Cultivating Calmness in a Crisis
To prepare for a contentious meeting I read Russell Ackoff‘s “The Art of Problem Solving,” over an early breakfast to cultivate calmness in a crisis.
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skmurphy
One Google Hiring Policy Startups Should Avoid
Don’t imitate Google: there are many criteria to consider in a hiring policy for a sales person, but college GPA has to be one of the least useful indicators of future success.
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Silicon Valley: Not as Nuts as 99…Yet
So we are starting to pump a little hot air back into the bubble every week now. The streets of Silicon Valley witness young entrepreneurs looking for department store Santas venture capitalists to listen to their list of needs and make their dreams come true. It’s “not as nuts as 99” but not as sane,
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Founder Story: Acquisition Integration at 60 days
We have been doing some joint projects with Ann Marcus recently, who is a real pleasure to work with, and a very effective interviewer. She sat down last month with the CEO of a recently acquired software firm, who has asked to remain anonymous due to the candor of his remarks. There are some real lessons here for any startup
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“Crucial Marketing Concepts for Consultants” @ PATCA May 10
I will be presenting a revised and improved version of the “12 Books for the Busy CEO” presentation on Thursday May 10 at 6pm at the PATCA monthly dinner at the Embassy Suites Santa Clara – Silicon Valley on 2885 Lakeside Drive in Santa Clara. I will cover a dozen books and offer a synthesis of the key marketing
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Is DodgeBall Duo’s Departure A Harbinger For JotSpot Wunderkinder?
Barbara Darrow (Unblog) April 16 entry was by Stacy Cowley “Dodgeball Founders Defect From, Take Shots At, Google” Google’s habit of acquiring promising startups and then disappearing them into the Googleplex Vortex is no secret — it left Blogger to languish for years, and closed Web 2.0 wunderkinds JotSpot (wikis) and Measure Map (blog traffic
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ASIC Design Starts Dropping: Implications for EDA
I attended a very thought provoking talk tonight on “Factors Influencing IC Design Starts and Future Revenues” by Bryan Lewis and John Barber of Gartner at the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the IEEE Components, Packaging & Manufacturing Technology Society. Bryan and John declined to make their slides available but I was able to crib this chart
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Getting Early Feedback
Getting early customer feedback is critical to fine tuning your product so that you can scale up. The temptation is to use a on-line survey tool to save your time, but I think for your early customers a questionnaire may only give you the answers that you are looking for, not the information that you need.
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Ten Tips for Leveraging Blogs and Wikis in Your Consulting Practice
Is my topic this Thursday, February 15, at 7:00 PM, at the IEEE-CNSV meeting at KeyPoint Credit Union, 2805 Bowers Ave., Santa Clara, CA. The event is free. I will cover a number of practical suggestions for using blogs to promote a consulting practice and wikis to foster project team collaboration against a deadline. Blogs and
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Recipes For Longevity in “Mutual Improvement Clubs”
Another excerpt from William Feather’s “The Business of Life” From page 262, an entry entitled “A Conservative Club.” More than forty-five years ago a group of men…organized a club for men of common intellectual interest. It was agreed that the membership would be limited to thirty, and that twelve meetings would be held each year
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William Feather on “Perseverance Rewarded”
In “Perseverance Rewarded” William Feather offers some good advice for getting started. Many folks succeed because they don’t realize how hard it is to accomplish what they have set out to do (of course several orders of magnitude more fail).
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More from William Feather’s “The Business of Life”
Six quotes from William Feather’s “The Business of Life” offer practical business wisdom from a successful publisher.
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Thinking About Your Business Goals for 2007
Thinking About Your Business Goals We went through a brief planning exercise with our clients, and some prospective clients, that several found useful. Since it’s not not too late to do some planning for 2007, here are a few questions that should answer on a single piece of paper (perhaps even a 3×5 card you can carry with you)
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Ser Hou Kuang & Sean Murphy Granted US Patent 7162706 B2
Ser Hou Kuang & Sean Murphy Granted US Patent #7162706 B2 for “Method for Analyzing and Validating Clock Integration Properties in Circuit Systems” on January 9, 2007. Abstract: A method for analyzing and validating clock integration properties in a circuit design is disclosed. A database of timing points that are clocked cell elements of the
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Paul Saffo “Best Strategy is Ready, Fire, Steer”
Eight quotes by Paul Saffo on how technology is re-shaping organization design and strategic thinking in both commercial and military realms.
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People Manage People, Tools Manage Data
This was a principle for systems design suggested in a talk I heard 15-20 years ago. I can no longer remember the speaker’s name but I remember that he was in the disk drive business. Google has proven unavailing in sourcing it so it was probably an original insight with this engineer that hasn’t gained wider
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Six From Encyclopedia Neurotica
Jon Winokur has published a number of good books, including “The Portable Curmudgeon” and “Advice to Writers,” and was interviewed September 2006 by Guy Kawasaki, which prompted me to add his most recent, “Encyclopedia Neurotica” to my Amazon cart (where books can linger for months or years). I was frankly a little disappointed, but found
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Tips for Hiring (and Firing) a Sales Person
I had the good fortune to attend the SVASE CXO Forum Dec-6-06 where Peter Bakonyvari, Vice President of Sales at JPMorgan SymPro, explored some of the practical realities in building a sales team. In particular what is involved in hiring and firing a sales person. First 90 days Is Critical Bakonyvari’s made the point that the first 90 days
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Iterating Towards Bethlehem: Michael Sippey at SVPMA 8/2/2006
Michael Sippey’s original title for his August 2, 2006 talk at SVPMA was “Iterating Towards Bethlehem” was changed to a less cryptic Making the Shift From Being a Packaged Software Person to Being a Hosted Services Person. The original title was a riff on Yeats’ Slouching Towards Bethlehem (not the Joan Didion book or the
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June 2006 SDForum Interview
I was interviewed in June 2006 by Barbara Cass, Volunteer Director for the SDForum, the final text appeared in the July/August 2006 newsletter (see page 15 of the PDF version). I have updated it here to add links for many of the referenced works and the quotes. KV Rao and I did a one year
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