Colin Powell: “It’s All About the People”; and his Thirteen Rules
May 15, 2013 § 1 Comment
A book landed on my desk from a fellow respected colleague and growing friend at Mozilla. Thanks Pascal! The book was Colin Powell’s: It Worked For Me – In Life and Leadership.
The core of the book and of Powell are his Thirteen Rules and the stories of the people in his life. These thirteen rules are self-described quotes or aphorism he had collected over the years (prior to the Internet). He kept them front and center under the glass cover of his desktop. I present them here as I can’t land this book on everyone else’s desk who might be reading this blog. It’s much more efficient in simply sharing this way.
1. It Ain’t As Bad As You Think. It Will Look Better In The Morning (Attitude)
2. Get Mad, Then Get Over It. (Attitude)
3. Avoid Having Your Ego So Close To Your Position That When Your Position Falls, Your Ego Goes With It.
“Disagree with me, do it with feeling, try to convince me you are right and I am about to go down the wrong path. You owe that to me; that’s why you are here. But don’t be intimidated when I argue back. A moment will come when I’ve heard enough and I make a decision. Loyalty is disagreeing strongly, and loyalty is executing faithfully.” « Read the rest of this entry »
Eleven Simple Concepts to Become a Better Leader
April 11, 2013 § 1 Comment
11 Simple Concepts to Become a Better Leader
January 28, 2013
Dave Kerpen (CEO, Likeable Local, NY Times Best-Selling Author & Keynote Speaker)
Enjoy,
Jim
1. Listening
“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” – Ernest Hemingway
Listening is the foundation of any good relationship. Great leaders listen to what their customers and prospects want and need, and they listen to the challenges those customers face. They listen to colleagues and are open to new ideas. They listen to shareholders, investors, and competitors. Here’s why the best CEO’s listen more.
2. Storytelling
“Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.” -Robert McAfee Brown
After listening, leaders need to tell great stories in order to sell their products, but more important, in order to sell their ideas. Storytelling is what captivates people and drives them to take action. Whether you’re telling a story to one prospect over lunch, a boardroom full of people, or thousands of people through an online video – storytelling wins customers.
3. Authenticity
“I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I’ve become. If I had, I’d have done it a lot earlier.” -Oprah Winfrey
Great leaders are who they say they are, and they have integrity beyond compare. Vulnerability and humility are hallmarks of the authentic leader and create a positive, attractive energy. Customers, employees, and media all want to help an authentic person to succeed. There used to be a divide between one’s public self and private self, but the social internet has blurred that line. Tomorrow’s leaders are transparent about who they are online, merging their personal and professional lives together.
4. Transparency
“As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth.” -John Whittier
There is nowhere to hide anymore, and businesspeople who attempt to keep secrets will eventually be exposed. Openness and honesty lead to happier staff and customers and colleagues. More important, transparency makes it a lot easier to sleep at night – unworried about what you said to whom, a happier leader is a more productive one.
5. Team Playing
“Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds.” -SEAL Team Saying
No matter how small your organization, you interact with others every day. Letting others shine, encouraging innovative ideas, practicing humility, and following other rules for working in teams will help you become a more likeable leader. You’ll need a culture of success within your organization, one that includes out-of-the-box thinking.
6. Responsiveness
“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.” -Charles Swindoll
The best leaders are responsive to their customers, staff, investors, and prospects. Every stakeholder today is a potential viral sparkplug, for better or for worse, and the winning leader is one who recognizes this and insists upon a culture of responsiveness. Whether the communication is email, voice mail, a note or a a tweet, responding shows you care and gives your customers and colleagues a say, allowing them to make a positive impact on the organization.
7. Adaptability
“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.” -Ben Franklin
There has never been a faster-changing marketplace than the one we live in today. Leaders must be flexible in managing changing opportunities and challenges and nimble enough to pivot at the right moment. Stubbornness is no longer desirable to most organizations. Instead, humility and the willingness to adapt mark a great leader.
8. Passion
“The only way to do great work is to love the work you do.” -Steve Jobs
Those who love what they do don’t have to work a day in their lives. People who are able to bring passion to their business have a remarkable advantage, as that passion is contagious to customers and colleagues alike. Finding and increasing your passion will absolutely affect your bottom line.
9. Surprise and Delight
“A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless.” -Charles de Gaulle
Most people like surprises in their day-to-day lives. Likeable leaders underpromise and overdeliver, assuring that customers and staff are surprised in a positive way. There are a plethora of ways to surprise without spending extra money – a smile, We all like to be delighted — surprise and delight create incredible word-of-mouth marketing opportunities.
10. Simplicity
“Less isn’t more; just enough is more.” -Milton Glaser
The world is more complex than ever before, and yet what customers often respond to best is simplicity — in design, form, and function. Taking complex projects, challenges, and ideas and distilling them to their simplest components allows customers, staff, and other stakeholders to better understand and buy into your vision. We humans all crave simplicity, and so today’s leader must be focused and deliver simplicity.
11. Gratefulness
“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” -Gilbert Chesterton
Likeable leaders are ever grateful for the people who contribute to their opportunities and success. Being appreciative and saying thank you to mentors, customers, colleagues, and other stakeholders keeps leaders humble, appreciated, and well received. It also makes you feel great! Donor’s Choose studied the value of a hand-written thank-you note, and actually found donors were 38% more likely to give a 2nd time if they got a hand-written note!
The Golden Rule: Above all else, treat others as you’d like to be treated
By showing others the same courtesy you expect from them, you will gain more respect from coworkers, customers, and business partners. Holding others in high regard demonstrates your company’s likeability and motivates others to work with you. This seems so simple, as do so many of these principles — and yet many people, too concerned with making money or getting by, fail to truly adopt these key concepts.
Which of these principles are most important to you — what makes you likeable?
Dave Kerpen is the New York Times bestselling author of two books, Likeable Social Media and Likeable Business.
Leaders Do These 15 Things Automatically Every Day
March 19, 2013 § Leave a comment
Glenn Llopis, Contributor
Many people wonder how leaders know how to make the best decisions, often under immense pressure. The process of making these decisions comes from an accumulation of experiences and encounters with a multitude of difference circumstances, personality types and unforeseen failures. More so, the decision making process is an acute understanding of being familiar with the cause and effect of behavioral and circumstantial patterns; knowing the intelligence and interconnection points of the variables involved in these patterns allows a leader to confidently make decisions and project the probability of their desired outcomes. The most successful leaders are instinctual decision makers.
Here are 15 things you must do automatically, every day, to be a successful leader in the workplace:
1. Make Others Feel Safe to Speak-Up
2. Make Decisions
3. Communicate Expectations
4. Challenge People to Think
“If you are not thinking, you’re not learning new things. If you’re not learning, you’re not growing”
5. Be Accountable to Others; Successful leaders allow their colleagues to manage them.
6. Lead by Example
7. Measure & Reward Performance
8. Provide Continuous Feedback
“Successful leaders always provide feedback and they welcome reciprocal feedback by creating trustworthy relationships with their colleagues.”
9. Properly Allocate and Deploy Talent
10. Ask Questions, Seek Counsel
“…on the inside, they have a deep thirst for knowledge and constantly are on the look-out to learn new things because of their commitment to making themselves better through the wisdom of others”
11. Problem Solve; Avoid Procrastination
12. Positive Energy & Attitude
13. Be a Great Teacher
“Successful leaders never stop teaching because they are so self-motivated to learn themselves. They use teaching to keep their colleagues well-informed and knowledgeable through statistics, trends, and other newsworthy items”
14. Invest in Relationships
15. Genuinely Enjoy Responsibilities
Successful leaders love being leaders – not for the sake of power but for the meaningful and purposeful impact they can create. When you have reached a senior level of leadership – it’s about your ability to serve others and this can’t be accomplished unless you genuinely enjoy what you do.
In the end, successful leaders are able to sustain their success because these 15 things ultimately allow them to increase the value of their organization’s value – while at the same time minimize the operating risk profile. They serve as the enablers of talent, culture and results.
Archives (2005-2006) – Old Cook ‘n the Books Posts
March 1, 2013 § 5 Comments
I went back to my original blog I started in 2005-2006 and figured I’d post them here for primarily historical purposes. Some are quite interesting from a hindsight perspective. Also interesting to compare my writing style and interests then vs. now…7 years ago
August 02, 2006
More good news from Silicon Valley
More evidence that what we are all-seeing in the trenches of Silicon Valley is also being reflected in the industry data. I’ve been telling everyone I know that the venture industry (which includes the VC’s firms as well as the entrepreneur’s and their companies) is as healthy as it’s been in recent memory. It continues to feel very much like 1997-1998 (prior to the bubble). Yes, there are also signs of “bubblish mentality” through some recent fundings (VC bets), but only 1-off stories for now and it feels like the hard lessons of the past have indeed been learned in better fundings and better management.
RETURN ON FUNDINGS NEARLY 20 PERCENT IN FIRST QUARTER
By Matt Marshall Mercury News
Venture capital firms continued to show strong gains through the first three months of 2006, showing that the Silicon Valley formula of placing bets on young companies is still paying off.
According to data released this week from Thomson Financial and the National Venture Capital Association, venture funds pulled in annual returns just shy of 20 percent, approaching the high-end of the 10-year average. That was up from 13.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005, and 4.6 percent a year ago.
How long the healthy returns last may depend on the future health of the market for initial public offerings of stock, which has been flagging lately. If the growing fleet of venture-backed start-ups can’t successfully go public and offer shares for sale in the market, venture returns will slow.
NOTABLE FUNDINGS AND FACTS FROM Q2 2006
$100M rounds of investment are increasing. This is a significant indication that large dollars from smart VC’s are betting that these companies will be worth at least $1B which could foretell the return of a healthy IPO market in the next 18 months (end of 2007/2008)
Altra, a Los Angeles biofuel company, has raised $120 million in a second round of funding. It is one of the largest rounds of funding ever raised by a renewable-fuel company. Limelight (an Akamai competitor) that is the technology backend supporting YouTube and other internet video streaming also raised +$100M in Q2 2006.
I’ve also heard several indications of $50M Series A fundings that will develop starting in Sept 2006 from several promising startups going after big markets requiring large investments.
Doll Capital Management, a Menlo Park venture capital firm that has recently invested aggressively in China, has raised a new fund of $500 million to invest in fresh companies. It has offices both here and in Beijing, and also invests in Japan.
TCV raised one of the largest ever funds in Q2 2006 at 1.5 Billion. Total Funds raised by VC Firms in Q2 2006 was almost $6.5 Billion.
Venture capital investment in Startup and Early Stage companies remained flat from the prior quarter in terms of dollars but increased 13% in the number of deals to $1 billion going into 268 deals, suggesting that VCs are offering smaller rounds to more companies. Average post-money valuations of Early Stage companies dipped slightly to $14.06 million for the 12 months ending Q1 2006.
Funding for Expansion stage companies hit the highest investment level in four years, reaching $2.9 billion, a 17% increase over the prior quarter. The number of deals rose slightly to 329, a 6% increase from Q1. The average post-money valuation for Expansion Stage companies increased to $59.16 million
The number of companies receiving “First Time Financing” reached a five-year high in Q2 2006 with 282 companies receiving $1.3 billion. This increase coincides with the recent fundraising cycle and reflects the opportunity to deploy funds into first-time companies early in a fund’s life.
Source = NVCA (National Venture Capital Association) Data.
http://www.pwcmoneytree.com
http://www.nvca.org
BOTTOM LINE:
The Silicon Valley startup market is on a healthy pace of company creation, job/employment creation and once again providing the underpinnings for the next successful round of public companies.
October 31, 2005
Up From The Ground Came A Bubbling Crude…
Speculating on the health of Silicon Valley has been a recurring theme among Silicon Valley circles and media pundits for many months. It’s clear to me that “we” indeed are back. The risk/reward balance among entrepreneurs and VC’s has definitely shifted decidedly toward the risk side of the teeter totter…and that is healthy for the startup community, Silicon Valley, and small business growth.
The recent proof points that Silicon Valley is healthy again?….
1) E-commerce is back in a big way. Several startups have been funded recently and the buzz is back. Alibaba in China is the recent pinnacle of these valuations. Even the Kozmo founder is going back “all-in”
2) Online Advertising has risen from the dead and buried (thanks Google). Pure Play media companies valuations are trading both publicly and privately at 6x-10x Revenues and +25-40x EBITDA. About.com (+$400M), Then you have Baidu in China.
3) Acquisitions Galore: In the first half of 2005, media/interactive M&A transactions totaled +$8B vs +$2B in the first half of 2004 (think Intermix/MySpace, AskJeeves, DoubleClick, Shopping.com, etc). We hear of a new big M&A deal almost every other day (Skype, Siebel, Macromedia, now talk of AOL..). Ruperch Mudoch and Fox Interactive are out buying first asking questions later (Scout.com, Intermix, IGN combined $1.5B so far and counting)
4) The big players (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo) are gobbling up smaller companies as fast as they can (Keyhole, Picasa, Dialpad, Teleo, Flickr, Snapfish, Konfabulator, Urchin, Dodgeball, and we are hearing Technorati and Facebook are next).
And finally to put an exclamation point on this “bubbling crude” theme (the return of Silicon Valley), this week I was involved in 2 separate discussions with CEO’s, VC’s, and investment bankers in which I heard the following:
1) Roll Up Funding Strategies are alive and well in today’s very active M&A market. Buy companies..roll them up….sell the whole package for more
2) B2B is the next big strategy shift now that “all things consumer” has had such success in the past few years. It’s time to start selling products and services to businesses now.
Money and ideas are bubbling up…now the trick is whether we can refine them and into what “grade” (87, 89, Premium, or simply sludge)……
“they said California is the place you oughta be so they packed up their bags and moved to the Valley…..Silicon that is…….stock option pools and internet stars”
October 27, 2005
The “Golden Age” of Technology Startups?
…And How Today’s Entrepreneurs and Startups Are Quite Similar To Today’s Top Chefs and Restaurants…..
The kitchen is getting crowded. There are several cook’s in the kitchen and everyone is using the same ingredients. These analogies have been recurring themes in my head the past several months. Start-ups are back in a very visible way in Silicon Valley, the VC market is very active, and the M&A market is exploding.
So what’s different this time? The article below offers a good premise that we are entering a “golden age” of company creation. After reading it, the analogy I used above (startups vs top chefs and restaurants) dawned on me. By combining today’s specialized technology ingredients (XML, RSS, etc) with several basic technology ingredients (Linux, etc), today’s very smart entrepreneurs can be likened to some of the top chefs in the world where star status is not differentiated by the ingredients used (there are no secret cooking ingredients) but rather by HOW the ingredients are combined and MOST IMPORTANTLY how the whole package is presented (not just the plate of food but all the way down to the restaurants ambience and wait staff service level).
Below are a few articles with different but similar viewpoints on this new “golden age” of technology
It is likely that in the coming years we will see sizable businesses (based on yearly revenue) come and go at what will seem to be alarming speeds. Businesses can now be created in a matter of weeks to capitalize on whatever important trend or market demand is surfacing. Huge amounts of venture capital in many cases will not be required for establishing the infrastructure, the billing and accounting systems, the transport or supply systems, the IT function – and the list goes on. Such commodities will be expertly and automatically leveraged by super-deep, business-to-business automation, and new enterprises will startup by focusing their energy on differentiating their value in the marketplace rather than creating and supporting all of the associated accoutrements.
Link: Print Story.
Hornik also posted yesterday on a very similar theme here
Built To Be Bought
August 22, 2005
VC Funding History – Silicon Valley Money Flow
The VC market is getting healthy again. VentureWire reported today that $6 Billion of new funds were raised by VC’s in Q2 2005 (that’s outside investors (Limited Partners) giving money to VC firms so they can invest in startups at some later time). For perspective, $2.5B of this was raised by only 3 firms (Menlo, August Capital, and NorthBridge). This $6B quarterly number puts CY 2005 on pace for VC’s raising nearly $25 Billion of capital that they can invest in their respective startup portfolio’s.
I don’t believe the media does a good job of giving perspective to VC data. So let’s give it a shot by comparing how much was raised vs how much the VC’s have invested historically in their startup portfolio’s.
Reviewing PWC’s Money Tree Data we find the following VC funding history (VC’s investing in startups) for the last 10 years. In 1995, there was $7 Billion invested. 1996 = $11B; 1997 = $15B; 1998 = $21B; 1999 = $54B (beg of the bubble); 2000 = $105B (bubble); 2001 = $41B (post-bubble); 2002 = $21B; 2003 = $19B; 2004 = $21B; 2005 ~ $25B (estimate). I couldn’t get the graph to work out for the X/Y Scale but all you need to know in the picture below is the gridlines are every $20B (Y scale) while each dot represents a year (1995-2005).
In terms of #’s of Companies funded over the last 10 years, the data looks like this.
1995 = 1800
1996 = 2500
1997 = 3100
1998 = 3600
1999 = 5400
2000 = 7800
2001 = 4500
2002 = 3000
2003 = 2900
2004 = 2900
2005 = 3100 (estimate)
Other interesting consistent historical insights from this data:
- 30% of all U.S. VC Backed Companies are funded in Silicon Valley. This grows to 45% if you include all of the West Coast (Southern Cal, Seattle Area, etc)
- Other than the bubble period, 200-250 companies get funded every quarter in Silicon Valley. We are on pace for 900-1000 companies funded in CY 2005. My gut says this is a function of the # of VC’s and the # of partners and time/focus.
- The average investment (dollars / # of companies) per VC funding is a rather tight range of $8.5M-$9.0M per company funded. Again, an average. This compares to pre-bubble funding amounts of $5-$6 million vs the peak bubble days of $16-$17 million per funding. I’m looking for this number to increase over the coming quarters as exits today are more visible and getting bigger faster is once again in vogue.
The data suggests that we are on track for the “old normal” of 1998 (borrowing from and apologies to Roger McNamee’s new normal analogy). I remember commenting to a few colleagues last fall (Oct 2004) that it felt to me like the VC industry had really started investing again for the first time in 3 years. Today, it feels like the pace continues to pick up and if the data keeps rolling in like this, the VC market will continue their powerful economic engine of Silicon Valley. VC’s fund companies, companies hire people, people buy things from companies, companies buy other companies, companies go public..and so on.
My gut tells me we are going to have a very fun next few years again….stay tuned…
Finally, VentureWire’s story as a reference:
venture market summary
By VentureWire Staff Reporters
U.S. venture capital firms raised $6.07 billion in new funds in the second quarter, the largest amount raised in a single quarter since late 2001, according to industry tracker VentureOne. The amount starkly contrasts the $2.3 billion brought in during the second quarter of 2004, and it represents an 80.5% increase from the $3.36 billion raised in the first quarter of 2005.
……..The latest second quarter figures are heightened by several large venture firms that closed large-sized funds during the second quarter. Menlo Ventures, closed its tenth fund with $1.2 billion in April, and both August Capital and North Bridge Venture Partners’ new funds topped $500 million.
August 22, 2005 in VC Musings | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 20, 2005
NanoTubes: A Big Breakthrough to Watch
Link: U. T. Dallas-led research team produces strong, transparent carbon nanotube sheets.
Some excerpts from what could be a huge breakthrough on actually how to produce NanoTubes…..
“Rarely is a processing advance so elegantly simple that rapid commercialization seems possible, and rarely does such an advance so quickly enable diverse application demonstrations,”
The nanotube sheets are produced at up to 7 meters per minute by the coordinated rotation of a trillion nanotubes per minute for every centimeter of sheet width. By comparison, the production rate for commercial wool spinning is 20 meters per minute.
The nanotube sheets can be made so thin that a square kilometer of solar sail would weigh only 30 kilograms.
There are several thousand ideas for the use of nanotube technology from artificial organs to supercapacitors, batteries, fuel cells and thermal-energy-harvesting cells exploiting giant-surface-area nanotube sheet electrodes; light sources, displays, and X-ray sources that use the nanotube sheets as high-intensity sources of field-emitted electrons; and heat pipes for electronic equipment that exploit the high thermal conductivity of nanotubes.
But my favorite is this one. An extremely intriguing idea … a Space Elevator!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
Stay tuned for more on NanoTubes and NanoTechnology….
Sidenote: My gut tells me that Nanotechnology is very possibly today’s “lightbulb invention” by Edison circa 1870. Think of all the applications and technologies that resulted from that invention to present day which includes transistor technology. It’s important to remember that a transistor was simply another “combination technology” combining the technologies of a “transmitter” (sound waves) and a “resistor” (conductive electricity). Transistors replaced Vacuum Tubes and performed the same functions by greatly reducing power and space requirements. With Nanontubes, we are therefore on the verge of going even smaller, lighter, and even greater power reductions and thus being able to produce the incremental technology leap needed for the next century of applications.
August 20, 2005 in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 18, 2005
Google 1 Year Later
What a difference a year makes! Today (Aug 18th) Google filed to sell an additional 14 million shares in a secondary offering. At the current price $280-$290 per share, that will add a few billion of cash to their current $3B war chest leaving them with $5-$7 billion of cash and growing. While others in the media are reporting this offering will add $4B of cash (14M shares * $280 per share), I predict this will not be the case. Usually, in these situations, the insiders (Larry, Sergei, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, etc.) take the opportunity to unload/diversify a large amount of their holdings and thus the cash raised does not flow through to the company’s bank account.
But the real story here is what a difference a year makes! This secondary offering (exactly 1 year later) is the effective equivalent of a 33 million share offering at $168 per share. When Google initially filed last year at their $135 range, they were scoffed out of the market by literally everyone (I was certainly on that bandwagon) and subsequently forced to drop their offering (number of shares sold and their IPO price) all the way down to $85 per share (37% price reduction).
After several false starts and auction process communications bungling, they eventually limped out the door and sold 19 million shares at $85 per share on Aug 19, 2004 for $1.6 Billion of cash. Since then, however, their execution and stock price have gone virtually straight up.
Kudos to Google for making hay while the sun is shining.
Link: Google files to sell 14.2 million shares.
Link: My Blog Series Covering Last Year’s IPO
Full Disclosure: I still own the original 7 shares I was allocated at $85 per share last year that I bought to simply be “part of the auction process. I laugh every time I think of owning 7 shares of anything…but I’m no longer laughing at the +200% return on those shares.
August 18, 2005 in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 11, 2005
How To Be a Leader
Fred Wilson (a VC) nailed it below. His advice on how you absolutely need to find people (preferably your team) to be completely honest with and rely on is how great teams and companies are made. The resulting loyalty created and the amazing abilities of all team members to go above and beyond is the secret sauce of a great culture.
Link: A VC: VC Cliche of the Week.
A CEO/founder must surround themselves with people who they like, trust, and can lower their guard with. The best leaders have a “kitchen cabinet” of people they can be completely honest with and who they rely on for advice, counsel, and support. It is tricky to provide that back to the same people who are providing it to you, but you must try to make it happen.
August 11, 2005 in VC Musings | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 08, 2005
And the Race is On….in China
Yahoo is reportedly bidding up to $1 billion for a 35% stake in Alibaba.com – China’s leading e-commerce site. The $3B valuation rationalization must be based on “what other people are willing to pay”. If historical trends are consistent, we are likely to see a very busy six-nine months of acquisition / investing activity in all things Internet in China….The Race is On!….
Link: Yahoo! Negotiates Stake In China E-Commerce Site – Forbes.com.
August 08, 2005 in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 05, 2005
It’s 1995 in China.
Chinese Search Engine – Nasdaq IPO – Soars 353% in First Day of Trading
It’s 1995 in China. They just had their Netscape. The internet wealth creation engine just woke up in China. The world goes to where the money is and the money is clearly in China. Baidu is China’s Google with Netscape’s excitement. Stocks simply don’t IPO at 27 and close at 120 in today’s market…but one just did. This is a seminal event. An event the historians can pin the following economic value creation on. It will be written that way a few years from now. That’s what you get when you have 45% market share in a search website vs Google’s 30% market share…it’s the only country in the world that is besting Google. Time to take notice. The telltale signs will be all other Chinese based internet stocks having unnatural valuation increases. Then comes all other Chinese companies purporting to have some sort of internet presence / product. Then comes the internet portions of these business being worth more than the brick and mortar pieces. We’ve seen it all before. The bubble will expand..this time faster..and even after the eventual consolidation, China will be put on the map as an internet powerhouse and the technology world will have changed virtually overnight from a US centric world to a worldwide economic engine..and everyone (including the US) will win.
The stock trades under the ticker BIDU and though it’s initial US Nasdaq prospectus price range was $19 a share, they priced it at $27, it opened at $66, and it closed at $120 today with a market value of essentially $4 Billion. Wow! not bad for one day’s investment. Not bad for a company with $5M of revenue last quarter on a run rate of $30M of revenue for CY 2005 (that’s only +130x Revenue).
Now all we need is the voiceover and the T.V. commercial…..B AAAA D UUUUUU (must be screamed like Yahoo)
August 05, 2005 in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Hacking Nature – Hacking the Brain!
Link: Discovery Channel :: News :: Brain in a Dish Flies Plane.
The brain can learn, just as a human brain learns, he said. When the system is first engaged, the neurons don’t know how to control the airplane; they don’t have any experience.
I heard this on the radio this morning and I was stunned. Goes to show you how far our current technology has to go. The idea that single brain cells (neurons) immediately start connecting to each other in a Petri Dish and then start instinctively start working together really makes you wonder.
To think these cells start learning how to fly a flight simulator level and straight with only 25,000 neurons is incredible. Even more incredible is the knowledge that a common house fly only has about 200 neurons and look what it can do! Try catching a house fly. The fact that it’s neurons react so quickly to outside stimuli makes you wonder where all this is going.
My first reaction to hearing all this are that brain cell neurons must by nature optimize for efficiency and for risk avoidance (flying the plane level and straight; not getting hit) without really knowing what it’s doing. It’s a react-first understand-learn-adapt system vs. our current technology of understand-first and program-react-perform system.
Being the parent of a 4 yr old and 1 yr old, I see these neural network “systems” in action everyday….continuously learning and adapting to their environment.
I wonder what artificial neural networks will be controlling 10 yrs from now? 50 yrs from now?
July 21, 2005
RSS For the Enterprise – The Holy Grail of Data Distribution
I was introduced to Bloglines a few weeks ago and within hours of using it had one of those “a-ha!” experiences. While I never paid attention to all the talk of “newsreaders” or “RSS” before and thought these technologies were for the ultra-geeks (I would be only a major geek) – the ability to read all of my frequently visited sites easily and quickly in one browser was as user-friendly as iTunes or even email. Browsing websites has now changed for me. I let many of my frequently visited sites now come to me and only show me the new stories. A huge benefit and time saver.
But that wasn’t my only immediate “a-ha!”. Having spent the last +15 years in the corporate finance world, it’s hard to imagine that we still live in an Excel world. Whereas almost every other technology has evolved since 1990, the vast majority of financial data reporting for small-midsize businesses and many small cap public companies is still based on a multi-step data extraction, organization, and presenting a final report with Excel. I can tell you from first hand experience that Excel is a very substandard tool for presenting important data in a timely and consistently accurate way. Quick, quality decisions therefore suffer unnecessarily. And yet it’s the middle of 2005 and those of us without access to a $1M data warehouse software package are still relegated to using a souped up 2 dimensional calculator.
RSS – or Really Simply Syndication – is an acronym created by the media types who invented it. It just as easily could be called RSDD (Really Simple Data Distribution). As long as you have a standard set of inputs (data instead of webpages), there’s no reason why someone can’t create the same type of Bloglines “DashBoard” for the business. We should be able to track the CEO’s top 10 metrics out of the database. We should be able to give the VP of Marketing the real-time product sales increase within minutes after the email newsletter is sent. When these key metrics change, the DashBoard automatically signals the executive to take a look. Real-time, actionable information from complex transactional databases. RSS for the Enterprise is the holy grail and one that will carry and create tremendous market value.
A few links I’ve found on the subject now that I’ve started searching for who else has this idea:
IT’S A VUCA WORLD…New Leadership Skills Required
February 18, 2013 § Leave a comment
Over two years ago, I was attending one of our quarterly Alliance of CEO’s keynote speeches (I’ve been a Director/Moderator of Group 307 since 2007). The speaker was Bob Johansen and he had just published a new book called Leaders Make the Future: 10 New Leadership Skills For An Uncertain World. One of his premises was the concept of the new VUCA world we are all living in. I began taking furious notes on my notepad. I recently dug out these notes and it’s time to transcribe them here.
Bob argued we are in a time of disruptive leadership change. In a VUCA world—one characterized by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity—traditional leadership skills won’t be enough.
- V = Volatility. The nature and dynamics of change, and the nature and speed of change forces and change catalysts.
- U = Uncertainty. The lack of predictability, the prospects for surprise, and the sense of awareness and understanding of issues and events.
- C = Complexity. The multiplex of forces, the confounding of issues and the chaos and confusion that surround an organization.
- A = Ambiguity. The haziness of reality, the potential for misreads, and the mixed meanings of conditions; cause-and-effect confusion.
The forward to the book gives a perfect flavor of the read:
Watching the Arab Spring unfold of late in the Middle East reminds us how prescient Bob’s work is in assessing the dynamics of our VUCA World. He foresaw the rising influence of what Howard Rheingold first called “smart-mob organizing,” through which social networks are used creatively and purposely to fuel change— foretelling events that unfolded in Tunisia, Egypt, and across the region. Frantic attempts by failing governments to quash social media interaction highlighted their hostility toward another emerging trend identified by Bob: “quiet transparency.” The complete absence of that trait among many Arab leaders, from Mubarak to Gaddafi, factored crucially into their downfalls. The resulting new and highly uncertain era, not only in the Middle East but around the world, demands yet another skill highlighted by Bob—“ commons creating,” or the ability to develop shared assets, requiring collaborative leadership at all levels of the government, business, and social sectors. John R. Ryan, President and CEO, Center for Creative Leadership
Bob’s own introduction to his 2nd Edition is just as compelling for anyone engaged in this new VUCA world:
We are now in the midst of a threshold decade: our natural, business, organizational, and social systems will reach tipping points of extreme challenge, and some of those systems are likely to break. However, such disruption can spark new opportunities.
Fortunately, virtual leadership tools in the emerging world of cloud computing are making new strategies for smart-mob organizing possible just at the time when it is becoming most necessary to work together in new ways and at great distances. I believe that the more connected we are, the safer, freer, and more powerful we will be. But there will be frightening downsides: the more connected we are, the more dangerous it will become. Leaders will need to make new links and organize people for action— yet also protect against dangerous hyperconnectivity like we see in global financial spasms. It is good news that we are more connected than ever before, but leaders must now learn to lead in ways that make full use of the new connectivity of cloud-served supercomputing— while minimizing its considerable risks.
A forecast is a story from the future that provokes insight in the present. Nobody can predict the future, but you can make forecasts: plausible, internally consistent, and provocative views of what you think could happen. The best forecasts provoke insight and invoke action. This book uses forecasts to provoke insight about leadership.