The Daily Brainstorm

bijan:

“Our engineering team can only spend 80hours a week on that problem and those guys [big company xyz] can spend 800hours on the same problem”

That was something I heard at a mtg last week by an engineering exec at a startup. He was reflecting on how hard it is to build stuff when they will always be at a disadvantage from a staffing and resource point of view.

Here’s the thing that startups can’t lose sight of: you will always be understaffed and under-resourced as a startup.

That’s just the deal. It’s a constraint.

But it’s a feature not a bug.

The unique weapons each startup holds is the natural ability to focus, the ability to recruit the best people and speed.

Big companies are stuck in meeting hell, politics and worse.

If your startup starts to lose or ignore the weapons that come with the joy of a startup, well, then you are tying one arm behind your back.

Don’t obsess about your lack of resources. Embrace it.

Use it as a way to focus on the most important things. Build stuff to take our breath away. And know that the big company wishes they could move with your raw speed and creativity.

Last month, Hicks freed up more of his team from desktop-support drudgery when Toyota signed a massive deal with Microsoft Office 365, its cloud alternative to Exchange email and Microsoft Office desktop software. The deal took more than two years, but in the end Toyota is ditching IBM’s Lotus Notes and putting its entire worldwide workforce of 200,000 employees on Office 365.

Why? Because if “I’m screwing around worrying about what version of mail I’m on, it’s wasted effort. It’s a lost opportunity … to do something more meaningful for our customers or our business,” explains Hicks.

(Source: futuramb)

You know, nowadays you’re kept in your place more by your mind, more by the herd mentality, than by actually having the material and wherewithal to do things.

—

Mike Watt, We Jam Econo, The Story of the Minutemen

The hardest part of starting anything is overcoming the objections in our mind and the objections of others.

(via marksbirch)

The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.

—Alfred Whitney Griswold

(Source: nathanielstuart)

Leaders who make such indispensable calls tend to come to power the way Lincoln did. They tend not to be battle-tested and experienced. They do unexpected stuff because no one really knows what they’re going to do.

By contrast, people who come into high office after lengthy careers in public life have been filtered by the system. This is how you rise through the ranks of the military. You go step by step. Every person who becomes general goes through the same process.

—Harvard organizational psychology professor Gautam Mukunda examines how successful leaders make decisions 

(Source: , via explore-blog)

If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time. Start now. Not 20 years from now, not two weeks from now. Now.

—Wisdom from Debbie Millman 

I was just read this phrase “salary commensurate with experience” in a email list I’m on, and thought perhaps it should be “salary commensurate with effectiveness” or “salary commensurate with excellence” instead. A lot is gained through experience, but experience teaches some and not others. Effectiveness and excellence, whether or not they were attained by simply having the knack or through the school of hard knocks, is really what you want to reward.

—Caterina

(Source: google.com, via brainstormbolt)

Tom Denari via Advertising Age

Geniuses make themselves evident by having ideas bigger than we can conceive; it seems that they can see the future. Their thinking is highly disciplined, even though their behavior might not be. They appear fearless.

Why don’t we listen?

First, geniuses can be annoying, as pragmatism is not their strong suit. They don’t live in the same reality as the rest of us and aren’t typically bound by the same time and space constrictions. Their pushing and stretching of our belief system can be emotionally draining. Instead of listening, we accuse them of not being aware of current reality. We tell them that they don’t “get it.”

Second, geniuses are hard to keep up with because — while we don’t like to admit it — their vision is often well beyond our own capacity. They make us uncomfortable, because we just don’t see the world the way they do. We respond by becoming defensive and frustrated. We dismiss them as being irrational, frivolous or self-indulgent.

Finally, geniuses get cranky — sometimes even belligerent — when we try to alter their ideas. They have little use for social niceties or making changes for political expediency. Geniuses will say “no” to many of your requests, believing that any impurities will simply dull an idea, forcing it toward mediocrity. To defend our position, we put them off saying, “Let’s test it.”

(Source: stoweboyd, via brainstormbolt)

We think compass, not road map. And the compass is simply our mission of “ideas worth spreading.” Whatever new technologies come along that allow us to support that mission, we’ll adopt.

—TED Blog | Chris Anderson answers questions about TED 

(via soxiam)