Most people are bad drivers with bad driving habits. I’m not, of course, and you certainly aren’t. But pretty much everyone else is. That’s what researchers report when people’s opinions of their driving skills are compared to their actual performance. It’s related to what cognitive psychologists call the Dunning-Kruger effect: the tendency of people (particularly the least competent) to vastly overestimate their skills and abilities. Continue reading ‘Is sudden acceleration just bad driving?’
One would assume there is some sort of predictive power in Twitter’s firehose, given that Google, Microsoft and a bunch of stealth startups seem willing to pay for special access to the data stream. But my take, based on Twitter traffic and trends as they stand today, is that insights gleaned from Twitter actually LAG more conventional online media. Here’s why. Continue reading ‘Twitter: A leading or lagging indicator of business trends?’
Yeah, AOL. The company best known for littering the planet with signup disks. Or, if you’re a student of the fast and loose business practices of Web 1.0, the company whose revenue shenanigans helped land a number of startup execs in the big house (remember homestore.com?). I know it sounds crazy, but read on.
I’m getting really tired of pundits claiming that big companies can’t innovate, and that startups are the saviors of our economic future. I’ve worked in/with big companies and startups, and have seen tons of innovation and many brilliant people in both. The biggest difference is a simple and obvious one – big companies become conservative because they have something to conserve, and startups take big risks because they have nothing to lose. Their respective shareholders expect these behaviors, and this difference in operating model – not lack of innovation or smart people in big companies – explains the difference in outcomes. Otherwise said, big companies don’t bet the farm, simply because they have a lot more mouths to feed than startups do.
The latest article of this genre that set me off was in Silicon Valley Insider. Henry Blodget pimps a video of Kevin Ryan talking about “Why big rich companies can’t crush tiny startups“. I posted a long comment that focused primarily on the fundamental logical flaw in the kind of reasoning Ryan (and many others) use, and thought I’d share it here also.
Continue reading ‘Big companies can be just as innovative as startups’
As someone who has hired literally dozens of MBAs from first tier schools over the years, I was puzzled by the buzz around the Harvard Business School MBA ethics oath. It was always my impression that a moral compass came as a standard feature on a base model MBA. Now, it seems, it’s being offered as an optional upgrade.
But given its availability, going forward no one would hire an MBA who hadn’t taken the oath, right? I don’t think so. My last experience with MBAs under extreme temptation leads me to conclude that such an oath would actually do more harm than good because it trivializes the issue of business ethics. Here’s why. Continue reading ‘The MBA oath trivializes business ethics’
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