To Get Into the Ivy League, ‘Extraordinary’ Isn’t Always Enough These Days. Harvard University received a record 61,220 applications during the current admissions year and accepted 1,954 (3.2%). (more)

Andrew Gelman: I can’t quite say I’m shocked that people aren’t more shocked about Harvard University and the CDC’s latest misdeeds . . . but I’m disappointed that people aren’t more disappointed. Here’s what really stunned me. Not that Harvard and the CDC made embarrassing stupid errors—again, we all do that; I proved a false theorem once, and one of my articles has an incorrect definition of p-values in its first sentence, granted that particular error was introduced in the editing process, but it’s still my job to read my damn articles before they go to press, right?—; and not even that they haven’t shown any interest in fixing these mistakes. No, what really bothered me was the reaction of our blog commenters. (more)

aka user acquisition - part of funnel (see AARRR) where you first "get" a user - you could define that as site-visit, or email-address-collect

Dave McClure has a presentation on "Metrics for Pirates", using the AARRR Sales Funnel/Life Cycle model. (Acquistion, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) (more)

Elena Verna There's a whole lot of ugly out there when it comes to growth teams. It’s hard to believe that 15 years ago, growth as a discipline didn’t exist. Yet nowadays nearly every company wants to cash in on the growth team ‘promise’: for growth to take them on that coveted exponential growth curve to unicorn status (more)

team responsible for growth (hopefully in Revenue and then Profit) :) see esp Growth Hacker, Product-led Growth, Pirate Metrics

Alex Steffen: When Shit Gets Real. The heat has come. In Portland, Oregon, it was hotter (108ºF) Saturday than it’s ever been there. . (more)

Alex Steffen: Ruggedize Your Life. How do we get smarter about making that choice? (more)

Alex Steffen: Getting the Memo on Climate Risk. The chasm between the way things work now and how they’d need to work to thrive in this planetary crisis means that the systems that make our lives possible are woven through with massive, unattended risks. (climate change) (more)

Alex Steffen: Discontinuity is the Job. *This is When *it Gets Real, part two. (2021-06-28-SteffenWhenShitGetsReal) (more)

Cedric Chin: Jobs's Second Act at Apple - The Next Big Thing. In an illuminating anecdote in the book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, author and business professor Richard Rumelt describes the following story, shortly after Steve Jobs’s return to Apple. (more)

Accenture plc is an Irish-American[3][4] professional services company based in Dublin, specializing in information technology (IT) services and consulting. A Fortune Global 500 company,[5] it reported revenues of $64.1 billion in 2023.[2] Accenture's current clients include 91 of the Fortune Global 100 and more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500.[6] As of 2022, Accenture is considered the largest consulting firm in the world by number of employees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture

giant consulting firm that came out of Arthur Andersen accounting and later became Accenture

Ian Piumarta and Kimberly Rose assembled a book Points Of View: A Tribute To Alan Kay for Alan Kay's 70th birthday. Available as free EBook for all of us. (more)

John Cutler TBM 30/52: Why Don’t We Have a Strategy? A product leader recently told me: "The system is not built for me to think. The system is built for me to be reactionary." Why? The theory goes that ideas are cheap, and execution is everything. (more)

Venkatesh Rao uses the term Positioning for 7 dimensions of business Flow State (Business Strategy). If the S-Curve-s are clustered close together in time, you get one big Aha! Otherwise you get a series of smaller Ahas! All 7 must be switched on. Otherwise you’ll get a change in emotion and energy, but not a true business positioning. The characteristic sign is that you get a frenzied, high-anxiety, manic energy tempo instead of a harmonious, vigorous and steady tempo. I call the former the “fire alarm” situation, and it will collapse if it isn’t corrected. (more)

Venkatesh Rao loves Walter Kiechel's Lords Of Strategy Business Book about the history of the Business Strategy Consulting industry. With those four players on the stage: BCG, the idea company, Bain, the all-the-way-to-execution cult, McKinsey the behemoth commoditizer, and Michael Porter the intellectual heavyweight, the strategy revolution was underway... There is a deep conceptual problem with Porter’s work, and the entire main line of development of strategy as a discipline, that makes it deeply suspect: the fact that people are missing.

Chet Richards reviews William Dettmer's Logical Thinking Process ISBN:0873897234 coverage of Eli Goldratt's Theory Of Constraints. As Goldratt demonstrated, conflicts often represent the effects of invalid assumptions, and his charmingly entitled "evaporating cloud" is a tool for dragging assumptions to the surface where we can shine the cold light of day on them. The focus is on breaking any implicit Trade-Off-s, "compromises" as Goldratt calls them - such as between cost and quality - so that both can improve simultaneously. There were times when such a cloud would have come in handy... Then he does a very unusual thing for a technical text. He introduces John Boyd's "Principles of the Blitzkrieg" (POB) as a way to get competence and full Commitment, "even if you're not there to guide or direct them" (p. 8-11). Which means that people have to take the initiative to seek out and solve problems, using the common GTOC framework to harmonize their efforts (Culture). In that sense, the POB can be considered as a powerful doctrine for connecting leaders and subordinates for implementing change.

Place/action to Focus your attention/effort, instead of drizzling BullShit. Bottleneck literally refers to the top narrow part of a bottle. In engineering, it refers to a phenomenon where the performance or capacity of an entire system is limited by a single or small number of components or resources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottleneck (more)

key Start Up success-requirement from Marc Andreessen - getting the right Fit between product and Market Segment - 2007-07-27-AndreessenMarketIsKeyForStartup - establishes viability/scalability of your Business Model? (more)