Our VP of Product Management said something to the effect of, “This is a great idea, Lee!”…and he couldn’t have been more supportive in his tone. In September (or October) of 2010, at one of our quarterly marketing offsite meetings,…
Blog Archives
You Win Some, You Lose Some
Tagged with: B2B, differentiation, failure, messaging, naming, opportunity cost, technology, The Pitch, win/loss analysis
Posted in Leadership, Marketing
Posted in Leadership, Marketing
Book Report: Black Box Thinking
“And this is invariably how progress happens. It is an interplay between the practical and the theoretical, between top-down and bottom-up, between creativity and discipline, between the small picture and the big picture. The crucial point – and the one…
Tagged with: Abraham Wald, Antifragile, Black Box Thinking, Bounce, Chesley Sullenberger, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, Daniel Kahneman, denial, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eric Ries, Esther Duflo, failure, feedback, flow, Francis Bacon, James Dyson, Jim Collins, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Popper, marginal gains, Matthew Syed, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, mitigated language, narrative falacy, pre-mortem, Scared Straight, Success and Luck, The Lean Startup, Unilever, When Prophecy Fails
Posted in Books, Leadership, Management
Posted in Books, Leadership, Management
Looking Past Failure
“You know what? If an applicant has a strong enough application, then one blotch shouldn’t automatically eliminate him or her from consideration. There might well have been extenuating circumstances … and, in any case, it gives you something to talk about…
Book Report: The Numbers Game
“It is easy…to think of soccer as a game of superstars. They provide the glamour, the genius, the moments of inspiration. They sell the shirts and fill the seats. But they do not decide who wins games and who wins…
Tagged with: analytics, Andrew Friedman, Bill James, Bob Paisley, Boris Groysberg, Chris Anderson, conjunctive tasks, Daniel Kahneman, David Sally, Einstein, failure, Gabriele Marcotti, Gianluca Vialli, John Wooden, Kohler effect, Louis Van Gaal, Luca Toni, Malcolm Gladwell, Nathan Milstein, O-Ring Theory, Pep Guardiola, regression to the mean, Sepp Herberger, statistics, strongest-link, Tampa Bay Rays, team dynamics, The Extra 2%, The Numbers Game, Thomas Huxley, weakest-link, Zidane Clustering Theorem
Posted in Books, Management, Math and Science, Soccer, Sports
Posted in Books, Management, Math and Science, Soccer, Sports
My Story, Part 1: The Accidental Engineer
It turns out that if you make your university choices for reasons other than passionate interest and enrol in what can accurately be described as a hellishly difficult program while completely lacking any study skills or positive work habits whatsoever,…
Tagged with: adversity, Dana Porter Library, education, engineering, ENSS, failure, Lee Brooks, MacLean's, my story, presentations, public speaking, The Big Apple, University of Waterloo, UW
Posted in Everything
Posted in Everything
Fun with advertising: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be shocked, you’ll be confused
Now that Christmas is out of the way for another year, we can get back to what’s really important: advertising! It might not have come across yet, but I take quite a passionate interest in advertising: the good, the bad,…
Tagged with: branding, evil, failure, mistakes, prankvertising, success
Posted in Advertising, Marketing
Posted in Advertising, Marketing
Choose your own adventure: prisoner or pioneer
“Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.” – Deepak Chopra My wife spent last week in San Francisco…
Tagged with: change, circle of control, Deepak Chopra, failure, innovation, leadership, lessons, mistakes, pioneers
Posted in Leadership, Management
Posted in Leadership, Management
Who will join you in the future?
“He is the Silicon Valley archetype: an entrepreneur with a gift not only for seeing the future but convincing others to meet him there.” That’s a quote from Tubes (page 72, for those of you scoring at home). In the…
Tagged with: entrepreneurship, failure, leadership, mistakes, passion, The Pitch
Posted in Leadership, Marketing
Posted in Leadership, Marketing
Book Report: The Big Short
“The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient…
Tagged with: analytics, economics, failure, hubris, lessons, Michael Lewis, mistakes, psychopathy
Posted in Books, Finance
Posted in Books, Finance
The Running Man
A few years ago, I hated running. Now I’ve changed my tune: I grudgingly respect its existence, and occasionally hang out with it. When I was a tallish skinny youth, someone made the mistake of telling me, “You’d be a…
Tagged with: excellence, failure, goals, lessons, respect, running, success
Posted in Everything, Sports
Posted in Everything, Sports
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