Mark Fraunfelder, a leading voice of the post-industrial age, has a new book out today. It’s not what you expect, and it provoked quite a few thoughts. The book is about the increasing insulation between modern life and the idea of actually making/growing/fixing things. As Mark chronicles his journey into the world of tinkering, I [...]

With so many options in media, interaction and venues, you now get to choose what you expose yourself to. Expose yourself to art, and you’ll come to appreciate it and aspire to make it. Expose yourself to anonymous scathing critics and you will begin to believe them (or flinch in anticipation of their next appearance.) [...]

How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior? We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be [...]

If your business needs money, it seems as though you have two choices: Get a loan from a bank. Raise equity from an investor, giving up part of your company in exchange. Banks are everywhere, so the idea that they can loan us money seems obvious. And venture capitalists and the companies they fund are in the news all the time… and making a billion dollars sounds like fun.

Successful organizations spend a lot of time saying, “that’s not what we do.”
It’s a requirement, because if you do everything, in every way, you’re sunk. You got to where you are by standing for something, by approaching markets and situations in a certain way. Sure, Nike could make money in the short run by licensing their name to a line of wines and spirits, but that’s not what they do.
“That’s not what we do,” is the backbone of strategy, it determines who you are and where you’re going.

The Big Drop Off We try so hard to build the first circle. This is the circle of followers, friends, subscribers, customers, media outlets and others willing to hear our pitch. This is the group we tell about our new product, our new record, our upcoming big sale. We want more of their attention and [...]

1. Go where your customers are. Jacquelyne runs a tiny juice company called Chakwave. I met her in Los Angeles, standing next to an organic lunch truck. Like the little birds that clean the teeth of the hippo, there’s synergy here. The kind of person that visits the truck for lunch is the sort of [...]

Let’s define “bear shaving” as the efforts we go to do deal with the symptoms of a problem instead of addressing the cause of the problem. A rare Japanese PSA (now long lost to the copyright gods) showed a girl shaving a bear so it could deal with global warming (here’s a lesser one)… Example: [...]