EQ Journal

Category

Moneyball Movie

10 Things You Can Learn about Sports and Business from Moneyball What the Ottawa Senators did Right to Make the Playoffs 12 out of 13 Years 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 [...]

Why I Wrote Quantum Entity

Here below is the dedication I wrote for the upcoming release of the first book in my new trilogy, Quantum Entity, which will be available later this year. Below that I include the Foreword. Dedication I wanted to write a great mid-21st Century story, a trilogy as it turned out, focused on five themes—entrepreneurship/science, science [...]

Learn from Failure

T.C. Transitus Communications Inc. Case Study Introduction Unfortunately it is often true you can learn more from failure than you can from success. This was true of the Starflyer and it was true of Transitus as well. Just as the Starflyer was a can’t-miss idea of mine from the 1980s, Transitus was a can’t-miss idea [...]

CGI—Big Company, Small Attitude

(This article originally appeared in Ottawa Business Journal, Jan. 9, 2012: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444) You expect a company with 31,000 employees and revenues of $4.32 billion in fiscal year 2011 which make it the seventh largest systems integrator in the world to have a big attitude. But meeting with tall, fit 40-something Scott Lawrence suggests a different [...]

BTI Gains Traction

(This article first appeared in Ottawa Business Journal: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444) BTI may be the fastest growing tech company in Ottawa you’ve never heard of—led by California-based Steve Waszak, their head count is now 270 globally with 150 of those in Ottawa. Waszak is a former Deloitte guy, former Cienna employee who is a tough competitor and [...]

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 [...]

PB4L—The ‘Field Notes’ Story

I collect stories about Personal Businesses for Life (PB4L) for this blog and also for my students because they can learn a great deal from people who have already bootstrapped an enterprise, made it successful and kept ownership of it—away from Banks, VCs, Angel investors, angry creditors, partners, ex-spouses, what have you. I have told [...]

Why Cheering for the Leafs Is … Unnatural

In Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and Montreal Back in 2004, I wrote this essay on how a sports team can positively impact a City’s development. I approached the subject by looking at an unusual phenomenon: the presence of significant numbers of Toronto Maple Leaf fans who are resident in other Canadian NHL cities. Now as [...]

Sir Terence Matthews’ Ten Guiding Principles

For a Successful Launch of your Next Startup Sir Terence Matthews, founder and guiding light behind such enterprises as March Networks, Mitel, Newbridge, Dragon Wave, Bridgewater Systems and many other companies, insists that every startup follows the same set of ten principles*: (* These are called ‘Terryisms‘ within the Matthews watershed of companies.) 1. Form [...]

Unconventional Mentors

When student entrepreneurs are looking for mentors, they are often referred by well-meaning friends or relatives to the usual suspects: bankers, accountants and lawyers. There is only one problem with that—most of these folks don’t know very much about entrepreneurship. I prefer to refer them to what I can only call unconventional mentors—people who know [...]

Don’t Trade in Your Old Suit (Yet)

[This article first appeared in OBJ, Ottawa Business Journal: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444.] “The world is a tough, competitive place,” said Jerry McGuire in the film of the same name. When I was a boy, there were about 3 billion people on this planet. Now there are nearly 7 billion. If you are a young person today entering [...]