John's Music Blog

I like an occasional beer.  I don’t drink a lot, but when I have a beer, my taste tends towards darker microbrews such as HE’BREW, the chosen beer, or a good stout, such as Guinness, properly poured.  I realize that by saying that, I’m not making any fans in St. Louis, home of Anheuser-Busch, brewer of beers that are quite a bit cheaper than HE’BREW, other microbrews, or Guinness.  

Recently the Carlsberg Group  introduced a $400 beer.  That’s $400 for 375 ml, which is about 30 times more than I pay for even the best micro-brewed six pack.  In 2006, Carlsberg, which sells beer in over 150 countries, generated 41 billion Danish Krones in revenue from sales of 102 million hectolitres of beer and 19 million hectolitres of soft drinks.  For the record, one hectolitre is equivalent to about 176 British pints.  So they are definitely not a microbrewer. (more…)

I once visited a very successful technology integrator just outside of Boston.  Every Wednesday, the mother of the founder, who was Italian, would cook for the entire company.  At the time, they had more than one hundred employees.  What a feast!

If you want to launch a startup, and you want to recruit and retain high-quality, highly-motivated members for your team, it’s imperative that you take care of them.  Cash conservation is important, but food, really good food, can go a long way to keeping a team motivated.  After all, it can’t all be about the distant and potentially huge payoff.  Employees can’t eat options.  There’s got to be something it in for them today.  Which brings me to today’s post.  A friend directed me to their son’s blog: One Food Guy.  There are enough restaurant and recipe suggestions to keep an entire team of entrepreneurs motivated.   Check out the Andalusian crepes.  Hmm.  Is that my stomache growling?

I’m a couple of hundred pages into The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  In Taleb’s world view, The Black Swan can be the highly-improbable good event or the highly-improbable bad event, either of which has the ability to change the course of history.  He makes a good case for his statement that highly-improbable events have more impact on the world’s future than probable events.  I’m sorry, if that seems irrational.  But my recommendation is that you slug through the first 200 pages, as I did, and see if you reach a similar understanding.  (more…)

The truth is that this post is not about entrepreneurs or inventors.   If I really stretch it, maybe this post is for individuals who are looking for opportunities within startups.  It’s definitely for people who think they have spent too long working for one of the bigger systems companies and are now looking for other opportunities in faster-growing, more nimble environments.  It’s for people who were recently laid off, or who are about to be laid off. At any rate, it’s for people looking for the next career opportunity. 

Sometimes, I think I should be in the headhunter business, because I get almost daily calls from truly talented people, who for reasons that sometimes escape me are looking outside their current employer for the next career opportunity.  I guess the reason that I’m not in the headhunter business is that I don’t have as many companies coming to me with good jobs to fill as I do good people coming to me looking for jobs.  Maybe the Tycoon widget from Myndnet, that I added to my Facebook profile will help change that, but I’m not sure yet.  Check it out. (more…)

I posted the following question on LinkedIn about five days ago:

What’s the best strategy for creating end-user awareness of an innovative product through social networking?

Here’s the dig.  At least I think it was a dig:

Try and be a bit more simple and straightforward in your communications than you are in your questions. (more…)

I wrote earlier today on leadership and The Five Temptations of a CEO, so it seemed an appropriate follow on to comment on an article about “followers” (as opposed to leaders) that I found in my morning newspaper.  The article, written by Barbara Kellerman, was a summary of her article  published in the Harvard Business Review and available here. 

She classifies followers into five types:

1. Isolates
2. Bystanders
3. Participants
4. Activists
5. Diehards

If you are the CEO of a startup or a business unit, you know the importance of picking the right leadership team.  But I wonder how much time you think about hiring the right kind of follower.  You might find a useful resource in this article.

I just finished reading The Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni.  If you’re a Facebook friend of mine, you might be confused, because my reading-list widget on Facebook tells you that I’m reading The Black Swan.

I actually didn’t know about Patrick’s book, until it was handed to me by my co-founder, David, who bought it as a present for a CEO we know pretty well. And I was totally prepared not to like it. After all, it’s only 132 pages and priced at $22.95. It seemed like a bit of pricing arrogance to me. But, hey, David bought the book. It was no skin off my back, if he wanted me to read it.  And sure, he could have bought it used for a couple of bucks, but whatever. (more…)

I’m a regular reader of Kent’s Imperative.  I don’t know how many of you read the blog, but I found this perspective  on Prediction Markets interesting. The notion of Predictions Markets has been getting a lot of attention lately.  And I wonder how many of today’s startups might be considering Prediction Markets as a way to determine which way the wind is going to blow.

About two years ago, I agreed to participate in a trial of a Prediction Market in the area of storage.  After a month of watching people trade on opinions, I began to wonder how they would validate the results.  Turns out they validated the results from the first published report of a top market research company.  (more…)

I had a call yesterday with a guy (I’ll call him Julio, because that isn’t his name) that is responsible for storage decisions at a very big company (I’ll call the company Acme, because that isn’t the company’s name).  I can’t name the company or the guy for reasons that are obvious to anyone who works in a large public company.   But I can share the gist of our conversation.  The part that is interesting to startups is the conversation we had around supplier management, environment complexity, and supplier support.

Julio’s at the end of a purchase decision cycle, and he told me which way he was going.  “We’re going with Sun, at least for now,” he said, “because they provide great service, we’ve worked with them for years, they understand our environment, and quite frankly, I don’t want to add another supplier.”  (more…)

As a fellow baby boomer, Denise Shiffman’s recent blog post really hit home.  She said, “Facebook is the new email.”  She wasn’t the first to make the connection.  In fact, the Scobleizer has a whole running debate here from October, 2007.  But because I know Denise, and implicitly trust her, she gets credit for getting my attention. 

As a boomer, I live on email, but as my blog readers know, I’m on Facebook now, too.  In fact, it’s about the only way that I communicate with Steve Zivanic, who created this viral campaign for very-traditional Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).  I just checked one YouTube posting of his video that reports 320,000+ downloads.  Good job Steve.  Steve’s left HDS and found a fitting home at myndnet.  He tells me they understand the value of viral marketing. (more…)