simplify. Often times, our simplifications lead us toward dogmatic solutions; plans that will allow us to solve the worlds problems if only the world would dramatically change by adopting them. It becomes easier to advocate full government payment for health care, or abolishing…
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Positive and Negative Goals: Reframe the Goal for Success
Sometime ago when the startup I was working for went through a tough time, our VC gave me some sage advice: Stay focused on staying in the air and not on avoiding the trees. If a pilot is in distress and starts focusing on not crashing into the trees, the trees become the target. Our…
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The What and The Why
Compared to a decade ago, it’s ridiculously easy to start a new web business these days. There are a number of platforms and free software that can be used to quickly create a piece of software without seeking any additional funding. But as Michael Gerber points out in the E-myth: just because one knows how…
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The Way It’s Supposed to Be Done
Tom Sawyer may have been ingenious converting whitewashing fences into play, but when he is trying to help Huckleberry Finn free a slave he represents the establishment. For those that don’t know the story, here is a quick overview: Huck and Jim are running away. Huck from his father, Jim from slavery. Eventually Jim is…
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Too Many Things To-Do
Sometime ago I heard David Allen speak on Getting Things Done (GTD). I’ve since read both of his books and his system is pretty good – keep sets of lists that have everything that you need to get done. When something new pops in your head, write it down. Clear out the accumulating piles of…
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Perpetual Indecision
Remember “The Blob“? The alien creature that consumed everything it touched; it grew with each object consumed, thereby consuming even more. This beast exists in the middle of many organizations. Not as a physical creature, but as the blob of ambiguity. Using meetings and politics, it slowly covers even the most decisive of employees with…
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Live with the Pain
This week I was talking to a guy who had been the CEO of a previous startup; we talked about the ideas I wrote about last week, and he made a couple of additional observations that I thought worth sharing. When he was CEO, he realized that the number of problems he was going to…
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What “Fail Fast, Fail Often” Means
What if we have so many customers knocking down our door that we can’t support them all? What if our support is so bad, they never come back? We should build our company and technology for that day, just in case. This hypothesis keeps companies overbuilding their product for an eventuality that will probably never…
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The Know Nothing
In a study, participants were asked to estimate something about their own ability. They overestimated. Others were told that statistically every person overestimates their ability, then they were asked to make the estimate. They still overestimated their ability, BY THE SAME AMOUNT. In other words, they told themselves, “Yes, other people don’t think clearly about…
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Blind Spots
All of us have a blind spot where our optic nerve exits the eye. So why do we not have a floating black spot in front of our eye? Because our eye covers over and fills that area, so that we can’t see the gap. We are blind to our own blind spots. (If you’ve…