EQ Journal

Why so many established enterprises let entrepreneurs eat their lunch

There is no industry that is changing faster than this one. Not music, film, television, nothing. It’s not just book publishing that is changing at an incredible rate as e-publishing platforms proliferate across the Internet and tablets, smart phones and computers become the medium of choice for many, soon to be most, novels and books. This great democratization of the publishing industry will let anyone and everyone create and publish professionally, catering to even the tiniest niche market and audience.

If publishers are not careful, they will be disintermediated to extinction and soon.

Newspapers are facing the same possibility. How is it possible that newspapers allowed services like Kijiji, Craigslist and Angieslist to eat one of the most profitable parts of their business? Why did the Yellow Pages refuse until recently to embrace the freemium model? How come it took them so long to realize that user created content is often free and a more complete listing of businesses is far more valuable than one that only contains listings of large, well heeled enterprises? Why did they allow services like digg, reddit and twitter to reverse out practically all the work of editors, headline writers, journalists and newspaper delivery to their readers/users?

The answer might be that old line publishers and newspapers suffer from the innovator’s dilemma:

Great companies do everything right. That’s what’s wrong with them.

This is the central premise of Clayton Christensen’s book of the same name*: by listening to customers, adopting six sigma total quality management practices and Kaizen (Japanese-style constant improvement), implementing supply chain best practices, focusing on maximizing short term profits, share profit and price as well as top line growth, leadership left no room for disruptive innovation. It had to come from outside.

This is one of the reasons that Steve Jobs did not believe in market research or focus group testing; he believed that what you got out of those were delay and insights that might help you with what you are doing or have done in the past but not what you might or should do in the future.

So he would not have worried that the iPad might cannibalize Mac sales or that the iPhone could do the same to the iPod.

Christensen’s insight is an important one but it might not be very useful. Almost all top executives I have known are incredibly resistant to change. Much of their focus is on boosting short term performance and stock price because it’s not only ‘good for shareholders’, it’s even better for their compensation packages.

@ProfBruce

Postscript: I will have much more to say about the publishing business in the coming months. @hmarieadkins (of Cyber Witch Press fame: http://cyberwitchpress.com) and I will write the definitive (so far) article on e-publishing after Quantum Entity, We Are All ONE is completed: http://www.brucemfirestone.com.

* The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business, Clayton M. Christensen, Harvard College, 1997.

This is a simple test for films (and books) that is harder to pass than you might think at first blush.

/bech•del test/ n.
1. The film (or book, Ed.) has to have at least two [named] women characters in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something besides a man.
http://bechdeltest.com/

Janak Alford from prototypeD.org suggested we put Quantum Entity, We Are All ONE (www.brucemfirestone.com) to the test. These are the folks who are producing a short film based on QE to be released on the same day as the book (June 20, 2012 at Artifex, http://www.exploriem.org/events/artifex/).

It didn’t take me long to find a scene that I think can pass Bechdel. This is from Chapter 1, Book 1. Some of my key characters are at an after-show party taking place on the top floor of the Soho Met Hotel and Dafne Weinstein, Nell’s publicist, is trying to pry her away from a local tech guy (Damien Bell as it turns out) who appears to be monopolizing her time. Dafne is anxious to capitalize on the show’s momentum via a Nell appearance on all their social media channels.

Here is the scene:

Weinstein especially is concerned. The live social media feedback for the concert is overwhelmingly positive and it feels like the whole world is waiting for Nell to make her media wall appearance. Weinstein wants to keep the momentum going but Nell has the unfortunate habit of wanting to actually talk to her fans herself, post her own comments and respond to as many as she can. She has this thing about being authentic.

…

I had long planned to tell the story of Quantum Entity, Book 1 from Damien’s point of view frankly because as a first time novelist, a male point of view is what I understand best. Book 2 was planned around biz dynamo Ellen Brooks and Book 3 is from another POV I can’t yet disclose. But Ellen is such a strong character that she took over the last third of Book 1. I didn’t plan that; it just happened. When you read QE, you’ll understand why. At times, I felt like I wasn’t writing the book at all. My characters, especially the female leads Ellen and Nell come to the forefront. They were telling me the story (dictating it really); I was just their scribe.

I hope readers will agree with me that Ellen, Nell, Dafne, Arcadia and other women characters you will find there are fantastic and not just there to be pretty wallpaper, foils for men, prizes to be sought after, screaming for help or waiting to be rescued by handsome princes. Sometimes, it’s just the opposite in fact. I have always liked strong women (and married one who I still adore 27 years later). What I find amazing though is the complete transformation I went through as I sought to improve my understanding of a woman’s way of doing things.

They tend to be more careful, plan things out more thoroughly, trying not to overlook things that may trip them up later and introducing far more what-if scenarios than men typically do.

In biz dev, women tend to have powerful feelings for their fledgling enterprises more akin to nurturing them. Men often want to have sex with their business creation. Different impulses but similar results. Both invoke passion. The other major difference is that many men want to be big or go home. I have male entrepreneurs that I mentor who have $8 million in revenues and tell me they suck and women entrepreneurs with businesses doing topline volume of $800,000 that think are wonderful. The latter is more of a lifestyle biz, probably not sustainable after the Founder retires. I ask my women entrepreneurs to raise their sights. I ask the guys to raise their game– execute better.

But I’ll admit it, I am a romantic too so there’s lots of that in this QE trilogy. Soon you will get to judge for yourself how these women and others in the books act, interact, develop and cope with their lives. I tried to develop female leads that knew how to talk to other women in a non-MTV/Much Music/Mean Girl kind of way.

Some of the female characters follow in the tradition of Ellen (!) Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver in the 1979 film, Alien). Ripley is warrant officer aboard spaceship Nostromo. On its journey back from Thedus to Earth, they pick up a hitchhiker who kills almost all her entire crew. What blew me away when I first saw the movie (I was in LA during its release) was that a fearless woman could walk tall and carry a big stick. For a guy who went to an all-boys school, then engineering school (we had 500 first year Engineers of which 2 were women; in second year we had none, one went to architecture and the other bolted), then I worked in male-dominated tech in Oz, so it was a complete eye opener. I had never seen a woman do anything other than look good and scream at the right (or wrong) times in sci-fi or horror flicks up to that point (think Fay Wray and King Kong, 1939). Of course, this is old news now with people like Sheryl Sandberg taking on the COO job at Facebook.

Fay with Her Director, Producing the Scream!

I have three beautiful daughters all in their 20s now and, in part, I wrote QE for them. Women form a majority of student population at most tertiary institutions, make up roughly half the labor force in the US, do more than half of the housework at home, most of the child rearing and are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families– bottom-line, women are working more hours on more jobs than most men*

@ProfBruce

(* The Shriver Report, By Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, edited by Heather Boushey and Ann O’Leary | October 16, 2009)

ps. I have two fine sons and a handsome grandson just a few weeks old too BTW.

Actor, Screenwriter, Maori Poi Fire Dancer, Teacher, Mentor, Environmental Activist
Born in Daylight

Barbara Kozicki traveled to New Zealand’s North Island or was she called there? She visited the cultural centre at Rotorua to eat a Hangi meal (based as it is on a 2,000 year old Maori tradition of using super heated rocks and an in-ground cooking technique) in Mitai Village and to buy a pair of short Poi to further her interest in traditional Maori fire dance that she had already self-taught in Vancouver for a few years. Little did she know that her month-long stay there would bring her insights and take her to a new place in her life that would change her irrevocably.

Babara Kozicki’s Maori Poi Fire Dance
Poi represents Flight of Birds/Wings Move Leaving Butterfly Patterns

While in Rotorua, she met a Maori girl, Ngaio Maxwell, who became interested in her after watching her play with her new purchase. Ngaio went to show Ms. Kozicki a move and the Poi broke (they were cheap and presumably ornamental, made for tourists) so she invited Barbara over the next day to learn some more moves and she gifted Barbara a pair of traditional short poi that she still has today.

Barbara told the girl that her interest in Poi stemmed from a video she’d seen some two years before. The girl asked her, “What video?” So Ms. Kozicki hummed a few bars/part of the tune she’d heard on that video. The girl jumped up and said, “I know it!” Together, they looked online and found it. Turns out the performers were the Ngati Rangiwewehi*, her group. Ngaio said, “That’s my Aunty, that’s my cousin, there’s my Dad and my Uncle.”

(* ‘Ngati’ roughly means born of a certain group. ‘Rangiwewehi’ is the name of the tribe they are from. ‘Te Arawa’ is the area of Rotoroua and the Bay of Islands where the group lives.)

The tiny hairs on Barbara’s neck stood up–she knew that somehow, two years after the fact, she had arrived at her second home. Faith and hunch had found this girl whose family had made that video which inspired Barbara to take up Traditional Poi dancing in the first place; it was an insane coincidence. Serendipity at work.

Maori Poi Fire Dance at Hnatyshyn Foundation gala, VSO School of Music, Vancouver BC (April 25, 2012)

The owners and almost all the staff at the hostel in Rotorua where Ms. Kozicki stayed are Maori women. One of them drove Ngaio and Barbara to and from a secluded beach so they could discover non-touristy New Zealand. A woman named Kat took them to a Marae (meeting place) where they saw a wharenui (a beautiful carved and decorated meeting house).

It was also Kat who introduced them to the tattoo artist that designed Barbara’s Moko stamp (chin tattoo). The artist is renown and does not normally tattoo foreigners. Tattoos are integral to Maori culture. This experience was a great honour and another indication of how accepting Maori culture can be.

Kat and Ngaio also arranged for Barbara to meet artist Donna Waiariki and her daughter Tia at Whakarewarewa Village. Donna is the artist who made Ms. Kozicki’s regalia. Turns out the pupu skirt is made up of flax, cut and braided. She also had to learn how to dye it.

Tia took them on a tour. The whole village knew about Ms. Kozicki before she had even arrived. Barbara and her new friends went to see a Poi performance. Someone on stage said, “There’s a member of our audience who should be dancing with us,” pointing at Ms. Kozicki. The next thing she knew, she was running up on stage where they gave her a poi set and then she was performing with their group.

The following day, Barbara went to buy an outfit but was told, with apologies, they had just one set left. Fittingly, the bodice was exactly her size; it was as if someone had measured it perfectly for her 5′8″ frame.

Barbara Kozicki, Vancouver BC

More synchronicity.

As her stay with the Maori came to an end, she met up one last time with her friend who said, “You are Maori on the inside but white on the outside because you were born in the daylight.” It was a marvelous moment for Ms. Kozicki.

…

Coming back to Canada imbued with the spirit of the Maori, Barbara wanted to perform her art but was rejected and criticized because she could not possibly be authentic. She had to struggle to find her place despite the culture wars.

Hurt and discouraged, rejected in her own nation, she fought the ban eventually coming to be accepted and then one day featured on the main stage at Calgary’s Canada Day celebration. She was home, again.

…

Barbara says that, “Poi is not like Hulu. There is no right/wrong. Poi is a way to communicate music in movement.

“There is no written history of Poi either. It is said that men did Poi to exercise their wrists in preparation for for warfare. Women were forbidden Poi moves. So they did it in secret instead. But when the men saw them do it, their beauty and grace, legend says they then decided it was OK. After that, women who excelled in Poi were highly prized.

“Women became so proficient at it that it was then used to distract enemies before war so one tribe could wipe out another.

“The Maori are a very musical culture. They incorporate new music as well as traditional forms. It is a very inclusive culture which is why it is so strong in New Zealand and so enduring.

“They taught me that if you have any Maori blood in you or just their spirit in you, they will raise you up in their culture as one of their own. Interestingly, Poi is compulsory in elementary schools in New Zealand.

“Using fire in poi is a modern invention; it’s a way to make it more showy, give it more wowza! For someone to do it alone, as a soloist like I do, is very unusual. Often you will find 30 or 40 women performing together. They can even do poi sitting, aka boat poi!

“I guess I brought something original to this artform. I made Poi sexier! With wiggling hips and me dressed in evening gowns performing at really high speeds. My Maori friends like it.”

…

Barbara does some private teaching but like most accomplished individuals, she has to dig deep to find patience for average performers. What she is really looking for are pupils that have talent, focus and passion.

She adores performing and loves to mentor others. She recently showed ten women how to turn their Poi fire dancing into supplemental incomes.

She is an actress, screenwriter and, of course, a Poi fire dancer. She is also an environmental activist with a particular interest in ocean conversation and consequently an inveterate letter writer.

One of her proudest achievements to date is a (successful) letter-writing campaign to have Loblaws pull canned shark fin from their shelves.

Ms. Kozicki won a William and Nona Heaslip award for academic achievement, leadership and community involvement totaling $15,000 per year for three years while she was at UBC and also a Hnatyshyn Foundation early career grant for the performing arts for $10,000.

…

Like many artpreneurs, Barbara wants to give back to her community and teaching, mentoring and environmental lobbying are ways for her to do that. But many artists are reluctant to take money for their work as teachers or mentors and in this I think they are wrong. Entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and artpreneurs all believe or should believe in fair trade, value for value. Sometimes they seem to have trouble saying, ‘I’m worth it!’

One of the things I have tried to do in a career of teaching architects and other creative professionals is to explain to them that it is OK to talk the language of business. Great architects like Douglas Cardinal can do that; Michelangelo could do it. All of us need the favour of patrons to survive; people who cherish us and our work. It is often abundantly clear that creativity and design contribute hugely to creation of new economic value but, for many artpreneurs, sadly, death is a career move. They see so little of it while alive.

Don’t let that be you.

@ProfBruce

As readers of this Journal already know, I have become more convinced than ever that artpreneurs play and will play a larger role in carving out sustainable city-state economies in the future than at any time in the past or, at least, since medieval times. Creativity cannot be outsourced and is much harder to knock off than, say, a 5-function calculator.

In medieval towns, the marketplace, court jester and musicians, magicians and sorcerers, alchemist, doctor, town fair, town centre, open air play, theatre, public hangings/beheadings, the joust, archery contest, sporting events, the Olympics, Marathon, wall hangings, murals, the Book, formalized dance, baking, cooking, recipe making, farming, religion, weddings, baptisms, funerals, battles, dueling, sewing, knitting, pottery, painting, blacksmithing, armour/sword/shield/banner/flag/dress making and much more were key parts of creating guilds and then towns that prospered from them.

Many of these old arts are making a comeback as people rediscover the joy of possessing, for example, an authentic, handmade leather iPad case from http://www.dodocase.com or a set of fabulous field notes made by former snowboarder, Aaron Draplin (http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2012).

Oh So Authentic Field Notes

I have also become more interested in creative writing now having finished Book 1 of my new trilogy, Quantum Entity, We Are All ONE, to be released in June 2012 (http://www.brucemfirestone.com). 18-time novelist Claire Harrison recommends that would-be creative writers practice* before attempting to pen their great opus by first redoing/rewriting a scene from a favorite film, TV show or book; to see if they can improve on the work done by published authors or proven screenwriters. So, as the good student I am, I tried my hand at it: I rewrote a scene from the film Ghost that wouldn’t you know it, 11 months later turned out to fit perfectly into Chapter 1 of Book 2 (Quantum Entity, American Spring). It was synchronous, for sure. You can see what I did with that film here: Ghost Scene, http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=3191.

(* My PhD supervisor, the late great Dr. Max Neutze also believed in practice saying to me upon my arrival at the ANU in Canberra, “Don’t worry, Bruce. The first million words are the toughest.”)

More recently, I was watching a film called Devil (2010) written by Brian Nelson (screenplay) and M. Night Shyamalan (story). In the movie, six people (four men and two women) are trapped in an elevator, one of whom is the Devil and a murderer, you just don’t know which one. All of the five passengers (SPOILER ALERT) will turn out to have been ‘called’ there (presumably by the Devil) to pay for their sins. One will outsmart the Devil and survive by confessing his/her sins publicly before the Devil can exact judgment.

A cop on scene (played by Chris Messina) is in the building’s control room. It will turn out he too has been called there, for a purpose that will only become apparent right near the end of the film. It’s a good plot twist. He has video into the elevator cab and audio– but only 1-way. The people in the cab can hear him but not vice versa. The cop is trying to find out which one is the murderer by process of elimination with a limited flow of (asymmetric) information.

At one point, he asks the people in the elevator to tell him their names, first by showing the video camera some ID. Turns out camera visual acuity is not good enough to allow him to read their tiny licenses. Thinking quickly (!), he asks if anyone has a pen so they can write their names large enough for him to read them. Not one of the five people in the elevator have a pen. So the cop gives up. Hmm.

The rest of the story develops around this conundrum and the writers come up with an elaborate, dare-I-say somewhat forced, way for the detective to deduce their names and eliminate one after another as a suspect. None of it works worth a bean and the writers use an old Agatha Christie trick (one she used in Ten Little Indians) to fool both audience and P.O.L.I.C.E.M.A.N. Hmm.

I can think of at least eight ways the cop could have directly solved the problem. See if you can come up with others.

One. Have them spell out their names in code using numbers (1-26) and their fingers with pauses between each number similar to what you would do with Morse code. Here’s mine:

2-18-21-3-5
6-9-18-5-19-20-15-14-5

If you can’t break this simple code, please go read Neal Stephenson’s wonderful novel, Cryptonomicon and come back in about a month.

Two. Anyone have an iPad or iPhone? I always carry one or both. It would be trivial to write out my name and those of my companions at any font size and hold it up to the camera. Quite readable for sure.

Three. Anyone heard of texting?

Four. How about emailing?

Five. I have a Twitter App on my iPhone and iPad. I can tweet it to the cop. Even DM him if he follows me @ProfBruce.

Six. Twitter too tough for Chris to master (he shoulda read Twitter Nation, http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2080 before coming onto this crime scene)? OK, he could friend me on Facebook instead; then we can message each other all the live long day.

Seven. Call for image enhancement. The P.O.L.I.C.E. not to mention NSA, CSIS, RCMP, CIA or FBI can read the initials on your cuff-links from LEO (Low Earth Orbit) so they surely can take this piece of video and read a few licenses.

Eight. Heck, if all else fails, you can sign your name really fast. I did it yesterday with help from @alexwolfe12. See if you can guess my first name from the composite image below?

Signing for Dummies

Any other suggestions?

@ProfBruce

Postscript: Hold the presses; if I had my iPhone, I coulda just called the cop. That’s NINE.

Guest Article by Ryan Ricci, BA, Desjardins Financial Security Independent Network

Running a successful business is a balancing act, an intricate puzzle requiring skill, determination and passion to make everything flow smoothly. However, if something happens to you, a partner, or a key stakeholder can the company continue to operate effectively?

Ryan Ricci

Chaos can result when a stakeholder dies without a succession plan in place – even if you are a start-up. If this happens you may suddenly find yourself in business with your partner’s spouse, children or parents. Or conversely, your children may be responsible for running a business they don’t fully understand.

Creating a buy/sell agreement with help from your lawyer in the event of the death of a key stakeholder is crucial for business continuity. That agreement details how the deceased partner’s ownership of the business passes to other stakeholders, protecting their heirs, surviving stakeholders and the business. Funding the agreement is equally important, and it does not have to be costly or complicated.

You and your business partner can protect one another, your families and your business for as little as $50* per month. Securing a corporate-funded life insurance policy would promptly provide tax-free funds for outright purchase of the deceased stakeholder’s share of the business. It’s a solution that’s simple, cost-effective and it avoids the introduction of new – perhaps unwanted – partners.

Take a few simple steps now to plan for your company’s growth with a funded buy/sell agreement.

Ryan Ricci, BA
Life and Health Insurance Advisor
Desjardins Financial Security Independent Network
ryan.ricci @ dfsin.ca
T: 613 829-7874 x 256 C: 613 614-0197

(*For illustration purposes only. Based on a healthy male, age 35, non-smoker, $250,000 coverage of term insurance at April 20, 2012. Rates and conditions are subject to change.)

OTTAWA (May 1, 2012) – The winners of the 2012 Exploriem Bootstrap Awards Fastest Growing company were announced at the Mayor’s Breakfast on April 27th at City Hall. From the five finalists StoneShare won first place, Renaissance Repair and Supply was awarded silver and YOUi Labs walked away with bronze.

On accepting their award StoneShare reflected on their entrepreneurial journey to date. “We have been working so hard for so long – this award is a welcome reminder to pause, take stock, and celebrate,” said Nick Kellett, Chief Technical Officer of StoneShare.

“As an entrepreneur you have a debt of gratitude to the people who help you. Entrepreneurs pay that back through hiring people and supporting their local community. It’s an honour to be recognised in front of our community,” said Len Andersen, Chief Executive Officer of Renaissance Repair and Supply.

The Bootstrap Awards are unique in that they focus on self-capitalized businesses. “Bringing in capital is twice as hard, but it puts you in control of your own destiny. YOUi Labs has won many awards, but bootstrapping is something that really resonates with us,” added Jason Flick, President of YOUiLabs and bronze award winner.

Ginsberg Gluzman Fage and Levitz LLP (GGFL) see their sponsorship of the awards as a way of supporting the local business community. “We are a firm of entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs so this award is a natural fit for us. Our practice is focused on helping entrepreneurs and family owned businesses achieve their goals,” said Deborah Bourchier, Managing Partner of GGFL.

Exploriem would like to thank all event and category sponsors for continuing to support local entrepreneurs. “Entrepreneurs and start-ups create more jobs and opportunities than all government incentives put together. Exploriem plays an important role in fostering start-ups and entrepreneurs,” emphasizes Larry Poirier, Chief Executive Officer of NITRO IT, Exploriem board member and Ottawa investor.

-30-

Notes to Editors (synopsis on winners follows)

Please email kennedy.alana @ gmail.com or call 613.315.4537 to obtain a quote from or an interview from Exploriem/sponsors or the winners.

About the Winners:

StoneShare

StoneShare is the preferred destination in Ottawa-Gatineau and Toronto for SharePoint specific products and services.
Founded in 2007, they are a Microsoft Gold certified partner and specialize in planning, development and implementation of SharePoint-specific business solutions. Collectively, their team provides decades of experience in Enterprise Content Management Solutions, Collaboration Solutions and Enterprise and Self-Service Social Applications.

Renaissance Repair and Supply

In today’s competitive environment, business and infrastructure costs are critical and re-used assets are an obvious option to increase return on investment. Network quality and reliability are paramount to the success of a telecom business. Renaissance Repair and Supply strives to provide quality remanufactured assets that allow increased profitability and reliability for its customers.

YOUi Labs

YOUi Labs next-generation user interface technology and services enable tablet, smart phone and personal electronics manufacturers to differentiate their products by offering a fresh and compelling user experience. The YOUi Labs platform provides industry-leading graphics performance that significantly reduces time to market and makes devices fun and easy to use.

About Exploriem

Exploriem is a registered Canadian not-for-profit organization. It provides mentorship, conducts events, creates networking opportunities and provides early stage funding and office incubator space to assist young entrepreneurs in Eastern Ontario and West Quebec.

Today Exploriem is led by its Executive Director, Professor Bruce Firestone who is perhaps best known as Founder of the Ottawa Senators. He is also Entrepreneurship Ambassador at University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management, Real Estate Broker with Century 21 Explorer Realty Inc. and Author, Quantum Entity. For more information, please follow @Exploriem and @ProfBruce

About the Bootstrap Awards

The Bootstrap Awards and Adawe Trade Show is an annual event hosted by Exploriem to honour entrepreneurs in the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau. Bootstrap Awards are unique in that they focus on businesses that use self-capitalization techniques to fund their enterprises.

For more information contact:

Alana Kennedy
Marketing & Communications
613.315.4537
kennedy.alana @ gmail.com
@AlanaKennedy

What is Beauty?

We came to Vancouver a few days ago to celebrate early stage career Hnatyshyn Foundation Award winners at an event held at the VSO School of Music. The concert hall at the VSO (Vancouver Symphony Orchestra) is acoutistically and virbationally isolated not only from street traffic outside its downtown location but from rehearsal rooms off to the side where performers can practice their arts without either being disturbed or disturbing others. It’s an amazing place.

Young performers included Jocelyn Lai (piano), Lambroula Maria Pappas (opera), Barbara Kozicki (actor and Maori-trained poi firedancer), Eli Bennett (tenor saxophone), Daniel Reynolds (piano) and Luke Sellick (double bassist).

At dinner a day later, I was asked by one of the women at our table in a trendy Van City bistro about the role of arts in city-state economies, “Without the arts, you have nothing, NOTHING. It isn’t just about Richard Florida’s diversity index, or do-gooders supporting the arts because it helps their social profile or gives them a kind of street cred with the chattering classes.

“Look at the necklace you are wearing, your earings, your (little black) dress, your makeup, your hair, your purse, your cute black pumps with gold inlay, the stylish Audi you arrived in, your nails, the frescoes on the walls and ceilings around us tonight, the presentation of the foods we are eating, the dynamite uniforms the servers are wearing, the culinary art that went into food prep, the fact that your daughter is a budding dancer, the music on your iPod, the apps on your iPad, the fantastic wedding ring you are wearing on the third finger of your left hand, the cutlery we are using, the chinaware, the floral arrangements, the renovation of this old building, the architecture of the streetscape outside that promotes pedestrian movement and walkabout…

“And that is just some of the art I can see from where I am seated right now. Then there is inanimate impact on your mental space: your ability to think abstract thoughts, to enjoy, to love, to appreciate, to create your own art whether it is great art or folk art, to feel one with the universe, to learn and to grow and change. Does a piece of music recall wonderful moments in your life, a certain smell bring back a poignant memory, reading a favorite book bring tears to your eyes/inspire you to be a better you?

“What would be left without the arts?”

NOTHING.

@ProfBruce

Comment: What is Beauty?

The Critique of Judgment begins with an account of beauty. The initial issue is: what kind of judgment is it that results in our saying, for example, ‘That is a beautiful sunset’. Kant argues that such aesthetic judgments (or ‘judgments of taste’) must have four key distinguishing features. First, they are disinterested, meaning that we take pleasure in something because we judge it beautiful, rather than judging it beautiful because we find it pleasurable. The latter type of judgment would be more like a judgment of the ‘agreeable’, as when I say, ‘I like doughnuts’.

Second and third, such judgments are both universal and necessary. This means roughly that it is an intrinsic part of the activity of such a judgment to expect others to agree with us. Although we may say ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, that is not how we act. Instead, we debate and argue about our aesthetic judgments – and especially about works of art -and we tend to believe that such debates and arguments can actually achieve something. Indeed, for many purposes, ‘beauty’ behaves as if it were a real property of an object, like its weight or chemical composition. But Kant insists that universality and necessity are in fact a product of features of the human mind (Kant calls these features ‘common sense’), and that there is no objective property of a thing that makes it beautiful.

Fourth, through aesthetic judgments, beautiful objects appear to be ‘purposive without purpose’ (sometimes translated as ‘final without end’). An object’s purpose is the concept according to which it was made (the concept of a vegetable soup in the mind of the cook, for example); an object is purposive if it appears to have such a purpose; if, in other words, it appears to have been made or designed. But it is part of the experience of beautiful objects, Kant argues, that they should affect us as if they had a purpose, although no particular purpose can be found.

Oxley Flower, NPR News and Affairs
(Please note identity of this commenter has been changed, Ed.)

Some of the performances:

Ms. Kozicki:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WIWYLqW8upg

Ms. Pappas:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2×6PcLO4qFs

Ms. Lai:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6q02puhg5f4

Mr. Reynolds:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NlK2CY3ovkY

Mr. Bennett:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HpR73WcenSA

Mr. Sellick (trio):

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs-GSwNX1Y8

Ottawa’s Next $100 Million Tech Startup?

(Portions of this article originally appeared in Ottawa Business Journal, April 16, 2012: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444.)

When you first meet Len Anderson in his company’s bustling headquarters—a capacious Kanata office building on Leggett Drive which looks more like a warehouse once you are inside—you are struck by his sense of humour and calmness given that he is in the eye of a storm which is taking Renaissance Repair from 0 to potentially $100 million in sales in just six or seven years.

Renaissance has an irresistible value proposition—for OEMs like Alcatel, Cisco, Huawei and Ciena or telecom companies like AT&T, China Unicom, Verizon, Bell, Sprint, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Telefonica, Docomo and Movil—about 80% of their networks run on legacy equipment, highly complex hardware, software and firmware that almost no one knows how to fix and repair anymore.

These companies all have huge teams of engineers and technicians but they focus almost exclusively on leading edge technology. Still they can’t afford to rip out tens, perhaps hundreds of billions of investment in their systems every time something goes wrong with their older equipment. And where can you find engineers who understand legacy equipment? Why in the city that designed it in the first place—Ottawa and Nortel engineers did that.

So Renaissance has a vast supply of engineering talent that can solve these technical issues plus an endless demand for its services, worldwide.

It sounded like an opportunity and a viable business model to Mr. Anderson when Nortel folded underneath him. He was there for nine years and five months running NT’s used equipment buyback, storage, remanufacturing, remarketing and recycling business. He was responsible for all used gear transactions globally which meant that when Nortel’s last CEO, Mike Zafirovski, cratered the business, Len was ideally situated to start out on his own.

“I got Renaissance off the ground with $20,000 from my credit card and an understanding wife,” he says smiling broadly.

(Mr. Anderson has used this line once or twice before, no doubt. His family lives to the east—in Rockland—so his trip to and from work each day in Kanata is one hour. He did not want to move them; they are settled in that community and plan to remain there so he uses his transit time for calls. We can only imagine what his cell phone bill looks like.)

During his first year in business he did what most self-capitalized entrepreneurs do—he hustled. He bought and sold (flipped) used equipment—not much different from what you see on TV when they try to flip houses at a profit. But in Len’s case, he actually had some expertise—he possessed asymmetric information that allowed him to value other people’s discards accurately. It’s a riff on buy low/sell high. By the end of year one, he was sitting on $1 million in cash.

His next step was to build a bigger pipeline—to rent and fit up a larger space. ‘How hard can that be?’ Len thought. Six months later, he had his lease and a few months after that they were operational in their new location having spent all their money and more on real estate. “It was ugly,” Mr. Anderson says. “We didn’t know anything about real estate but our Landlord certainly did. We negotiated uphill all the way. We didn’t even know how to spell ‘BDC’ when we moved in,” he adds with a laugh.

BDC is obviously Business Development Bank of Canada who came to their rescue with credit support as did Yves Tremblay, founder of Purple Angel and Cesar Cesaratto who runs their team, as well as friend, investor and confidant Larry Poirier from Nitro Microsystems.

Staff will double or triple in size this year to perhaps 60 or maybe even 90 people. Len has found that startups put so much pressure on everyone that some of his employees crumple and leave. Staff turnover has been at 50% although that is coming down as they cull the herd and learn to hire-up. They have brought in an experienced HR leader in Kim Waite who has made meaningful changes in this crucial area.

There is no doubt in Mr. Anderson’s view that the talent they need is here not in China, India or even the US, UK and Germany. Every time he learns that an OEM has declared another product line a ‘legacy’, you can hear cheering at Renaissance as well as at places like Pythian. Pythian* is another Ottawa-based success story that works with legacy products—they run database management networks for companies like CBS, Electronic Arts, Telesat, Forbes, Toyota and Nordion.

(* You can read more about Pythian, How to Establish a Sustainable Competitive Advantage, here: http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2482 and Becoming an Entrepreneur by Paul Vallee here: http://www.eqjournal.org/Paul-Vallee-pythian-speech-30-march-2011.pdf.)

Mr. Anderson does yoga and kickboxing plus he cross country skis every night with a headlamp on his head—to try to unwind and relax. “You know I never expected to run my own company and sometimes wonder how I ended up doing this,” he adds, pointing with his arm to millions of dollars worth of equipment sitting on shelving or being worked on/repaired by engineers and technicians all in blue lab coats.

Asked if he is building the company to sell or hold on to, Mr. Anderson says, “We’ve already had three inquiries about that but I have a good support network and we want to see what we can do with all of this.”

Professor Bruce M. Firestone, Founder, Ottawa Senators; Author and Executive Director, Exploriem.org; Broker, Century 21 Explorer Realty; Entrepreneurship Ambassador, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa. Follow him on Twitter: @ProfBruce

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Television’s Golden Age could be Ahead not Behind

I am an Aaron Sorkin fan from his days writing A Few Good Men, The American President and, of course, The West Wing, so it was with great anticipation when friends of mine and I gathered to hold a tailgate party in a local park on a cold fall evening before going to see the film based on the book of the same name written by Michael Lewis. The Book contains some favorite themes of mine—sports, business, role of the underdog, differentiated value and teamwork amongst others.

What I especially like about Sorkin’s work is his dialogue—fast paced, intelligent, real. But I felt that most of the glowing reviews I’d read about the movie were undeserved so here’s mine: this film production completely sucks. It lacks most of the elements that make any filmgoer care about a movie—sympathetic characters, story development, interesting subplots, adversity overcome, romance/love interest, delight, imagination, surprise, intimacy, character development, captivating storyline, climax…it’s relationships that matter to most people. Without the well-told romance between Rose DeWitt Bukater (played by Kate Winslet) and Jack Dawson (Leo Di Caprio) to drive the plot, James Cameron’s Titanic would have been a stinker as well as a sinker instead of being one of the top grossing films ever. Pretty much the only element that I think Moneyball had going for it was that a few scenes authentically capture the inner workings of the management layer of pro sports teams.

Billy Beane played by an underwhelming Brad Pitt is a loner who is hard to like. In fact, no one likes him except for his daughter which itself is a subplot that goes absolutely nowhere. And Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill) is one of the least interesting characters to co-star in a major Hollywood film in quite awhile and that is saying a lot given the abysmal quality of most Hollywood productions lately.

I am having a hard time thinking of any recent Hollywood films that can come close to the writing, acting and directing seen in HBO series Game of Thrones, AMC’s Mad Men, Showtime’s Shameless or for that matter ABC’s LOST. Could it be that television’s golden era is ahead not behind? I think that is a real possibility especially as the Internet eats TV so made-for-TV serials will mutate to made-for-Internet ones. Television-land should be a more interesting place to work than Hollywood and I think Steve Jobs knew that before he passed away.

Your TV, once it’s equipped with a Siri-like AI, will transmute into an omnipresent media wall that will be a place you look to for entertainment, communication and help. It will be a workplace too. That is why Steve Jobs was rumored to have spoken from his deathbed ‘I have solved it’ or words to that effect. I’m quite sure this was his direction; it is also the direction I took in my new novel Quantum Entity, We Are All ONE (June 2012). You can read the Dedication and Foreword here: http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=3426.

Game of Thrones reportedly cost (see: June Thomas’ excellent article in Slate.com on the economics of these series, March 29, 2012) HBO between $50 and $60 million for Season One (10 episodes) and subsequent seasons are bound to cost more via wage creep as actors, directors, writers and others demand a bigger piece of the pie. Rumor has it that HBO plans to make 70 hours of the series (seven seasons) so its overall production budget could easily top half a billion dollars. Now writers, actors and directors tend to get better at their craft the more time they spend with a project and with their characters. Seven years is a long time in anyone’s career so it should come as no surprise that made-for-TV and (in the future) made-for-Internet series will be much better than most films released widely through traditional channels. As cablevision companies get disintermediated as the Internet devours TV, HBO’s audience and subscription base will increase vastly in size and they know that.

Director Bennett Miller lets loose the dogs of ageism—everyone over 50 in his film is either fat or ugly or preferably both. They are also universally stupid, obtuse, resistant to change, over-the-hill detritus getting in the way of progress. Newsflash Mr. Miller: I know many old 30-year olds. You only get old when you think you know everything and that can just as easily happen at 30 as at 60. As long as you are open to learning new things, you will NEVER GET OLD.

Having said this, here are ten lessons you can take from the film (and book) that are worthwhile for entrepreneurs (and sports entrepreneurs) to know:

1. You can take advantage of asymmetric information which Billy and Peter do admirably by substituting data for opinion on up and coming baseball players. However, this is not new. The Ottawa Senators had computers (laptops) and analysts on the floor of the NHL draft from their very first draft in 1991. This was to do analysis in close to real time of draft picks and potential trades. Pouring resources into drafting, data collection and analysis allowed the Sens to be in the playoffs 12 years out of 13, second only to the Detroit Red Wings. It became known as the ‘Ottawa model’ in the National League although Sam Pollock (with the Canadiens), Bill Torrey (with the Islanders) and Glen Sather (with the Oilers) were the real pioneers in the field albeit without assistance from modern computers.
2. You are either all-in (body, mind and soul/heart, brain and gut) or you are nowhere.
3. If you do not have an optimistic, unreasoning BELIEF that you are right, you will fail because you will leave your path too soon. Glen Sather told me the best trades he ever did were the ones he didn’t do. One year after the Oilers won the President’s Trophy (as the top team in the League), they got beat out in the playoffs and that summer fans and media were calling for him to get rid of key players. ‘Gretzky’s a bum.’ ‘Messier is useless.’ Instead, he did nothing at all. The next year, the Oilers won their first Stanley Cup going 16 and 2 in the process.
4. You need buy-in by everyone in your organization and teamwork—not just players and managers, everyone from top execs to ticket, beer and merchandise sellers…
5. You have to hate losing more than you like winning.
6. In most team sports, more money is not necessarily more likely to produce great results. In the NHL, you need to feel like the guy next to you and across the dressing room from you is your brother otherwise there is no way you can last the daily grind of two months, four rounds and up to 28 bruising, intense games. Top revenue teams like the Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Rangers do not dominate the NHL. Even in baseball, money by itself is not going to produce a World Series champ. The same is true in business—VC funded enterprises are not necessarily more successful than self-capitalized ones. In fact, they are almost surely less likely to survive since the latter spend most of their time getting close early and often to their customers. Ever heard of a business with fast growing revenues failing?
7. When I was with the Sens, we looked closely at $$$ spent per point produced and benchmarked ourselves against other NHL teams this way. Ottawa was consistently at or near the top by this measure of efficiency. This is your tooth to tail ratio. In most businesses, functions like administration and accounting are tail, sales are teeth. Having more teeth and less tail is usually a good thing. We had all of our employees spend some time in ticket sales so when someone in the media or a fan said: ‘Why not just give Alexei another million?’ our people had some idea how hard it was to sell another $1,000,000 in tickets, merchandise and beer. Often big money teams will have a lot of dough invested in tail, not so much in teeth (i.e., player development/ticket sales/sponsorship deals.) The real core competencies of any sports biz are: product on the field/ice/court/pitch and relationships with your fans and corporate supporters. That’s it, that’s all. Bill Wirtz from the Chicago Blackhawks told me that and he was right.
8. You have to be tough sometimes. You do have to fire people from time to time—better for them and better for your organization. There’s no way around it. You also have to have rules of behavior for your organization and that includes players. When you get a lot of young people together with a lot of money, stuff happens so a code of conduct and an expectation that everyone will live up to it is very important, even more so now in the age of Twitter. When I was coaching 10 and 11 year olds (competitive soccer) years ago, we had two simple rules—when the coach is talking, you’re not and if you don’t practice, you don’t play. Our two best players didn’t like practicing so I benched them. Their parents went ballistic even taking their complaints to our soccer association board, thankfully to no avail. Eventually it got so bad I had to ask them to withdraw from the team, i.e., I fired our two best players. Nevertheless, that year we went to the finals before losing by one golden goal—a great scissor kick by our opponent’s star striker. That team had character and felt about each other the way a band of brothers would. Our leader on the field was one of the most wonderful 11-year olds I have ever known, special in every way. He died that winter in a horrible skiing accident—he was racing, helmet and all, but went off course and hit a tree. Over 500 people went to his funeral; he touched so many lives at such a young age.
9. Don’t judge a book by its cover. Just because someone looks like a player doesn’t make him one. One investor I know only invests in firms run by CEOs who are 6 feet or less or run by women on the theory that those CEOs had a much harder struggle to get there than someone who is a tall white male.
10. Teams take on the character of their owners—passionate owner? You’ll have a passionate team. Analytical one? Same thing. Absentee owner? This can be a problem since you need at the center of each bee hive, one heart/one brain pumping out instructions and setting all the horses in their traces so the chariot can wing around the arena at warp speed.

One other thing that I think the book and film captured accurately—Billy Beane could not watch his own team (Oakland As) play. I get that. I have a tough time watching the Sens play especially in the playoffs. I have discussed this with a few close women friends, one of whom told me, “I know what the problem is! You’re not the Founder of the Sens, you’re their mother!”

Your emotional investment is so huge that when bad things happen to your team (your child), it’s personal. And if it isn’t, well, it won’t matter anyway cuz your team will suck.

@ProfBruce

At TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) 2011, U2’s Bono made an offhand, almost throwaway comment that stopped me in my tracks. He said something like this: ‘The difference between good, maybe even very good art and great art is HUGE.‘

Entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and artpreneurs would do well to keep this in mind. Steve Jobs was not satisfied with good, he clearly wanted great, insanely great. Filmmaker James Cameron is the same– before he re-released Titanic (in 3-D this time) for the 100th anniversary of that famous ship sinking, he went back into the studio at the urging of noted astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to fix the night sky behind Rose DeWitt Bukater (played by Kate Winslett) while she is floating on a puncy raft (a piece of wreckage really) on a freezing North Atlantic holding onto young Jack Dawson’s hand (Leo DiCaprio) who happens to be in the process of dying at that moment from hypothermia.

All eyes are on Kate and Leo but not Dr. Tyson’s who correctly pointed out that James had used two halves of a night sky which were identical and, anyway, the night sky in 1912 and 1997 (when the film was released) are NOT the same. Star positions will have moved in the intervening 85 or so years…

So Cameron asked Dr. Tyson for the correct starscape and went back into the studio and fixed it for the subset of astrophysicists in the world who: a) have seen his version of Titanic, b) have noticed the flaw and c) who care about it.

So to recognize these insanely great artpreneurs including the indomitable Bono, I created a Venn diagram for comedic relief:

To me, great art is a combination of the unpredictable (genius), the authentic (folk art) and well executed (professional). As readers of this Journal will know, I like ideas but without execution, they are pretty useless.

Also, this generation (I’m talking Gen Y here) seems to seek authenticity almost above all other values and I tend to agree with that. You can almost always tell a phony from the real thing.

I realize that it is all the rage these days to talk about MVP– Minimum Viable Product. I agree that it is important to get into contact with the marketplace early and often. Still you must create large scale value for clients and patrons and you mustn’t tarnish your brand.

Your personal brand and your enterprise’s brand are crucial to building trust in all that you are so it won’t do to publish/paint/write/draw/design/build/create a piece of crap.

@ProfBruce

To find out if your startup is really going to be of any real use, take a few moments to perform an Einsteinian thought experiment. Ask: If my product or service had been around ever since Jan 27, 1756 (Mozart’s DOB), what would it be worth today?

Imagine YouTube, for a moment, having been around circa the latter half of the 18th Century. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a YouTube video of Mozart’s last concert or Albert Einstein’s speech when he won his Nobel prize in physics in 1921. What would that video archive be worth today?

What if Pinterest.com had been around since the 1800s and you could see what interested James Watt the inventor of the steam engine (other than mechanical engineering). Or what if you could go back even further to see the interests of Chris Columbus or Leonardo da Vinci. What if Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Krishna or the Prophet Muhammad had been able to pin their interests to an electronic bulletin board? What would that mean to their followers? Quite a bit I would think.

What if Ottawa Business News (a company I founded, now known as Ottawa Business Journal) had been started in the 19th Century instead of the 1980s? Would it have helped tie the Ottawa business community more closely together and make it stronger? Would its archive be worth more? Would it have deeper roots in that community? I think ‘yes’ to all three questions.

If you want to take it a step further, ask yourself: If I could travel back to any point in time I wanted to (breaking all of Einstein’s Laws I’m afraid) and introduce my new enterprise then, what kind of changes would it produce in the fabric of our society today? Would it be a better world? If the answer is ‘yes’, well, you have your answer.

So to know if an enterprise you are creating is likely to be any good, think backwards first before looking forward.

@ProfBruce