“Unsurprisingly, top-down mandates seldom work. ‘Here is your new content management system. All content will now be published with this centralized system. Signed, The Management.’ I often found myself consulting with organizations with similar problems. ‘We spent all this time and money installing a CMS, but everyone still publishes static HTML pages. How do we force them to use it?’ You don’t, of course. As SocialText has learned, people use the simplest thing that works, and they look to their peers to find those tools.”

“John Nesheim, in his best-selling book High Tech Start Up: The Complete Handbook for Creating Successful New High Tech Companies, concludes from his research that there are 14 stages in taking a venture from idea to IPO, as follows… Chapter 3 of High Tech Start Up, reprinted below, describes the main focus activity, time required, typical participants, help needed, major costs, main risks, output and ROI for each of these stages. Although written for a hi-tech company, this discussion is also generally applicable to most other new ventures.”