Posted 10 months ago Comments
“Too often students are given answers to remember, rather than problems to solve.
Robert Lewin
(via david)
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Posted 10 months ago Comments
“When we work hard on something we believe in, it’s called passion. When we work hard on something we don’t believe in, it’s called stress
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Posted 10 months ago Comments
Truth!
If large companies are serious about innovation, they need to pick the right staff to lead the process and then put a fire under them, Pollenizer co-founder Phil Morle says, on the eve of the technology incubator holding its first course for entrepreneurs within companies.
To create new products or profitable business units, employees need to work in environments where there are limits on resources and “the fear of not getting there on time”, he says.
“It’s not going to work if it feels like they’re going to work every day and getting paid,” he adds.
Teams working on a project need a deadline and should work separately to the rest of the organisation for a period.
“They have to be able to configure the business [opportunity] so that it can be sold to your competitor,” Morle says. “That’s what makes the most value.”
The technology start-up incubator hopes to impart this wisdom to executives that participate in its new academy. The first five-week course starts in July and aims to help corporate executives be more entrepreneurial.
Morle says executives have a deep understanding of their businesses and can pull levers to “increase margins and performance” but without a more entrepreneurial approach, large companies risk becoming “irrelevant”.
“They need new products,” he says. “The world is moving so fast, start-ups are appearing all over the place at a rapid rate.
“Pollenizer is getting 50 ideas a week coming in, which are all trying to take a little piece of somebody else’s business. Unless companies are doing the same thing, eventually someone is going to eat their lunch.
“[The alternative scenario is that] 10 small start-ups will come together to form a better experience overall than what the [established companies] are doing. Media companies are greatly feeling this.”
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Posted 11 months ago Comments
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Albert Einstein
Ain’t that the truth!
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Posted 11 months ago Comments
“The institutional structure of the United States is under stress. We might be in dangerous economic straits if the dollar were not the principal international reserve currency and the eurozone in deep fiscal trouble. We have a huge public debt, dangerously neglected infrastructure, a greatly overextended system of criminal punishment, a seeming inability to come to grips with grave environmental problems such as global warming, a very costly but inadequate educational system, unsound immigration policies, an embarrassing obesity epidemic, an excessively costly health care system, a possible rise in structural unemployment, fiscal crises in state and local governments, a screwed-up tax system, a dysfunctional patent system, and growing economic inequality that may soon create serious social tensions. Our capitalist system needs a lot of work to achieve proper capitalist goals.
With the financial fiasco continuing in Europe, I have been catching up on my economic literature of late.
In terms of tying together the various threads that interest me - from policy to technology, and the law to the economy - this excerpt from Richard Posner’s judgment on the Apple-Google case and America’s “dysfunctional” patent system pretty much sums things up.
(via fred-wilson)
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Posted 11 months ago Comments
True dat, Seth
I don’t think winners beat the competition because they work harder. And it’s not even clear that they win because they have more creativity. The secret, I think, is in understanding what matters.
It’s not obvious, and it changes. It changes by culture, by buyer, by product and even by the day of the week. But those that manage to capture the imagination, make sales and grow are doing it by perfecting the things that matter and ignoring the rest.
Both parts are difficult, particularly when you are surrounded by people who insist on fretting about and working on the stuff that makes no difference at all.
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Posted 1 year ago Comments
“But here’s the truth: most companies can’t innovate because everyone is paid to maintain the status quo.
This is the single biggest reason companies fail to do anything new or exciting. You and everyone else are maxed out making sure your company is doing what it’s supposed to do; innovation is what the weekends are for.
This is the single biggest reason companies fail to do anything new or exciting. You and everyone else are maxed out making sure your company is doing what it’s supposed to do; innovation is what the weekends are for.
I endorse this statement. Every little thing about it, in fact.
If your employees are stretched to the point that they never get to be creative or dabble outside their typical day-to-day, you risk not only losing a valuable player, but also falling behind in business.
(via dwellman)
