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One of the most captivating presentations I have ever seen

Hey 273sters, here’s another great freebie from Mixergy.com, I’m addicted to this site.  It is an interview with Tom Szaky, founder of Terracycle a company that takes garbage and turns it into products.  He got the idea for starting the company when he started selling worm poop which he’d been using to help grow pot in his basement during college.  I really like the way he talks about creating a profitable marketing department, and putting a lot of effort into communicating with journalists.  Free publicity is the best publicity.

I am going to try and start posting freebies like this on a regular basis.

Happy Earth Day everyone, here are 10 great documentaries that you can watch for free.  Enjoy.

On Tuesday I went to a great seminar on Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Entrepreneurship.  I will provide a more comprehensive write up as soon as I receive the slides for the day but one thing I noticed was that the logos on the Slides and websites of both Swedfund (a government run Swedish risk capital fund concentrating on ethical investments in the developing world) and Diferencia (a consultancy and training firm specialising in sustainable development) had flipped the world map upside down.  This made me think a lot about our perspective on the world.  Below is the 273 Map flipped, you can see our investors in red and the entrepreneurs in green.  To me this view of the world presents a great opportunity, what do you think?

This also reminded me of a video, that I have posted before on a different blog about turning problems upside down to find opportunities, I think it is worth posting again - enjoy.

In this first instalment of this article, I am going to introduce you to one of the coolest fish families in the world, the Cichlids, a family made up of 1000s of brightly coloured little fish with just as many fascinating little quirks that make them ideally adapted to their own niche.  My aim is to see if we can draw any parallels between the mechanisms of rapid speciation in the Cichlid fishes and the explosion of tech companies in the Silicon Valley and whether this has anything to teach us from a network strategic management point of view (or more usefully, from the point of view of a tech start-up).

Darwin argued that all individuals struggle to survive on limited resources, but that there is variation amongst the population that gives some individuals traits which confer a competitive advantage over those that do not possess such traits.  Such individuals have higher evolutionary fitness and are thus more likely to survive to produce the next generation.

In their paper, Strategic Networks, Ranjay Gulati et al argue that ‘A key question in strategy research is why firms differ in their conduct and profitability’ and that the traditional view of firms as ‘atomistic actors competing for profits against each other in an impersonal market place is increasingly inadequate in a world in which firms are embedded in networks of social, professional, and exchange relationships with other organisational actors’ .  They go on to contend that ‘the conduct and performance of firms can be more fully understood by examining the networks of relationships in which they are embedded‘.

It is easy to draw a parallel here between the ‘networks of relationships’ in which a firm is embedded and the ecosystem in which an organism spends its life.  I propose that an evolutionary perspective can help explain the effect that the ecosystem within which a firm finds its self has on that firms conduct and likelihood of success.  To do this I will draw parallels between explosive speciation of the African cichlid fishes and the explosion of high tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Silicon and the Cichlids

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