Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Submitted to:
Mushtaque Ahmed
Course Instructor, Brand Management (MKT523)
Chief Executive Officer, NetValue Institute of Brand Management
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expected. Most companies, though, go from 1 to 1.1, or 1.1 to 1.11, they don’t make a huge
disruptive change. To have a lasting impact, one must find a zero and create a new paradigm.
“Today’s “best practices” lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried. Indeed, the
single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected
places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.”
A useful interview question (also for yourself): “What important truth do very few people
agree with you on? Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people
to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively
defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different
future.”
“If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the
contrarian truth.”
“The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”
“We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of
individual talents and preferences. Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are
made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests
and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic
parallel reality. If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things
as everyone else around you. The clearest way to make a 10x improvement is to invent
something completely new. If you build something valuable where there was nothing before,
the increase in value is theoretically infinite. A drug to safely eliminate the need for sleep, or
a cure for baldness, for example, would certainly support a monopoly business.
The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated
together and served by few or no competitors. But leanness is a methodology, not a goal.
Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it
won’t help you find the global maximum. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re
good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the
future… in a power law world, you can’t afford not to think hard about where your actions
will fall on the curve. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be
avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in
the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the
decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.