Entrepreneurship–predefined

I quoted my friend Paul Gompers here and here in the past as saying that management is the optimization of resources and entrepreneurship is the optimization of opportunity.

Now I find what I assume is the original source of the quote from HBS professor Howard Stevenson:

Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.

This is a slightly purer form of the concept … not optimizing, but pursuing opportunity. I like it. Gompers’ juxtaposition of management and entrepreneurship is itself elegant and powerful, but more as a comparison than the Stevenson wording where entrepreneurship stands alone.

Hat tip to whoever pointed me at the Inc article where this was uncovered, apparently in a preview copy of the book Breakthrough Entrepreneurship by Jon Burgstone and Bill Murphy, Jr.

Why chocolate matters to a smarter planet

Why does anyone need to ask?

And what does this say about IBM, able to turn even chocolate into something just too earnest?

The Shortest Starbucks Order

Back in 2006 I posted on The Longest Starbucks Order (it is still a good traffic-source from Google searches). Today I want to talk about my shortest Starbucks order: no lid, please.

I have realized over time that barista handling of the lids always leads to one of those “I wonder how often they wash their hands” moments.

This train of thought began one day in my local Peet’s. They don’t put the lids on your coffee for you. They have a stack of lids next to the milk, sugar and stirrers. Why do they do that, I wondered. After all, Starbucks goes the extra mile and puts the lid on for me. And then as I reached over to put the lid on for myself I was conscious that my hand was all over where my mouth was about to be … and that gave me pause for thought. Over at Starbucks, I thought, they put the lid on for me, and it’s the cleanliness of their hands I have to worry about, which is indeed a little more worrying that the cleanliness of my own (call me a snob).

Starbucks stores all seem to be uniformly scrupulous about maintaining cleanliness of the area behind the bar, the milk steamers, the spoons etc. The staff are careful to use tongs and tissue for food items, baked goods, hot breakfast snacks, to ensure they are not touching the food. However, when I order my drink, the baristas do not wear gloves and their bare hands are touching the lid, smooshing it down all around, including from where I am about to drink. And, perfectly understandably, for they are human after all, these pleasant, happy, well-trained baristas, touch their own face, sweep back their hair, touch each others’ hands as they pass cups … in short, their hands are short of food-prep hygienic. Movie reference: “Outbreak”… ugghhh!

I don’t want to make Starbucks baristas’ lives harder. I don’t want them to wear gloves. In fact I want to make their lives simpler. Please just stack the lids and let me place my own.

Move over #SoMoLo … it’s time for #SoMoLoClo

After some frustrating searching for SoMoLo, I think the earliest reference I could find is in 2010. Keys-by-Tearn claims to have coined the term in 2009, but I cannot find verification for that online. (A prize will be given for the earliest verifiable mention found in 2010 or earlier and posted to the comments by end of year.)

SoMoLo is a contraction for “Social, Mobile, Local” and was coined and is current because of the confluence of Social Networks, Mobile Devices and Local (or Location based) intelligence driving new forms of consumer behavior. We use Facebook to tell friends what we have bought (and follow their recommendations). We use our smartphones to check for better prices than what we see in the store in front of us, and we check for other local stores that are open and have the item in stock. This term is a catchy one because it captures and points to marketing strategies being adopted in many segments where smartphone users are a desirable demographic. Search for SoMoLo on twitter and see what people are saying.

Before SoMoLo has really caught on outside the cognoscenti, let me elbow it aside and introduce SoMoLoClo – for social, mobile, local, cloud. This is more of a techies term, which I first noticed should be introduced last month, and tweeted about it for the first time last week when David Skok presented a great overview of the current Application Development landscape at a MassTLC event. He brought the use of cloud computing into sharp focus as an innovation driver alongside the SoMoLo facets. SoMoLoClo might not be a nifty marketing strategy that everyone understands, but by adding ready-to-run, on-demand, sophisticated capabilities based in the cloud to SoMoLo architectures, you get a very powerful technical platform. Kinvey, from the Techstars Boston class of 2011, is a great example of how a cloud capability can turn an merely interesting app, into something much more multi-dimensional.

So goodbye SoMoLo, hello SoMoLoClo! And remember, you read about it here first!