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For over forty years, if you wanted to see the latest music in the UK you turned on “Top of the Pops.” New, up-and-coming bands eagerly awaited the validation of success that an invite to appear on the TOTP stage represented. When they arrived the band “played” the song but really they were miming…
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(cross-posted from my Medium.com page) Several weeks ago Robin Wright — once famous for surviving the mythical ROUS and breaking Forest Gump’s heart — was highlighted for her successful push to be paid the same amount of money per episode as her co-star in House of Cards, Kevin Spacey. The many laudatory companion stories…
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(cross-posted from my Medium.com page) One of the arguments made about autonomous vehicles, particularly in car-obsessed places like the U.S., is that a large group of people will never give up the “freedom” to drive themselves. They’ll have to pry the steering wheel from their cold, leather-driving-gloved, dead hands. That argument assumes that all…
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“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…” – John F. Kennedy at Rice University, announcing the Apollo Space Program I’m old enough to remember the residual thrill of the…
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“A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players” – Steve Jobs We tend to view the modern company as a loose collection of functional areas — a sort of “business biome” where, as long as every function performs its individual activities, the whole entity…
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(a parable about risk-taking) Two polar bears — we will call them Bold Bear and Timid Bear — sit on an ice floe that is slowly drifting away toward open, warmer water. As their comfortable, known perch begins to melt they discuss their predicament: Bold Bear: “This ice floe has been great for the…
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While not the usual fare for this blog, this year marked the loss of one the great American essayists of the last fifty years, and a writer (by way of some professorial tough love) who became a great influence on both writing and approach to work. Wikipedia can tell you the complete biography. For…
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In startups, teams are — by necessity — small. I’ve worked on bootstrapped development projects where the same five people wrote code, tested, created documentation, and even did ads. (Turns out software engineers don’t make for good marketers, though a sketched ad featuring cavemen discussing ERP was pretty funny…at least to us). Once a…
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Full disclosure: I was there at the dawn of the microcomputer age. Seeing an old Atari joystick washes nostalgia over me. I remember the simple joy of typing in pages of BASIC code of a program in a magazine — and then the tedium of finding the one error that kept it from running.…