Devoting yourself to something means emotions can get attached. This happens as much in professional leadership as in personal lives. In professional environments you can choose to care deeply about your work or not. Entrepreneurs can devote themselves so much as to lose everything in a project. Athletes and teams that come in second often seem more crushed, despite being the second best in the world, than those who merely[…] Keep reading →

Between my talks and seminars and the university courses I’ve taught, I get to speak in public a fair amount. We all know one of the main challenges of public speaking is keeping the audience engaged — a bigger one being how to recapture an audience’s attention if you lose it. Here’s a trick that works every time. Although doing it can challenge you more than you think you can[…] Keep reading →

I wrote the other day about my six-month anniversary of burpees. A couple days before was a bigger anniversary — the tenth anniversary of Submedia’s Manhattan display in the PATH system. We launched June 18, 2002. I don’t write that much about Submedia here, the company I co-founded in the late 90s, but it still pays my bills and I still work on developing the technology, relationship, and other things[…] Keep reading →

The U.S. has “a dysfunctional patent system.” Those aren’t my words. They aren’t the words of an ignorant person either. They are the words of U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner, one of the nation’s most esteemed judges and faculty at University of Chicago. A patent dispute between Apple and Motorola prompted that description. Here’s an article from a couple weeks ago — Famous judge spikes Apple-Google case, calls patent system “dysfunctional”[…] Keep reading →

You learn leadership through experience. I’ve had occasion to recall some of the most challenging and educational experiences of my development. I’m not proud of them. I wish they had never happened. But they formed me as much as anything. The painful experiences I co-founded Submedia in the late 90s. By the early 2000s we had nearly run out of money and were having trouble paying our debts. My PhD[…] Keep reading →

A couple friends created the eVr1 Codex — part accessory, part memory drive — that stores a huge canon of literature so you can keep it with you at all times. I know both friends from business school classes. You can also see the California outdoor love of nature they share. Here’s one of their products. Our Vision eVr1’s vision is to connect modern man with the long, global human[…] Keep reading →

I wrote the following after reading this article from a venture capitalist giving advice to people thinking about starting companies. A lot of advice VCs give entrepreneurs seems to me versions of “make my job easier,” like how to write a great business plan, how to pitch, etc. In this case, I see him asking entrepreneurs to improve the signal-to-noise ratio so he can have an easier time funding companies.[…] Keep reading →