The idea of anti-trust by government is not yet 130 years old, and it took a decade before President Teddy Roosevelt to put those ideas into action. The last time the U.S. government broke up a monopoly was AT&T in 1982. The Curse of Bigness by Tim Wu gives a quick background on how anti-trust all began, then dives into the key questions: When is big too big?How do we measure big?Is Anti...
I’ve been a fan of space travel for as long as I can remember. Some of that must come from being born a month before men first walked on the moon. Some from being a child when Star Wars came out and when the first Space Shuttle launched. I’ve been excited in recent years with the efforts of SpaceX and Blue Origin, each showing glimpses of man returning to “outer space”...
A hidden assumption in how the world works came up yesterday at a startup pitch event. More than once. It goes like this… When you are the speaker, someone introduces you, and at that moment the audience presumes/assumes that you are an expert in whatever topic you’ve been introduced to present. You remain an expert in the eyes of the audience until either you say something that an...
I love to uncover hidden assumptions and thus enjoy stories of the early days of some industry, where all of what we take for granted today didn’t exist. Modern portfolio theory, mutual funds, and retirement accounts are commonplace today, but were all invented and become popular between the 1960’s and 1990’s. Success by Ten is supposed to be advice for creating a $1...
Fifty years ago, presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy shared these words: Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our...
Why do I spend my free time trying to understand wealth inequality? 0.7% of the global population (a.k.a. 52 million people) own 50% of everything there is to own. The other 7.5 BILLION people split the other half. 8.5% of the global population (a.k.a. 600 million) own 85% of everything there is to own. The other 7 BILLION people split the other 15%. 70% of the global population (a.k.a. 5.2...
Is it too little butter, or too much bread? I’m a fan of Seth Godin. I’m a fan of Bilbo too. And I’m one of those people who can’t sit still, who isn’t satisfied working on just one project at a time, and as such, once or twice per year multiple projects all need attention at once, and I’m awash in bread with too little butter to go around. Unfortunately...
These days it seems everyone knows China and India each have over 1 billion citizens, but ask an audience to name the third most populous country, and very few seem to know. Ask to list the top five, and its just the rare few who love the intersection of global geography, demographics, and statistics who can answer the question. I stumbled on the above chart, and its interactive website, and it...
Five years ago when this blog was new, I posted an Ignite talk about the true purpose of business. Two years ago, I reprised that topic to help break the myth that the (sole) purpose of business is to maximize shareholder value. My podcast is almost a year old, and last week I not only (re)explained the Ignite talk with more words, but then spent the week talking what Apple, Google, Facebook, and...
The common meme you hear in the news is that the world is changing ever fast than before. It’s not. It took mankind less time to get from the first airplane flight to the first person on the moon than from the moon to today! Computers may be faster since then and the internet may have connected them all together, but that change pales to the 19th century when mechanization led...
