Please take a minute to watch this amazing video. It’s a very moving story about how a poor community of 2,500 people living on a landfill in Paraguay spotted an opportunity to create instruments from trash. Aside from being an incredibly inspiring story, there are some powerful lessons here about innovation and the ability to […]
There has been an across the board shift since the 2008 financial crisis that has made the job of business development in large organizations much different than it was in the early 2000’s. Some of the biggest changes include an increased pressure to do more with less resources, an increased need for collaboration and more […]
The recent news of the Microsoft offer to acquire Nokia’s handset business has brought many layers of responses regarding technology, market niche and global footprint. Very few commentators have hit on what I see as the real issue, however: culture clash. With the button-down, northern European hardware culture of the Finns in stark contrast to the software-centric […]
I had the good fortune to travel through Cedarville, Michigan this summer and take a tour of the Great Lakes Boat Building School, the only wooden boat building school in the Midwest. Bud McIntire, their director of development, took us on a tour of their operation to give us a behind-the-scenes look at the fascinating […]
I’m a fan of the Apollo 13 movie on many levels, but today I’d like to highlight the scene where the team must recommend a change to the CO2 filter. Suddenly faced with the realization that the cabin filters in their disabled craft are not operating, the crew has a very short amount of time […]
What is it about garages that drives such amazingly committed environments for nascent business startups? To give us a ground-level view (no pun intended) into this motivation, let’s explore an experience I had last week at AirVenture2013 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. For a few days, I had the good fortune to join thousands of aviation enthusiasts […]
The garage located at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto is famous for where Hewlett and Packard made it happen. It’s nothing more than a simple building with swinging doors – so what made it work? Today, we continue our examination of this question with a look at how the element of low overhead plays a […]
As a young product manager in the mid-90’s, I was sipping champagne and enjoying company cafeteria cake in Finland with the executive team of a multinational cell phone company. We were celebrating their new cell phone, whose battery life was measured in weeks, not days. But as I sipped my champagne from a plastic cup, […]
Getting the Call I was on my normal early morning commute when my cell phone rang; it was the leader of an advanced technology task force for the government of a large Midwestern state. I had been collaborating with this team on securing a multi-million dollar national grant for their region. The promise of our […]
We slunk back to our conference room and stare at the walls and table littered with papers. Weeks of pulling data, drawing graphs, running complex simulations: REJECTED. Our team’s substantial capital request to increase raw material production capacity had been denied! If our forecasts were correct, we’d be unable to meet customer demand in 12 […]
