My first post was on March 12, 2003. I wrote about 80 posts a month, until June when I picked up the pace to over 100 posts a month through November 2003. But the blogosphere was different then. There were no aggregators, and people often relied on blogs to serve that purpose. Over time – as the key to blogging has gone from aggregation to SEO to original content to linkbaiting to where we are now, which is establishing yourself as an authority on a topic – I've written a lot of different types of posts. There are only a few of you that have been reading since 2003. For the rest of you, here are 30 posts that you may have missed. These posts run from 2003- late 2006, and they don't include a couple of my most popular posts of all-time, because you have probably seen those already. These posts are a great representation of the things I really think about most of the time. I encourage you to bookmark, tag, save, or whatever it is you need to do to this post to save it until you have time to go read some of the posts in this list.
1. The Wisdom Fallacy, Why Management Is Really Like Math – This is a short post, but after I wrote it, I received an email from a student at Vanderbilt who said he forwarded this post to his father. His father is friends with Charlie Munger, and forwarded the post to him. He enjoyed it so much that he forwarded it to Warren Buffett. So I'm very proud to say that Warren Buffett has read something I wrote. Unfortunately, while it's an important idea, I don't think this post flows that well.
2. Walmart: Are There Negative Effects of Low Prices? – In the early days of this blog, the business press was obsessed with Walmart. Pundits believed Walmart would take over the world and ruin this country. Now no-one thinks about them. In this post, I argued that WalMart was on the decline and would suffer from competition from other retailers.
3. Why I Quit Entrepreneurship and Got a Real Job – My first mega home run post that got picked up all over the web, and crashed my server. I wrote this post about 8 months after I sold my stake of a small business to my partner, then spent some time trying to raise money for a business idea, applying for a SBIR grant from the Department of Defense, and teaching some college courses part-time. After all that, I was glad to be back in the corporate world for awhile. This post got me tons of hate mail.
4. Risk, Return, and Employee Pay – I argue that profits belong to those who take the risks, not those who do the work.
5. MyIdea.com – My College Business Plan – I went through grad school in the late 90s. In my strategic thinking class, we had to come up with a web based business idea and write a full business plan about it. This is a description of my idea. It also took 1st place in a business plan competition, and won me a $1000 prize.
6. Paranoid About Perception – I write about how to stay vigilant against misperceptions.
7. Extroversion, Talking it Out, and Business Decision Making. Since I'm introverted, and tend not to think out loud, then when I change my mind about something, or reach a decision, it often seems brash and ill thought out because no one saw the steps that led to it. (They were all internal, not vocalized.)
8. Can the Blogosphere Build and Run a Real Business? – The post that kicked off the notorious "Business Experiment" that eventually went down in flames. I learned some very important lessons though, so it was worth it.
9. The Importance of Big Picture Thinking – A very short post that makes an important point. Details are important, but sometimes they can blind you to the big picture.
10. Zen, Leadership, and the Importance of Brain Filters – This one is kind of deep, and not everyone will understand it, but it addresses the importance of building filters to become a better leader.
11. Is Concentration the New Competitive Advantage? – This is one of my personal favorites, and I believe very strongly in this idea today. I think our ultra-connected society is growing a generation of shallow thinkers. I will be writing about this idea a lot more at my new blog.
12. Is Paradox the New Paradigm? – I write about the importance of embracing conflicting goals.
13. How to Be An Effective Entrepreneur – My thoughts on how Peter Drucker's book "The Effective Executive" applies to entrepreneurs.
14. How To Make Millions In 30 Minutes or Less – A short post about the easy road to riches.
15. The Emerging Field of Opportunity Science – Will the soft skill of recognizing opportunities someday be formalized into quantitative measures?
16. How Broken Windows Can Kill a Business – A warning about letting little things slide… they can turn into big things.
17. Know Thyself? We Only Think We Do. – A warning against the biases of self-deception.
18. Please Stop With Your Chinese Math – The first post of mine that was picked up by one of the Wall Street Journal blogs. In this one I criticize those entrepreneurs who argue that "they only need 1% of the market…"
19. How to Find Topics To Blog – One of my most popular non-business posts.
20. The Useless Mindset of Spilled Milk Management – This is one of the things I hate dealing with the most… when people don't look for solutions, but instead, sit around just wishing bad things hadn't happened.
21. Thoughts in a Meeting: A Monologue on Corporate Dysfunction – A very unique post for me. I tried to take ideas from many jobs and mesh them into one internal monologue. It was tough, but I think it turned out ok.
22. Media 2.0, The Limbic Brain, and the Rise of Stochastic Quality – I don't think people understood this post, but I was attempting to explain things like why people follow Techcrunch.
23. The Wisdom of Niches: Why Experts Still Matter – An anti-wisdom-of-crowds post.
24. How to Become a Better Business Decision Maker – The gist of it is: review your decisions regularly to see if you are making good ones.
25. Purple Cows, Pie Kitchens, and the Blogosphere: Does Quality Matter Anymore? – This post asks questions, and doesn't provide any answers, but I think a lot of people found it interesting.
26. Elasticity for Entrepreneurs – I explain the concept of elasticity, and how entrepreneurs should think about it.
27. Zen, Motorcycle Maintenance and Entrepreneurship – I relate the wisdom of one of my favorite books to entrepreneurship.
28. Introversion, Anxiety, and Entrepreneurship – A post about becoming an entrepreneur, and the interplay with my introversion.
29. My First Lesson in Business: What Flipping Burgers Taught Me About the Importance of Good People – I think this title is self explanatory.
30. Why Business Needs More Geeks – Geeks love what they do. Business needs more of that.
Like I said, this list doesn't include my top few posts of all time, but I think these are some of my better posts, and certainly these exemplify my core thought processes pretty well. It's a lot to read at once. Save it and read through it at your leisure.
