People frequently ask me why the $%^# I decided to ‘get my genes done.’ I get the feeling that this is a scary area for many of us and that is part of the reason why I did it, to explore something that has an interesting future possibly. I also thought it would be a good idea to both understand where I’m from, genetically, and what possible risks lie ahead for me. Finally, 23andMe offered a DNA-day special a few weeks back and the price was right for me to do it.

For those that don’t know, 23andMe is a company who’s mission statement it is to develop new methods and technologies that will enable consumers to understand their own genetic information (source: Wikipedia). It has made headlines because Google invested in the company and one of the co-founders of 23andMe is married to one of the co-founders of Google.

In the following review, I want to write about several things: the last mile, which is a concept I discussed in my last blog post; the analysis; and finally, about whether it means anything.

The Last Mile
I previously wrote how crucial this concept is to running a successful business because 99.9999% of customers pay a business to get not only a product, but none of the headaches associated with getting this product—they don’t want to spend time making bank-transfers, physically going to a store to buy it (debatable), physically carrying the product home, reading complicated manuals. They just want to use it! Taking care of the last mile means that you can charge 2x or 10x for a product because the last mile is simply part of the product.

That 23andMe takes care of the last mile was very apparent to me in the context of the discount I received and the fact that live in Europe. If I remembered correctly, they discounted ca. 80% of the price of the product, but the non-discounted shipping costs of getting a ‘spit-vial’ to my home and back again to their labs was more expensive than the price of the product. It made me think twice about doing this, but in the end the result was that I had a pretty perfect service that required nothing from my part except:

1. paying,
2. waiting for delivery,
3. spitting into a vial,
4. filling out the Fedex papers,
5. sending it off,
6. and waiting for the results.

The total process took ca. 6 weeks, and while I’m not a particularly big fan of the shipping process in general, it was pretty comfortable on a whole.

Once the lab-analysis is done, you receive a mail notifying you that you’re results are ready, which you can access on the 23andMe website. Nothing wrong with that, except I hope that they use the dynamic nature of the web to keep updating info about my genes as their understanding of genetics improves. As I find it unlikely that people will do this analysis very frequently, I consider me not having to retake the test to get a marginal improvement in results a ‘last mile’ service as well. But we’ll see…

The Analysis
It’s important to state that ‘while you wait,’ there’s plenty to do on the site other than seeing your results, which frankly requires some (4-6 weeks after sending) patience to arrive. There are endless surveys you can take, forum-discussions, and articles. The whole thing feels like a Wikipedia for genetics, written in a clear format that even dumbos like me can understand. It does require time and interest in the matter.

The actual data that you get from the analysis is split into health results and ancestry results. Of these two, I found the ancestry part the least useful, even though I consider my personal ancestral history to be quite mixed and thus, for some, fascinating. Things you can do there is find out your maternal and paternal ancestry, find relatives (so far, completely useless, probably because most 23andMe users are American), and see visual representations of your geographic ancestry. I appear to be 100% European and resemble Northern Europeans the most, but the site also writes that “all humans are more than 99% similar to each other genetically,” so I’m not sure how significant or interesting this is.

The health results are much more interesting and for obvious reasons I will not go into great depth about my own results. The results are split into five categories, ‘Disease Risk,’ ‘Carrier Status,’ ‘Drug Response,’ ‘Traits,’ as well as a category, called ‘Health Labs,’ which goes into more experimental data. For some results, specifically carrier status and drug response, I feel like it’s a list I need to discuss with a doctor, as a lot of terms are quite scientific and it would require considerable time to understand what is relevant and what isn’t.

Most interesting to me is ‘Disease Risk,’ as it identifies areas to watch out for in the future and areas that are of less concern, and ‘Traits,’ which tells me stuff about lactose intolerance, muscle type, etc., all of which are handy to know in everyday life. Regarding Disease Risk, I like that they hide more serious conditions, until you specifically give permission to see these results. I was a little nervous about finding out exactly about those conditions, so I was happy the site allowed me some time to prepare myself mentally before seeing “the truth” (as far as that can be determined through such an analysis).

Does it mean anything?
Will you be able to live life without knowing these results? Clearly, we have survived for a long time without knowing much/anything about our genes and plenty of people today live on just fine in ignorant bliss. I have also lived my life in relative ignorance so far, though through years of playing around with exercise and diet, I realise that healthy living certainly benefits my current life and hopefully leads to a longer one (the analysis incidentally also shows your odds of living a certain age).

While frightening to find out whether you have an elevated chance of dying from things like cancer or getting Parkinson disease, I was relieved to find out about my chances, good or bad. Information means that you can prepare yourself, whether it’s just the idea that we are all mortal in some ways or that you have a checklist to visit your doctor with. I think my family will also be interested in finding out what my ancestry information reveals, though I didn’t think that part was particularly detailed.

Finally, while I’m a believer that no matter how well we understand ourselves, the chances of humanity as a species destroying itself or our planet destroying us are much more significant, I still think that we have for some years been on the threshold of a genetic revolution, one that will very likely result in things like a much longer and healthier life, though not without some significant societal consequences such as how to support an ageing population.

Just like the Apple iPad could potentially revolutionise computing and it’s good a reason for buying one, I consider the ‘plug-and-play’ 23andMe service to be a worthwhile purchase to gain a better understanding of where we stand in terms of the revolution in medicine.

Marks out of 10 – Service: 7/10 (points taken off for the time it took to find out the results); Analysis & presentation: 8/10 (points taken off for ancestry & complexity of certain health information); Overall Usefulness: 6/10 (you can live without it, not sure how doctors will react to this, more targeted at US than elsewhere); Overall grade: 7/10.

2 people like this post.

Unlike

I’ve been struggling for a while about what to write for Tech IT Easy—things seemed to change from one day to the next and it made little sense to reflect, rather a speedy reaction felt more like the right thing to do. That hasn’t changed much, as I believe we’ve just reached a stage of development where speed outweighs thought, but my realisation of this warranted a blog post for future reference. I always imagine myself looking back at what I wrote a few months-years ago to see whether I learned a lesson that I could apply on the future.

Every startup starts great, I think. You (and your team, if applicable) feels a sense of elevation, of engaging onto a route that brings rewards, wealth, and joy to future customers (of course the entrepreneur is usually the 1st customer). This hazy phase is necessary to get the necessary adrenaline for the rest of the trajectory. It’s like a warming up, the important difference being that the more you structure your plans during that phase, the more strategically you can dedicate energy to different steps & actions.

Continuing with the analogy of a run, we have reached the marathon phase. We’re running on the limits of our “bodies,” which contain what energy we have pumped in before, what survival strategies we researched, and what supplies we managed to take with us. Both in a marathon and in a startup the vision of the destinations should be strong. It starts with much socialising with other runners, perhaps with some personal trainers during the preparation stage. But eventually, we realise two things: there are lonely routes to run during that marathon. And eventually, it’s a race too and only a selected few can win.

So what am I learning during this marathon?
I may have mentioned this before, but I envisioned my role in the company as different then it is now. I drafted a contract for myself with a set of deliverables that relate a vision outlined in our business plan. One deliverable is keeping that business-plan updated as I know that these plans hold little value as static documents. But essentially, it’s about getting our product to a certain stage and our company to a certain stage, and that’s how I phrased it in my business-plan.

As a CEO, an important part is learning to let go of the definition of a “job” (singular). A CEO must be a generalist and be able to do a number of “jobs” (plural). Not to a great depth, but enough to get each member of the team to do their job well. That means that, in my company, I have to understand how our products are built and help build them. I have to understand design and help my designers. I have to understand marketing and help my team there. In the end, there’s three things to realise about being a CEO: a good percentage of your time is spent on people management and you have to learn to delegate a lot of things. And last but not least: the final responsibility is always yours! You can fire an employee for doing a bad job, but you are always to blame for the outcome. So there’s no excuse, ever!

A runner’s most important asset is his brain. In regular intervals, he has to observe his body and his environment and make a decision about what the best actions are at that moment. Going downhill = move faster. A long road to the next water-source = conserve your supplies. A runner close to you = know his and your strengths and weaknesses and decide whether to run faster, slower, or at normal speed.

The startup’s most important asset is leadership, which fulfils the same role as the brain during a marathon: evaluate internal resources and the environment and decide what step is best to take when.

I hope to have a few more general blog posts on entrepreneurship left in me. But for now, the sun is shining and the future looks bright. But we also need to conserve our supplies to the next water source, and run at sufficient speed to meet both our milestones and reach the finish.

All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

3 people like this post.

Unlike

Let me start by saying that it’s hard to write about what we’re doing, particularly from a non-marketing angle. Tech IT Easy is a .Org and it doesn’t feel right to use it as a commercial medium (apart from the sponsorship banner, which I value very much and which will at some point host my company’s logo as well).

Marketing aside, it’s hard to write about something that continues to evolve. What is a permanent truth is that you get presented with a lot of information, challenging problems, and Choices (with a capital C) all the time, and I wouldn’t exchange this period for anything (except for a bit more sleep).

The Uncertainties
Today’s post will be about managing uncertainty, which is really at the core of my job description. I wrote about technology, market, people, and other risk before, which is a way to abstract what is happening.

What really is happening is that you have multiple people in a company, each has their own job, not each does it in the same (predictable/independent/insert apt term here) way. These people have to build or build upon often multiple technologies that may or may not exist yet. All of that needs to happen before the project runs out of money. You need to involve external parties who have to like what you’re doing, enough for them to give us stuff for free, invest in our stuff, and/or buy our stuff. Risks from all angles but oddly enough it feels fine.

Lilypads allround
In a draft I wrote a few days ago and don’t want to bore you with, I compared it to the following:

Entrepreneurship is different. You may love doing a certain activity more than others, but doing so may very well come at the price of success. If I were to try to describe the feeling, I would say it feels like jumping from one lilypad to the next and keeping them all floating in the same general direction. I can spend more time on one lilypad because it houses a nice frog I like or because the sun’s shining on it just right. But eventually, the pressure would push the leaf into the water and I would drown. Or something to that (slightly nightmarish) effect.

This isn’t that bad, of course, or rather if you think it’s bad, believe me: you’ll get used to it! I wasn’t prepared for this, but I knew it would be hard and now it’s just an everyday thing.

The best way to deal with all these lilypads is to learn to be efficient and to spread the love around equally.

Gut instinct vs. calculated risks
During the early days of my master in entrepreneurship which was supposed to teach me all this stuff, we tried to analyse “the entrepreneur” from the psychological, sociological, and economical perspective. The most frustrating part about it was the psychological side because every academic paper and article seemed to compare the entrepreneur to a superman. It probably didn’t help much that plenty of those articles were written during the .Com days where we all worshipped entrepreneurs many of which later turned out to sell very good smelling air.

One thing that struck me, however, was the concept of “calculated risk.” Entrepreneurship isn’t a risky venture, it is an exercise in calculated risk. I didn’t get what that meant until very recently.

As mentioned, our company is composed of several people, all of whom are different and work differently. I have people that need structure, people that hate structure, and people that seem to jump from one lilypad from the next, with me, the “boss,” chasing after them. In one way I hate it, in another way I really want people to find the best way FOR THEM to work, though of course respecting the general reality of our situation.

I am taking a risk there, but the crucial part is that I do so in a calculated manner. And that is more literal than you think. For example:

We have a very clear vision of where we want to be in several months time, but there are alternative paths to get there. One would be to build upon existing technology, which would involve a slight adaptation but at a very high financial cost. The advantage is that we have a ready to go product, the disadvantage is that we have to calculate the higher cost down to our customers. That’s ok, if it wasn’t for path no. 2.

No. 2 would require building something from the ground up that would interface with an existing technology, except that it allows us to create something much more impressive (and innovative!), as well as build a series of cheaper prototypes until we reach the mature prototype phase. Cost of production would be the same in the end, except that we can produce 10 versions of our product for the same price. The advantage is a superior product for the consumer, the disadvantage from a developmental stance is that instead of a minor adaption such as in path 1, we spend more time on this part, time we could allocate to other areas.

These are pretty much once-a-week decisions that I have to make, and a large part can already be decided by instinct. It is better to build 10 cheap prototypes than 1 expensive prototype. But how much better it is can also be calculated out in time and material cost in a simple excel sheet.

How I choose to interpret “calculated risk” is that it is actually calculated. Risk is simply uncertainty and uncertainty means that there are alternative paths to a destination and we don’t 100% know which is the right one.

You can apply this to plenty of other things, such as how to design products for different business models and how to design companies for different investors. It is amazing what clarity it brings to quickly crunch the numbers when a new idea is introduced that appears to derail the whole project. After calculating the cost of that choice (the “risk”) it may in fact bring the project to a whole new level!

I still consider myself a visual thinker where ideas are concerned, but I am becoming more and more convinced of the power of “the numbers” in turning ideas into commercial innovations. There is a risk to spending too much time in them, of course. Who hasn’t heard of forecastoritis, also known as the hockey-stick financial forecast. Life doesn’t work that way and while any forecast over a longer period of time ends up looking like starting with a large minus that turns into a larger plus, the best forecasts actually reduce the minuses to a minimum. I see a large R&D budget as the equivalent of a welfare state that just sponsors those types of people that don’t really ever want to make money: the scientists. They just want to build things and love an endless R&D budget. What they don’t realise is that when a company actually makes money, part of that money will be used for R&D anyway, which actually becomes an endless development budget! But only after you have a viable cash cow that makes it happen and only if development continues to generate continuous revenue opportunities. Ok, that last paragraph was a bit of a rant…

All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right. Pictures are courtesy of the great M.C. Escher and nature.

1 person likes this post.

Unlike

I asked yesterday for a more graphical and intuitive way to plan out costs for products and projects. The reason lies in an essay I co-authored several years ago with Jeremy Fein, co-founder of this blog. I forget the exact title of the thing, but its premise was that good entrepreneurial teams are composed of both brains & brawn (Asterix and Obelix, in other words). It has since become my philosophy towards entrepreneurship and building teams.

Good ideas also reside in intersections between different modes of thinking. I don’t know who made up the idea of the ‘execution multiplier for ideas‘ (Derek Sivers posted it on his blog once), but an idea is worth little without someone carrying it out. Similarly, in Neil Fiore’s book “The Now Habit” (the ONLY self-help book I would ever recommend to people) he writes about the source of good ideas, which often come when you least expect it: on your breaks, your holidays, anywhere which is not work-related.

While productivity is a great thing and crucial to executing ideas, idea-generation itself is actually not very compatible with the productive mind. But it’s not impossible to combine the two either.

Let’s look at a sample workflow from problem to idea generation to product (product meaning the outcome of idea generation, which has to lead somewhere):

1. You have a problem (duh… no really, don’t come up with an idea if it doesn’t solve a problem!)
2. You discuss it with people to try to figure out it’s parameters —what is the true gist of the problem?

This is a good time to get stuck. Where do you go from here? Do you go the left-brained route — the super-rational approach that would e.g. benefit from some number crunching in Excel? Or do you take a right-brained approach — the artistic approach of drawing out the problem further on a white board or an outliner?

It of course depends on the complexity of the problem, but it isn’t time yet to go super-rational all of a sudden. It breaks you out of creative solution mode and gets you into execution mode, which is really brain-dead “getting things done” mode. Before you get things done, you have to define “things” much further.

The next step in my process would be:
3. draw out several solutions, preferably in a group, and discuss them and the logic behind it. Is it an elegant solution to the problem? Does it solve it or does it complicate it? What scenarios are there and what are its parameters?

As soon as you come to scenarios, we come into process mode. And this is where a more left-brained approach of calculating resource-allocation (people, time, money) absolutely makes sense. In my last post, I was hoping that someone would have a good way of making this more compatible with step 3, I am still waiting for someone to come up with a good solution, however.

4. calculate it out. What are the costs associated with each solution, what are the benefits of each solution?

Costs vs. benefits could also be called expenses vs. income on a financial projection for a startup. Solid resource allocation is ultimately the lifeblood of a company, however in an early stage it is also the language to use when looking for funding for your company.

I don’t want to be too rigid about this; I’ve struggled with the process of “problem -> idea generation -> execution -> product” in the past and think that it’s an area that benefits from several approaches and also leads to more-than-several pseudo-suggestions on how to approach this.

Rather, I thought to expand a little on yesterday’s post and clarify why I really do want a more visual Excel (for lack of a better term). If you want to combine right- and left-brained perspectives, a white board alone won’t do it and Excel alone won’t do it. I want software that does both.

Like

Unlike

Both ‘startup’ and ‘entrepreneur’ are terms that immediately evoke an often false reaction from an audience and I would personally prefer not to describe my work using those words. In the following post, I write about three associations in regards to entrepreneurship, one positive, one negative, both somewhat false, and one what I see entrepreneurship as really: just a job. As usual, these diary posts, which I try to write in a short amount of time, are produced with minimal editing. I hope it makes sense. All my entrepreneurial diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

The popular associations
The word entrepreneur has two popular and a third upcoming association. One association is negative, that of a risk-taker and in some ways a loser—this would be more in a European context where job-security is highly valued. The other is positive, that of a potential Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, i.e. the smart entrepreneur who sees a big opportunity and has the drive, intelligence, and access to other resources to make it very big.

Of these two, the latter is what we are all aiming for, but realistically that applies to less than 1% of entrepreneurs today (using the very broad definition of someone that starts anything from 1-man webdesign company to an ambitious cure for cancer). The first association is also a misunderstanding of entrepreneurship, as entrepreneurs are not blind risk-takers, or at least they shouldn’t be. I would say and hope that it applies to a minority of entrepreneurs also.

The third association: a career-choice
The third association is that of an upcoming trend: entrepreneurship as simply a job. You’ll find plenty of job-adverts with “entrepreneurial attitude a plus” or similar in the job-description, a term I hate just as much as the often mis-used “business development,” standing for just B2B sales.

Added to the job-description part comes that there are plenty of entrepreneurial courses and full academic programmes available to the public, one of which I enjoyed, though I know from personal experience that that doesn’t make a person an entrepreneur.

A third factor contributing to the ‘entrepreneurship is a job’ association is easier access to the marketplace. I’ve had some online discussions with Cecil Dijoux on this blog about today’s technology culture in the context of enterprise software development, and there is as much a democratisation of software-/web-ware development, as there is of other increasingly “low-tech” industries. (As a side note: My definition of low-tech is a technology something has very low barriers to developing it.).

I think that the abundance of resources (not just) in regards to programming, to very well developed (internet) distribution methods for getting products, tangible or intangible, out to customers, as well as more-and-more programmes for funding/assisting startups, means that entrepreneurs have access to a better developed funnel where it comes to their profession of gathering resources and marketing their products.

That doesn’t make it easy, and actually brings other challenges like being one tree in a very large forest, but it does mean that it can be seen as a type of job.

Now, what is there not to like about the word ‘entrepreneurship’?
Maybe it’s a personal thing, but I feel very uncomfortable telling people I meet that I’m an entrepreneur. One, I do see it like a job, a job that I have to do well, and nothing special really. The term ‘entrepreneurship’ makes it sound fancy, which it is not. Two, I’m a European and I do feel the same association that many Europeans have to the word, which is that it’s “less than a real job.” Rationally, I don’t think that’s true, but emotionally I have found myself feeling the following initial reaction more than once when someone comes up to me and describes himself as an entrepreneur:

“Get a job, you hippie!”

Add to this that a startup is not a company until it makes money, and an entrepreneur is not an entrepreneur until he makes money doing what he does.

So I think the term ‘entrepreneurship’ is glorified, perhaps invented to make entrepreneurs feel like they’re doing something special, same as the term ‘Artist’ or ‘Inventor.’ Art isn’t art unless the audience considers it so, and people have invented plenty of mousetraps that are now collecting dust in a garage somewhere.

Suggest something new please
I’d like a new term for what I do and maybe you can suggest one. It should perhaps be related to a startup, which immediately summarises what is happening: A company that is starting up and isn’t there where it wants and needs to be yet.

The problem is that an entrepreneur is not always in the same class as a startup. He can be 50 years old and have a long and successful career behind him. Would you call him a “starter,” a term often used for people fresh out of college applying for a job at Consultant X or Multinational Y? Generally, entrepreneurs are responsible for the activities that happen in a startup in order to make it a success. Their chances of success increase if they have prior experience, resources, and networks to build upon, that make it easier to access the three pillars of “starting up,” as I’ve summarised in the picture above.

In regards to the above, I personally like to describe my work as “I’m running a small company and we’re developing a new product X,” but that is also a bit of a mouthful.

The other side of the coin is that entrepreneurs are in (desperate) need of marketing, where glorification does play a part. I read somewhere that entrepreneurship can be described as the process of developing something irregardless of resources currently in possession. That suggests a pitch is necessary, and perhaps already being termed an entrepreneur helps getting a foot in the door. I doubt it and it would personally bother me if that’s all it took, but I’m smart enough to realise that we “entrepreneurs” need to do whatever it takes to acquire resources, as long as it fits our code of ethics of course.

So, entrepreneurship, yes or no? I don’t like the term, but I may be stuck with it. If I come up with something more apt, I’ll let you know. And same for you please!

Like

Unlike

This post is part of a series, a diary of starting a business if you will. It follows part 1, the decision of becoming an entrepreneur.

One thing I found out is that it’s hard to put your responsibilities down on paper… there are so many!!! There is of course a basic job-description, which more or less sounds like that of a project manager/pull-the-rabbit-out-of-the-hat magician: “make it happen that we go from this thing on paper to the product in the hands of customers.” “Make it happen” is a super-loaded phrase, which can mean countless things.

There is a continuous struggle between micro-management and keeping the overview. Micro, because it is your responsibility that every (little) thing is carried out by your employees (if you have them). Overview, because You the entrepreneur are The Organisation. There is a third struggle that shouldn’t exist really, that between your professional life and your personal life. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to do this thing well is to focus on it exclusively. Friends, family, love, …blogging… it’s a nice luxury to have, but it comes second place.

The responsibility of an entrepreneur are thus: have a goal and make sure that everything is executed to get to that goal.

In a technology company, there are matters of technology and business (really, in what business except for strategy consulting isn’t there a mix of “technology,” which can mean anything from cooking to software development, and the commercial side of things, which is meant to pay for everything?). What I found was that as someone with a business background, who sort-of-kind-of has an idea about product development, and has a better grasp of business development, I still can’t let go of the reigns of product development entirely.

Product development ties in directly with business development. People are unwilling to pay for something that doesn’t exist and similarly our budget is supposed to last us until we have something worth paying for or investing in. Therefore, as an entrepreneur I have to make sure that product development stays on track. The absolute best way to do this is to have a capable product development manager in charge. The truth of it is that startups by their nature are resource-poor, which includes tripple-A product development managers (probably employed at multinational X or Y somewhere), and there is a lot of learning/training on the job. Learning/training means that the (hopefully) existing product development manager (in our case yes) still has to be managed, through schedules and regular meetings. In any case, product development is in its conceptual stage a very brainstorm-friendly activity, which means the more the merrier. But ultimately, a startup must get beyond this stage, respecting the entire resource-poor situation that a startup usually faces.

So, responsibilities of an entrepreneur as far as the technological product development is concerned: If you have a product development manager, you have to make sure that he works under the realities of the business. If you don’t, which I imagine many 1-person software startups operate under (as well as those lucky strategy consultants), well then you have to do the job of product development as well, keeping a close eye on the business realities.

OK, the business part of things. My role is fairly well-defined here as I come from a business background and approach startups from a business perspective. Assume that role 101 is having a firm grasp on everything that goes on, which can be phrased as “where are resources (people, time, money) being expended at and is it wise to do so.” This entails having a good budget plan and sticking to that.

Role 102 is to build the business, which I call business development, but that often gets confused with sales as that that is what it says in job adverts. Business development is the building of the business, which includes sales, but also includes building the company and all that entails.

So, we are trying to get from point A to point P, how do we go about it? If product development is about turning an idea into a product, business development is building a business plan into a business. Business plans are total BS unless they contain validated information. Some key-chapters in business plans are the market overview, the market approach, the time-line, and the financial need to meet all these objectives. Business plans can serve as a. cannon fodder, b. a plan of approach, c. one of several signals to attract investment. For c. no investor will take a look at your business unless you have a plan of approach (b.). On that plan, there should be a time-line, which you are following (predictability!) and there should be a goal: the market you are targeting and your approach.

The market section of the business plan presents a big problem for technology entrepreneurs. Because (non!) customers often don’t know what they want. I can ask a target group “what kind of air do you like to breathe?” and it wouldn’t surprise me if a significant number of responses would say: “I like to breathe air that smells like perfume.” OK, that’s a terrible question, but what I mean is that people sometimes make up answers that have nothing to do with reality (that said, both the perfume business and the fast-food industry have made lots of money from essentially selling air that smells good. Scent is also plays a very important part in memory, but I digress…)

What I’m a big fan of is validated market data, which is data gathered from actual customer experience with your product or part of it. That brings forth another problem of a bias towards early (and over-excited) adopters, something which the book “crossing the chasm” deals with, but is really not something that I think is realistic to address at an early stage, except that validated market data can also come from experts in the markets you are targeting.

The implication is also that product development is again completely tied in with business development which leads us down the path of rapid prototyping, another practice that works great in software / on the web, not as easily (though not impossible) with hardware. In any case, the experts in this area most well-known today are:

• - Steve Blank, who wrote “The Four Steps to Epiphany” and is currently hosting the excellent Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminars (btw. Steve Blank also writes a great blog on customer-focussed development, which I’ve only just started reading.
• - Eric Ries, who authors the blog Startup Lessons Learned and has some great articles on responsible (=lean) development.
• - And Donald Reinertsen, who wrote an incredibly dense book called “Principles of Product Development Flow,” a book which is clearly an authority in the field, but which I cannot recommend to any sensible entrepreneur with a 60hr/week schedule. Those principles, by the by, number in the 100+.

As well as of course Toyota and plenty of other experts out there, I’m sure, many of which are referenced by the people mentioned.

I think that it can safely be said that task 3 or a sub-task of business development is working towards the customer, the lifeblood of a business.

There are other tasks of course, which have to do with human resources, legal work, accounting, etc. Some of which can be outsourced, some of which can be done half-heartedly (oh no, I didn’t say that), some of which are really-really important, etc.

All these tasks, however, require a certain authority. The entrepreneur’s responsibility is to either be an authority on a task level or to be sure to work with authorities, either in the company or in an (informal) consulting fashion, so that they are carried out responsibly.

Task 4 can thus be entitled: be an authority on the tasks that need to be carried out or have access to one.

So, a whole can of worms starting a company can be and it is vital that it does not interfere with the single most important thing that you must do as a human being: be healthy! Health is part sleep, part exercise, part food, part love. There is no yin without yang and vice versa. Thus forget everything I said about personal life being no. 2. The best is if it reinforces what you do in your work. Health leads to happiness and happiness leads to optimism: a key-quality in entrepreneurship if there ever was one.

So the responsibilities of an entrepreneur summarised:

• 100: keep your eye on both sides of the court: the goal & the resources needed to get to that goal
• 101: align Product development with Business development
• 102: always validate your market data by staying close to your customers
• 103: be an authority on the tasks that need carrying out or have access to one
• 104: stay healthy and happy.

This was written in a single session with minimal editing. I hope it kind of makes sense. Part 3 of my e’diary will be on the topic of: can you prepare for entrepreneurship? As I have a master in entrepreneurship, I thought it might make for an interesting perspective. All my entrepreneurial diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ By choice, I’m being mysterious about my company. If you have questions, feel free to comment or write to me via the email address on the right.

Picture courtesy of Be The Dream.

Like

Unlike

Materialism doesn’t matter. There, I’ve said it. Nothing material, nothing that you can touch, matters… when talking about computers. See, I’m not that evolved.

Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, my laptop got stolen on the train. Last summer, due to a friend of mine “borrowing” my laptop at an event without telling me, I realised that I better start backing up if this were to happen again. So, on the 27th of December, a day before my laptop actually disappeared, I had a full backup made via Apple’s Time Machine, as part of my weekly routine.

And now, some hardware expenses later, one of which was a gigantic (640 GB) laptop hard drive by Western Digital which I’m loving, I have a different Macbook, but with exactly the same data I had before and am running it like nothing ever happened. And I’m telling you, I didn’t like spending money on this, but having all my data back feels like that money was inconsequential. Backups rock, as does OS X for having backup software built in!

OK, philosophically speaking, I’m still being materialistic about my data. Clearly, I’m not “if you could take one item to a deserted island data, what would it be?” material. But it’s kind of a revelation to me that hardware (and software) and money really is much, much less important than data.

I also hope that this inspires you to make a last minute resolution for 2010. Always back up your data because you never, ever know when it might just be gone.

Vincent

Like

Unlike

I’m reposting this comment I wrote in response to Eric Ries’s stimulating blog post on Harvard Business Review online, with the title “Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?” Feel free to share your thoughts on it there as I think it’s worth thinking about whether Entrepreneurship can eventually learned or whether it is an art-form. My thoughts on that are below.

Having both studied a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship and working in my 3rd startup (trying to apply the lean techniques that Lessons Learned made me aware of), I can say that my ideal is that entrepreneurship is a science. In reality, it’s a collection of Sciences as well as the act of Imagination AND Guts AND Agility, none of which are particularly scientific.

It’s a collection of sciences because no entrepreneur or team of entrepreneurs is undertaking just one activity, he, she, or they are doing many in parallel, some of which are business related and some of which are technological. Both have scientific foundations behind them.

Why the Business of Entrepreneurship is scientific is simple to explain. Businesses, starting or existing, can’t operate in a vacuum (for long). We have to obey financial restrictions, sell the idea to our investors, who themselves employ scientific means to measure whether the return on their investment justified, communicate to the market in effective ways, study the market, and project manage all the activities and people in the company. For most of these “wheels” already exist, so there isn’t always a need to reinvent them.

BUT, there is no replacement or science for guts, imagination, and agility in starting a business. You have to ignore many rules, you have to play dirty, and you have to be quick & flexible if you want to succeed. Maybe a management scientist can eventually plug those dirty variables in a formula somewhere. But I doubt it can be applied to any two startups successfully.

Vincent

Like

Unlike

I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible.

Sarah Lacy writes about SMSONE, a ultra-local news provider in India similar to Outside.IN, a Union Square Ventures funded US-only company that provides news updates via the web. SMSONE does it, as the name suggests, via SMS. And it spreads through a franchising model, working with local entrepreneurs that pay a franchise fee and also collect a share of the advertising revenue from locally focussed businesses. It is able to do this because of something that apparently doesn’t exist in the US (but does in Europe): receiving an SMS in India doesn’t cost the recipient anything.

When reading about this, I was immediately reminded of a similar business model employed by a Dutch entrepreneur in Russia, Ms. Annemarie van Gaal, founder of Independent Media, a company that distributed Russian versions of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire en Good Housekeeping (source). When she spoke at the Star entrepreneurial seminar in Rotterdam a year ago, she told us about how she differentiated herself from the competition (paraphrased as I haven’t got my notes with me):

The trouble with getting your magazines distributed in Russia was that you had to pay quite a lot of money (some would call it bribes) to companies that would then take care of it… badly. Instead van Gaal decided to do it differently. She would hire street kids to distribute her magazines, similar to the gold days of newspapers: the newspaper boy.

If you read Sarah Lacy’s account on Techcrunch, you’ll see that SMSONE does it similarly, hiring local kids, often without much education, to take care of distribution. Doing it via official channels is likely a nightmare over there, and centralising distribution kind of defeats the purpose of micro-news.

It’s a different way of thinking, which many of us westerners don’t have. I mean, would you entrust your products to a beggar on the street or to a street musician? Not only is it probably against the law (except if the government does it), we pride ourselves on our super-organised infrastructure, where anything from temp-workers to interns are there to provide companies with a flexible workforce, and anything from printing presses to mobile internet exists to produce and distribute your stuff.

Of course, I wouldn’t just leave you with these two examples. In the beginning of 2008, Boston Consulting Group published a study of “local dynamos”— domestically focussed companies, which use creative business models to capture value from emerging markets that are filled with challenges, like lacking infrastructure and low-income consumers. The map below shows how widespread these companies are.

Some very interesting examples are mentioned, like:

• Shanda, a Chinese gaming-company, that, in order to combat software-piracy, focusses on providing interactive services through gaming, services that are impossible to pirate. And to overcome a lack of a financial infrastructure to pay for online services, they work with pre-paid cards.
• Indian CavinKare, which sells cheap sachets of shampoo through small local retailers, while using educational marketing to teach customers how to use their products.
• Goodbaby, which targets the many 1-child families in China, who are both willing to spend more on their child than multi-child families would, but are also in need of education.
• Amul, an Indian food-and-beverage-marketing-organisation, which collects and pays for milk locally, while tracking all operations via satellite and uses ERP solutions to make analysis based on the data and gauge whether future supply needs to be increased or decreased.
• Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods (Russia), which works extensively with local partners, and has devised leasing schemes for expensive machinery to boost their production and is able to serve 280 million consumers nation-wide.

The BCG, of course, takes the stance of its customers, Western companies, and the study is mainly aimed at how multinational companies (MNCs) can replicate 6 of these dynamo’s advantages, in order to compete with them. They are:

1. Customising to local needs – which involves first understanding these needs, and then meeting them.
2. Devising innovative business models that overcome local challenges – a logical follow-up to the last point, how to make money from the info you gained.
3. Leveraging the latest technologies – meaning that these emerging economies are less burdened with traditional infrastructure and quicker on the uptake of more affordable, newer, and easier-to-spread technology, e.g. mobiles.
4. Benefiting from low-cost labor and overcoming shortages of skilled labor – there’s two ways to look at this; a local workforce will be better equipped to interact on a local level, a highly-trained workforce will be better equipped to run a business. Tough call.
5. Scaling up fast – Russia, India, China, Brazil, etc. are all giants with the promise of huge rewards when you capture them. Many of these dynamos grow quickly through both through acquisitions and building up their network of suppliers and distributors.
6. Sustaining long-term hypergrowth without imploding – this kind of follows on to the last point

Some of the Western companies mentioned, which have managed to compete on a local level, include:

• General Motors, which has adapted its luxury-liners to meet the demands of its Chinese customers, who are usually sitting in the back;
• LG, in China, which has learned that the audio-quality of its televisions is more valued by its customers, who often reside in noisy environments;
• Carrefour, which has started to work with local municipal governments in China, as these don’t meddle in their operations like local dept. stores would, and are able to provide access to prime locations;
• Perfetti Van Melle, in India, a candle/chewing-gum manufacturer, which has found local means to advertise, interacts frequently with local partners, and has adapted its products to local tastes;
• and Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut and KFC, and has adapted its menus to meet local Chinese tastes, started a new food-chain aimed specifically at the market, and uses its international expertise to integrate IT, lean supply chains, and a higher level of food standards into their offering.

It shows the value of out of the box thinking in terms of reaching people, and I believe that traditional “Western” thinking should long ago have been thrown out the door anyway, particularly in light of the troubles that media-, automotive, and financial industries are going through. We are in the flux of disruptive innovation and only those quickest to grasp new technologies and ways of thinking are able to survive another day.

No shortage of lessons on that from entrepreneurs in emerging economies…

Vincent out

Like

Unlike

Hi, Vincent here. I have neither the intent, nor the talent to develop this application, but it was a thought/pain I experienced at a museum today and an iTunes search didn’t reveal an app like it.

A brief background. I’m pretty a-cultural, but I find audio-tours in museums generally a must, which means I usually spend the 5 or 10 euros extra to get one of those players to walk around the exhibition with headphones on. A little anti-social, but it helped me discover the lives of some amazing artists, like Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc. And my favourite nation of artists: Japan!

Yesterday, I was an an exhibition of “That Scream Guy” Edvard Munch. I was there with my sister and it seemed a little wasteful (it was only 3 rooms of lithographies), not to mention anti-social, to get an audio-guide. Still, it helps tremendously to get just a little background on a picture, really adding to the experience.

Here’s the iPhone app I would like to see.

1. Point the phone at a painting (an immediate weakness there),
2. image recognition happens (how?),
3. it hooks into a source of info about it (preferably in an audio-format) such as Wikipedia,
4. and you get to hear or see a description of the painting you are seeing.

It’s nothing genius and apart from perhaps the image recognition part, it seems fairly cheap/easy to produce.

The one weakness: cameras in museums aren’t always allowed. I would guess this means that you have to work together with museums to get things going (which sucks!).

Well, this is just something I want to throw out there, a la the much underused twitter hashtag #freeideasiwanttoseehappen

So if someone is looking for a creative challenge, you have your first customer right here!

/Vincent

Like

Unlike

When Leopard (10.5) came out, I could mention a laundry list of features that were pretty great. When its spawn/sibling/relative(?) came out in the form of Snow Leopard, I was struck with a serious case of reviewer’s block. There is very little to say about something that really only innovates under the hood and at the fringes.

So, my review today will be short, so short that I won’t talk about more than one feature. And that feature may disappoint you, I know it. But, in the greater picture of things, I think it’s pretty cool.

Stepping over from Windows half a decade ago, I had to adopt a new behaviour. I was forced to use iTunes, which meant that I had to import my whole library into it to make full use of this software and it’s ability to organise music. The iPod also affected this, which, prior to the iPhone/Touch, delegated its entire user-interface to iTunes also, allowing people to create intricate smart- and playlists, download podcasts, etc. in the software, whilst letting the hardware be controlled by one button only.

My musical behaviour on the computer had become somewhat bloated, less spontaneous than before. Leopard (10.5) innovated on this a little, by introducing Quicklook, which, through the space bar, allows for the quick previewing of most files, which is especially nice for movies and occasionally nice with music as well. The problem with the latter is that when you shift the focus to another app, as ADD-affected/music-listening people tend to do frequently, the music stops… quite literally. So it wasn’t a perfect solution.

Snow Leopard (10.6) introduced an improvement to that feature, one that is already affecting the way I listen to music on my Mac. Quicklook still works the way it always did, but what’s new is that you can quick look within an icon. By hovering over a music file on your desktop and changing the display in the finder to large enough icons (they need to be made a certain size (64×64 on my Macbook) for this to work), you will see a play button on the icon, which, when clicking, plays the track or video. And you can keep playing it while you do your other stuff, such as me typing this blog post.

Pretty awesome, if you ask me. No need to fire up iTunes just for that one file and my need to ADD has been satisfied.

/End Review.

Vincent

Like

Unlike

This weekend, I was faced with the important principles surrounding the owning of gadgets, such as my current laptop. I should add a disclaimer, I’m at an age where I have to be super-responsible for my life and there really is little excuse to make (many) mistakes. And when I woke up in a hotel-room without my laptop, I wanted to bang my head against a wall (if my headache wasn’t already big enough). Luckily, it all worked out in the end, but it sure gave me a reality-check.

So gadgets, by which I mean anything that costs in excess of €200 and more probably in excess of €1000. How do you keep your gadget habit safe? Three things that really-really-really matter:

• Common sense: I don’t need to explain this much, but not leaving expensive stuff unattended is probably rule 101 of common sense. That said, we are all human and common sense will never protect us 100%.
• Backups: I’ve had 2 moments of stress regarding my laptop in the last month. The first was installing Snow Leopard, which didn’t make it very clear whether I was upgrading Leopard or formatting the whole drive. Luckily it was the first, but it was stressful for about 30 min. The second was when I couldn’t find my laptop waking up and had 2 hours at breakfast to reflect on “how important are those pictures/documents/memories really?” Nothing with bits in it is really life-changing in my experience, but still it kind of feels like an extension to our human brain.
• Theft insurance: I currently pay about €200 per year on this, covering about €5000 of property and, at my age at least, it’s a real stress-reducer, especially with things that can easily get lost. You can think logically, you can backup, but having to buy a new laptop out of your own wallet kind of sucks.

So, just a short message to all the gadget lovers out there. Technology rocks, but so does a little insurance. If you have any ideas of your own of how to keep your gadgets safe, feel free to share in the comments.

Vincent

Like

Unlike

Retro Programming sucks?

I love this idea, but my no. 1 thought is that the context differed largely for him as a kid and for kids now. 1. there’s peer influences. I know that home schooling is a semi-big deal in the US (tried it once, it sucks) and that a large factor of that is keeping your kid isolated from bad influences.

In the scenario of CreatoComputer2009(TM), you would have to keep the “bad” influence of innovation and gadgetery around kids to a minimum, to allow your kid to use CreatoComp. Because as soon as that kid sees that all the other kids have to work nada to have a working computer, the whole experiment implodes.

Vs. 1978, where everyone had to work at making these wiry beasts, people dared calling a computer, work.

You can take this analogy to anything retro really: cars, movies, Asteroids the game. Compare that to any modern invention and people (except for the nostalgic crowd) quickly turn away.

I agree that to create creative & creating people, you have to confront them with difficult problems to solve at an early age (perhaps). I do think that it needs to be built upon the platform that we are now living with: super-connected graphical interfaces that operate in the digital realm mostly and involve minimal wiring or soldering. I also think that our understanding of education is evolving to the extent that even playing games can be considered a type of learning, which seems fairly compatible with being a child also.

You know there’s only one answer to this problem, right?

Vincent.
(P.S. I know, 2 posts in 2 days. Doesn’t mean that I’m back though, more confused about whether I want to come back. Gotta love the limbo that is August…).

Like

Unlike

As is usual when I take a long break from writing, my blog posts end up becoming insanely long. Take it as you will, but I’ve tried to make it as coherent a post as possible. P.S. this is a post written under de cover of my “leave of absence,” which means I still write, but less frequently. – - Vincent.

A good friend of mine, Zihni Ozdil from the Netherlands / Turkey, Historian Extraordinaire, is now publishing his wisdom online. If history, politics, and culture (“beyond the superficial”) is something you find interesting, I encourage you to check it out. On his site, I found an article entitled ‘the real Evil Empire,’ which, ignoring the provocative title, deals with the interesting topic of the cold war and the ‘demonification’ of Russia and communism at that time.

Yesterday, I had an interesting discussion with some Canadian Swedes that moved to Florida with their kids and had trouble finding a school. The only way, it seemed, to guarantee that their kid ended up in a good one is to have an A-class school in your district (which you can find via a website that profiles attendees according to race and economic background… wow…) and to have paid your electricity bills. It worked out well for them, but clearly suggests the underlying problem of a long-term selection bias.

Last night, meeting the Canadian Swedes, where I was also in the company of a Russian and a Japanese, I noted that it was strange that while both Russia and Japan, being superpowers in their own right, have infamously challenging education systems, which result in some pretty smart people graduating from either country, the US does not seem to follow that pattern, at least not at the high school level, and certainly not across all demographics. Yet, by all accounts, the US is a superpower, if not the superpower of this and the last century.

My post today is not about comparing countries’ education systems, it’s more about the strategic purpose of education. Many people don’t know this about me, but I don’t vote and I don’t generally care about (regional) politics. To me, our planet should be one country, where anyone can move and work anywhere, and services don’t have to be moved just because you physically moved  XX km/miles to another country. But I do recognise the power of competition and how that can lead to excellence. Versus a ‘group think’-like mediocrity where everyone just tries to be like everyone else and no one exceeds. So, in a way, I endorse a system of divided regions, because I think it leads to competition and thus excellence.

Education plays a strong role on the competitive advantage of nations, as it does in certain companies. Last year, applying to a lot of consultancy companies and working as one myself, I was struck at the importance that the accumulation of knowledge plays in this industry. If I were to start my own consultancy, continuous education of the staff would most certainly be a cornerstone of the business strategy, because knowledge is your product as a consultant.

I know that this thinking plays a strong part in government circles as well: how to make your/our country as strong as possible, not (just) in military terms, but in the sense of knowledge, mostly measured by the no. of graduates and the no. of patents that are published every year (as well the commercialisation thereof, which doesn’t go quite as smoothly).

I know that the no. of graduates coming out of Chinese universities is tremendous, and the no. of patents coming out of US ones is among the highest in the world also. So clearly, the US, superpower extraordinaire, is doing something right. I don’t however entirely understand why the primary/secondary school system is so abysmal then in the US. My only explanation is that, in academic circles, there are no national boundaries, and a Russian researcher can just as well (if not better) produce patents in the US as anywhere else.

There are other dimensions to the US superpower status as well, of course. It’s a military superpower, it is a cultural superpower (in terms of films, music, and literature), it has a large consumer-base. These three dimensions—safety through military strength, an easily adopted culture, a consumer’s paradise—also have the effect that they serve as an attraction point for outside academic or other talent. And while other countries may have strong educational bases, the other aspects are perhaps ignored just a little too much, still making the US a prime export location for knowlegde.

In the strategic literature, there is the concept of the resource-based view, which stipulates that company strategies are nothing more than a collection of resources, some of which are internalised and some that are not. I think that in the context of the US and education, the resources that must be internalised are those that lead to the commercial exploitation of technological advantage, which sounds abstract, but basically means making sure that the best technology/knowledge is produced in-house and generates economic benefits in-house as well.

But there other resources that must most certainly not be held onto in-house. These include standards, which facilitate the assimilation of knowledge. In education, the standards that we use are the bachelor-master-phd system, which can easily be studied in different combinations and locations. And text-books, which as many students know, are often from US-origins.

In many ways, the cultural exports from the US—movies, music, literature—are nothing more than the spreading of a standard, that of a language and a way of thinking, which makes assimilation of outside talent easier. And as long as that outside talent is used for the benefit of the US, in the form of patent exploitation, the US benefits, even if their own primary/secondary education system is quite uneven.

As mentioned, I don’t care about politics, country-differences, or governments. But if my logic is correct, I wonder if a metaphor exists for commercial superpowers, i.e. companies that are market leaders and remain so by attracting the greatest talent and finding ways to turn that into economic benefits.

Organisations are not complete economies like governments are and also have the benefit of being mobile—by law they are considered single persons, which have residence, pay taxes, etc. just like everyone else. So, as long as they obey the law, they can choose where they stay and choose to ignore local conditions, much like, I theorise, some governments do, instead focussing on the bottom-line: attracting excellence and turning that into profit, while keeping ‘unnecessary’ expenses as low as possible. Well, at least that is the stereotype of an organisation, while pressures have certainly lead some to adopt a more socially-responsible attitude.

Clearly, the question of talent, whether attracting or training it, remains a vital one for both countries and organisations. But I don’t think there is necessarily a correlation between talent and local conditions.. at all.. though local conditions do play a part in the quality of life, or lack thereof, which affects the talent’s in question desire for a certain location.

Vincent out.

(Picture courtesy of thehindubusinessline.com)

Like

Unlike

I hate breaks in anything I do, blogging, work, sports, love, etc., because it’s always harder to return back into the zone. Similarly, I already knew subconsciously that it would be hard to return back to blogging after the proposed hiatus. Routines are good and when they are moved aside, they get replaced by something else.

The human body is a machine and everything, from hours in the day, to food and exercise, to making money, to relationships, are all pieces in the machine of life. There’s only so many hours in the day is a well-familiar phrase to most of us and reflects the difficulty in balancing different activities and responsibilities, with some just falling off the map.

I am not saying that I plan to stop blogging, but I do think that we all need to make choices in our lives which will affect other, previous ones, like domino blocks.

Dynamics…

I just bookmarked a blog post on delicious on forming sales teams in a startup. It’s a good one and you should all read it. As I tagged and bookmarked however, I immediately thought, hey, I’m pretty sure no one on my company will read it. Why? Maybe because we already figured it out… Maybe because we figure stuff out as we are doing it… Your choice.

Blogging or any kind of writing for public purposes brings several complications to business people:

• it is public knowledge, meaning that the competitive advantages are slim: I don’t think this is a major factor, as most innovations are combinations of different ingredients that may or may not be public knowledge. Great artists steal, as they say.
• Writing is processed explicit knowledge from something that was previously implicit and needs to be made implicit again by the reader for it to be useful in a practical context: I’ve written about the knowledge-generating company and the knowledge spiral twice before. Another phrase, “You can’t help yourself, because your *self* sucks!” also comes to mind.

It’s the latter that represents the greatest challenge to authors and consumers of their work. I’ve also previously written about the benefit of formal education, which, I think, tries to recreate the knowledge spiral, turning explicit knowledge into the implicit kind, to be used by students in their work later on.

The dynamics of business is that there are expenses—YOU, the team, the office, etc.—which need to be recuperated by your work—the work you do for customers, after which they pay you. It leaves very little time for reflection, e.g. through blogging, etc., and for making things explicit, e.g. through blogging, etc.

I’m still a big fan of Michael Gerber’s E-myth revisited, which is really about writing that franchise manual for your business, so you can both understand the processes happening in your company, and expand on those, by more easily passing on knowledge. It’s Taylorism, of course, or Scientific Management, or any of the other management methodologies that followed in the past century.

But these activities require time, time which people inside organisations usually do not have, and hence prefer to outsource to outside consultants, who then need to make their knowledge explicit and again implicit in the minds and methods of their clients’ organisation.

It’s a real nightmare for people (like me) who think to much and always aim for something higher. And who want to blog. And who want to do good business…

Thoughts?
Vincent

(Picture courtesy of Fisica & Psychica)

Like

Unlike