Though anecdotal, I've seen a slight rise in activity with companies looking to incubate new businesses or start-up climates within a larger company. These are challenging situations to get off the ground. Based on a mixture of consulting to a number companies in these situations and being involved with at least one of these situations as a manager within the company, here are some thoughts on winning and losing moves:

Yesterday while getting some minutes on the elliptical machine, I was re-reading George Lois' advertising book, "What's The Big Idea". Two of the stories really cracked me up, and they led to write this perspective post on lawyers, more from a startup, venture, or new business initiative point of view.

When thrust into a situation where either resources are constrained, there are competing management choices, and paths forward are unclear, I often find a consulting method of "finding and relieving the bottleneck" useful.

The following backdrop and questions apply to this part of the series of musings and open discussion on entrepreneurs and decision-making (See Part 1, Part 2,

Earlier this quarter I had an opportunity to contend for a contract product management role associated with a company that provides software to marketing professionals and intermediaries (e.g., in the agency space). At risk of oversimplifying, the software that this company provides is somewhat new in its packaged form - the technology could be consider offspring technology (new product introduction) developed via consulting projects with big brands.

The following backdrop and questions apply to this part of the series of musings and open discussion on entrepreneurs and decision-making (See Part 1, Part 2,

The following backdrop and questions apply to this part of the series of musings and open discussion on entrepreneurs and decision-making (See Part 1, Part 2,

Remembering a number of bad experiences with getting maintenance services at a car dealer, I tried to make the case to my in-laws that it would only take five minutes and ~$25/strut for two struts to fix the hatchback on my 2007 Ford Freestyle. There was likely a gas leak in one of the struts that was preventing the hatchback to stay up when I opened it. Simple fix, even for someone who knows practically nothing about cars.

The following backdrop and questions apply to this part of the series of musings and open discussion on entrepreneurs and decision-making (Part 1 here and Part 2 here. Note that there will likely be a total of six parts for this series with a recap summary at the end.):

The following backdrop and questions apply to this part of the series of musings and open discussion on entrepreneurs and decision-making (Part 1 was here):