Lesson of Cezanne & The Upcoming Disruption

There was a time when great art was about depicting things as close to what ...

Just How Powerful Are You?

By on April 30, 2012 in Entrepreneurship, Market Power, The Personal Story

When you write online, no one checks to see if you have a journalism degree before they start to read. If you experience an earthquake and want to report on its danger or safety, no one asks your credentials before you report to Ushahidi. And if you were interested a creating a new company, you [...]

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Resilient Organizations & Open Networks

By on April 23, 2012 in Market Power, Social

In Philip Auserwald’s recent book, The Coming Prosperity, he mentioned that open networks beat closed networks and larger networks beat smaller networks. As regular readers know, I’ve been talking about similar ideas in the fast/fluid/flexible series on business models. His set of ideas provoked me into asking a series of questions to and with Philip [...]

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Advice to Writers

By on April 17, 2012 in Entrepreneurship, The Personal Story

When I was in grad school, I had this habit to clean the house to avoid the act of studying. I would study with some amount of focus for 20 minutes, and then go scrub the tub and so on. Someone could have created a barometer of sorts for how near it was to Test [...]

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The Synergist; Valuing All the Roles

By on April 16, 2012 in Culture & Leadership

In his most recent book Les McKeown mentioned that work teams needed to include the three different roles of visionary, operator, and processor. I was struck by this set of definitions and how useful they are. In my own experience of working with teams, it seems that almost everyone values the role of visionary when [...]

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What defines scale?

By on April 11, 2012 in Market Power

In the past 100 years, we needed institutions to create scale. Firms provided us with a more efficient way to create value by lowering collaboration costs and increasing the access to information. Centralized firms enabled what individuals could not do on their own. One side effect, though, was that the customer became “out there”.  Also, [...]

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The Elastic Enterprise

By on April 9, 2012 in Market Power

I was recently connected to Haydn Shaughnessy, the Forbes columnist and E2.0 expert, who just wrote a book, called the Elastic Enterprise. In it, he mentioned that one of the main transformations that the elastic enterprise brings is a new form of scale. As you know I’ve written about this topic of scale in the [...]

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The Checklist for Changing the World

By on April 4, 2012 in Culture & Leadership

Most people think that ideas change the world. That’s not true. Ideas in our head do not create change. Ideas, co-created with others, fueled by the conviction of our hearts to do better, and then manifested in the real world – that is what creates change. We all have innumerable ideas. Some, of course are [...]

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What Replaces Marketing

By on April 4, 2012 in Market Power

During the last few months, I’ve been teaching and advising some students over at Stanford University on Entrepreneurial marketing (in a class taught by Chuck Eesley). My key thesis is that Marketing is Dead. In many ways, old news. And, the more helpful and less theatrical lesson: Marketing in the 21st century is always about [...]

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3 Books Well Worth-Reading

By on April 2, 2012 in Culture & Leadership

The Synergist A business book meant for the real-working leader, Les McKeown gives an intuitive model to allow anyone to lead. The notion is that every team needs a blend of visionary, an operator, and a processor. And the often invisible but crucial role that blends all these 3 is a synergist, able to find [...]

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Quiet: Understanding & Celebrating Introverts

By on March 29, 2012 in Culture & Leadership

The last few weeks I’ve been as limp as a lettuce leaf that had stayed a few weeks too long in the fridge. This is not unusual. It is what happens if / when I do back to back events / workshops/ etc. I end up putting so much energy into the world to be [...]

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