Four Qualities

Thought for Mon, 28 Jan 2008 via Buddhist Thought of the Day on 1/28/08

With four qualities the wise, intelligent, worthy person goes about not uprooted, not lifeless, not blameworthy, not censured by the wise. What four? With Good Conduct of body, speech and mind, and with gratitude....

Curious And Curiouser Layer By Layer

Curious via Seth's Blog offered the following on 1/21/08

Nic created the video below--the subtitles and edits are his. The bad cold is mine. I hope you like it (the video, not the cold).

Also from Seth's Blog Layering on 1/22/08

Here's what we used to do:
Create ---> Edit ---> Launch

Here's what happens now:
Create ---> Launch ---> Edit ---> Launch ---> repeat

Someone asked me which post on this blog represented the turning point of its growth. The 'breakthrough' post. It turns out that there wasn't one. Instead, there were 2,500 posts, one after the other, each building (and I was learning from each) as we went. And thus the challenge. We live in a layered world now. Those that plan and plan and then launch are always going to be at a disadvantage to the layerers.

The Entrepreneurial Mind on 1/17/08 also has a perspective on whether To Plan, Or Not to Plan.

I don't believe that this is in opposition to what Seth Godin had said, just said differently from a different perspective. Dr. Campbell also expresses the idea that plans are not the holy grail of entrepreneurship and when he writes that he will have to adjust my plan each step along the way, I think of Seth Godin's layering.

We set business plans up on a pedestal as if it is the holy grail of entrepreneurship. Just look at BusinessWeek.com's most recent special issue on entrepreneurship -- it is all about business planning.

It is as if we are telling aspiring entrepreneurs that once they unlock the secrets of the business plan, the world of entrepreneurial wealth will come pouring out at them. Sorry, but this is just not true.

On the other hand, there is now a debate raging as to whether we should even teach entrepreneurs about business plans.

All of this -- and I mean both sides of this debate -- is missing the point.

So why do we teach about business plans? It is because they are a way to help organize what can be a complex and overwhelming array of issues. It is because it forces us to integrate our marketing plans, or operating plans and our financial plans into one, coherent story.

But I still plan. I just know that I will have to adjust my plan each step along the way as I begin to implement it as I start and grow my business.

The Entrepreneurial Mind also tells us that Growth is Never a Smooth Curve

The truth is that growth is a messy thing. It never follows a smooth path. The real curves that signify growth are jagged. Growth is lumpy, not smooth.

Growth requires us to make leaps of faith as we commit to significant new overhead, including more space, more equipment and more staff.

And in today's dynamic economy, a growing business is like the shark -- it has to keep moving forward, or it will drown.

The commitment to growth requires careful thought and careful planning. Never grow simply on faith and hope. Grow with a careful plan that tells you what challenges your decision to grow will create.

Is this in disagreement with what was said above? I don't believe so. This goes back to Seth Godin's point about maintaining curiosity, because curiosity is to my mind the pre-commitment to immerse our selves in a chosen field to learn all we can and endeavor to make it better. This post only touches lightly upon Dr. Campbell's ideas. His full post better expresses the balance that entrepreneurs need to achieve.

The Awards And Risks of Innovation: Embracing Destruction And Creation

The challenge of how we deal with innovation may not seem like much of a problem, innovation should always be a good thing. Innovation though is one of the effects of creative-destruction process. The challenge is making sure that one is on the right side of the dichotomy, the fear is in the inherent risk of the process. The New York Times article raises this question regarding The Risk of Innovation: Will Anyone Embrace It?.

Whether humans will embrace or resist an innovation is the billion-dollar question facing designers of novel products and services. Why do people adapt to some new technologies and not to others? Fortunes are made and lost on the answer.

The greater danger is how we as a society will approach innovation in the future. The issues found within this next New York Times article on Two Views of Innovation, Colliding in Washington - New York Times seem similar to some of the fair use issues discussed in this weblog regarding media, but applied to technology. The article points to a bias towards big business in Washington which could create massive obstacles for smaller innovators.

From the vantage point of a half-century, for example, it's clear that the formation of Silicon Valley involved serendipity more than intentional design.

It appears that the Senate leadership has sympathy for the large technology companies. Opposed to big tech is a small group of high-profile inventors, like the Segway designer Dean Kamen and the former Apple engineer and QuickTime co-inventor Steve Perlman, as well as venture capitalists and a growing array of smaller businesses that do not share the market power of the largest companies.

Schumpeter, who is seemingly being hailed by many lately as having the answer to entrepreneurialism in the future, was arguably in line with the folks in Congress abd had according to the Economist View post Robert Solow on Joseph Schumpeter,

a lasting bias in favor of big business. "American opinion is so anti-big business," he wrote, "precisely because big business has made the country what it is...: who is not a part of big business feels he does not meet the standard and by compensation turns against it." Clearly a successful innovation confers, in his view, at least a temporary monopoly. Without the lure of those monopoly profits, there would be no incentive for anyone to bear the risks of entrepreneurship. Schumpeter believed that large firms were both the source and the result of successful innovation; and so tampering with them would be dangerous. ...,

The Businesspundit on 1/19/08 offers two basic choices in meeting this challenge Adaptive Vs. Creative Strategy.

Strategy is, in general, adaptive. New market opportunities rarely catch entire industries by surprise. The moves of most companies are evident in advance, so it really becomes a game of small adaptations to new circumstances by offering new products, entering new lines of business, and using other basic strategic business moves.

This sounds like the bigger technological companies. In order to succeed, smaller companies are forced for all intentions to adopt a more creative strategic approach with all of its risks. Taking some ideas from the Businesspundit,

Almost all literature about strategic thinking is geared to adaptive strategy, which makes sense because that is what companies need most of the time.

This is where Schumpeter's concept of creative-destruction, and how it seems to be being commonly applied, makes the most sense to me. The innovation is not limited to only the product itself, but includes the strategy on how the new business is implemented. As the Businesspundit states,

Creative strategy involves strategic moves that come as a surprise. Because such moves are unexpected by definition, you can't plan for them. Think of Apple releasing the first iMac, and re-defining the playing field for home computers and how they are evaluated.

As a result, creative strategies, when they work, work really really well.

See the full article from Businesspundit for a more details and on how to enhance your chances for success .

The driving force behind innovation, however, remains individual intellects and passion. Businesspunditon 1/11/08 provides the Wozniak on Innovation podcast of Steve Wozniak's talk at the 2007 Ideafestival click here. Quoting the Businesspundit,

It is worth listening to, if for no other reason that Wozniak's contagious enthusiasm about technology. See full article.

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