99 karma · joined August 18, 2007
I ended up enrolling in California's Disability Insurance Elective Coverage (DIEC) - http://www.edd.ca.gov/disability/self-employed.htm. I wonder if anyone else has gone this route?
In what sense does this article have any practical value for entrepreneurs, or even the Obama administration? Seems like Schmidt, Page and Brin have been offering plenty of informal advice along with lots of other successful entrepreneurs.
Every entrepreneur knows that those who choose to ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
An operations guy would read it a lot differently, because it seems to be implying that you have to choose between predictability and innovation.
As any operations guy knows, the reason Toyota etc. are consistent and innovative is because they have gradual continuous improvement throughout the company, led from the bottom-up by the employees themselves.
As you can see, Seth has heard of the term "Six Sigma", but I'm not entirely sure he knows what it means. Not his fault, I wouldn't ask Deming for sales advice either.
At the end of the day what I took from it is the old message: "what made you successful in the past is not guaranteed to make you successful in the future", and a lot of people and companies have trouble letting go and trying something new.
This paper was established to advance free market and free trade principles, and it isn't beholden to any US party (it's a British publication).
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9...
I nearly fell off my chair on the part where they claimed lenders were forced against their will to make the bad loans for "Affirmative Action" reasons... Wow. Just wow.
The attitude that "we're doing better than our competitors so we don't need to improve" is toxic, and usually fatal for a company in the long run (... the others aren't going to be content with sitting in second place forever).
My earlier-gen MBP, iPhone, iPods etc are all rock solid (I'm delighted with them all), but I could easily see a situation where quality could go south on new products in the rush to cut costs and get to market faster.
I hope that's not the case. It would be little comfort to me as a new buyer if my machine bricked for no reason, and some smug fanboy pointed out that other people who bought Macs in the past had no problems (making me the problem?)
I would rather talk about the opposite case: i.e. A hacker has a brilliant technology idea and needs to find a business person with the connections, sales skills, finance skills, channel knowledge (and at least some technical understanding) to make it commercially viable. That seems like a harder problem... your fresh out of college MBA guy might not be the right fit.
Do you hire people who are brilliant but ethically questionable (and might stab you in the back one day for an advantage), or do you hire people who are merely great ... but will stay and struggle with you when the inevitable hard times come?
-- I don't think there is an equivalent to IBM in the handset market.
IBM had a powerful steamroller when it came to branding, sales and cash - most people hopped on the PC Compatible standard (including DOS) because it was the "sure thing". Not because DOS was inherently more open than, say, CP/M.
Google has a similar steamroller (at least in the respect that to a lot of people, Google = Internet) but unless most people are demanding a "Google Phone" then handset makers aren't going to fall over themselves to hand over their lunch to google.
Google and the developer community will have to build something pretty incredible and build a lot of mind-share with the general public, I think.
Tapping with a hammer ....... $ 2.00 Knowing where to tap ........ $ 9998.00
http://fridayreflections.typepad.com/weblog/2007/08/knowing-...