Succeeding at innovation is tough business Marketing strategists, Stephen Wunker, Jessica Wattman and David Farber show that most innovative product launches fail.  More than half of newly launched products don’t meet their company’s expectations.  Of every 100 new products, only one covers its development costs.  Of 300 new products, only one successfully meets the company’s growth target.    The reason? The authors point to the…

In his book entitled Principles, asset manager and Bridgewater founder, Ray Dalio, mentions that life can be overwhelming and full of unexpected events. Having a set of principles should help one keep one’s feet on the ground and move forward in life. Accepting that life can be messy and uncomfortable is part of the game and the author recommends that anyone be guided by rational…

In his book, The Failure of Risk Management, author Douglas Hubbard talks about starts out with defining risk management explaining why most risk assessment methods don’t work before developing a functional risk management approach.   Defining risk To define risk management, the author begins with defining risk itself. It involves assessing the probabilities of various outcomes and, for each outcome measuring the magnitude of the outcome…

In his book The Black Swan, the author, Nicholas Taleb, talks about how random events may come as a surprise to many of us. He begins by mentioning that  human beings have a gift for transforming stimuli coming from their environment into meaningful information. Much of this has resulted in building the scientific method, mythologies about how our world was created, stories of heroes facing difficult…

Why does project risk matter?  In his book, Identifying and Managing Project Risk, Tom Kendrick mentions that “reviewing the records of technical projects, it is striking how many consecutive projects fall victim to the same problems.” He adds that “risks tend to occur in project after project unless you understand the root causes and do something differently to avoid the problem.” Clearly, any project comes…

Why is VC blossoming? In his book, The Entrepreneurial Bible to Venture Capital, investor Andrew Roman talks about what entrepreneurs must understand about the venture capital industry if they want to raise money and how they should go about attracting venture capital. He begins by talking about the venture capital market in the 1990s where the costs of launching a new business were high: purchasing software licenses and…

In his book, Hard Things About Hard Things, entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, Ben Horowitz, shows that, ultimately, any founder will have to confront “the struggle.” Whether it’s a product that doesn’t perform as expected, loyal employees that leave, unhappy customers, or venture capitalists that want to pull out, entrepreneurs will always face, at some point in their career, the “struggle.” And there is no recipe overcoming it. Everybody has to…

In venture capital investing, founders and management of Gladstone capital, David Gladstone and Laura Gladstone provide our practical guide to the nitty-gritty aspects of venture capital investing. Targeted at venture capitalist looking at making the right investments, they mentioned that investors should start out any conversation with a thorough due diligence, defined as a process of researching, examining, questioning, analyzing and assessing any investment…

In his book, Against The Gods, the remarkable story of risk, financial analyst and asset manager, Peter Bernstein, begins with the creation cosmic creation. He mentions that “the recognition of risk management as a practical art rest on a simple cliché with the most profound consequences: when our world was created, nobody remembered to include certainty.” Indeed, the Greek gods rolled the dice to decide who…

The authors, Brad Feld and Jason A. Mendelson, starts out by mentioning that bringing one’s company to the next level requires an influx of cash. Founders turn to venture capitalists who provide the perfect form of financing to ventures. The author suggests that they focus on investors and understand how they work in terms of decision-making process, capital sourcing, timing, industry focus and negotiation style. The author also looks at term sheets…