Subsidizing Startups Does Not Produce Entrepreneurs
While subsidizing entrepreneurs may produce startups, subsidizing startups will not produce entrepreneurs.
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Rules of Thumb
The Benefits of Collaborative Writing, Interviewing, and Improvisation
Our collaborative writing approach has no backstage: clients see our ugly early first drafts, but this “wiki style” collaboration allows rapid iteration.
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Joel Mokyr on Creative Forces and Cardwell’s Law
Cardwell’s Law (named for British historian Donald Cardwell): every society, when left on its own, will be technologically creative for only short periods. I explore the implications for Silicon Valley and for entrepreneurs.
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Howard Tullman on Distinguishing Mistakes From Failure
Howard Tullman outlines the important distinction between mistakes and failure: mistakes are intrinsic to risk-taking and learning, failure is when you give up.
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“Sharing My Practice” Discussion with CPSquare: Intro
In May of this year I was invited to take part in a month long group discussion on CPSquare where my consulting practice was the focus. This is the introductory statement I posted to explain a little bit about my background and what I do. Intro I worked in Electronic Design Automation on board, chip,
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Slides and Audio From “Leading A Team of Experts” at PMI-SV Sep-17-12
Slides and Audio From “Forming Leading A Team of Experts” at Project Management Institute of Silicon Valley on Sep-17-2012. Audio includes a lively discussion.
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De Tocqueville on Concept of “Self-Interest Rightly Understood”
Insights from De Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” chapter on “How Americans Combat Individualism by the Principle of Self-Interest Rightly Understood”
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Ben Kaufman on “What Raising Money Means”
Raising money is never the goal. The goal is building a successful and meaningful business. Raising money is one path to building a viable business
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Scott Sambucci: Seven Tips For Selling as a Startup Founder
Scott Sambucci wrote a great book on selling entitled “Startup Selling: How to Sell If You Really, Really Have to and Don’t Know How.”
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Neal Stephenson on Distinguishing Different Motives for Hypocrisy
You can fail to live up to your espoused beliefs due to hypocrisy or because the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. The difference is an important distinction and one with implications for the example you set in establishing the culture in a startup. Is there one set of rules that everyone strives
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Neal Stephenson on the Importance of Culture
Two excerpts from Neal Stephenson‘s “The Diamond Age” on the importance of culture of a startup or an economic region. These are from pages 24 and 25 and outlines two real life events as a part of the back story of one of the characters in the novel, hyperlinks have been added to provide context.
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Working Day and Night
It’s less about working day and night than working on the right things. I used to determine when I needed a break by when I was too sick to work. It’s an effective stopping rule but not particularly well thought out.
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Debugging Your Startup Requires Peace of Mind
Debugging your startup requires peace of mind because debugging any problem, including debugging yourself, requires peace of mind. It’s what enables you to stay in flow.
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Marcelo Rinesi: The Expertise Light Speed Barrier
Marcelo Rinesi writes on the implications of the “expertise light speed barrier” of ten years of focused practice to become an expert. He observes that if “we manage to defeat the ‘expertise light speed barrier’ and find ways to teach and learn much more effective than anything before, it would have an astounding impact on
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Verify Your Market Insights Against A Variety of Information Sources
While we stress the value of serious conversations with prospects and customers there are other sources of market insights on emerging opportunities for your current product or next offering. I have placed them on a spectrum that runs from a macroscopic view based on objective measurements and numbers to a microscopic view that is more
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Enterprise Change Agents Need to Add Process Mining to Their Bag of Tricks
Today many change initiatives (and new software sales almost always involve the key elements of a change initiative) rely on interviews and replicating the results from an existing “manual system.” Process mining tools and techniques will play an important role here.
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The Heart That Holds On
Entrepreneurship is sustained by what’s in your heart and a childlike curiosity toward how the world works and new undiscovered possibilities.
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How to Tell When Your Team Has a Workable Plan of Action
One key technique for determining whether you have a workable plan of action is to conduct a premortem, a review of possible sources of failure in advance with a goal to avoid them, or at least reduce their impact and likelihood of occurring.
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Are You Using Cognitive Task Analysis for New Market Exploration?
Review of key elements of Cognitive Task Analysis–Knowledge Elicitation, Analysis, and Knowledge Representation–with applications to market exploration. Are You Using Cognitive Task Analysis for New Market Exploration? I am interested in talking with anyone who is using Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) or Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) methods and paradigms to inform their customer interviews. I
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Your Prospects and Your Customers are Real People
Your Prospects and Your Customers are Real People I’m hardly the first person to complain about the word “user” to describe people who do stuff with software…People don’t think of themselves as “users” and in all other contexts the word “user” is not generally positive and certainly not evocative of the kind of intimate, day-to-day
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