Income inequality is in the news, along with the populist Brexit, Trump, and La Pen movements that have sprung from the consequences of that issue. Before those votes, I wondered if there were any real-world consequences from income inequality, or whether it just made good sky-is-falling news stories. One book that greatly helped me understand what is truly going on is Thomas Piketty’s...
As much as I advocate for doing good by doing business, there are some problems of the world that can’t be solved by for-profit companies, or at least not completely solved by for-profits, which instead need government aid and philanthropists. The 2017 letter from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation showcases five areas where the foundation has made incredible progress: vaccines...
The Bolshevik Revolution is a root cause of income inequality in the United States. That seems too crazy to be true, but history is more connected than the stories they teach in school. The story begins in 15 years before Lenin’s Russian Revolution, in 1902, when Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company. This was Ford’s third car company, the first two failed from a failure to ship a working car...
The modern world wasn’t planned. It wasn’t designed. It came to be from billions of little decisions plus a few thousand big decisions, most of which were solving short-term problems, few of which ever questioning the core assumptions of society and economics. From this we have a world today where business is about making money, and where the press and elite will tell you that the sole purpose of...
Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over {$17 trillion} dollars a year, but...
Hans Rosling has a great new talk on global poverty (with even better graphics than his first TED talks). As always, he tells a great story. However, in his five minutes he explains what happened over 215 years, but doesn’t provide any analysis. Most importantly, he doesn’t point out that we are not only winning this war on global poverty, but at the same time losing. The story...
What is the story with the unicorns? Is there a tech investment bubble? What on earth is going in in the venture investing world? The short answer is that we’re at a crux of a paradigm. The paradigm wrapped around investing venture capital in startups. Few people I talk to know that venture capital, as practiced today, is a fairly new concept. People instead assume...
We seem to be in a golden age of startups. From my nearly quarter century view as a serial entrepreneur, it certainly seems that entrepreneurship does nothing but rise year after year. Surprisingly, the U.S. Department of Labor says otherwise. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics entrepreneurship has been declining. According to the same research, the death rate of small businesses is...
Income inequality has finally floated to the surface of the news. It’s nice to see this issue being talked about, but much of what I’m seeing is focused on the symptoms, with solutions like “just pay the workers more”. What I’d prefer are some opinions on the root causes, purposefully plural as this is not a simple issue. I believe I have uncovered one such hidden cause. It lies down in the...
Practice makes better. The Ignite format looks simple, 20 slides, auto-forwarding every 15 seconds, making for an exactly 5 minute talk. Hitting the timing of the slide transitions comes down to two strategies. Either practice, practice, and practice, not skipping or adding any words to the script, or don’t even try, making the slides pure images that don’t need to be in sync with...
