Idea Stage

I came across an interview with David Mamet by Richard Covington for Salon in 1997 and was struck by how this passage could also apply to entrepreneurs entering an established market with a new product: …come into a new situation where they aren’t particularly welcome, assess the situation as quickly as they can and make something new out of it, make a new solution that hasn’t occurred to the indigenous people because the indigenous people have been there too long. Here is a longer excerpt for context, hyperlinks added to original. Q: Why do you say in your book “On

--> <img src=”http://www.adobe.com/images/shared/download_buttons/get_flash_player.gif” alt=”Get Adobe Flash player” /> --> Source: Powers of Ten (which was inspired by “Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps” by Kees Boeke) I remember watching this film in high school and having it change my perspective. I thought I would try and look at not distances but durations in the context of planning tasks and individual (and organizational) objectives.

In Poker a Jack is as good or better than about 3/4  (OK 76.92%) of the cards in the deck, losing only to Queen, King, and Ace.  So a “Jack of all Trades” is good at many things. The full verse is “Jack of all trades, master of none, though ofttimes better than master of one.“ Scott Adams offered “Career Advice” in July of 2007: But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: Become the best at one specific thing. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility.

Recapping ideas, papers, and books that had changed my life yesterday reminded me of Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectual Reasoning Model from her 2001 paper “What Makes Entrepreneur’s Entrepreneurial” (There is an annotated version on the Khosla Ventures site at http://www.khoslaventures.com/presentations/What_makes_entrepreneurs_ent... ) What follows are some quotes from “W