The last two years I’ve coached my son’s team in hockey and it has been one of the most enjoying and fulfilling things I’ve ever done. My most recent coaching experience inspired me to standup and articulate the connections I see between and the lessons I think we can glean from youth hockey.
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I have been listening to the Cautionary Tales podcast all year long as I drive with my 10 year old son to and from his Saturday Art of Problem Solving program. The delivery and style of the stories create both and emotional and intellectual response of joy and satisfaction; frequently mingled with discomfort, sadness, longing, and pathos. This Saturday we listened to another episode and it was no different. Except it was.
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Would you believe me if I told you that expert entrepreneurs regularly make decisions without all the relevant information? That they take action knowing that they could do additional analysis and get additional advice? Do you think that you have the courage to become an expert entrepreneur?
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Expert entrepreneurs build and manage the biggest, most profitable, most well-known, most innovative and impactful, most admired companies; what do you mean they care more about helping others than helping themselves?
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Earlier this week I enjoyed a webinar from the TSIA, From Traditional to XaaS Hardware: Navigating your Digital Transformation, and got many good notes from it. (“X” is for “anything.”) I thought I would share this point because it also illustrates the “mindshift” necessary on the part of vendors and customers to imagine the value of XaaS hardware.
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We’re embarking on a journey to create valuable content for entrepreneurs and business leaders—on YouTube!
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Every entrepreneur dreams of growing their business to serve all the people they envision need their offering. At some point, most entrepreneurs get stuck in the execution and operation of what they’ve built, while their dreams recede with regret in their rear-view mirror. Simbiotrek (sim-bē-ˈä-ˈtrek) was founded to get entrepreneurs unstuck—or better yet, so they avoid getting stuck all together.
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This is a “poem” that I encountered through Alcoholics Anonymous. No, I haven’t been in the program, but my grandfather was an AA member from the late 60s until his death.
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If you run a small- or medium-sized business, you likely have a very intimate knowledge about your customers’ needs and goals that many of your larger competitors do not. This is why we, at Simbiotrek (sim-bē-ˈä-ˈtrek), believe there is huge opportunity for smaller firms with established offerings to grow and have oversized impact by focusing on customer value.
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Here are some “old” notes that come a cross a bit like a buzzword soup, but I’m pretty sure there are some germs of good ideas in here. If you can avoid going cross-eyed and dizzy reading the notes (or just scroll right past them), I follow them up with some bullet points that extract what might be those ideas to extract and expand on.
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The NABC business model framework was developed at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and is credited as a major component of its successful turnaround through the development of impactful innovations.
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About two months ago I shared my final decision with my supportive leaders and teammates at Globant: I’d be leaving the great situation and fantastic opportunities we’d created together, and starting my own business, Simbiotrek (sim-bē-‘ä-‘trek). Now, what I’d left to go create is starting to emerge…
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I recently posted on LinkedIn some thoughts on Peter Drucker’s famous statement, “There is only one valid purpose of a corporation: to create a customer.” My beliefs in customer sovereignty (meaning that customers have the freedom to take their business wherever they want) and in customers experiencing value from your offerings as the ultimate indicator of future success, led me leave an excellent job, company, and colleagues to start my own business. But it takes constant effort to keep focused on adhering to those beliefs, just as it takes constant effort to keep a company focused on its customers.
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The previous days have been good, even great, and definitely essential in bringing me to today. But TODAY is THE DAY when I “put out into the deep” and launch my own business, Simbiotrek (sim-bē-‘ä-‘trek)!
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This talk (on YouTube) by Daniel Jackson, Design by Concept: A New Way to Think About Software, was recommended to me by Michael Feathers. I just thought I’d take a few notes on it while I watch 🙂
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I have had a journey with journey mapping. Through it, I have noticed different types of customer journey maps requiring different inputs and resulting in different outputs/impact over time. I think that there is a time and place for each type of journey map and that it is worth categorizing the kind you’re using or creating in light of what you intend to achieve. I also believe that customer journey maps (and personas and scenarios) if kept as “living assets”, can help give all your teams “line of sight” to your customers, and that they are a powerful catalyst for organizations looking to reinvent themselves as truly customer-centered and empathetic.
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I recently noticed a former colleague gain a Disciplined Agile certification. In my congratulatory message I also indicated my interest in learning more. In addition to that conversation, he also pointed me towards a series of meetups and LinkedIn articles led by Ivar Jacobson around “Essence for Agility”. I won’t go into all the aspects of that, but I do want to share some of the thinking that it inspired me to do about how I’ve been been working and why that has been a solution to the Achilles’ Heel of Agile Adoption.
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The definition of a customer seems so obvious in B2C relationships that we often don’t bother to define it. Amidst the complexity of B2B relationships, however, this lack of precision can lead to all kinds of confusion and lack of clarity.
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The article below was originally published in June 2018 and was based on a previous article from November 2017. Over the course of 2020 I had the opportunity to return to these ideas, refine them, apply them in new situations, and learn a bunch more from my experiences and also the study of others’. I intend to revisit and provide updates and expansions to some of the ideas in this post over the course of 2021 – and beyond: learning is a lifelong activity and learning is at the heart of innovation.
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In the 2+ years after having these revelations and writing them down (on medium), my two “anchoring core values” remain strong guides for me. They are known to my family and my colleagues – which also helps to provide some external pressure, when needed, to stay true to them. I believe it is worthwhile for everyone to look inside themselves and uncover their own “anchoring core values” – if you find that mine resonate with you, you won’t be the first, as I think they’re fairly universal.
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