Gordian Knots

Friday night dinner was in Zaytinya, an eastern Mediterranean (Greek, Lebanese, Turkish) restaurant in Washington DC. Loved the food and ambience.

The basic idea behind opportunity science is that in an age of increasing competitiveness, falling barriers to entry and ever increasing business opportunities, the advantage will lie with the companies that pick the best opportunities to pursue. No big surprise there. That happens now to a large extent. The part that is interesting is that we could start to put more and more science behind this task. That could mean the field will take the next step and become a discipline unto itself, complete with college majors and whole departments at major corporations.

Don’t buy it? Think about how primitive our models for this kind of thing are today. We do a SWOT analysis and figure out ROI and then debate a little while. That’s it. Yet with increasing computer power, models borrowed from economics, biology, neuroscience, physics and sociology, opportunity scientists could potentially give structure, formalization, and predictive power to a field that now requires lots of “hunches.” Think about being able to estimate the “tipping point” of a new venture with a high degree of probability.

We are already seeing early attempts at evaluating ideas with things like Merwyn. The next step is to generate ideas as well. That too, is already starting to happen.

So the time is ripe to combine models of what people want, what they need, how they think, how they interact, what our resources are, what our budgets are, what our skills are, what our ideas are, etc., and combine it all into a formalized field of study.

Initially, opportunity scientists will have to fight the battle for credibilityt, that their field isn’t grounded enough in hard data. But as we begin to better understand and model the human mind and the way we interact in groups, the day may come when our business strategy for attacking new markets is heavily determined by an opportunity science computer program

I’m back from a long vacation in India. Spent more than three weeks in Madras (called Chennai in new parlance), the southern port city where I grew up and spent my formative years.

Back in Washington DC now…….and back to blogging..

Warren Buffet addressing a group of students: “If there’s one thing that you leave here with today, it should be this: And I’ll start with a question to get to my point. If you could pick 10% of one person in this room to own or ‘go long’ for the next 30 years, who would it be? It wouldn’t be the person with the highest IQ; it wouldn’t be the star athlete; you would look for certain other qualities… And if you had to pick one person to ’short’ for the next 30 years, who would it be? Now ask yourself why you have made those selections. If you’ve considered these questions properly, the person you’ve gone long is probably someone who is honest, courageous, and dependable; the person you’ve shorted is probably someone who is egotistical and likes to take the credit. The point is that success is mostly dependent upon elective qualities, not anything with which you are born. You can choose to be dependable or not. And it’s not easy to change, so choose correctly now. Bertrand Russell once said, ‘The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken.’ So ask yourself, ‘Who do I want to be?’ At the end of this process you should determine that the person you want to buy is yourself. You all are holding winning tickets.”