We are smarter than me, part II

A few days back I wrote about efforts by Wharton Publishing to involve  a large community in one of it's publishing projects. Now Guy Kawasaki is planing to write another book and this time he is 'open sourcing' the content.

Is this the new way to write books? How does the 'wisdom of crowed' reflect the content? How well will the books be received? How much room will these efforts leave for brilliant insights from an expert - the author?

Capital efficienty the holy grail for building software companies

Will Price has a good post on how capital efficiency is the holy grail for building software companies. Another aspect that I like about the post is that it proves the point with some good data and does that in an efficient manner.

Cognitive Dissonance

WSJ has a nice piece on cognitive dissonance. I won't say much here except it is well worth the read.

We are smarter than me...

Wharton School Publising is experimenting with Wiki style involvement for a book on management. The press release mentions that over a million business professionals an scholars have been invited to participate in this effort. I am not sure what the time line is but it would be interesting to follow how this effort pans out...

More Than a Million Invited to Write and Edit First Collaborative Book on Management Best Practices
Taking a page from Wikipedia®, publishing giant Pearson, under its Wharton School Publishing imprint, has embarked on a new book publishing project that could involve tens of thousands of authors and editors. Starting last month, more than a million business professionals and scholars -- including faculty, students, alumni, and newsletter recipients from Wharton and MIT's Sloan School of Management -- started receiving messages inviting them to collectively write and edit the book, tentatively titled We Are Smarter Than Mewww.wearesmarter.org). The book's content will examine how Web 2.0 technologies such as social networks, wikis, and blogs can benefit the business enterprise.

10x in 2 years

Cannot agree more with JSharp on how start-ups need to be aiming for 10x in 2 years.

Life at a hyper-ventilating, highly-strung, unstable startup is entirely different. At a startup, you are expected to work 25x harder for 5 times the return - in 20% of the time. Put simply, your target return is 10x growth in the value of the equity within a *two* year period from product launch. 10x in 2 years.
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Building a "ten-bagger" (a startup that grows 10x in value within two years) is not hard. Every month, someone comes along and shows you how it can be done - YouTube, Skype, PayPal, Google. The key is making sure the people at your startup *understand* the 10x in 2 years rule.

However, I am not sure if it is as easy to be a 'ten-bagger' as JSharp suggests. I guess finding, recruiting and retaining people who share this mentality is very hard, and maintaining the culture, momentum and focus of the team over two highly uncertain years is harder.