Perspectives
Where Gender Inequality Starts
We're doing something wrong in promoting gender equality and I think it starts all the way back to how we name babies. We have a patrilineal naming tradition that asserts to a baby girl that her father is more important than her mother. To me this is the beginning of...
Bonehead Circles
One of my faithful readers pointed out a comment I made in my last post about Open Dialogue. It was when I referred to my reluctance to speak up recently about a bonehead move by a co-worker. He said that in his experience, "Maybe the problem is that boneheaded moves...
Open Dialogue
I was naughty the other day and am feeling slightly guilty about it. Essentially, I found myself not willing to share my honest opinion and thus breaching all my rules about open dialogue. I have always said it is better in a startup and in working with a close team...
Startup Failure – We Need a New Word
I came to the realization the other day that we need a new term for startup failure. For some reason, articles such as this one, seem to link childhood failure in school and on the sports field with startup failure. But the linkage is just not there. Let's look at how...
Necessity is the Mother of Invention
I was preparing a talk for Techno at the Impact Centre recently recently on evaluating new innovations and I ran into this old proverb again: Necessity is the mother of invention. I thought about it for a while and realized that the expression is very apt but that...
A Culture of Helpfulness
Today's TED Talk made me think long and hard about the issue of culture in startups, especially about how to create a culture of helpfulness. The research on the subject is quite clear, that helpful cultures outperform unhelpful ones hands down. I'm struggling though...
Why Startups Succeed
There is a great TED Talk you should watch that went live yesterday. In the talk Bill Gross who is the founder of IdeaLab and has founded a lot of startups talks about some research he has done about why startups succeed and others fail. "He has gathered data from...
End If
Since I wrote a post on Monday entitled If, Then, Else, I figured I should follow up that one with 'End If'. Bear with me here for a sec and you'll see why this is relevant and interesting (at least to me.) In computer terms End If is the command that is used to...
If, Then, Else
I was sitting with several people in a meeting recently trying to figure out why they just weren't getting what we were talking about. It was one of those situations where we had had a meeting recently and made a number of key decisions. Now we were meeting to decide...