Mark Graban gave a great talk at last year’s Lean Startup Week on how to avoid wasting your time–and your team’s time–looking for meaning in normal fluctuation. Here are some highlights.

This blog post is an overview of a series of blog posts on “The Shape of Firms to Come.” It’s an attempt to outline what I believe are key values that businesses will embrace to endure over the next 25 years.

Safia Abdalla (@captainsafia) wrote a list of 24 “Things I Learned in 2017.” Here are ten that really resonated with me.

Peter Drucker has suggested that businesses organize their abandonment of business and practices that they never would have started doing if they knew when they start what they know now. This is my effort at 2018 renunciations for SKMurphy, Inc and in my personal life.

It’s not uncommon for an entrepreneur to feel stuck in low gear, falling behind both the competition and their own plans for progress. Here are some suggestions for how to keep calm and carry on.

A reasoned rule approach is a good first step to managing decisions that fall into common patterns or cases. You identify six to eight variables that are distinct and obviously impact the outcome of the case and normalize them into standard scores that can then be added or averaged to create a summary score.

Morgan Housel (@morganhousel) documented ten insights in “What I Believe Most” (July 5, 2017), here are my top four that I think are the most useful advice for bootstrapping entrepreneurs.

There are few–if any–real secrets to entrepreneurial success. Most entrepreneurial secrets are hiding in plain sight, available to anyone who keeps their eyes and ears open and is willing to ask questions.

It’s not uncommon for a startup’s offering to evolve from service to system integration to product. Here is an explanation for the reasons and benefits.

Key product management lessons learned extracted from two blog posts by John P. Cutler: “50 Things I’ve Learned About Product Management” and “Feedback Loops and Done.“

A focus on inefficiencies is a good method to find a underserved market where you can bootstrap you way to viability. Here is a list of several others.

How do you answer someone who asks “Should I be an entrepreneur?”

Max Gunther’s “The Zurich Axioms” is aimed at investors but also offers valuable insights and rules of thumb for entrepreneurs.

Silicon Valley startup culture embraces hard work, but some entrepreneurs fall into the trap of working long hours as an end in itself. With no limits on the workday, Parkinson’s Law warns that work will simply take over your life.

When Cyberspace everts into the real world enabling communication and connection for non-computing related applications we call it IoT (the Internet of Things).

Fundamental questions allow you to explore new perspectives that can unlock new opportunities. Entrepreneurs can be unwilling to ask them–even of themselves–because a label that is commonly applied: stupid questions.

If you are a startup founder you are very likely spending an hour or two a day reading and writing email. Some days it may seem that you spend most of your time responding to emails from prospects, customers, partners, cofounders, service providers, and spammers. 

Here  are some questions to ask yourself before you start negotiating a complex business relationship: for example a software license, SaaS subscription, or a reseller or OEM relationship. Entire books are written on negotiation, I am trying to highlight some questions that can get overlooked.

A review of some remarks by Vinod Khosla on “Silicon Valley Vision” in 2012 and the value of youth from the Nasscom conference in November 2011. I contrast that with an earlier article by Jim Collins on “Built to Flip.”

I like getting up early and arriving early. But I find the hours late at night can unlock a lot of creativity so I often get up late unless I schedule something early. I also like working up to the last possible moment–what is it about the last few minutes before you have to leave that are so productive–that I arrive late. Starting from myself as someone with good intentions but poor follow through here are some observations and suggestions for getting up early and arriving early.