Insight on Insight
By brendan at 19 December, 2011, 9:02 pm
Have you ever noticed that Entrepreneurs never put an “Out of Office Message” on their email? John Stokes said this to me whilst we were having lunch at the soon to be demolished Rosati’s in Flinders Lane. John is a British Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist based in Montreal, Canada, where he runs a US$50M fund [...]
Read More >>solving surly problems
By brendan at 22 March, 2011, 9:07 pm
He said to me “you’re an interesting contradiction , you genuinely like people, however you can’t stand idiots, which makes you surly most of the time”. Of course I didn’t like that, and promptly got a bit introspective about it – which is effectively the label adults place on sulkiness But it appears I have [...]
Read More >>Tall & Stupid – Meet the CEO
By brendan at 18 September, 2010, 4:18 pm
The average height of an Australian Male in 1995 was measured at 174.8cm (~ 5ft 9in) by the ABS. I am 174cm (5ft 8in & ½) tall. So imagine my irritation when I met with the CEO of a major (AUD$1B in revenue) Australian organisation who was around 188cm (6ft 2”). He followed me around [...]
Read More >>The Boogey Man
By brendan at 3 February, 2009, 2:41 pm
One of my relatives occasionally drives me mad with his worrying: How would it look if he failed? What would his wife say? What if he didn’t like it? His worrying almost always to takes the same form. 1. Identify the worst case outcome (eg usually a combination of bankruptcy/divorce courts/public ridicule). 2. Don’t explore [...]
Read More >>Last will and testament.exe
By brendan at 23 May, 2007, 4:22 am
My wife and I are at the lawyers, going through our will. The previous lawyer had made a number of mistakes, and then promptly left the firm, so it is up to the principal to fix our issues. The Maserati in his carport tells me this guy is either good at his job or good [...]
Read More >>How I learnt to love bad suppliers
By brendan at 18 April, 2007, 4:54 am
I got a quote the other day from a computer guy, who emailed: “I will charge you $350 to upgrade your Drupal installation to the latest version.” This was probably the worst quotation I have ever received. (Drupal is an open source content management system that I use in one of my businesses.) So I [...]
Read More >>Problem Solving Pathways
By brendan at 11 April, 2007, 4:55 am
The other week I went to hear a speaker talk on leadership in times of crisis. I noticed during the question time that lots of people were asking really good questions, but I didn’t think of my good questions until the next day. Irritating but not unusual. On discussion with a friend, we came to [...]
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