December 2011
11 posts
November 2011
9 posts
Why We Behave Well…Some Thoughts on Tim Tebow
Been meaning to write about this for a while, but kept putting it off until Tim Tebow of all people threw this question in my face again. (Insert Tebow throwing accuracy joke here.)
The question is: why is there a stigma in this country about being a good person?
In this country, we don’t really love or worship good people. What we love is redemption: the bad street kid who cleaned up his act. The evangelical who gave up drinking to find God. We love that story.
But we don’t love people who are good from the start. Who seem to be born to show us all the “right way to live.” We have a number of clichés that show how much we hate these people. Goody-two-shoes. Suck-up. Holier-than-thou. Precious.
When we are confronted with a person who honestly lives a good life (especially in the public eye, but not necessarily) we look for chinks in the armor. We call them hypocrites.
So good
“There is a reason why we are so committed to social media at The Times and that reason rests with our audience. We have an incredibly enlightened, intelligent and sophisticated group of users who are highly engaged with our products. Our efforts in social media are meant to tap in to the knowledge from that readership. We value what they can share with us and with other users.”
—Arthur Sulzberger, Chairman of the New York Times, in an excellent and eye-opening speech at the London School of Economics. Money stat: A New York Times article is tweeted every 4 seconds. They are quietly killing it online. I wonder how their margins look. (According to a buddy, not much better than last year.)
Innovators, Imitators and Idiots: Why MBAs Fail at Entrepreneurship →
stuwall.tumblr.com
5 pitfalls for recent grads starting a company
I began working on Postabon, a bootstrapped start-up, after I graduated from Harvard Business School last June. My co-founders and I slept on lots of couches, worked from coffee shops, and invested in a minimum viable product. We recently…
This applies far beyond MBAs.
Luck Is Just The Spark For Business Giants →
nytimes.com
We systematically found 230 significant luck events across the history of our study’s subjects. We considered good luck, bad luck, the timing of luck and the size of “luck spikes.” Adding up the evidence, we found that the 10X cases weren’t generally “luckier” than the comparison cases. (We compared the 10X companies with a control group of companies that failed to become great in the same extreme environments.)
The 10X cases and the control group both had luck, good and bad, in comparable amounts, so the evidence leads us to conclude that luck doesn’t cause 10X success. The crucial question is not, “Are you lucky?” but “Do you get a high return on luck?” We call it ROL: return on luck.
Play
