IT advisory ideas & more...
Most of my Mechanical Engineering courses at MIT bored me to tears. One exception was a course called “Creativity” which may have influenced me entrepreneurially. We were given a 150-page manual describing a planet called Arcturus IV (fictitious of course) which was similar to, but which possessed different characteristics than Earth, e.g. gravitational pull, soil and atmospheric...
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Last year, MIT Sloan School of Management published a study performed by Professor and head of MIT’s Entrepreneurship program Ed Roberts (David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology, Founder/Chair, MIT Entrepreneurship Center), and Professor Charles Eesley (Assistant Professor in the Entrepreneurship Group at Stanford University). The study demonstrates MIT’s entrepreneurial...
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I played chess as a child; my father introduced me to the game (and I suggest all fathers follow suit). I managed to make the chess team at Midwood High and barely at MIT. Might the experience then, and subsequently, have influenced my lifetime entrepreneurship skills? I think so, and since the competition for making school chess teams is not that insurmountable, fathers might do well in...
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Note: In the Innovation section of this blog I posted six chapters briefly describing my life, from youth through my Wall Street days. As a sample, I’m posting one of these chapters, the one covering the possible influences of my MIT undergrad period on my later career. Blogs describing my experiences at Gartner, Soundview, Giga, and currently, will eventually be posted in the Gartner,...
read moreThe MIT "Creativity" course was clearly designed to push us beyond the framework of standard thinking, and it’s quite possible that it had significant influence on my analytic processes.
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When Neill Brownstein of Bessemer Venture Partners asked me, ”so Gideon, what are you up to?” (leading to the founding of Gartner), my first step was to document my view of what I believed to be the sorry status quo of the then-Advisory Industry (Yankee Group, Dataquest, IDC, et al). But true to form, I was almost always questioning the status quo. Even today in retirement, my...
read moreI’m sometimes asked if any competitor of Gartner could unseat it as the leading Advisory. I think not. But, could a competitor penetrate it? Allow me to share with you accurate data from my Giga experience, based upon the huge and detailed spreadsheet by month which I recently found in a closet, dating back to 10/1/2000! As you likely know, I founded Giga in late 1994 (I left Gartner in...
read moreThere could be no logical basis for thinking I would be successful on Wall Street. I had no financial experience whatsoever, and was hired by E.F. Hutton because of my IBM experience where I analyzed IBM’s competition. I was lucky that soon after I was hired, IBM announced its Copier 1, and people wondered whether this might impact Xerox, one of the “nifty fifty”, the name for...
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35th Anniversary of Gartner Inc.'s Founding: Gartner Inc. (originally called Gartner Group) was born on April 1, 1979, together with a ... [read more]
Oh My Darling Clementine: My three year-old grand-daughter Clementine is very smart. While she's never taken any piano lessons ... [read more]
Social Networking May Be Bad for Your Health: What might have once been called 'intellectual networking' seems to have been displaced by today's ... [read more]
Genius Economist Suggests Solution to Housing Problem: John Geanakoplos is James Tobin professor of economics at Yale University and one of the founders of Ellington Capital Management, ... [read more]
Which Executive Education School Is Tops?: Interestingly, executive education rankings by various publications produce results which seem all over the map. In fact, the ... [read more]