A few years ago, I got a new boss. When the company-wide email introducing him went out, it had the usual flow: "John was at company whatsit where was responsible for over 60% growth in et cetera and so forth, leading to their acquisition by someone or other. Prior to that, John was the head of all that stuff at a similar company where he..."  You've probably read that email at some point...impressive credentials but not too surprising. It was the last sentence in the e-mail stood out to me: "In his free time, he likes entering competitions on Kaggle." Kaggle, now part of Google, hosts c ..read more

A designer friend of mine who has done websites in Germany recently described that process to me as requiring a totally different design mindset than designing for audiences in America or the U.K. His reasoning? “The Germans actually read documentation - you can’t give them too much text. Try that on a web page here [the U.S.] and your visitors are gone.” His observation reminded me of a story from the Hardcore History podcast about the brilliant German Army General Staff’s plan to win World War I (mind you, this is long before the Nazis). With characteristic German precision, they devised a ..read more

Jeff Skilling, former CEO of Enron and current inmate 29296-179 at a federal prison camp in Montgomery, Alabama taught me a valuable life lesson. Readers under 30 may barely remember Enron, but when the company filed for Chapter 11 in December of  2001, it was the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history (since eclipsed by Lehman Brothers among others). The complexity of Enron's accounting fraud made it a hard story to understand, but in a nutshell: the company's profits were the result of accounting trickery, the stock price eventually collapsed, thousands lost their jobs, and millions of peo ..read more

Have you ever bet enough money on something that it made you nervous? I used to read a lot about finance, and at some point I came across an observation about something called convergence trading that stuck with me. A convergence trade is what you do when you expect the prices of two securities to eventually become equal; you basically bet that the higher-priced one goes down in price and the lower-priced one goes up. Sounds reasonable, but of course if the prices move further apart rather than converging you find yourself “quickly staring into the abyss,” as one author put it. If you trust y ..read more

Switching from consulting at the start of my career into product management was the best thing that's ever happened to me professionally. Nothing against consulting (it's a mostly honest living), but making things just motivates me more. What you realize quickly when you make that switch from professional services into product though is that products are incredibly unforgiving. If you're stuck the night before you owe your client a deliverable, you can almost always scrape something together and make a decent showing. There's no dancing around broken software though. If the lights don't turn ..read more

Would you climb a mountain with people you didn't like or trust? Earlier this year, I came across the story of Treasure Hunt Studios in VentureBeat. This Berlin-based mobile game company spent two years developing its first game - two years! To put that in perspective, the movie Titanic was shot in just seven months. The reason for the insane duration? CEO Kyle Smith's relentless focus on building the right team, even if it hurt the product in the short run. "Just because someone is super-smart, you don’t have to accept that they also have a difficult personality. We learned this the hard way ..read more

I had wanted to write a book for years before I finally did it. I buckled down, writing at nights and on weekends for eight months, and eventually self-published on Amazon in late 2015. It was a great moment of personal satisfaction to check off a bucket list item. But in fairness, it was a commercial failure. My most recent royalty check from Amazon in the amount of $2.47 (which does not buy you a cup of Starbucks coffee but does buy you a pound of zinc oxide) sums it up pretty well. Literature is DEAD, people! So as disappointing as it was to write a book that almost no one read, there was ..read more

There are lots of ideas that are ready for the garbage can. I nominate two for the cause. Some ideas outlive their usefulness. Other ideas remain useful but are widely misused. Others still are simply overused. And some just need to die. With a tip of the hat to John Brockman of Edge.org, I'd like to nominate two business ideas for the glue factory. I nearly scrapped this column, because they’re not bad ideas per se. Both are still in fashion today, especially in the startup-o-sphere, and like many popular ideas there's more than a grain of truth to them. But these two ideas have run themselv ..read more

Photo Credits: NBC Universal, Times Free Press I encountered a few things over the last week or two that made the value of being authentic click for me, which I’d like to share with you. Thing #1 The first was while sitting in traffic in my car, as I do every day while I slowly go insane from my awful commute, and I came across an old Freakonomics podcast guest starring Aziz Ansari of Parks and Rec and standup comedy fame. He's a thoughtful guy, and he also said something about how he chooses his material that stuck with me. It's at the 26:00 mark in the episode if you want to listen to it in ..read more

It appears that there was a small news blip about an election in the United States last week, so you could be forgiven for missing a couple of new articles I published ;) This week, it gives me great pleasure to direct you to two pieces I published last week about seizing on moments of inspiration in business. I wanted to describe a few of the most formative experiences in my career that ultimately led me to start my latest venture, UserMuse. The first, published in Fast Company last week, covers one of my earliest experiences doing user research in the field. Not only did I eat my first ..read more