If not the IC-IQ quiz, here’s another quiz
The Intangible Capital quiz IC.IQ can be powerful and a great way to quickly get at what’s going on in a business. It tells you what the financials and all the “hard” data have ignored.
“Hey, look, a quiz!” – your IC
If you are a C-level executive of a company, or if you’d like to be one but don’t know enough about intangible capital to get there, take this simple 22-question IC.IQ quiz.
Reading List: What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management
This is a pretty tight book full of illustrative stories backing his theories of good (and bad) management.
Reading List: Vanity Fair, “The Inheritance”
New York Times ownership – “America is not kind to the heir. He tends to be depicted as weak, pampered, flawed, a diluted strain of the hardy founding stock”. The second is that, following many disastrous decisions, while many people hope Sulzberger succeeds, few think he will.
Reading List: Birthright: Murder, Greed, and Power in the U-Haul Family Dynasty by Ronald J. Watkins
With my increased involvement in exit strategy planning for business owners, I have been reading more and more books about closely held companies. I just finished one called Birthright: Murder, Greed, and Power in the U-Haul Family Dynasty. If you enjoy reading about dysfunctional families, self-delusional owners, irresponsible heirs to corporate dynasties and the frustration [...]
Upgrading Tangible and Intangible Infrastructure
But in retrospect, we realized that it was a good description of what we had helped them do—replace their systems bit by bit, one car at a time.
Reading List:Blue Ocean Strategy By W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
The title refers to an open, “blue” ocean where there is little competition versus an ocean “red” with the bloody remains of battles with shark-like competitors. The contribution this book makes—a powerful and graphic way of comparing your company with its competition—is called the “Strategy Canvas” and is drawn using the key factors of competition.
The most striking thing about this book is the convincing case he makes that the business of the large consulting firms in the U.S. has really been created and perpetuated by government regulation
More than ever, you have to consider appearances. Before you do something, you need to think about how it would look if your actions today were to be published on a blog or news site tonight or tomorrow. Your customers, your competitors, your investors (and even your employees) are out there watching. What will they think when they read (or maybe write) about your latest moves?
Reading List: The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations By Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom
The book is full of interesting stories about powerful, but essentially leaderless organizations, ranging from the Apaches to Alcoholics Anonymous, Al Queda, Wikipedia, craigslist, and Skype.
Industry Snapshot: Doing Your Homework
The lesson? Talk to everyone…over and over. Trust, but verify. Keep questioning. And talk to everyone again. Software requires systemic change—keep cycling through the whole system to get it right.
