August 19, 2022 • #
The late Dee Hock, founder of Visa, was a business legend in many respects. Like many of the most revered founders, his ideas were years ahead of their time, and his writing is clear, concise, and super interesting. He famously organized Visa around a decentralized management model, in an era when the norm was the extremely centralized, hierarchical structure. Companies like Amazon, Johnson and Johnson, Uber, Valve Software, and others have adopted the same principles Hock pioneered to make their companies more resilient in the face of challenge.
In 2000...
✦
August 17, 2022 • #
Geospatial analytics company Descartes Labs recently sold to private equity, in what former CEO Mark Johnson calls a “fire sale.” This post is his perspective on the nature of the business over time, their missteps along the way in both company identity and fundraising, and some of the shenanigans that can happen as stakeholders start to head for the exits.
Not knowing much about Descartes’ actual business, either the original vision of the product or its actual delivery over the years, I don’t have...
✦
July 26, 2021 • #
“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”
— Peter Drucker
People throw around these two words pretty indiscriminately in business, usually not making a distinction between them. They’re treated as interchangeable synonyms for broadly being “good” at something.
We can think about effectiveness and efficiency as two dimensions on a grid, often (but not always) in competition with one another. More focus on one means less on the other.
That Drucker quote is a pretty solid one-line distinction. But like many quotes, it’s concerned with being pithy and memorable, but not that helpful.