Posts Tagged "innovation"

For Innovators: Focus Narrowly First, Accelerate Later

For Innovators: Focus Narrowly First, Accelerate Later

To begin, here’s an excerpt from my ‘Harvard Business Review App’ (the full article by Walter Isaacson was published in the March 2012 issue) which ironically refers to one of my favorite management issues: innovations using 2×2 quadrants in order to manage better! Isaacson: ‘When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a...

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MIT’s Influence?

MIT’s Influence?

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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My Failed Initiatives: Coaching a Financial Report Business

My Failed Initiatives: Coaching a Financial Report Business

In mid 2003, I suggested to my stepson that he apply his entrepreneurial interest and talent to a project we called Topline Analysis, LLC.  This was a new and rather structured report format which I designed, specifically to publicize small public firms to those Wall Street “buy-side” investment firms which invested in listed companies but received virtually no research “coverage” from ...

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Entrepreneurism and M.I.T’s Impact

Entrepreneurism and M.I.T’s Impact

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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Influence of Chess on Business Acumen

Influence of Chess on Business Acumen

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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Gartner Culture Case Study

Gartner Culture Case Study

A brief sideshow: After the intimate family party celebrating my 75th birthday, I posted a description of some of my kid’s gifts on my “Gideon Gartner” blog category. Two items from that blog click here to access the Gideon Gartner category, which have to do with Gartner Group “culture”, are repeated here with minor changes. Around 1986, my older daughter Sabrina...

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One Chapter Of Many, From My Life: MIT Undergrad

One Chapter Of Many, From My Life: MIT Undergrad

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,...

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Lessons from MIT Creativity Course, 1956

The 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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Innovating via “Process”

Reading abundantly often suggests innovative ideas which are appropriate to one’s firm. Two public sources which I had read and was influenced by were the book “The Tao Jones Averages: A Guide to Whole-Brained Investing” by Bennet Goodspeed, and various reports promoting the concept of Strategic Intelligence Systems (SIS) — specifically the article written by David B....

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Entrepreneurial Case Study From My Wall Street Days

There 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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