Author, Investor, Speaker, Mentor
Loyal readers: As you know, I’m a big fan of The Economist. Each December, I renew my subscription. It causes me a bit of pain, because it is so expensive, but it’s definitely worth it. This year, as I looked at the renewal form, I noticed that one of my options was to give a … Continue reading AiC Contest: Free Economist Subscription
Loyal reader Foobarista had a great comment on my recent post on capital efficiency: “Pay attention to the right spending. In a company I worked at, the CEO paid close attention to things like printer cartridge expenses and other office supplies while running up huge bills on unnecessary lawyer consultations and expensive “business consultants”.” When … Continue reading Make Sure You Consider Magnitude *and* Percentage
“We make a living based on what we get, and we make a life based on what we give.” –Winston Churchill “You manage things. You lead people.”–Stephen Covey
Whenever a boom comes around, I read articles about how it’s dangerous to be too cheap and too cautious. One saying I learned during the last boom was “You can’t save your way to prosperity.” Maybe. But as you start to hear the siren song of profligacy (last time, we called it “Get Big Fast”), … Continue reading In Praise of Capital Efficiency: How Being A Cheap Bastard Leads To Startup Success
One clear way to distinguish between a good organization and a bad one is to look at how it handles disagreement. The mark of a good organization is that disagreement leads to improvements in the business. The mark of a poor organization is that disagreement leads to a worsening in the business. In the chaos … Continue reading The Difference Between How Good and Bad Organizations Handle Disagreements
Since I don’t have the patience to reconstruct the elegant arguments of my lost post (including the careful and humorous references to Genghis Khan, The Princess Bride, football referees, and Dungeons and Dragons), I’m going to give it to you straight and raw. Rules are dangerous because outside of natural laws of physics and chemistry, … Continue reading Rules, Damned Rules, and Heuristics
Yet again, a browser failure has eaten one of my posts. And despite Google’s claim that Blogger now autosaves posts every minute, there is no sign of my lost post on “Rules, Damned Rules, and Statistics.” Screw you, Blogger. Alas, I lack Eric Sink’s technical dexterity and sheer cussedness to recover the post. Any bright … Continue reading Browser-Based Madness
According to the latest paper co-authored by Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, the Klu Klux Klan functioned more like Amway than Al-Qaeda: “The terrorist group was primarily a pyramid scheme selling hate and was far more successful at making money than at influencing politics.” Thanks to dues, taxes, and of course, exorbitant robe prices, the Klan’s … Continue reading Evil Business Idea of the Day
You hear about transparency all the time. “We’re in a new era of transparency.” “We live in a transparent society.” But I can’t help feeling that while transparency is all around us, when we ask about the benefits of transparency, we often get an opaque answer. Transparency is in danger of becoming yet another buzzword, … Continue reading Transparency is a Prerequisite of Collaboration
The old way of thinking about authority was static and hierarchical. Seniority and rank are crude, linear, black and white tools. While they have the advantage of being simple and clear, even organizations that are thought of as being strictly hierarchical, such as the military, have long abandoned such simplistic thinking. The Web has brought … Continue reading Contextual Authority, or Who Cares What Arrington Did Before TechCrunch?