Mitch Joe

These are the people who take the time to express their opinion, in public, that a particular book has no new content in it, or that someone’s blog post is just a rehash of old ideas.

There are various reasons for taking the time to damn something with faint praise, including:  self-promotion; attacking an enemy; or truly altruistic reasons for wanting someone to avoid spending their time material that’s better covered elsewhere.  Let’s look at the altruistic motive.

Mitch offers the following argument:

… you can learn something new from anyone at any time. The trick is in leaving yourself open to this experience. The trick is in always being a student.

This is a very good point!  You never know where you’re going to find a good story, a new technique, or inspiration, pure and simple.  It doesn’t seem to matter if you are a novice, a master, or anywhere in between. The danger to us is when we get stuck in execution mode or when we suffer from tunnel vision.

• In execution mode, we are focused on getting certain things done within a certain timeframe.
• When we have tunnel vision, we only look in a certain direction.  We don’t think to look in different places for new ideas in order to improve ourselves.

It doesn’t help that most organizations generally don’t encourage looking outward.  They encourage, or force, most employees to maintain an inward focus on repeatable execution for predictable results.  There’s no carrot or no pot of gold at the rainbow for you in these places if you stray into the outliers.

Sometimes this same tunnel vision occurs outside of a formal organization.  Peer pressure, or “common wisdom”, influence our behavior as well, don’t they?  If your friends, colleagues, or family tell you not to waste our time on something, you’ll often do what they say.  This is a concern that I have as we seem to move towards more of a recommendation mindset instead of an exploratory mindset.

Our (seeming) lack of free time  motivates us to efficiently use the spare hours and minutes.  I read a lot of content that talks about respecting the reader’s valuable time.  This type of respect is a key success factor for many content creators.

By placing your trust in a content creator (or curator), you are choosing the recommendation path.  You are letting someone else choose for you, just as if you were following along the suggestions that Amazon.com offers when you place an order, or if you follow the related posts generated by a tool like Zemanta.  You trust them to make good choices for you to use within your scarce free moments of time.

You sacrifice freedom and serendipity when you come to rely on recommendation.  True, there’s a lot of content out there, so you could waste a lot of time, or go insane, by trying to discover everything yourself.  It’s perfectly logical to follow the recommendations of a trusted advisor.  But it’s also good for you to explore on your own and find something new to share with your community.

It doesn’t have to be something completely new, either.  You can still find value in common knowledge that’s presented in a fresh and exciting way.  One person’s common knowledge could be your Next Big Thing.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to review something and give an honest opinion.  It might be presumptuous, however, to say that something’s a waste of time even if it seems to be too basic.  We all have to make choices about how to use our time, and thinking that we don’t have time to do something, like exploring or refreshing ourselves on the basics, is ultimately a choice.

What do you think?  Is there good stuff to be found even in basic information?  Or should we be trying to shield people from mediocrity?

Image by Daisuke Shirako

Everyone says that startups are fast-paced, innovative and able to take bigger risks more quickly than large companies. But the reality is that too many startups are not prepared for the risk-taking and innovation that has to take place.

Just because a startup is small doesn’t guarantee that it’s agile or decisive.

The agility and decisiveness in a startup comes from its founders. The founders have to be ballsy, risk-taking, innovative and aggressive. If they’re not, they can very quickly find themselves running a “small company.” Small companies are fine, but they’re not startups.

A lot of people want to work at startups because they’re small. They believe that a startup has more camaraderie and less politics than a bigger company. They expect more innovation in a startup, and they expect their work to have more impact and meaning. And all of those things could be true but they’re not automatically true.

The truth is you can get a lot of the benefits described above in a small company that’s not a startup. The difference is that a startup is at a stage where it has to be more innovative, aggressive, soul-searching and decisive. If it’s not, then it’s not a real startup.

Founders: If you’re not decisive, aggressive, soul-searching and capable of pivoting and adjusting (sometimes drastically) then you’re not running a startup. You’re running a small company. That’s OK. Just don’t get the two confused.

Employees: If you’re not genuinely interested in pivoting, adjusting, taking risk, and sometimes flipping on your head with huge change, then you’re not really a startup employee. You’re a small business employee. That’s OK. Just don’t get the two confused.

Startups aren’t small companies. They have a lot of similarities, but they’re not the same. Understanding and executing on the differences is critical for startup success.