December 1, 2009
Strategy
No Comments
As part of my effort to keep on learning and supplement my reading on the personal MBA, and figure out how I can be more entrepreneurial I have been going to Enterprise Tuesdays, which is a series of lectures and talks every Tuesday evening at the University of Cambridge.
It’s the end of the first term now and I’ve been looking back over notes I’ve made and there seems, to me, to be some similarities in what everyone has said.
- An idea is worthless until you do something about it.
- Stress test your idea with a few people (who will tell you the truth!) is it really a good idea? Is the timing right, is the idea ready, is the market place ready?
- Put everything in to it, you must be passionate about it.
- Be passionate about it, if you’re not then no one else will be.
Obviously there was a lot more to the lectures than that, but to me these seem to be the common themes across the lectures so far.
I’m still having difficulty with the post lecture networking, the place is full of MBAs, CEOs and all sorts of other acronyms and I feel like a fraud for being there, which I think fits in with what Josh calls Imposter Syndrome
September 23, 2009
Books, Strategy
No Comments
The Nudge, Thaler and Sustein
Well, that certainly makes you think! The book describes various ways in which we are influenced or possibly should be influenced, but most of all it makes you think about the decisions your making (as well as making me feel bad for the lack of decision making on my part in many of their cases!).
At first I thought the book wasn’t really relevant to me and what I do on a day to day basis, however… as you read in and think about it, you can think of more and more situations where it is relevant (and you won’t stop thinking of situations where you wish someone else had read it before giving you a form). I am a developer for a large e-commerce site and there are many situations where this has caused me to think more about the user and things like what the default settings should be in a given situation, or how we present products and information to the customers.
Well worth a read.
August 23, 2009
Books, Strategy
No Comments
What Would Google Do, Jeff Jarvis
A reasonablebook talking about ‘the Google way’. There are good ideas in this book, most of them are discussed elsewhere (on the web and in other books) and they are repeated over and over again.
So, some good if unoriginal ideas repeated over and over. Get it from the library if you like reading, but don’t bother buying it.
February 23, 2009
Random, Strategy
No Comments
Regurgitate (definition 3 from TheFreeDictionary.com)
3. to reproduce (ideas or facts) without understanding them [Medieval Latin re- back + gurgitare to flood]
Please note… I had an idea here, but it ran in several threads and they didn’t all quite join up.
I read blogs, I read articles, I watch many RSS feeds.
Some people create new stuff but mostly they just regurgitate it. I get the same story from 4 or 5 sources and not one of them has added anything new or original, okay some may have re-written the words but they have not added to the story, they haven’t done any extra research and furthered the cause, they have just passed it on, and sometimes without even adding any attribution to where the story originated! I mean I’ve already read it three times so I know you didn’t write it.
I guess not everyone has a million RSS feeds they watch so some people will only see it once. Twitter seems to be the same, or in fact worse. As a few people post a story the rest clamour to show how up to date they are by passing it on as quickly as they can.
I am worried. Whilst I love the power people now have to create, edit and publish whatever they like whenever they like it I’m just finding more and more that the circle keeps closing. I think this circle will close up even more as everyone starts to ‘life stream’ we’ll end up with a big brother (TV show not 1984… or well both…) where all we do is watch someone watching someone else… until we get bored and stop watching and move up the chain, to watch what the other person was watching… but who’s at the top? and what happens to those that feel they can’t live without being followed. (Well it might not take off and the few that do will be Snowcrash style Gargoyles.)
Take on board other peoples ideas and opinions but don’t just copy! create something new, create something you can be proud of… yes, babies repeat words back when they are learning but they learn pretty quickly to talk for themselves. It’s about reaching that next level, push yourself, learn, read around a bit more, add something of yourself, express your opinion. Make everyone elses life more interesting and re-open the closed loop of inward looking story regurgitation, this is what Editors used to do at the newspapers but now you, dear reader are also the writer, the editor and the publisher you must think more about the other roles. I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy it more in the long run if you create your own work and you’ll certainly have more people reading your work, as it will provide them with original insight.
July 24, 2008
Books, Strategy
1 Comment
It’s been a couple of months since my last post, which I guess I blog years is a long time! It’s been pretty hectic really, and still is.
But I had to come online to say that Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA has updated it’s reading list for 2008.
I think a nice addition would be to say what’s changed and why, which I couldn’t see immediately when I looked through the list earlier. All the ones in my ’still to read’ stack are still in there, but will probably remain unread until, well, until I get them out of storage! Ain’t moving house brilliant.