“their eyes are open to whatever results occur”

I started a new book: Rules for Revolutionaries from Kawasaki (I admit I only took it because I liked the title :D).

Ok, it’s true that he’s always saying the same things but, anyway, I like him. I like how he puts it simple, touches everything that’s important, and I like what he thinks about the spirit a company and a team should have.

He wishes to everyone that we, at list once in our lives, get to work in a team like the Macintosh Division of Apple; and then explains some of his leanings on that team.

I specially liked the description of a Strong Leader:

“What is legitimate authority? Knowing what you’re doing, communicating what you’re doing, and expecting the team to add value to your behavior and ideas. Great leaders are paradoxical. They catalyze, rather than control, the work of their teams.They have an overarching vision for the team but are not autocratic in the realization of this vision. Their eyes are open to whatever results occur – not just planned goals, because serendipity is a great innovator. “

I didn’t want to praise them in a too obvious way, but I’ve also learned that from 2 of the leaders and entrepreneurs I’ve worked with lately ;-)

This made me also think about the times I’ve been leading teams, and I believe in those cases, what really mattered was the team. The best experience was a summer camp with Badalona kids. That was my first real and grown up startup. Where I truly experimented the greatness of a team, the need to have a co-founder and the results that can be achieved if you all put passion, even if you don’t have “formal experience”. I will explain that adventure sometime… but I was happy to see that Kawasaki was of the same opinion:

“The two most important things about people on a revolutionary team are their ability and passion. Their educational level or work experience is meaningless”

This sentence also made me think….

“Great teams are made of people who see the current state-of-the-art as a fraction of what could be. If there was a single quality that characterized the Macintosh Division team (besides arrogance), it was idealism. We believed we could change the world.”

Do you think you can be idealist without being either arrogant or naive?

crossing the chasm

by Geoffrey A. Moore

My tutor recommended it when I was working on the Business Plan of a technology product. I was in a point when I had discovered that marketing strategy is key for any business. However, during my business studies I had’t paid much atention to marketing. I had the preconceived idea that marketing = advertising strategy. It didn’t sound attractive to advertise someone else’s product and so I chose finance major.

Anyway, Crossing the Chasm is a good book about marketing in new technologies. It talks about:

• the product life cycle 
• the kind of consumers for each part of this cycle
• the strategy to follow in each phase
• the difficulty of passing from the early to the mainstreem market
• what “product” really means and everything it includes
• criteria on how to evaluate your segments

It was interesting and useful, but I’m not going to lie to you, it’s also a really dense book. It took me nearly 3 months to finish it and I have to recognize that towards the end I was reading diagonally ;-)

europe vs. silicon valley

Hay un americano que vive en Suiza y que ha escrito un libro sobre startups y, entre otras cosas, compara Europa con Silicon Valley. 

Este es el hombre, Hervé Lebret. Aqui tenéis 2 hojas resumiendo el libro (pdf). 

También me ha gustado una cita de su entrevista: 

“success only comes from those who are foolish enough to think unreasonably” 

Vinod Khosla (founder of Sun and former VC at Kleiner Perkins)