Month: July 2005

Pigeons and Fundamentalism

Seth Godin in a Fast Company article:

We don’t expect a pigeon to wise up and change its behavior. But what about your boss? Have you ever had a boss who said, “I’ve looked at all the best thinking on [insert issue here: factory expansion, layoffs, global warming, stem-cell research, foreign trade], and I’m going to change my mind; my old position was wrong, and this is what we should do instead”? Or is your boss, well, more like a pigeon?

Great Ideas Versus Great Teams

Joel Welsh: “Maybe you haven’t started up your dream business yet. You’d love to be an entrepreneur and strike out on your own. So, what do you spend your time thinking about? Most people think about the idea for what their business will do to make money. I submit that instead we should be thinking about who we want to be in the foxhole with.”

Office Funagalo

Tony Plant in a People Management article (via Johnie Moore):

Having observed a lot of meetings and team activities I have concluded that many workers speak “Office Funagalo”. Author McCall Smith tells us that Funagalo, a language invented for giving instructions in African mines, is good for telling people what to do: it has “many words for push, take, carry, load, and no words for happiness”

How Many Co-founders?

Allen Morgan: “If you want to raise money from VC’s, here’s a really tough, really important question you ought to ask yourself very early in the process: ‘How many co-founders should I have?’ Having the wrong ‘answer’ to this question can make your life difficult in some subtle (and odd) ways.”