I think of the business model as the enabling “wrapper” around the “technical” solution you make happen. If you’re a plumber, it’s all the business stuff. If you’re a teacher, it might be the whole infrastructure of a school. In a non-profit, it’s the rest of the “onion” around the thing you want to do that actually makes a difference…
Author: Stuart Patience
This seems apt – and the book it comes from is available free (or “pay what you want”) at readthesequences.com. Recommended. Imagine reaching into an urn that contains seventy white balls and thirty red ones, and plucking out ten mystery balls. Perhaps three of the ten balls will be red, and you’ll correctly guess how many red balls total were…
The thing that I’m recommending for a lot of people now is to find a sphere of activity, no matter how small or how local, that you feel you can control and you can do at home and you can contribute to. This feeling of powerlessness may set in that will cause people to panic more or become too depressed…
I’ve been spending more time on Skype, Zoom, Whatsapp and even normal phone calls (imagine!) than normal over the past week. A few times my meetings have bumped up against Zoom’s 40 minute limit for free accounts, where meetings of more than two people need to stop and reconnect when the time runs out. This has been a frustrating niggle…
Getting the right bus can save a lot of time: you might be able to go direct or make an earlier connection, you might have a shorter layover or better traffic. So running to catch the bus can be worth it. You’ll work harder, run at a pace that you can’t sustain – but if you catch the bus, it’s…
We can rarely go around – or over, or under – the big, difficult things. If we could they wouldn’t be big or difficult. The only way is through.* *Hopefully with a minumum of “Stumble Trip! Stumble Trip! Stumble Trip!”
This is true all the time, but it’s more relevant than ever in months like the one we’re having, and probably for several months ahead: it matters which voices you listen to. Here are two recent quotes from Seth Godin about this – the first about who shouts loudest, who we listen to, and our choice to lead instead of…
One of the most famous walks in England is along a high ridge in the Lake District called Striding Edge. It runs to the east of the mountain called Helvellyn, one of the highest mountains in England, and particularly in bad weather, one of the most dangerous. Most English mountains are relatively safe, but that’s one of the ones that…
There is a place (a big place!) for custom work – people pay more to get difficult jobs done well, and the craft required gives you an opportunity to do work that people will notice and “cross the street for.” But if everything you do is complex and nuanced, such that every quote is a custom quote, and every sale…
Every successful business has a monopoly—a monopoly on what it makes that someone else can’t make the way they make it. That leaves out commodity businesses—people who bring coal out of the ground. I don’t think of those businesses as particularly successful. I think of them as useful. I’m glad if I need a bag of coal someone’s doing it,…