Comments on: SmallBizPod #38 - Thursday 25 January 2007

By: SmallBizPod - small business blog » Blog Archive » Talent and SMEs: War, X-Factor and Making Do

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 23:15:55 +0000

[...] it as the war for talent. When I interviewed Polly LaBarre and Bill Taylor, formerly of Fast Company, they considered winning talent the mark of a successful company, but also the most difficult issue [...]

By: “This Time Next Year We’ll Be Millionaires!” -- Mavericks at Work Blog

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 20:56:55 +0000

[...] We’re going to do a series of posts over the next week about what we saw, what we did, and what we learned during our visit to the UK. One quick impression–the “innovation economy” in England is alive and well. Germany may be sclerotic, France may be hopelessly bureaucratic, but the UK is bustling�and it is definitely “with the program” in terms of entrepreneurial energy and new ways of competing. Our old friend Charles Leadbeater, an influential management theorist for both business and government, is putting the finishing touches on an important new book called We-Think, which promises to be the best work yet on the open-source model of innovation. During a lovely visit to his flat on the east side of London, Charlie gave us an overview of new-generation British companies, from Innocent Drinks, which reminds us a lot of Jones Soda, one of our mavericks, to Zopa.com, a peer-to-peer lending operation. We came away optimistic about where young British innovators want to take their companies and their country. Tuesday was Media Day, and we got to sample British public opinion. Here too the experience was reassuring. We spent the better part of a day doing 18 back-to-back interviews and programs on radio stations in London, Birmingham, Wales, Northern Ireland, and just about city and hamlet in-between. Folks in Britain, as in North America, seem to have come to the conclusion that big companies don’t offer the security or the sense of possibility that they used to, and our various interviewers seemed eager to encourage their listeners to think bigger and aim higher for their companies and careers. This podcast aimed at small business was typical of the conversations we had, as was this interview with WorldBusiness, a monthly magazine published in conjunction with Insead, the European business school. Which leads us to the most hilarious part of our visit. Our publicist at HarperCollins, in order to drum up interest in a business book by two know-it-all Americans, dropped a throw-away line into the press release to the effect that Mavericks would help readers “live the Del Boy dream.” It didn’t mean much to us�until every single interviewer asked us about Del Boy, what our favorite Del Boy story was, and just how, exactly, could their listeners live the Del Boy dream? [...]

By: alex

alex — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 23:23:57 +0000

Hi Rob, good to hear from you. I guess you’re saying necessity is the mother of invention or should that be innovation. I think there’s definitely something in that.

How do you earn a living when everyone’s doing the same old same old and customers have more than enough of everything? Sounds like time for a bit of innovation.

There are, of course, some innovative geniuses with business vision, but they are fewer. And how many purple cows can they come up with anyway?

By: Rob Smorfitt

Rob Smorfitt — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 20:38:22 +0000

I am a firm believer in innovation driving successful companies. I as recently embroiled in a debate while writing a book on entrepreneurship, as to whether the innovative idea arises on it’s own or in response to a specific need. The team was split between those who believed innovation was driven by “ideas” people, and myself and some who felt that the need generated the innovation thought process, which actively sought to solve the problem.

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