Even among the sordid histories of Eastern Europe, Ukraine is particularly tragic. In just the 20th century, it was starved by Stalin, decimated by Hitler, subjected to seventy years of incompetent Soviet rule, looted by its own government and, most recently, invaded by Putin.
Ukraine’s situation today remains desperate. It is in dire financial straits, dependent on financial assistance from the IMF, US and EU. Crimea has been annexed, the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk are caught in a frozen conflict and its chief antagonist, Russia, controls its gas supply.
Yet still, Ukraine is not without promise. While much of its Soviet era industry lies dormant within the conflict zone, its tech industry is booming. I recently talked with Yevgen Sysoyev of AVentures, a venture capital firm in Kyiv, and he thinks that we may be seeing the birth of a new Ukrainian renaissance. While that may sound crazy, he might very well be right.
Every story is a caricature, especially a Hollywood film. Some details are omitted to maintain the flow, while others are added to sharpen one aspect or another. The truth is always multifaceted and even the most faithful telling cannot capture any narrative in its entirety. I think it’s best to see the new movie Foxcatcher in those terms.
The film boils down nearly a decade’s worth of events to a little over two hours. It tells the story of Dave and Mark Schultz, two of the best wrestlers the USA has ever produced and focuses on their dysfunctional relationship with John du Pont, a scion of one of America’s most prominent families.
Foxcatcher is based on Mark Schultz’s life story and is mostly told from his perspective. It portrays two brothers taken in by the twisted psyche of a coddled aristocrat who wants to buy his way into their world of elite accomplishment. Yet the most disturbing aspect of the story is not about du Pont or the Schutz brothers, but the part the rest of us played in it.
It doesn’t seem so long ago that the best way to get instant access to content was to stop by a newsstand and handover a few dollars for the publication of your choice. You could also fill out a little card and receive a subscription for a discounted price. Either way, you paid for the privilege.
Yet now, everybody expects to get content for free from their phone, tablet or laptop and publishers don’t like it. They think that if consumers paid then, they should pay now and have come up with a variety of schemes, such as paywalls, to get them to pony up.
The truth is that it doesn’t really matter if consumers are willing to pay for content or not. As long as the economics favor free distribution, consumers will favor products that they don’t have to pay for. And that, for the most part, is the market reality today. Publishers, for their part, need to stop whining about it, and start innovating their business models.
Alexandre Dumas is thought to be the first person who said that “nothing succeeds like success.” Yet hard to know who really said it first. It’s one of those aphorisms that seems so obviously true and it’s been repeated so often, by so many, that it’s become almost an integral part of the lexicon.
Failure, on the other hand, is the mark of a loser. Nobody brags to friends, “my son dropped out of college today,” or “my 6th startup went bust!.” Failure is something that you are supposed to crawl away from, try to forget and do your best to avoid next time around.
Nevertheless, not everyone treats failure that way. Thomas Edison, when asked about his many unsuccessful attempts to create the light bulb, insisted that he never failed, he just found 10,000 things that didn’t work. The truth is that some of the most important ideas get uncovered that way, when something we thought was right ends up being very much wrong.
As of 2011, only 67 of the original Fortune 500 companies were still in business. Meanwhile, Gartner estimates that by 2017, 50% of the applications for the Internet of Things (IOT) will come from startups less than three years old. We live in a truly disruptive age.
The truth is that success often breeds failure. A young company will develop core competencies, build out a distinct model and begin to prosper. Then the market environment shifts, new firms take the lead and the old dogs find it hard to learn the new tricks. Eventually, every business model fails.
Yet Arrow Electronics is living proof that it doesn’t have to be that way. Starting out as a small electronics shop in 1935, it’s seen every stage of evolution in the technology industry since its inception. Yet each time its business was threatened, Arrow saw opportunity and found a way to thrive. The story is an important lesson: Disruption can be beat.
In the early 1970’s, the financial industry was transformed by a strange confluence of events. In 1973, The Chicago Board of Trade opened the first options trading floor and, almost as if on cue, a month later the Nobel prize winning Black Scholes options pricing model was published.
Soon after, Hewlett Packard introduced a pocket computer small enough for traders to use on the floor and that, combined with a glut of engineering talent made available by the closing of the Apollo space program, created a wave of revolutionary change that is still being felt even today.
Almost overnight, finance was transformed from a clubby world of cozy relationships to a mathematical one of complex securities, abstract formulas and computing power. Now, a generation later, the financial industry is about to be remade once again, except this time, it is not obscure financial securities that are being transformed, but very nature of money itself.
When Hershey launched Reese’s Pieces, they knew it would be an uphill battle. Its had to compete with M&M’s, the 800 lb. gorilla of the industry. They hoped co-branding the new product with its popular peanut butter cup would help, but M&M’s dominated the category.
It was slow going for the first few years, but then in 1982 opportunity knocked. The brand was offered a product placement in a new film about a boy who befriends an alien by luring him with candy. The producers were looking for $1 million to provide product placement.
Mars, the owner of M&M’s rejected the deal, but Hershey’s took a shot and it paid off. E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial passed Star Wars to become the highest grossing film ever. Reese’s Pieces became a viral hit and sales shot up 65% in the first two weeks after the movie hit the theaters. If you want to know how ideas spread, you can learn a lot from that little alien.
For a relatively young country, America has had a continuing love affair with tradition. From the way we revere the Constitution to watching football on Thanksgiving Day, we often look to posterity for guidance.
When other countries talk about the past, it’s usually about kings and battles, but in the US we speak of founding principles. Yet perhaps the most important legacy comes from a man named Vannevar Bush (no relation to the political Bushes), who probably did more than anyone else to create the America we know today.
When Bush was born in 1890, America was a backwater. Students in the sciences would usually have to go to Europe to earn a doctorate. By the time he died, in 1974, the US lead the world in science, commerce and military affair. Bush played a central role in making that happen. Lately though, his legacy has been subject to not only neglect, but outright attack.
When Chip Kelly first entered the NFL, he had his work cut out for him. Sure, he’d been a phenomenally successful college coach, but many top NCAA coaches don’t make it at the professional level. What’s more, he was taking over a team that had gone 4-12 the previous year.
The early results weren’t promising. Unlike many new coaches, Kelly made few personnel changes and through the first half of the season the Eagles looked very much like the team they were the year before. Kelly, it seemed would become just one more NFL flameout.
Yet things didn’t turn out that way. By the end of the season, Kelly’s Eagles had won their conference championship and boasted the second best offense in the league. This year, they are off to an impressive 6-2 start and, while the jury is still out on how successful Kelly will be in the NFL, his management style has already had an impact. Here’s how he does it:
We live in an age of movements: Political movements like the Arab Spring and Euromaidan, technology movements like open source and social movements like marriage equality. They seem to self-organize and spread virally, as if they were LOLCats or some other digital meme.
So why can’t we get our organizations to act the same way? You would think that with command and incentive structures in place, it would be easier for leaders to set a direction and get things moving, but anyone who’s run an enterprise knows that’s patently untrue.
And that’s a big problem. Managers need to be able to get their organization behind ideas in order to adapt to changing markets. As we have seen with Blockbuster and Kodak, even dominant firms now go bankrupt in record time and traditional change management techniques are often too slow. To lead today, managers need to create movements.
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and is mostly told from his perspective. It portrays two brothers taken in by the twisted psyche of a coddled aristocrat who wants to buy his way into their world of elite accomplishment. Yet the most disturbing aspect of the story is not about du Pont or the Schutz brothers, but the part the rest of us played in it.
