Lone Gunman

‘What we do well’, ‘What we can be paid to do’ and ‘What we want to do’ are the sets in Bud Caddell’s ‘How To Be Happy in Busi­ness’ Venn dia­gram.

Remind­ing me of the love–growth–cash tri­an­gle (pre­vi­ously posted), this Venn dia­gram is an info­graphic worth look­ing at on an annual or semi-annual basis to quickly get a feel for the direc­tion your pro­fes­sional life is heading.

via Link Banana

(From another Under­cur­rent strate­gist, Mike Arauz: the “I’d Rather Be Watch­ing Porn” Test: “because your com­pe­ti­tion on the Inter­net is every­thing else on the Inter­net”.

Dis­re­gard­ing soft­ware and much hyper­bole (not nec­es­sar­ily mutu­ally exclu­sive), one might think that recent times have been an inno­va­tion desert. This is the opin­ion of Newsweek’s Michael Man­del who believes that the lack of inno­va­tion over the past decade may be respon­si­ble for America’s eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion.

There’s no government-constructed “inno­va­tion index” that would allow us to con­clude unam­bigu­ously that we’ve been expe­ri­enc­ing an inno­va­tion short­fall. Still, plenty of clues point in that direc­tion. Start with the stock mar­ket. If an inno­va­tion boom were truly hap­pen­ing, it would likely push up stock prices for com­pa­nies in such leading-edge sec­tors as phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and infor­ma­tion technology.

Instead, the stock index that tracks the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, biotech, and life sci­ences com­pa­nies in the Stan­dard & Poor’s (MHP) 500-stock index dropped 32% from the end of 1998 to the end of 2007, after adjust­ing for infla­tion. The infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy index fell 29%. […]

Con­sider another indi­ca­tor of com­mer­cially impor­tant inno­va­tion: the trade bal­ance in advanced tech­nol­ogy prod­ucts. […] In 1998 the U.S. had a $30 bil­lion trade sur­plus in [life sci­ences, biotech, advanced mate­ri­als, and aero­space]; by 2007 that had flipped to a $53 bil­lion deficit. […]

A more indi­rect indi­ca­tion of the lack of inno­va­tion lies in the wages of college-educated workers.

via @jakeybro

Some­what related: this week the 2009 State of Inno­va­tion Sum­mit was held in Wash­ing­ton DC. “Com­men­tary” from John Wilbanks (runs the Sci­ence Com­mons project at Cre­ative Com­mons) and from Bioephemera’s Jes­sica Palmer.

The ques­tion ‘What does a woman want?’ was, accord­ing to Freud, “The great ques­tion that has never been answered”. One per­son try­ing to answer this ques­tion, how­ever, is Mered­ith Chivers—a psy­chol­o­gist spe­cial­is­ing in sex­ual behav­iour whose work was exten­sively dis­cussed in The New York Times ear­lier this year.

The arti­cle, focus­ing on female sex­u­al­ity, is eye-opening in many ways, espe­cially in show­ing the gulf between male and female sexuality.

The men, on aver­age, responded gen­i­tally in what Chivers terms “cat­e­gory spe­cific” ways. […] The men’s minds and gen­i­tals were in agreement.

All was dif­fer­ent with the women. No mat­ter what their self-proclaimed sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift gen­i­tal arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. […] With the women, espe­cially the straight women, mind and gen­i­tals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person.

via Green Oasis

Be wary of advice and fore­casts from eco­nomic ‘experts’, says econ­o­mist Zachary Karabell—not because they are try­ing to sell their ser­vices or because they are lying, but because they truly believe their (unin­ten­tion­ally) skewed opin­ions.

Being wrong in the past is not much of a lia­bil­ity as long as one is right in the present. […]

There may be “experts” who know­ingly skew their analy­sis to serve their own bot­tom line. But I believe they are rare. The issue is less the integrity of those sell­ing their wares than the mar­ket forces that choose them. When times are good and peo­ple feel con­fi­dent, experts who sup­port that view find more traction—and more demand—than those who don’t. When times turn trou­bled, as they most cer­tainly are now, those whose per­spec­tive rhymes with the pre­vail­ing gloom appear wiser than those who do not.

Promi­nent experts, there­fore, are often sim­ply those whose voices are in har­mony with today’s mood and who have an eas­ier time sell­ing their sto­ries. That doesn’t mean that the analy­sis is inher­ently flawed—only that it is inher­ently market-driven.

Obvi­ous, but it’s good to have this reit­er­ated every now and again.

Tak­ing inspi­ra­tion from Paul Graham’s Ideas for Star­tups essay, Mar­tin Zwill­ing offers some fur­ther thoughts—to wit, don’t start with an idea, start with a prob­lem.

Poten­tial startup founders are always look­ing for ideas to imple­ment, when they should be look­ing for prob­lems to solve. Cus­tomers pay for solu­tions, and there is no mar­ket for ideas. I’m often approached by peo­ple with a “mil­lion dol­lar idea,” but I haven’t seen any­one pay for one of these yet.