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- From the Desk of Eric Ries July 2018
From the Desk of Eric Ries July 2018
From the Desk of Eric Ries -- July 2018
From the Desk of Eric Ries
July 2018
"Saying no to an idea is better than saying nothing at all. We may fear rejecting another person's idea in order to avoid conflict, but this fear is often counterproductive. Communicating your reasons for saying no can build and strengthen relationships with both your customers and your employees."
This is just one of the counter-intuitive messages in Sweet Rejection: Cutting Out the Noise, a podcast conversation between Stanford Professor Bob Sutton and Henning Piezunka, assistant professor at the European Institute of Business Administration INSEAD). As Piezunka further explains, saying no is often the start of the process that ultimately gets you to the right outcome, as long as you don't give up. "The precondition for that is that you keep the conversation going...So you need to have a way [to do that], even if the first conversation or the first interaction did not go the way you had hoped for." For another perspective on the importance of forging ahead to find success, check out this story of a serial entrepreneur.Moving on to other topics, here are few conversations and discussions about my own work, and some other pieces I found compelling over the last month.I hope something here catches your attention, too. I’m always glad to get recommendations, so if there are things you think I should be reading, send them to: [email protected]
[Conversations]Investing for the Long-Term -- CEO Initiative 2018These Washingtonians Spend Their Lunch Hours Delivering Letters to Other People's Senators
Thanks to Fortune for the honor of being on this list with founders, actors, politicians, and others who are committed to making the world a better, more equitable place.
[Readings]
An Ohio Startup Rebuilds Lives One Piece of Fried Chicken at a TimeI ate at the restaurant in this article, Hot Chicken Takeover in Columbus, Ohio, when I went with Steve Case on his Rise of the Rest tour.
A Remarkably Effective Problem Solving Tool Anyone Can UseOn the creation of Toyota's famous "Five Whys" by Taiichi Ohno, who said, "Having no problems is the biggest problem of all."The Finkbeiner Test: A Tool for Writing About Women in their Professions "In the spirit of the Bechdel test, a metric that cartoonist and author Alison Bechdel created to measure gender bias in film," this writer proposes a new test for writing about women in science--and every other field, too. For starters, "Take the things that are said about a female subject and flip them around as if they were said about a male. If they sound ridiculous, then chances are good they have no business in the story." Beyond Zero-Sum Thinking in the Game of Tech....and Life
In this podcast, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz talk about how zero-sum thinking limits progress and growth not just in innovation but in politics, economics, and both personal and professional relationships. Their conversation is moderated by Steven B. Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, among other books.
"How did he do that?" "How did he not die?" -- these crucial questions about Super Mario Bros. and more, answered at last.
AI in Startups"AI-enhanced functionalities have the potential to radically compress the cycle time (not just from entrepreneurial idea but) from a desire to engage in entrepreneurial activity to (iterative, cumulative) product life cycle(s) management."