EQ Journal

Category

Bundling

I think bundling is going to be a big factor in terms of leveraging entrepreneurial ventures in this century. For example, Lululemon Athletica not only sells active wear they also have Yoga classes in their stores. In essence, they are housing two complementary businesses under the same roof. But there is no reason why they [...]

Artpreneur Schedule

What is the Level of Commitment Needed to Complete? In one 5 and ½ week mad dash during the summer of 2011, I finished the 1st draft of Book 1 (Quantum Entity) of a sci-fi trilogy I storyboarded over the previous eight months. Book 1 is approximately 334 pages long (about 104,000 words). Entrepreneurs and [...]

Corporate Culture

Why a Stage 4 or 5 Corporate Culture is Essential to Startups and Established Enterprises Alike Why is it that corporate culture is so important to the success of startups and, in fact, all organizations? We know that Zappos.com’s wacky corporate culture and resultant great customer service* were key contributors to making it a billion [...]

Russian Dachnik Movement

Introduction The Russian Dacha and the Dachnik movement have been around for more than 100 years and the home garden for more than 1,000. The Dacha is typically a one-room cottage perched on one hectare of land—large enough to grow fruits and vegetables to support a single family via intense, mostly manual labour. One-room Russian [...]

To Make Yourself More Successful

First Make Your Clients More Successful Aurélien Leftick, Director of Customer Success, and Harley Finkelstein, General Counsel of Ottawa’s fastest growing tech company, Shopify.com, recently gave one of the best University of Ottawa Magic from a Hat lectures yet. You could hear a pin drop as the audience listened to the two young brainiacs from [...]

Best Homes 4 U

Create a Virtual Homebuilder, Please In 2000, in a speech to the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce on Parliament Hill, I tried to get Ottawa-area home builders to create a Virtual Homebuilder but failed; this is a very conservative industry. Here is what I had in mind: -put their available lots and designs online in a [...]

iPhone Yields at least 288% p.a. Return to Apple

Advanced Spreadsheet Use—For Product Managers There is probably no invention more helpful to the product manager today than the spreadsheet. It probably deserves to rank up there in importance with what the invention of double entry bookkeeping meant to the accounting profession. Use of spreadsheets does not substitute for human judgment—rather it is an aid [...]

Raise National Income by Unleashing the Entrepreneur Class

Hassle Factor Deters Entrepreneurs Reduce Red Tape as a Pre Condition for Economic Takeoff in Developing Nations An interesting data set became available from Bloomberg BusinessWeek (Sept. 5, 2010) showing the number of procedures, number of days and the fees and legal costs (as a percentage of per capita income) associated with becoming an entrepreneur [...]

Who Pays Whom?

In Pursuit of Recurring Revenues: The Holy Grail of Techdom In the modern economy, the answer to the question of ‘Who pays whom?’ isn’t always obvious. Should a cable company pay ABC because ABC has the content, shows like Diane Sawyer and Primetime News, or should ABC pay the cable company because it has the [...]

Why Not to Work from Home

I’m sure there are many people who work from home and enjoy that experience. I am not one of them. I had a home office for 14 months and came to really dislike it for a number of reasons, the most prominent of those: there was no separation between work and home. It wouldn’t matter [...]

The Value of Education

A Case Study of the Perceived Value of An Architecture Degree, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada I wrote the following article more than ten years ago. At that time, we made an effort to determine the rate of return on tertiary education, namely, the value of an architecture degree from Carleton University. Depending on our assumptions, [...]

One-Sigma Business Processes

“Those mundane and tedious little things that, when done exactly right, with the right kind of attention and intention, form in their aggregate a distinctive essence, an evanescent quality that distinguishes every great business you’ve ever done business with from its more mediocre counterparts whose owners are satisfied to simply get through the day,” Michael [...]