Saturday, April 5, 2014

a greateR beast on creativity

Josh Groban interview on creativity and music

What I learn and loved from this video:
"You are only gonna be as good as your connection with your team"
"let the day unfold"
"don't be afraid to let go"


I feel this to be such a hard thing, since theres a beast, an uncontrollable passion ready to embrace the challenge and make things happen, the optimum way to generate an outcome that will create remarkable value is not based on individual controls but in a collaborative rhythm to unleash a greater beast!

learning is not for school is for life

In times of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
– Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition
Great quote found from a great blogger: rayhightower.com post

just as Steve Jobs put it: Stay hungry, Stay foolish



Saturday, March 22, 2014

Grow is priority! not just for the market...

While looking at changes and companies priorities, Its very noticeable the huge importance of Growth, not only in well stablished companies but startups finance,

Growth is a critical factor on stockholders and investors eyes.

From employees eyes sometimes this gets interpreted as "insatiable investors", just hungrier every day for more money: "money money money"



Although the exclusive goal of money is not too inspiring (for some :) the strategy of raising the priority of Growth is pretty neat!

I think We should be using the same pattern across the life decisions we make, It's not about "money money money"   but WEALTH and making sure we always challenges ourselves with curiosity, no comfort zone, no blind todays priority focus, stay cuirious:
Am I using my Unlimited capacity in the best possible way?
  • Where am I investing my time?
  • What company Do you work for?
  • What company concept should you start?
  • What school should your kids go to?
  • What communities do you help and help you grow?
What Do you want your career to go or your company where you invest time?



Blockbuster or Netflix? Blockbuster decided to stay as the best while the underdog didn't get discourage for its small size but got very excited from the grow factor.  It's not easy, they need now to realize how to keep moving? when should you kill the golden cow to go for the risky new thing.

What should every one do? I do not know, I just know that the awareness and appreciation for the value for how we invest our time and plan in the future, makes a difference!

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, several good points

Great points?


The core topic STRATEGY! Recommending how to visualize a field and make decisions based on your strengths and weaknesses as well as the ecosystem.

Ok, what are the great points?

  • What is the definition of opportunity: a lot of good? a lot of bad? What I want to read from the book is that you make your context an opportunity!
  • Weakness or Strength: They are not real! They are just opinions based on the norm, based on comparison with your CURRENT context.
  • The comparison  is not meaningless, but It is a piece of data to strategize and NOT A CAST HIERARCHY.
  • Rules are stablished to bring order, avoiding chaos, they support predictable good, supporting the 'strong' and put a side the 'weak'.
  • The strategy of the 'weak' is very hard, you need to be desperate to engaged and make it happen


Rules do bring order, but they also hide opportunities, since only chaos could lead to the impossible!


Quotes

They are out of context but they helped me to remind some great fragments that emphasize the points above developed.
"To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice. Their teams are just good enough that they know it could never work. Their players could never be convinced to play that hard. They were not desperate enough. But Ranadivé? Oh, he was desperate. You would think, looking at his girls, that their complete inability to pass and dribble and shoot was their greatest disadvantage. But it wasn’t, was it? It was what made their winning strategy possible." 
"He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of."
"Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions. They also need to be conscientious. An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer. That, too, is obvious. But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable. By disagreeable, I don’t mean obnoxious or unpleasant. I mean that on that fifth dimension of the Big Five personality inventory, “agreeableness,” they tend to be on the far end of the continuum. They are people willing to take social risks— to do things that others might disapprove of." 
"Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all." 

Fragments I hated 

"is not just how smart you are. It’s how smart you feel relative to the other people in your classroom."

Why?

Matching the market is real but you make it real.  You reason of success should be long term not short term to beat someone but long term to create the maximum possible wealth.  Even so It was interesting to see these stamens and help bring clearness on the idea!

About the book form

Its very historical, I personally think it goes in too much detail sometimes, the examples are great I would prefer to have more examples and less deep details on each of them, It's just my personal preference.

References

book in Amazon
great article, seems It is the basis of the book

Great book references from Malcolm Gladwell

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

"The Iron Lady" quote - Margaret Thatcher

"You must pay for the privilege- something, anything! If you pay nothing, you care nothing. What do you care where you throw your rubbish? Your council estate is a mess, your town, graffiti, what do you care? It's not your problem , it's somebody else's problem- it's the government's problem! YOUR problem is, some of you, is that you haven't got the courage for this fight. You haven't had to fight hard for anything. It's all been given to you- and you feel guilty about it! Well, may I say, on behalf of all those who HAVE had to fight their way up, (and who don't feel guilty about it) we resent those slackers who take, take, take, and contribute nothing to the community!"
Accountability!  It is your responsibility to produce a remarkable creation, make it happen!

reference: movie script

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

review: The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Recommendation: Go get it, amazing book!

In a nutshell

The profitable value comes from the learning verified speed of an organization or individual.
Entrepreneurship doesn't mean unmanaged goals, neither killing creativity, but taking innovation into the field minimizing the waste to align and create remarkable real value.

Juice!

What is so critical about eliminating waste?

How would you feel if tons of precious resources were wasted for incorrect leadership and driving? i.e. electricity, water, real state...  very alarming right?   What about your/your team time and talent, the unlimited potential to produce wealth!

The critical question is: which activities create value and which are a form of waste?

“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

"Our current problems are caused by trying too hard—at the wrong things."


What options we have? 

Be very romantic and produce the perfect product in your garage, see what happens, cross your fingers and expect some luck to happen. risk: Producing something no body wants.

Stop the chaos and freeze very well defined goals to deliver in a period of time, let your self and the team work and focus on making things happen and then launch the innovation to succeed your dream! risk: Producing something no body wants.

Work in small batches of experiments, you do not have a clear idea of what the dream product is, just hypothesis to be evaluated in a minimum period of time, you produce an MVP (minimum viable product) only to asses the experiment hypothesis.  Evaluate the experiment results from non vanity metrics, nor politics and decide: 1. persevere or pivot 2. what is next?
"risk": Producing something people uses and do not like

Decisions are made based on common sense not on what the person with higher range statement is.

Metrics need to be: actionable, accessible, and auditable.

The learning needs to be constant and very dynamic, in a loop of Build-Measure-Learn and constantly optimizing the duration of this loop, forget about the competitive advantage on the market, if you go faster than the market in this loop you'll get the advantage otherwise you need to evaluate your process and make changes.

Evaluating hypothesis on two type of assumptions:
  • Does it create value?
  • Does it create growth?
Startups need to start by focus all their energy on early adapters, once the company grows there is a challenge necessary pivot to be able to satisfy masses, they have a very different expectations than early adapters.

On Growth

There are four ways past customers drive sustainable growth:
  • Word of mouth.
  • As a side effect of product usage.
  • Through funded advertising.
  • Through repeat purchase or use.
There is not good or bad, It's based on the experiments you produce the type of growth injector you will need to implement.

Good tips

I like the recommendation on processes stages: backlog, in progress, build, validated
No more than 3 projects at a time on every stage (It reminds me "The Goal" - Goldratt)

“Stop production so that production never has to stop.”, you don't want to trade quality for time!

The 5 why's a great exercise to learn and improve from mistakes!  just like kiddos!

Quotes

"Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste."

"we could have discovered how flawed our assumptions were without building anything?"

"The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time."

"As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek."

"I’ve come to believe that learning is the essential unit of progress for startups. The effort that is not absolutely necessary for learning what customers want can be eliminated. I call this validated learning because it is always demonstrated by positive improvements in the startup’s core metrics. As we’ve seen, it’s easy to kid yourself about what you think customers want. It’s also easy to learn things that are completely irrelevant. Thus, validated learning is backed up by empirical data collected from real customers."

"systematically figuring out the right things to build."

"“Can this product be built?” In the modern economy, almost any product that can be imagined can be built. The more pertinent questions are “Should this product be built?”"

"if you cannot fail, you cannot learn."

"Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem."

"planning really works in the reverse order: we figure out what we need to learn, use innovation accounting to figure out what we need to measure to know if we are gaining validated learning, and then figure out what product we need to build to run that experiment"

"“get out of the building” and start learning."
"“go and see for yourself”"

"If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is."

"The reason to build a new team to pursue an idea is that you believe you can accelerate through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop faster than anyone else can."
"The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else."

"Sustainable growth follows one of three engines of growth: paid, viral, or sticky."

"reducing batch size, we can get through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop more quickly"

"The ideal goal is to achieve small batches all the way down to single-piece flow along the entire supply chain. Each step in the line pulls the parts it needs from the previous step. This is the famous Toyota just-in-time production method."

"“Startups don’t starve; they drown.” There are always a zillion new ideas about how to make the product better floating around, but the hard truth is that most of those ideas make a difference only at the margins. They are mere optimizations. Startups have to focus on the big experiments that lead to validated learning. The engines of growth framework helps them stay focused on the metrics that matter."

"in my experience startup teams require three structural attributes: scarce but secure resources, independent authority to develop their business, and a personal stake in the outcome."

"“In the past, the man has been first; in the future, the system must be first.”"