New Years Eve is always a time for optimism. I hope to learn from my experiences in 2015 and to make new mistakes in 2016 instead of repeating the old ones. I hope to build on the skills I nurtured and insights I gained this year.

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Retrospectives, Post Mortems, and After Action Reviews

The end of year is always a good time to look back and assess what you have accomplished and what you have learned doing so. This goes by several names: retrospectives, post mortems, and after action reviews being the most common. If you kept a copy of the goals you set for yourself for the year, comparing that list with your list of accomplishments may offer further opportunities for insight.

Christmas afternoon finds me reading “Courtesy.” It’s an essay by Ian MacLaren (pen name for Scottish author and theologian John Watson) that offers a recipe for keeping the spirit of Christmas alive in daily life. Here are some excerpts I found useful, the last finds me still clearly in the “before picture.”

No man is a failure who has friends. Clarence’s parting observation to George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” is good advice for all of us on Christmas Eve. Watching  “It’s A Wonderful Life” has become a Christmas tradition in our family in recent years: it’s one of the few black and white movies my boys will watch. And tonight was no exception.  

Moore’s Law and the rise of cloud computing models that enable collaboration in networks of up to hundreds of thousands of individual CPUs on a single algorithm mean that old algorithms can find new applications and address much larger problems. I believe that this will have as profound an impact on knowledge work over the next two decades as the personal computer did transforming clerical jobs in the 80’s and 90’s.

We are as excited by eMOBUS’ recent acquisition by  Asentinel, a leading provider of lifecycle Technology and Telecom Expense Management (TEM) solutions. It is wonderful to see all their hard work payoff. Congratulations team!

Another time capsule post: this one is an archive of a profile I had on the UnderTheOak wiki in the early 2000’s that was maintained by Matt Simpson (wiki now offline).

Scott Robertson had a great post up last month on how to make content marketing work: be relevant, be different, be real, be useful, and be consistent. Here are some excerpts along with additional thoughts and commentary.

Curiosity, experimentation and action are essential to moving your business forward.  I have selected a few aphorisms by Beston Jack Abrams from his self-published third volume of  “Abramisms” on these and related topics that I think are of use to entrepreneurs.

Only ask your customers for referrals, don’t jump the gun and ask prospects to recommend you, especially if they have not even had a chance to use your product.

Two critical aspects of any plan are risk identification and assessment, but if a team stops there and does not modify the plan to mitigate as much of the risk as possible then it’s pointless. Risk mitigation is what allows you to build a sustainable and enduring business.