I’ve been re-reading my Occam’s Paradox post as well as the comments and trackbacks (which are excellent – please click through them if you have a minute). I fell a little short of really saying what I originally intended for the post, which was that I think that we have a tendency not only to make things more complicated than need be, but also to focus on too many things (and therefore the wrong ones). As a result we try to assimilate too much data to make decisions (not recognizing the massive diminishing returns on this effort) and try to pay attention to too many things. I wrote a post a while ago about trying to cram too much information…
Archives / July, 2005
Occam’s Paradox
Remember Occam’s Razor? It’s the principle (that you probably learned in high school physics) that states that the simplest solution to a given problem is probably the best. I’ve been thinking recently about complexity in business and in life and think there’s a corollary to Occam’sRazor that perhaps should be called Occam’s Paradox – the propensity of humans to make things more complicated than they need to be. I don’t pretend to know why this is, but I notice it all the time (both in my own life and with other people). I guess it’s just easy to start down the road of dependency mapping (i.e., making everything you do a part of a larger matrix that has many interdependencies). …
Cheese
Today is the 36th anniversary of the first moon landing (July 20, 1969). Moon’s almost full, so you’ll get a great look at it. Google put up a moon site recently – www.moon.google.com. Be sure to zoom all the way in <g>.
Who is your vc?
John H turned me on to a post from Investments and More titled VC’s – Top Brass Solid, Others Not (“wow – someone taking the glam out of the VC world,” he writes). I actually found his post pretty amusing. While I think a lot of people at venture firms are fantastic (law of natural selection, I guess) there are, of course, some that are better than others. What Steve’s post did bring to mind was how important it is to recognize that when you take on an investor you’re taking on an individual more than you are taking on a firm. Some firms have more cache than others, but at the end of the day as an entrepreneur you…
Changing styles . . .
Brent wrote in recently to remind me that I wrote in M&A Part I – Lines in the Sand that I’d talk a bit about changes in my negotiating style over time. I actually interested to hear if other people have had similar experiences, because what I’m about to describe both seems like a natural progression and might also be termed ‘growing up’. I had an odd introduction to more formalized negotiation a few months into my first corporate job after leaving Wall Street. The company I worked for decided to embark on a few acquisitions and I was assigned to work on these with my boss who was the head of the business development group. Eventually we settled on…
Some thoughts on better board meetings
I sit through a lot of board meetings and while they are a great time for a company to harness the expertise of the people sitting around the table, they need to be structured and managed in such a way to actually accomplish that (i.e., effective board meetings don’t just happen – they are the result of planning and careful management). I sometimes joke with my dad that it must be tuff to get a word in at his board meetings given the powerhouses around the table; he just laughs and tells me that they prepare for their board meetings carefully. In actuality, I think he get a huge benefit out of his board – as do many of the…
Toys
Here’s some stuff I’ve been playing with that I’ve been meaning to post about: First is MyBlogLog, which tracks links people follow from my blog site. It also tells me how many page views were served from my site. Since I serve full feeds this doesn’t capture all of my link traffic (I miss everything that isn’t clicked directly from the site itself), but I get enough direct site hits to extrapolate these data to my subscriber base. If you want you can also put up a chicklet on your site that shows your most popular links. It’s easy to set up (you have to embed a small amount of code on your site) and intuitive to use. Some more…
How cool is your ride?
Even though I’m getting older I still like to think of myself as at least a little bit cool (although I’m sure there are many people who would set me straight on that one). As a result I was a bit dismayed this weekend to read an amusing article in the Times that clued me in that – at least in my choice of cars – I was not as cool as I thought I was. In fact, the Land Rover that I drive is pretty close to the “Stodgy” end of the cool meeter and in the same category as Chrysler and (gasp!) Oldsmobile. As the kids would say these days: “Not so groovy!”
TSA in action
i can’t tell you how much safer i’m feeling now. i’m writing this on a flight from denver to chicago (on my danger sidekick, by the way). i almost inadvertantly took aboard an allen wrench set (in my bag from when i rode my bike to work last week and perhaps the most blunt object in my bag). the fact that i somehow got it with me to chicago in the first place aside, i know i’m much safer now that its been confiscated (apparently under the ‘tools’ clause of the tsa’s list of banned items). if not, right now, someone could have taken the set and be using it to LITERALLY dismantle the plane. . . i’m glad to…
Networking 101 Expanded
Josh Kerbel wrote me with a good question to my Networking 101 post and my follow up post to that one Here’s how you do it that I thought I’d post along with my response (with his permission). Josh Writes: A while back you wrote a post about networking and you referenced Ben Casnocha as an example of a great network, the type of guy who writes people letters and goes out and meets them. Being that I depend on networking for most of my deal flow and just to build up a network of contacts, I am always looking to talk with people, new people and old. So I tried a little experiement, I mailed letters of congratulations (I…