Monthly Archives: September 2005

Real estate investors do it with houses. Entrepreneurs do it with businesses. Should you do it with Web sites? The “it” is buying, fixing up and selling properties — in this case, underperforming Web sites. Yaro Starak of the Entrepreneur’s Journey blog has just published a detailed explanation of how (and why) you might consider […]

Find a need and fill it. Find an aggravation and fix it. That’s the kind of thinking that drives a small army of independent Firefox developers. These imagineers continue to improve the Web browsing experience with their innovation. They see problems or irritations, then create small, simple, often-elegant solutions (called extensions) that fix or eliminate […]

What’s the goal of your business? To make money, right? Actually, that’s misguided, says the wise former Apple “evangelist” Guy Kawasaki, now a venture capitalist. The first thing I learned is that the people who change the world—the people who really make a difference—aren’t motivated by money. Instead, Kawasaki notes, they want “to make meaning […]

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace. “Making the complicated awesomely simple… that’s creativity.” Charles Mingus

I’m getting pretty weary of Blogger’s many limitations and, uh, eccentricities (Can you say “bugs?”) In the previous post (below), for example, I must have tried to format the color of my bullet list about 15 times, but no matter how I selected them, those first two bullet points would not turn yellow. Got it […]

Simplify doesn’t mean “dumb down”. It means your memos, presentations and other businesss documents should only be as technical as they need to be depending on your audience. Obviously, if you’re writing or speaking to engineers, you can safely assume a certain level of technical competence — although you might be surprised at how many […]

Any effective communication requires answering two basic questions before you start to write: Who are you trying to communicate with? What are you trying to get them to do? Then tailor your memo, email or other message so they — your intended audience — understand it. That last bit is where many companies fail, especially […]