Most Influential Failure
Well we’re back from Greece, it was amazing to see the ancient and future history at the same time. I also see that GeekWire has announced the continuation of the Seattle 2.0 awards (I won an award at the first Seattle 2.0 ceremony). I helped in judging this round and am excited to attend the event next week. I hope that you can attend as well. Reflecting on the categories after spending all this time in Greece, I am a bit sad that we don’t have a category to honor the lessons learned from failing to build a successful startup. Failure is something Greece has never looked at critically in their culture and increasingly it is something that we in the U.S. are failing to appreciate. Failing at things happens! As a father I can … Read entire article »
Filed under: career, Innovation, Lunch20-Seattle, Startups
Is Entrepreneurship The New Degree?
I saw this clip of Alan Patricof and started wondering how the increase in entrepreneurship will influence the job market and hiring in the future. Historically… well a century ago… building a business was the norm for most people to earn a living. Granted the businesses were different, but earning a living was a family affair or that of a small group of people building a small company (a blacksmith for example). That isn’t to say that higher education didn’t exist, it just wasn’t the norm for most people. It wasn’t really required as anyone could build a great business and those that built great businesses were known as good people to work with. I wondered as Alan talked about all of the incubators and the startup fever that has taken … Read entire article »
Filed under: career, Entrepreneurship, Investing, Startups
Learning From The Best or The Rest?
Another good interview over on Vimeo with Howard Marks… Watching this and so many other videos from experts got me thinking about how we usually approach learning. The norm is that we all go to school with some good and some bad teachers. We learn the basics and later select what to do with our lives. An increasing number of us in the US and in the World are making the decision to go get a Higher Education. What is interesting though is that those higher education instructors are usually mediocre at best. Even the great universities are not always filled with The Best instructors available. What impact does that have? If most of the people in society that have higher education degrees are being taught by a pool of mediocre … Read entire article »
The Difficulty of Pursuing Your Ideas
I recently came across this story on TechCrunch about Fitbit’s new $12m business Fitness Tracker Fitbit Raises $12M To Market New Wi-Fi Enabled Smart Scale, Aria. Like all ideas, someone else thought of this one well before Fitbit thought it up. In fact when I thought it up eight years ago, I probably wasn’t the first to think it up either. But being a relatively good idea that I thought I had at the time, seeing this funding got me thinking. Why didn’t I pursue that idea further seven years ago? Whether you are an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur, or even a wantrapreneur. When you have ideas that you think are good, what holds you back from pursuing them? Is it fear, is it being lost at where to start, or is it … Read entire article »
Filed under: career, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Investing, Startups, Technology
What You Say Matters
Following up on my post about the modes of communication I found this video by Simon Sinek on leadership, inspiration, and doing something meaningful important – Sinek explains how these are all tied together and need to be used at the same time. I believe that the message you are providing matters just as much as the mode you are communicating that message in and Sinek provides some great insights into making that message more important. Definitely some good lessons here for people and companies to think through when they communicate with people. … Read entire article »
Filed under: career, Entrepreneurship
Does The Mode of Communication Matter?
Communication is at the heart of all things in life… finding the love of your life, raising a round of financing, getting a promotion, or enjoying life with friends and family. Some of those communications are obviously more critical than others and some are more time sensative than others as well. Living in a world where corporate training dollars fuels the research and instruction that permeates our training attention we are all well aware of the communication styles that research such as Myers-Briggs brings us. This is good and we all make efforts to adjust what we are saying depending on the type of person we are talking to (more data/less data, small talk/straight to the point, etc.). All of this focus on communication style seems to skip the relevance of … Read entire article »
Filed under: career, Entrepreneurship, Investing, RealEstate, Technology
Traveling and Parenting
I have been on the road a lot more lately and I found myself the other day suddenly zoomed all the way back home with the help of text messaging and instant messaging. I was pleasantly working on some emails and out of the blue I started to receive text messages from my kids. First one, then the other, then the IM from my wife popped up. Here I was trying to stay focused on the work I was doing and I was pulled hundreds of miles away into Seattle responding to the kids, discussing with my wife the right approach to take, checking on the status of their grades online. Then diving into my lecture on responsibility in a few 140 character responses… it was only a matter of 10-15min… … Read entire article »
Filed under: career
Are There Alternatives to Resumes?
If resumes didn’t exist anymore or if employers just stopped accepting them, how would you choose to convey your talents? I was recently reading this article on the Wall Street Journal about Union Square Ventures removal of resumes in their hiring process. Christina over at USV is sharing the progress they are making and discovering that people are behaving different then expected. Namely that despite a timeline for taking their online interview, candidates waited until the last minute to get in before the deadline… busy prepping or procrastinating? I think the latter. Interesting though, as I’m sure the fire and forget resume submission process that happens so frequently is a bit circumvented here as the candidate needs to think about the firm they are applying to, the skills they have, and the … Read entire article »
Filed under: career, Innovation
