Entrepreneurship
No mistake in the title: US immigration laws have some California entrepreneurs – Peter Thiel included – pondering a ship to house innovators and entrepreneurs 12 nautical miles off the California coast – i.e. international waters! The point here isn’t the specific plan, it’s the regulatory and political environment that spawned it.
The London Business School has made all of the presentations and panels from the 2011 Global Leadership Summit available (if you complete a free registration form). It’s their flagship annual conference and the theme this year is “innovation”. So far it’s been great to watch, starting with 3M’s CEO George Buckley on the first video – and not just because of the pretty decent joke about “3M’s greatest marketing mistake”: the company should have branded “3M” in Neil Armstrong’s boots that landed on the moon…
Great article sent by a reader, who by the way has now sent two great suggestion this year. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about entrepreneurs and how they’re supposedly much more risk-averse than usually assumed. While one can make the usual complaints about Gladwell’s articles (few, carefully selected samples to reach the desired conclusion), the most interesting takeaway is the quest for opportunities with asymmetrical success probabilities.
A great story called “Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs” highlights the sort of “good obsession” that seems to be a part of success. In the milder form, we call it “hunger” in an earlier Buysiders.com post – an incessant and relentless drive to be/ become exceptional or, in this case, to create exceptional things. That said, this story relates behavior that borders on the troublesome, and part of the story regards VCs’ efforts to try to separate between “good” and “bad” manic behavior. But as a teaser and to paraphrase the old saying: could we be calling the insane “eccentric” just because they’ve gotten rich?
Fred Wilson had an interesting post today on action oriented entrepreneurs/ leaders. While we don’t agree 100%, there are some interesting teasers to think about not only for the companies we study but also for our own. The situation one wants to get to is to have a team composed of people with diverse backgrounds and complementary skills – and personalities – combined with carefully-planned incentives that align individuals and teams with the company’s vision. Easier said than done, but the closer you get to this the better.
