I am working on a guest lecture for Software Engineering students @WakeForest for Monday. Today I will present a dry run for @rolemodelsoft. Here are the key ideas I intend to share from my 20+ years of trying to make great software:
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Vision and Mission are two of the most misused and therefore meaningless words in business. But it doesn’t have to, and shouldn’t, be that way.
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The capstone of the Entrepreneurial Action Levels framework is Level 5: Onwards and Upwards. As with your entrepreneurial journey in toto, your need to act at any of the five levels is not a linear path.
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Launching. Learning. Listening.
While you may not always act at this level, someone in your company had better be!
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This week I was a guest on a podcast for the first time.
I’ve loved podcasts since … forever? But this was the first time I was on one.
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As an entrepreneur in our modern digital economy your business needs to leverage technology for success, and “digital transformation” has been the buzzword de jour for years to describe what companies need to do to become competitive in the 21st Century. Even so, business owners rightly respond, “But what is it and do I really need to it?”
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Expert entrepreneurs aren’t daydreamers! And even if they are, I don’t have time in my business for that! Entrepreneurship is a creative endeavor, but is also firmly rooted in reality. When we talk about “entrepreneurial imagination” it may not be what you first think.
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It is so important to listen. To all your stakeholders, but especially to your customers. Being a good listener is another trait that expert entrepreneurs share, but even that is not enough to build a beautiful business.
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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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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-bÄ“-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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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 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 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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