Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

Sustaining Imagination is Hard

by Braden Kelley

Recently I stumbled across a new Royal Institute video of Martin Reeves, a managing director and senior partner in BCG’s San Francisco office. Martin leads the BCG Henderson Institute, BCG’s vehicle for exploring ideas from beyond the world of business, which have implications for business strategy management.

I previously interviewed Martin along with his co-author Dr. Jack Fuller in a post titled ‘Building an Imagination Machine‘. In this video you’ll find him presenting content along similar themes. I think you’ll enjoy it:

Bonus points to anyone who can name this napkin sketch in the comments.

In the video Martin explores several of the frameworks introduced in his book The Imagination Machine. One of the central tenets of Martin’s video is the fact that sustaining imagination is hard. There are three core reasons why this is so:

Overspecialization – As companies grow, jobs become increasingly smaller in scope and greater in specialization, leading to myopia as fewer and fewer people see the problems that the company started to solve in the first place
Insularity – As companies grow, the majority of employees shift from being externally facing to being internally facing, isolating more and more employees from the customer and their evolving wants and needs
Complacency – As companies become successful, predictably, the successful parts of the business receive most of the attention and investment, making it difficult for new efforts to receive the care and feeding necessary for them to grow and dare I say – replace – the currently idolized parts of the business

I do like the notion Martin presents that companies wishing to be continuously successful, continuously seek to be surprised and invest energy in rethinking, exploring and probing in areas where they find themselves surprised.

Martin also explores some of the common misconceptions about imagination, including the ideas that imagination is:

A solitary endeavor
It comes out of nowhere
Unmanageable

And finally, Martin puts forward his ideas on how imagination can be harnessed systematically, using a simple six-step model:

Seduction – Where can we find surprise?
Idea – Do we embrace the messiness of the napkin sketch? Or expect perfection?
Collision – Where can we collide this idea with the real world for validation or more surprise?
Epidemic – How can we foster collective imagination? What behaviors are we encouraging?
New Ordinary – How can we create new norms? What evolvable scripts can we create that live inbetween the 500-page manual and the one-sentence vision?
Encore – How can we sustain imagination? How can we maintain a Day One mentality?

And no speech in 2023 would be complete without some analysis of what role artificial intelligence (AI) has to play. Martin’s perspective is that when it comes to the different levels of cognition, AI might be good at finding patterns of correlation, but humans have more advanced capabilities than machines when it comes to finding causation and counterfactual opportunities. There is an opportunity for all of us to think about how we can leverage AI across the six steps in the model above to accelerate or enhance our human efforts.

To close, Martin highlighted that when it comes to leading re-imagination, it is important to look outward, to self-disrupt, to establish heroic goals, utilize multiple mental models, and foster playfulness and experimentation across the organization to help keep imagination alive.

p.s. If you’re committed to learning the art and science of getting to the future first, then be sure and subscribe to my newsletter to make sure you’re one of the first to get certified in the FutureHacking™ methodology.

Image credits: Netflix

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What I Learned Solving a Business Crisis

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What I Learned Solving a Business Crisis

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

By 2006 we knew we had a serious problem. Our company’s onetime flagship product, called Afisha, was in a steady decline and it was becoming all too clear that something had to be done. What had once been a market leader that generated huge profits, which fueled the growth of our company had slowly, but surely, lost its market position.

It was clear that the business was in crisis, but nobody was exactly sure what to do about it. Operationally, nothing had really changed. We still believed in our product and our people. Nevertheless, the marketplace had evolved and our business model, which once had seemed bulletproof, was no longer viable.

We didn’t know it at the time, but Afisha’s brightest days were still ahead. We were able to reimagine the business model, strengthen the brand and return to profitability. What we learned is that solving a crisis is not a straightforward linear process, but a journey of discovery. You never know what you’ll find so you need to be willing to experiment.

Acknowledging The Problem

As I explained in Mapping Innovation, when Afisha came out in 2000, it was an immediate hit. At its core, it was simply a guide to restaurants, nightlife and other entertainment, somewhat similar to Timeout. Its restaurant, music and movie columnists quickly became tastemakers in Kyiv, while its sex advice column, achieved a cult-level status. Ad dollars soon came rolling in

In 2006, all of those elements that had made Afisha successful were still in place, but the business environment had changed significantly. The ad market, which had been worth less than $100 million dollars in 2000, was now quickly approaching a billion dollars. Strong multinational publishers like Hearst, Hachette and Rodale had begun investing heavily into Ukrainian versions of top international titles like Cosmopolitan, Elle and Men’s Health.

What we had to accept was that Afisha, although still popular with readers, was no longer a dominant brand. At the same time, the free distribution model which it had once depended on to quickly achieve wide readership was now seen as a liability among advertisers. That diminished our ability to command top ad rates while, at the same time, the booming media market sent our editorial costs through the roof.

None of this happened all at once, so it was easy to believe that Afisha was just going through a temporary downturn. It was only when we were able to acknowledge that our once-successful model had become fundamentally broken that we were able to start moving forward.

Assembling A Broad-Based Team

Once we had acknowledged the problem we assembled a meeting to come up with a strategy to move forward. This included the publisher and editor-in-chief of Afisha, several of the key staff, our company founder, me (as CEO) as well as several company leaders outside of Afisha who had specific knowledge and skills and who were widely respected.

The composition of the meeting was important. Clearly, the Afisha team had to be deeply involved in the process. Having the company founder and me there made it clear that the business had the full backing of the executive leadership. However, in many ways, it was those outside the core Afisha team who had critical impacts.

For the Afisha team and the executive leadership, the business model was so familiar it seemed almost like second-hand. Bringing in other leaders from around the company helped us look at the business in new ways. They asked questions that challenged us, made observations that we hadn’t seen and suggested things that wouldn’t have occurred to us.

Identifying Issues And Developing Options

As the working group met and got down to business, we began to identify problems. First, as noted above, the competitive landscape had shifted dramatically and, although Afisha remained a beloved brand, international titles had taken away significant market share. Second, the free distribution model was no longer financially viable.

As we discussed options, we were able to quickly build consensus on two actions. We would redesign the magazine and the website to beef up the editorial content and better compete with the international titles. We would also look for partners to license Afisha to other cities in Ukraine and create a more national brand.

We also came up with a third option that was considerably more speculative. For years, we had been giving paid subscribers Afisha cards to receive discounts at local merchants. We thought that we could add value to the card by creating an event calendar that was exclusive to Afisha card holders.

Our reasoning was that if we could increase subscribers through upgrading the Afisha card, we could reduce our reliance on free distribution and improve the economics of the business. It seemed like a longshot, but it was also low risk. All we had to do was sign up some partners for events and publish an event calendar in the magazine and on the website.

Finding The Unexpected

The editorial and licensing strategies, which seemed like no brainers, were, at best, mildly successful. Readers seemed to like the new design and expanded editorial content, but then again they liked the old Afisha too. We were able to set up licenses for five major Ukrainian cities, giving up close to national coverage, but the licensees struggled to earn a profit.

The Afisha card strategy, on the other hand, was an unexpected hit. We had hoped to be able to do one event a week, but were soon so deluged with partners that we had to limit events to one per day. From happy hours and shopping nights to club openings and movie festivals, it seemed like everybody wanted to work with us.

Before we knew it, we were able to upgrade events from a promotional activity to a seriously profitable business. We organized a nationwide Frisbee contest for a beer launch, a French movie festival for an upscale coffee brand and organized party trips with sponsors. To our amazement, the business just grew and grew.

What we learned from the experience is that you can’t plan your way out of a crisis. If we were able to plan effectively, we wouldn’t have been in the crisis in the first place. Our success wasn’t the product of our own brilliance, but our willingness to experiment. That’s how we came across the “happy accident” that led to the events business.

The truth is that it takes some bad luck to get into a crisis and it takes some good luck to get out of one. Sound management can help stem the bleeding, but if you are ever going to rebuild a successful business, you have to experiment and allow for the unexpected.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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AI is a Powerful New Tool for Entrepreneurs

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AI is a Powerful New Tool for Entrepreneurs

by Braden Kelley

In today’s digital, always connected world, Google too often stands as a gatekeeper between entrepreneurs and small businesses and financial success. Ranking well in the search engines requires time and expertise that many entrepreneurs and small business owners don’t have, because their focus must be on fine tuning the value proposition and operations of their business.

The day after Google was invented, the search engine marketing firm was probably created to make money off of hard working entrepreneurs and small businesses owners trying to make the most of their investment in a web site through search engine optimization (SEO), keyword advertising, and social media strategies.

According to IBISWorld the market size of the SEO & Internet Marketing Consulting industry is $75.0 Billion. Yes, that’s billion with a ‘b’.

Creating content for web sites is an even bigger market. According to Technavio the global content marketing size is estimated to INCREASE by $584.0 Billion between 2022 and 2027. This is the growth number. The market itself is MUCH larger.

The introduction of ChatGPT threatens to upend these markets, to the detriment of this group of businesses, but to the benefit to the nearly 200,000 dentists in the United States, more than 100,000 plumbers, million and a half real estate agents, and numerous other categories of small businesses.

Many of these content marketing businesses create a number of different types of content for the tens of millions of small businesses in the United States, from blog articles to tweets to Facebook pages and everything in-between. The content marketing agencies that small businesses hire recent college graduates or offshore resources in places like the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Ecuador, Romania, and lots of other locations around the world and bill their work to their clients at a much higher rate.

Outsourcing content creation has been a great way for small businesses to leverage external resources so they can focus on the business, but now may be the time to bring some of this content creation work back in house. Particularly where the content is pretty straightforward and informational for an average visitor to the web site.

With ChatGPT you can ask it to “write me an article on how to brush your teeth” or “write me ten tweets on teethbrushing” or “write me a facebook post on the most common reasons a toilet won’t flush.”

I asked it to do the last one for me and here is what it came up with:

Continue reading the rest of this article on CustomerThink (including the ChatGPT results)

Image credits: Pixabay

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Startups Must Be Where Their Customers Are

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Startups Must Be Where Their Customers Are

GUEST POST from Steve Blank

“A CEO running a B-to-B startup needs to live in the city where their business is – or else they’ll never scale.”

I was having breakfast with Erin, an ex-student, just off a red-eye flight from New York. She’s built a 65-person startup selling enterprise software to the financial services industry. Erin had previously worked in New York for one of those companies and had a stellar reputation in the industry. As one would expect, with banks and hedge funds as customers, the majority were based in the New York metropolitan area.

Where Are Your Biggest Business Deals?

Looking a bit bleary-eyed, Erin explained, “Customers love our product, and I think we’ve found product/market fit. I personally sold the first big deals and hired the VP of sales who’s building the sales team in our New York office. They’re growing the number of accounts and the deal size, but it feels like we’re incrementally growing a small business, not heading for exponential growth. I know the opportunity is much bigger, but I can’t put my finger on what’s wrong.”

Erin continued, “My investors are starting to get impatient. They’re comparing us to another startup in our space that’s growing much faster. My VP of Sales and I are running as fast as we can, but I’ve been around long enough to know I might be the ex-CEO if we can’t scale.”

While Erin’s main sales office is in New York, next to her major prospects and customers, Erin’s company was headquartered in Silicon Valley, down the street from where we were having breakfast. During the Covid pandemic, most of her engineering team worked remotely. Her inside sales team (Sales Development and Business Development reps) used email, phone, social media and Zoom for prospecting and generating leads. At the same time, her account executives were able to use Zoom for sales calls and close and grow business virtually.

There’s a Pattern Here

Over breakfast, I listened to Erin describe what at first seemed like a series of disconnected events.

First, a new competitor started up. Initially, she wasn’t concerned as the competitor’s product had only a subset of the features that Erin’s company did. However, the competitor’s headquarters was based in New York, and their VP of Sales and CEO were now meeting face-to-face with customers, most of whom had returned to their offices. While Erin’s New York-based account execs were selling to the middle tier management of organizations, the CEO of her competitor had developed relationships with the exec staff of potential customers. She lamented, “We’ve lost a couple of deals because we were selling at the wrong level.”

Second, Erin’s VP of sales had just bought a condo in Miami to be next to her aging parents, so she was commuting to NY four days a week and managing the sales force from Miami when she wasn’t in New York. Erin sighed, “She’s as exhausted as I am flying up and down the East Coast.”

Third, Erin’s account execs were running into the typical organizational speedbumps and roadblocks that closing big deals often encounter. However, solving them via email, Zoom and once-a-month fly-in meetings wasn’t the same as the NY account execs being able to say, “Hey, our VP of Sales and CEO are just down the street. Can we all grab a quick coffee and talk this over?” Issues that could have been solved casually and quickly ballooned into ones that took more work and sometimes a plane trip for her VP of Sales or Erin to solve.

By the time we had finished breakfast it was clear to me that Erin was the one putting obstacles in front of her path to scale. Here’s what I observed and suggested.

Keep Your Eye on The Prize

While Erin had sold the first deals herself, she needed to consider whether each deal happened because as CEO, she could call on the company’s engineers to pivot the product. Were the account execs in New York trying to execute a sales model that wasn’t yet repeatable and scalable without the founder’s intervention? Had a repeatable and scalable sales process truly been validated? Or did each sale require a heroic effort?

Next, setting up their New York office without Erin or her VP of Sales physically living in New York might have worked during Covid but was now holding her company back. At this phase of her company the goal of the office shouldn’t be to add new accounts incrementally – but should be how to scale – repeatably. Hiring account execs in an office in New York let Erin believe that she had a tested, validated, and repeatable sales playbook that could rapidly scale the business. The reality was that without her and the VP of Sales living and breathing the business in New York, they were trying to scale a startup remotely.

Her early customers told Erin that her company had built a series of truly disruptive financial service products. But now, the company was in a different phase – it needed to build and grow the business exponentially. And in this phase, her focus as a CEO needed to change – from searching for product/market fit to driving exponential growth.

Exponential Growth Requires Relentless Execution

Because most of her company’s customers were concentrated in a single city, Erin and her VP of Sales needed to be there – not visiting in a hotel room. I suggested that:

Erin had to quickly decide if she wanted to be the one to scale the business. If not, her investors were going to find someone who could.

If so, she needed to realize that she had missed an important transition in her company. In a high-dollar B-to-B business, building and scaling sales can’t be done remotely. And she was losing ground every day. Her New York office needed a footprint larger than she was. It needed business development and marketing people rapidly creating demand.

Her VP of Sales might be wonderful, but with the all the travel the company is only getting her half-time. Erin needs a full-time head of sales in New York. Time to have a difficult conversation.

Because she was behind, Erin needed to rent an apartment in New York for a year, and spend the next six months there and at least two weeks a month after that. Her goal was to:
1. Validate that there was a repeatable sales process. It not, build one
2. Build a New York office that could create a sales and marketing footprint without her presence. Only then could she cut back her time in the City.

Finally, she needed to consider that if her customers were primarily in New York and the engineers were working remotely, why weren’t the company headquarters in New York?

I Hate New York

As we dug into these issues, I was pretty surprised to hear her say, “I spent a big part of my career in New York. I thought coming out to Stanford and the West Coast meant I could leave the bureaucracy of large companies and that culture behind. Covid let me do that for a few years. I guess now I’m just avoiding jumping back into an environment I thought I had left.”

We lingered over coffee as I suggested it was time for her to take stock of what’s next. She had something rare – a services company that provided real value with products that early customers loved. Her staff didn’t think they were joining a small business, neither did her investors. If she wasn’t prepared to build something to its potential, what was her next move?

Lessons Learned

For a startup, the next step after finding product/market fit is finding a repeatable and scalable sales process

This requires a transition to the relentless execution of creating demand and exponentially growing sales

If your customers are concentrated in a city or region, you need to be where your customers are

The CEO needs to lead this growth focus

And then hand it off to a team equally capable and committed

The full article originally appeared on Steve Blank’s blog

Image credits: Pixabay, Steve Blank

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Trends in Medical School Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education

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Trends in Medical School Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers, M.D.

Biomedical and health entrepreneurship continues to expand around the world. Driven by global pressures to optimize the allocation of scarce resources, life science bioentrepreneurs are creating innovative products, platforms, service and systems that deliver more value. As a result, the demand for biomedical and health professional entrepreneurial talent has increased and biomedical and health innovation and entrepreneurship education and training (BEET) programs are growing to fill the gap.

Authors of a 2019 analysis of 171 allopathic medical schools conducted an exhaustive search of the published literature and websites of existing medical school innovation and entrepreneurship (MS I&E) programs, with an emphasis on answering the following three questions:

1. How are I&E programs organized and integrated with the medical school curriculum?
2. What are the core competencies of the I&E program?
3. How are the core competencies measured/evaluated?

Twenty-eight I&E-oriented medical education programs were identified from 26 schools; all of the programs integrated faculty leadership with backgrounds in medicine, engineering, and/or business/entrepreneurship. Of the programs, 57% (16/28) had been launched within the past four years and 75% (21/28) based program enrollment on a selective application process. Nearly all (27/28) incorporated lecture series and/or hands-on modules as a teaching technique. The most prevalent metric was completion of a capstone project (22/28; 79%). At least 15.2% (26/171) of American and Canadian allopathic medical schools include the option for students to participate in an I&E curriculum-based program.

In a few short years, educational offerings in MS I&E have accelerated, in part due to the impact of the COVID pandemic. Trends include:

Sharing lessons learned teaching medical students innovation and entrepreneurship
Experimenting with various program business models
Creating medical student entrepreneurs
Rethinking MS I&E
Designing a curriculum map and defining learning objectives, entrustable professional activities and knowledge,skills, abilities and competencies
Mentoring and guiding medical students
Offering non-clinical-career options
Providing exit ramps
Rethinking how we select medical students
Resetting the future of academic medical center work
Using principles of medical education reform and what we should be teaching in MedEd 2030
Training MS I&E faculty
Encouraging interprofessional and transdisciplinary entrepreneurship programs
Integrating premed, medical student and postgraduate programs
Encouraging life-long learning

We should teach innovation, entrepreneurship and the business of medicine in medical schools, not MD/MBA programs. MBE programs are a better option for those interested in getting an idea to a patient.

Here are the many reasons why physician entrepreneurship is important and why we are likely to see more of the international design, development and deployment of MS I&E programs in both allopathic and osteopathic schools as well as other health professional schools, including nursing, pharmacy and public health schools. Ultimately, as a result, patients and sickcare systems will be the beneficiaries and doctors will be better and happier.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Intrapreneurship 2.0

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Empowering Employees to Be Startup Founders

Intrapreneurship 2.0

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

The single biggest threat to a successful, established company is rarely an external competitor; it is the Internal Antibody. This is the organizational immune system that attacks new ideas, citing rigid budget cycles, resource constraints, and ‘the way we’ve always done things.’ This institutionalized resistance is why so many large organizations fail to capitalize on the single greatest source of innovative ideas: their own employees.

Intrapreneurship 1.0 was about suggestion boxes, pitch competitions, and “20% time” — nice initiatives, but often disconnected from the strategic core, quickly defunded, and politically vulnerable. Today, in the age of rapid, complex disruption, we need Intrapreneurship 2.0: a systemic approach that treats internal innovators not as suggestion-givers, but as legitimate Startup Founders with the mandate, resources, and protection needed to scale. This is how you unlock a continuous capability for internal disruption.

The Three Pillars of the Intrapreneurial Operating System

To transition from a siloed corporate structure to a decentralized innovation engine, an organization must build three pillars, transforming its internal operating system to mimic a venture capital firm.

The Seed Funding and Protection Pillar:
The greatest barrier for an intrapreneur is not generating the idea, but navigating bureaucracy. Intrapreneurship 2.0 requires a dedicated, independently governed Internal Venture Fund separate from the traditional P&L and capital expenditure budget. Most importantly, it requires a “safe harbor” — a leadership commitment to shield these projects from the corporate antibodies, protecting the innovator’s career, even if the project fails after a disciplined experiment.
The Governance and Autonomy Pillar:
Intrapreneurs must have high autonomy over their team, budget, and execution methodology. Their reporting structure should be to an impartial “Innovation Review Board” (IRB), modeled after a VC board of directors, not to their traditional department head. This allows them to move with startup speed, pivoting based on market data rather than political consensus or departmental inertia.
The Talent and Rewarding Pillar:
Innovation is a retention strategy. The rewards for successful intrapreneurial ventures must be commensurate with the risk taken. This goes beyond a one-time bonus; it must include genuine equity-like incentives (e.g., profit-sharing on the new business line), career advancement into a new business unit established around the innovation, or formal recognition as a Chief Intrapreneur. This elevates internal innovation from a side project to a viable, exciting career path.

Case Study 1: Transforming Legacy Hardware into a Service Model

Challenge: Stagnant Revenue in a Global Industrial Manufacturer

A multi-billion-dollar industrial equipment company faced declining revenue as its traditional hardware sales became commoditized. The future was in “Equipment-as-a-Service” (EaaS), but the legacy sales force and technology platforms lacked the agility to transition.

Intrapreneurship 2.0 Intervention:

The leadership team sponsored a small, cross-functional team to form a fully-funded internal startup, deliberately naming it to sound external: Synergy Tech Solutions. The team was explicitly tasked with building the EaaS platform and customer experience outside of the main P&L. They were given a two-year budget and full autonomy to choose their cloud infrastructure and agile pricing model. Crucially, a formal Executive Steering Committee acted as their impartial VC board, providing guidance but never vetoing their market experiments. When the new service generated its first $10M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), the core intrapreneurial team was given the option to merge their unit back into the core with significant promotion and profit sharing, effectively transitioning from founders to general managers.

The Anti-Bureaucracy Toolkit

The single greatest tool for the intrapreneur is the ability to say no to corporate overhead. Intrapreneurship 2.0 recognizes that speed is the only currency that matters. Leaders must provide a practical “Anti-Bureaucracy Toolkit” that includes:

Pre-Approved Legal Templates: Quick contracts for small vendors or pilot customers, bypassing the standard six-week legal review.
Shadow IT Access: Permission to use modern, rapid prototyping software (often blocked by corporate IT and security policies) with agreed-upon guardrails.
Fast-Track Procurement: A simplified purchasing card with a higher limit for immediate needs, eliminating cumbersome Purchase Order (PO) processes.

Case Study 2: Solving Internal Talent Drain with an Innovation Marketplace

Challenge: Losing Top Talent to Startups and Internal Siloing

A large technology company suffered from talent drain as its best engineers left to join external startups. Simultaneously, internal talent was siloed and locked into non-strategic maintenance work.

Intrapreneurship 2.0 Intervention:

The company created an Internal Innovation Marketplace, essentially an internal job board for mission-driven, intrapreneurial projects. Any employee with an approved idea could post a “Team Request” for talent. The powerful shift was institutionalizing a formal Talent Mobility Policy that allowed employees to dedicate 100% of their time to an internal startup for a defined period (6-12 months) with a dedicated manager bypass for high-priority projects. This marketplace acted as a decentralized innovation incubator. It gave existing employees the startup experience they craved — ownership, speed, and mission — without having to leave the company. Within 18 months, the company successfully launched four new business lines, and top talent attrition was cut in half, proving that the best retention strategy is often internal disruption.

Conclusion: Scaling the Founder’s Mindset

Intrapreneurship 2.0 is the evolution of innovation culture. It’s not a program; it’s an organizational design decision. It is the recognition that the person closest to the customer pain or the technical opportunity is often a mid-level employee, not an executive.

“If you want to create a culture of continuous innovation, you must stop treating your best ideas as suggestions and start treating your best people as founders. Give them the key to the innovation vault and the mandate to drive change.” — Braden Kelley

The time for hesitant, half-measures is over. Embrace the principles of Intrapreneurship 2.0 to transform your workforce into a legion of nimble, motivated internal entrepreneurs, securing your future through your own capacity for disruption. Your first step: Audit your current innovation budget and separate 10% into a true, autonomous Internal Venture Fund.

For more on this topic I encourage to explore the writings of my friend Braden Kelley, a two-time best-selling author, including Charting Change and Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, and the creator of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology. He helps organizations drive innovation, overcome resistance, and embed continuous change capabilities.

Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Pixabay

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What the Current Round of Layoffs Tells Us

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What the Current Round of Layoffs Tells Us

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

When layoffs hit one or two companies, you might blame it on management, but when they hit market leader after market leader, you know something structural is afoot. The important thing then is to extract the signal from all the noise. Here is my cut at it.

First of all, it is the digital consumer sector that is under fire—not all of tech. But note that when you click on the Tech Section of any major publication, all you get is consumer tech news. B2C has eclipsed B2B in the public perception of what tech is all about. The downturn may not change this for consumers, but it sure will for investors. B2B tech actually has the opportunity to thrive in a downturn if it focuses on solving urgent problems that have short time to payback.

Second, the digital consumer model has such attractive economics when it is operating at scale that it led to a massive overvaluation of the sector per se. As with prior bubbles in tech, overvaluing is primarily due to extrapolating present growth as perpetual and ignoring global economic and geopolitical downside risks. Downturns simply call this out and demand a recalibration of valuation based on a more balanced mix of positive and negative factors.

Third, when enterprises have hyper-valued market caps, management does everything it can to sustain them, eventually to the point of counterproductive actions driven more by inertia than any sensible investment strategy. Given the peer pressures of investor relations, this is almost impossible to stop, so ultimately we end up where we are, in need of a correction that everyone saw coming, but no one acted upon. And to be fair, guessing when the correction will come is not a winning play. Better to accept the dynamics you have in front of you and then adapt as fast as you can once they change.

Net net, it is time to own the correction, put our houses in order, accept the deflation in stock price, refocus on our core mission, reset our performance metrics, and get back out on the field.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Should a Bad Grade in Organic Chemistry be a Doctor Killer?

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NYU Professor Fired for Giving Students Bad Grades

Should a Bad Grade in Organic Chemistry be a Doctor Killer?

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers, M.D.

A recent article described the termination of an NYU organic chemistry professor in response to a student petition. When the professor pushed students’ grades down, noting the egregious misconduct, he said they protested that “they were not given grades that would allow them to get into medical school.” The reporter noted that, in short, this one unhappy chemistry class could be a case study of the pressures on higher education as it tries to handle its Gen-Z student body. Should universities ease pressure on students, many of whom are still coping with the pandemic’s effects on their mental health and schooling? How should universities respond to the increasing number of complaints by students against professors? Do students have too much power over contract faculty members, who do not have the protections of tenure?

And how hard should organic chemistry be anyway? One faculty member said, “Unless you appreciate these transformations at the molecular level, I don’t think you can be a good physician, and I don’t want you treating patients.”

I know the feeling. While organic chemistry is termed a “doctor killer” by premedical students, getting any grade less than an “A”, typically in science, technology, engineering, or math subjects, can doom your application. When I saw that B I got in physics in my junior year of college, I started thinking about Plan B. Then I really learned the gravity of the situation.

Despite the noise and groaning, medical school applications continue to rise, driven by many factors. However, the medical school education model dates back to the Flexner report issued in 1910. Many are trying to address the challenges of how to train the biomedical research and practice workforce to win the 4th industrial revolution, but progress has been slow. Here were the challenges facing medical schools in 2015. Things have not radically changed. Medical educators, particularly those in public medical schools, will continue to face several basic problems in the coming years. The “invisible enemy” has exacerbated many.

We should rethink how we recruit and accept medical students.

Here are some questions that should inform that transition:

1. Do doctors really need to be that “smart”? GPAs can vary significantly across different medical schools, so it pays to do your research before applying. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) reported an average GPA for medical school of 3.60 across all applicants for the 2021-2022 application cycle. For the same year, applicants had an average science GPA of 3.49 and an average non-science GPA of 3.74.

2. What kind of intelligence do doctors need to meet the needs of their stakeholders and communities?

Types of Intelligence by Mark Vital

3. Do patients really care what grade their doctor got in organic chemistry, or, for that matter, whether they graduated last in their class from medical school?

4. How has the pandemic and the persona of Gen Z changed medical education?

5. What do doctors and patients need to know to win the 4th industrial revolution? Organic chemistry?

6. How does the present system and its reliance on undergraduate STEM academic performance impact inequitable socioeconomic and demographic acceptance rates?

7. How should we transform premedical, medical, and post-graduate pedagogy? Examples are project-based learning and peer reviewed feedback.

8. Why do we insist that undergraduates declare a major?

9. Is the purpose of a medical school education solely to graduate students who have the knowledge, skills, abilities, and competencies to take care of patients, or should we provide them with exit ramps too?

10. How do we balance a medical culture of conformity with a culture of creativity?

11. What will be the future of medical work?

I’m lucky that I dodged the bullet. But I still have Plan B.

Image Credits: Adioma (Mark Vital), Pixabay

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The Problems with ‘I’ll eat what you kill’ Arrangements

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The Problems with 'I'll eat what you kill' Arrangements

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers, M.D.

As more health professionals get involved with biomedical and clinical innovation and entrepreneurship, some are becoming advisors, mavens, salespeople, consultants and connectors. As such they are hired to help potential clients or employers meet benchmarks or the next critical success factor. In many instances, that means finding investors or helping to raise money for their early-stage company, newco or startup.

The success fee model also applies to sales and marketing, where the advisor is hired to source leads, leverage their relationships and networks and work around the gatekeepers of decision makers. They only get paid if contacts eventually buy the product.

Most say they do not have money to pay a retainer or recurrent cash payment so, instead they offer equity or some form of incentive or success fee model. Unfortunately, if you are considering such an “I eat what you kill” model, it comes with some problems:

You might be running afoul of SEC regulations concerning raising private money if you are not a registered broker dealer
If you are compensated with equity, the vesting schedule and amounts may not be mutually agreeable
The company might not have the business development, sales operations, CRM or customer success infrastructure or people to follow up on leads and convert them to investors and track them back to you
The client does not give you regularly scheduled updates on performance
The client has unrealistic expectations about your ability to raise money from members of your network
The client does not have a valid fundraising plan with the appropriate target investors
After making an introduction or handoff, the result is no longer related to your efforts, much like a dating service
There may be conflicts of interest for the advisor
You may damage your reputation or personal brand if you are not transparent about your role
You may not have the necessary education, skills, attitudes and competencies to raise money

11. The company or CEO you work for does not have the infrastructure, people or knowledge to close deals that you have sourced or people you have referred. Here are some reasons why and what they can do about getting a bigger ROI on their digital marketing tactics.

If you are asked to help a startup raise money, keep these issues in mind before agreeing to negotiated terms and conditions. Better to find your own meals than relying on eating what someone else kills.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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The Problems with ‘I’ll eat what you kill’ Arrangements