Conor O’Neill of Argolon has a great post on his blog discussing a method of jump-starting tech startup companies in Ireland. I think his ideas are right on the money, and relatively easy to put into action anywhere. The idea centers around creating a summer “hothouse” to help college students get rolling with ideas for new products. To his list of ideas, I would add just a couple of suggestions:
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Supporting companies should offer mentors on all aspects of business - not just fundraising, but management, leadership, community responsibility, etc.
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There should be monies available for the startup folks to travel to one or two conferences during the summer.
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There should be regular events along the lines of OpenCoffee or BarCamps set up specifically for these startups. These kinds of events will be helpful for the startups, but also for the supporting companies and the larger tech community.
October 27, 2026
Professional
AI
OrganizationalDevelopment
Thanks to the COVID outbreak of 2020, companies around the world accelerated the shift of allowing or encouraging office workers to do more of their work from home or other remote locations. While this has led some companies to adapt their cultures, I’ve been very surprised that one major cultural shift doesn’t seem to have taken root widely: the majority of companies still seem to have a meeting-first culture rather than a written-first culture.
October 19, 2026
Professional
AI
OrganizationalDevelopment
Since the creation of the modern company, we have become used to identifying workers as individual contributors or as managers of people. Individual contributors needed only follow the orders of a leader, who would ensure that all workers contributed to the same, hopefully effective, goal. While factories tried to deconstruct work activities into simple, easily-repeatable tasks that left no room for individual variations and ideas. It’s fair to say that many managers have tried to accomplish the same breakdown in office work, asking individual contributors to simply do their tasks and not be overly involved in thinking about the overall goal.
August 20, 2018
CommunityDevelopment
OrganizationalDevelopment
Professional
Change is constant – we all deal with it, we all complain about it. We all do it. In a 2008 study titled “The Enterprise of the Future”, IBM surveyed over 1,000 CEOs around the world. 83% of those surveyed said they expect their organization to undergo substantial change.
**But only 61% of those executives believe they have managed change successfully in the past. **
Why the disconnect? If change is so constant, why are we so bad at it?