There’s a school of thinking out there that it is important to fail. I can’t agree more. Mistakes are more memorable than successes and often have more complete lessons to learn. But sometimes failure leads to a person getting beaten up all the time. And the process of beating them up leads them to become…
Just Deliver
Two words. Just deliver. If you can’t do that then get out of the way because you’re going to slow the rest of us back. And when it’s time for us to deliver we aren’t going to slow down for you.
Copying can be a really good thing.
Let’s say that you are a real estate broker. Now let’s say that you have started losing a disproportionate amount of work to the guy across the street. Now let’s pretend that you can pinpoint some new online tool he started using as the reason why he’s winning. What do you do next? If you…
Value creation versus value capture.
Was over reading some thoughts from Fred Wilson at AVC. Somehow I’d never really captured the O’Reilly Doctrine the right way: Create more value than you capture. That should be the mission of every business out there. If you aren’t creating value for someone what the hell are you doing in business? If you aren’t…
Been way too quiet around here….yeah, I know.
So apparently blogs still don’t have the ability to write themselves. I’m really going to have to submit a feature request to WordPress about that. How handy would it be to simply have an app that replicates a post you’d be likely to make given your influences and post topics…..now that’s something intriguing. But anyway….
The flaws inherent in business logic.
Most recognize the importance of separating business and personal. Just because someone is tough to work with doesn’t mean they don’t make an excellent person to hang with after hours. Same goes for vendors or clients or anyone else. It’s important to focus on the context that we are dealing with someone in. It’s that…
Culture and how sometimes people just don’t fit.
I answered a LinkedIn question the other day on the topic of what’s more important: that they have knowledge or talent. The answer to this drives to the heart of your group’s culture. Some groups are driven by the sheer intelligence of their members, such as startups founded by several PhDs that simply can move…
The tried and true is a long and lonely road these days.
With all the talk of innovation (and sometimes I lead the charge) it’s easy to forget that there’s a reason clients like some grey hair across the table from them. Experience means that you’ve been there, done that. You know what can go right, but most importantly you know what can go wrong. Innovation leads…
Do whatever is you.
You know what one of the easiest ways to shortcut someone respecting you is? Being inconsistent. When you become what other people want you to be it’s difficult to keep that mantle of “who you are” up all the time. Especially if it changes from situation to situation. It’s easy for us to fall into…
Sometimes confusion really isn’t your friend
Seems obvious, right? But a lot of us go into meetings and intentionally try to take it in different directions (i.e. differentiate from others). Our goal at the start is to be different. What happens when everyone tries to be different though? The guy who walked in and just talked about what the client needed…