“Startups have been multiplying like rabbits over the past three years. Due to the added competition, many startups are beginning to narrow their focus to a much smaller demographic…. Becoming a master of any of the smaller niches has many great advantages, such as less competition, loyal readership, and better focus. All marketers exploit a basic positioning principle that states that it is better to be first than to be better. It is clearly too late to be the first social network, or bookmarking service, or video sharing startup. Consequently, the Web 2.0 era demands that startups put intense focus on their niche regardless of the smaller demographics.”

“Here’s an incomplete draft of my take on the 2007 Business and Design Landscape (pdf). As an update to my previous 2005 / 2006 versions of the business design playing field, this includes not just consulting firms, but also schools, events, publications, and corporate groups.”

“The thing that I’ve said more than once to folks about being President is that in the role, I become intimately familiar with how the sausage gets made. A professional services firm is all about the people who work there, and so presidency is all about engaging with the people. And when you’re engaging with people, no matter how great, respectful, and delightful those people are (and the people at Adaptive Path are all those things, and more), things get messy. You put any group of people together, and messiness emerges.”

“There are lots of rules for running a good meeting – always have an agenda, start on time, make sure no one is hungry. But this rule is more important than all others: Be a cheerleader for your objectives. When you run a meeting you have an objective and you are trying to convince everyone else to help you get there. Here is a list of five types of meetings and how to run them.”

“Hi there! I’m Lane Becker, formerly of Adaptive Path and Measure Map, and now one of the co-founders of Satisfaction. We started Satisfaction to help companies and customers find better ways to interact. A good company’s customers have always been more than just something to “support,” but historically that’s been the main channel through which they’ve been able to communicate. Now, thanks to the internet, customers have a lot more to say, and smart companies know they need to listen — and even (gasp!) engage. We’re building Satisfaction because we see the possibilities for collaboration between companies and customers expanding like never before, to the benefit of both parties, and we want to create new tools to encourage and foster this activity.” (Thanks a.wholelottanothing.org!)

“Our culture worships planning. Everything must be planned in advance. Our days, week, years, our entire lives. We have diaries, schedules, checklists, targets, goals, aims, strategies, visions even. Career planning is the most insidious of these cults precisely because it encourages a feeling of control over your reactions to future events. As that interview question goes: where do you see yourself in five years time? This invites the beginning of what starts as a little game and finishes as a belief built on sand.”

“It is why in a society of overachievers, I look for opportunities to teach the merits of underachievement. This is not easy, and I don’t expect to have the answers here for at least a few more decades.”

“Our annual survey of emerging ideas considers how nanotechnology will affect commerce, what role hope plays in leadership, and why, in an age that practically enshrines accountability, we need to beware of ‘accountabalism.’”