strategy+business: “A century after his death, Ernest Shackleton and his unsuccessful Antarctic expedition offer a rich lesson on how to embrace failure…You are on a journey through an inhospitable landscape. Resources are limited, and experience, although useful, is inadequate. Parts of the territory are mapped, but the land itself is shifting—places you were counting on have relocated or ceased to exist. Visibility is limited, and what you can see may not be real. Merely staying alive is a struggle, and as you move painfully toward your goal, you are conscious always of time running out. This is an apt metaphor for a high-stakes business adventure, of course, but it’s also a description of exploring Antarctica. Over the years, commentators have mined the polar expeditions of Ernest Shackleton, the famed Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer, for management lessons on topics such as the importance of hiring good people and overcoming obstacles. But the adventures of Shackleton and his men are far more complicated and interesting than any mere homilies about teamwork.”
What I Learned at Clubhouse: by Anu Atluru. “25 lessons from an early employee on product, community, go-to-market, and more.”
Arnold Kling: “Although running a business may look easy from the outside, it takes a lot of skill. Most people, whether or not they know how to code, lack the skills to run a business, especially a complex one. I think that so many complex businesses today depend on software that to be a business leader you need a sense of the software development process. You need to know what sorts of projects are easy, what sorts of projects are hard, what sorts of issues to anticipate concerning maintenance and change management, etc. And I suspect that most people who have never written code have a poor sense of how software is built and maintained.” More: “People tend to describe business success as if it were simple, as if the founder has to has to be right about only one thing. If that were the case, success would be more than 90 percent luck. In practice, I think it is usually less than 10 percent luck. This is a very important point, and too many people do not see it.”
