You need each of your nine lives if you invest in start-ups. It’s the opposite of Russian roulette: each chamber except one contains a bullet. The game involves finding that empty chamber before running out of money. Early stage investing is one of those areas where experience can be a handicap. It doesn’t pay to
Project management is a form of corporate-sanctioned torture where the pay-off is the experience you gain. In most jobs you eventually run out of ways to stretch yourself and projects are a great way to gain extra experience, network outside your normal circle, and get noticed. The bigger the project the bigger the career gain.
Most businesspeople regard working in the public sector as being a second-order challenge but I believe management of the public sector is one of the great challenges for the next generation, comparable to the turnaround in business leadership achieved during the eighties and the Thatcher revolution. In full flow during an argument, it’s tempting to
Business people don’t understand scientists and scientists are ill-equipped for the business environment. It’s a minor miracle anything emerges from research and development departments. Given the importance of innovation and technology to a company’s prosperity, corporate efforts to manage R&D are surprisingly clunky. Any company (or economy for that matter) that cracks it deserves all
Part one (scientists) covered the personality barriers that get in the way of R&D investment, but that’s the easy bit. It is, after all, just a communication thing. The hard part is coming up with a way of managing R&D that achieves better results than leaving things to chance alone (which, by the way, is