Finding Clarity in an Ambiguous World
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
The Beach Vendor Sales Cycle
There are certain fundamentals of business that can be observed in almost any environment. Today, at the beach in Manzanillo, Mexico, a wide variety of vendors walked passed us, each selling wares that were quite varied: donuts, candies, mangos, tamales, blankets, wooden statues, bathing suits, jewelry, temporary tattoos, and even rubber chickens. All day long…
-
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…
-
Aligning Incentives: Preferred vs Common Stock
An investor friend of mine posted on his blog this question: This week’s sign of tech bubble: multiple seed-stage startups demanding investors buy common stock instead of preferred. Thoughts? I have strong professional opinions on this and will draft a full blog post on the topic, but thought I’d crowdsource some input first… Every…
-
Contentment is not found in more
What makes someone rich? Being surrounded by a group of people who you love, of course. Though this really wasn’t what my friends and I were trying to actually posit by the question. We reworded it to: “What do others think that it takes in order to consider themselves rich?” Someone speculated that having a…
-
The Consequences of Price
On a fluke, I recently visited BlockBuster for the first time in 4 years. Between Netflix and Redbox, I never really consider renting a movie from the expensive brick and mortar place. Walking through the store, I could almost smell the death of their business. Their competitors have displaced them. Even though they’ve changed their…
Got any book recommendations?