Your Customers' Vision, or Yours?
You don’t necessarily have to listen to what your customers tell you they want to run a customer-centric business. As Steve alludes to in his recent post about Mickey Drexler, there is a debate floating around about whether you should do as Steve Jobs did, and “ignore the customer,” or you should do as others, such as Drexler do, and center the entire business on the customer.
Long Term Innovation vs. Exponential Innovation
Ray Kurzweil is a famous author and futurist. One of his most widely reference works is a book that is now six years old, but which discusses a theory with startling ramifications. The book is called The Singularity is Near, and theory is actually fairly straightforward.
What is it like to work with Elon Musk?
There is a members-only Q&A site — for lack of a better classification — called Quora, which is a virtual treasure trove of experiential information and stories.
Why Steve Jobs Acolytes Should Focus on Mickey Drexler
Just ran across this piece by Tyler Brûlé in FT. In "Kylie, me and client focus," Brûlé punctuates what I've been saying to people lately about J Crew CEO (and Sun Valley denizen) Mickey Drexler -- that he'd make a great dean of a business school.
The Inertia of Normality
Nothing worthwhile is effortless. The leaders whose work and accomplishments we admire work every day on what Dustin Curtis calls “The Fight”:
But the truth is that, in order to make progress, you need to physically and mentally fight against the momentum of ordinary events.
Dent The Future: Introducing Our New Conference
Some leaders seem able to shape the world through sheer force of will and strength of vision. Some leaders seem immune to the forces of creative destruction, and carry their organizations successfully through decades of disruption and change.
Lessons From a Vintage Internal Disney Cross-Functional Interaction Map
Clay Christensen stresses in the Innovators Dilemma that teams "...should be structured to facilitate the cross-functional interaction that is characteristic of different types of projects."
Where Design Sits at Apple
If anyone doubted the continued importance of design at a post-Jobs Apple, those doubts were put to rest yesterday when Apple announced a few major changes in executive leadership, including Jony Ive’s move to Human Interface leadership across the entire company.
Creating a Lifestyle Dent
In certain circles the term “lifestyle business” is a derisive term. There’s a glory in dedicating yourself fully to your work, to the late nights, to the sleeping under the desk mentality of of the early stage tech startup culture. As Michael Arrington put it: startups are hard, stop whining.
Startup School Presentation Videos
YCombinator is one of the original and most well-known startup “incubators”*, and once a year they host an event at Stanford called Startup School.
This year’s event happened on October 20th, and featured (as usual) a truly remarkable