Among the many myths that corporate types have about startups (whether standalone or of the corporate variety) is that there is some kind of alchemy involved. Sort of “Steve Jobs arrives on a clamshell and the world is changed forever!” They think growing new businesses requires some instinctive DNA that founders are born with and that other mere mortals will never possess.
Last week, I was accepted on the Thinkers50 Radar list, composed of 30 management thinkers to watch in 2019. How I made the list, I am not quite sure. The entrepreneurs, researchers, advisers, and organizational leaders included in this list constitute a humbling collection of minds.
Do your people go into the kitchen … or do they go home?
When Kat Cole, a waiter at a local Hooters, learned there were not enough cooks that day to serve food, she watched as other waiters hung up their aprons. No food to cook means no food to serve, they figured.
In this insightful article, Kara Swisher notes that one big reason that Instagram’s co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, decided to leave was that the popular site was pulling users away from the “big blue” platform that is the core Facebook product. Clanging sounds of early warnings of early-stage fading of advantage!
Every year around this time, we sit to think about last year and set our resolutions for next. But there is a major risk in continuing this tradition, especially if you are doing something new.
When many hear the word Blockchain, they think immediately of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This is an unfortunate mistake. You can classify types of Blockchains across two dimensions:
There are trillions up for grabs in the business of delivering things right to you, no matter where you are. A sector reeling from the cumulative effects of digitization is the global logistics business. In what our colleague, Michael Sikorsky, calls “the second half of the chessboard,” we can anticipate some significant inflection points in the business of logistics, involving innovative digitally-enhanced business models, the instrumentation of basically everything and the impact of the experience economy on product-centric business models.
For years I have been selling Outthinker: our workshops, certifications, speeches, membership, etc. And to be honest, it has felt exhausting. Waking up to long lists of tasks, burning red, overdue, people to follow up with and check in with. Long flights banging away email outreaches when I could be drafting the next chapter of a book.
Some claim Blockchain will fundamentally change the world. Others dismiss it as hype. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Naturally, reaching your own conclusion of what Blockchain might mean for the world, your industry, or your business requires an understanding of what it is. Here we attempt to cut through some of the noise and describe, in accessible terms, what this technology, whether transformative or hype, really is.
When I was young, the go-to source for important information was a reference book, like the Encyclopedia Brittanica. It kept its secrets about who I was, what I read, which sections got attention, and which didn’t. Those who watch over reference books, the librarians, are the custodians of human knowledge embedded in the materials in their care. They have long been admonished to maintain an ethic of “facilitating, not monitoring, access to information”.
