Thursday, March 17th, 2011

How To Create The Next “Shaper” Business Like Facebook, Google & Microsoft (from SXSW)

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Boy, I love John Hagel — This guy is a walking web site. I’m amazed his thoughts on “shaping'” have not become more famous!

Afterall, how many of you wouldn’t like to create the next Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Visa type of ecosystem?

He covers “shaping” and other concepts in his book The Power Of Pull.

I got a chance to meet Mr. Hagel when I sat in on his latest “shaping” presentation  at South by Southwest (SXSW) this week.

What follows is a part 2 to the first piece I did on Hagel called How to Shape A Market. …

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Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

Reid Hoffman’s 10 Rules of Successful Entrepreneurship

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I’m here at SXSW and LinkedIn founder (and investor) Reid Hoffman just rattled off 10 tips for entrepreneurs.

Enjoy:

10 Rules of Entrepreneurship

1) Disrupt — Ask yourself is this ’10X’ different. If it takes $10 in revenue and replaces it with $1 in revenue (e.g. Skype), then that’s disruptive. …

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Monday, March 14th, 2011

Tony Schwartz Tips on Managing Energy & Productivity

Tweet 4 Comments Emotional Energy — How you feel influences how you perform. Duh!

A Major Myth — Most of us believe (wrongly) that to get more work done, we should work more time. Instead, …

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Author Tony Schwartz (Be Excellent At Anything) had some good nuggets on increasing energy and productivity at SXSW in Austin today.

Talented artist Sunni Brown did this super-cool live drawing of Tony’s talk (below).

Some Of Tony’s Energy & Productivity Tips

Emotional Energy — How you feel influences how you perform. Duh!

A Major Myth — Most of us believe (wrongly) that to get more work done, we should work more time. Instead, Tony says, we should manage our energy better.

The Power of Sleep — “Sleep is the single most undervalued behavior in our lives” because of the myth that if we give up one hour of sleep that will equate to one hour of additional productivity.

Quote from Herbert Simon — “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Multitasking is Bad — It is inefficient to multi-task (technically you can only task-shift). If you shift your attention from something, the cost to you is 25% effectiveness on that first item’s successful completion.

Two Tips On Improving  Your Productivity— He cites a study of Berlin violinists  by some guy who is an “expert on experts” (they were cited in Outliers)

#1 Practice– The top violinists practiced for 90 minutes maximum in 3 sessions primarily in morning (Schwartz says that it’s been proven that you can only practice 4.5 hours total in a day (that’s the limit))

#2 Sleep — Schwartz said that the superstar violinists slept more than average violinists (typically 8+ hours per night) and that they also napped on a regular basis (about 2.8 hours per week).

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because I wrote about Tony Schwartz’s previous book The Power of Full Engagement in How To Recharge Yourself and The 20 Best Business Books Of All Time.

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Monday, March 14th, 2011

Barry Diller’s Thoughts On The Internet

Tweet 2 Comments On the iPad — “I have a truly emotional thing about the ipad.”

Charging …

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Barry Diller was interviewed by Poppy Harlow of CNN here at South by Southwest. A few nuggets from the Q&A are below:

 

On the Internet in general — “The Internet is a miracle…you put stuff together w spit…you push a button & publish to the world.”

Internet valuations are”mathematically insane” but can work if there is a “willing dumb buyer.”

On the iPad — “I have a truly emotional thing about the ipad.”

Charging for Internet usage — 30% of traffic on cable systems is Netflix. There will be charges for Internet usage (like electricity).

On Internet television

“Thirty million households are connected to the Internet but noone knows how to navigate them.”

In 3 years, you’ll have Internet Television be out there and navigated by everyone.

Google TV wasn’t good…not a consumer product really…but they’ll figure it out. They may be run over by the Playstation or xBox or any PVR machine (which are ready today).

Advice for Internet entrepreneurs

“Get as much money as you need to get started. Give away as little as possible. Keep your head down. Don’t listen to anyone. And keep going on your path. It’ll either work fabously or fail miserably, in which case you can do it all over again.”

“And think in longer forms of video (than just short (3 or 4 minutes). ”

“The cable companies want Netflix to succeed as much as they want destruction. They’re going to try to kill Netflix.”

Which is more important: content, context or conversation?

“Sumner Redstone invented ‘Content is King’ because he had content and wanted to be king.”

They are all important.

 

 

 

 

 

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