Bliss is: Never needing to ask directions again

I'm sitting in my new favorite airport lounge - the Virgin lounge in JFK (flying SAA from NYC to Cape Town). I have to say that Virgin really know how to do this pampering luxury thing well. Anyway, this lounge isn't the only thing that has impressed me recently.

One of my clients has recently acquired a very large section of real estate (focus on estate here - a pun for insiders) in mid-town Manhattan. Having spent the better part of the last 6 years in and around New York, I figured that I'd be able to find my way there for an 11am meeting with no problem. As fate would have it also had a colleague (new to Manhattan) in tow so the dent to my pride when we got a little lost (it was only by 100m and I did ask for directions pretty much immediately...) was all the more pronounced. This time Google Maps didn't help.

Well move aside Google, I have discovered (thanks to Mike C - the person I was meeting) HopStop and I'm not looking back. This neat tool calculates the best route from one place in a city to another, using bus, subway, walking etc. A boon for people like me who end up meeting clients and friends scattered across different cities.

Now I just need to find the same thing for London (Streetmap is getting a little outdated and I'm not even going to start on the TfL site!).

How big is too big (or how fast is too fast)?

A question that I am asked quite frequently is how big do I want Open Box to be and how fast do I want to get there?

We have been lucky – we have been in the very fortunate position of being able to decide for ourselves what we want to do and how we want to do it. This applies to our growth.

We have also been lucky in that we have always been successful – or at least my short-hand definition of being successful (having really great, dedicated, people who liking working together, working on projects for good clients, with solid revenues, which in turn support the continuation of good people working with good clients). As a result I have been quick to point out that we haven’t had to grow to be successful (it isn’t part of my measure of success). This has left us with the opportunity to grow only where it makes sense and where our clients need us to.

I read recently that McKinsey, which holds itself out as one of the world’s leading repositories of knowledge on how to manage a business, say that they will never grow their company by more than 25% per year because otherwise it is just too hard to transmit the corporate culture. Obviously this isn’t a helpful guideline when you’re a 5 person start-up – doubling in size is not a difficult thing to do in 12 months – McKinsey is certainly not at that stage. But for companies that are no longer 5 person start-ups (and who are growing fast), it does beg the question: “What do you know that McKinsey doesn’t?” or perhaps the better question is: “What does McKinsey know that you don’t?” It does also highlight a challenging aspect of growth that starts to potentially have an affect on my definition of success – that of the culture of the company not being transmitted.

What all this does clearly indicate is that every company is like every individual – they may share some common high level similarities but no two are the same and therefore it is dangerous to assume what works for one will work for another, which brings me to my answer: It depends…….

Quote of the Week

I’ve been reading a great book recently (Founders at Work – highly recommended). In one of the interviews, a founder says that once his company started he was largely driven not by the possible success, fame or money, but rather the unthinkable possibility of failure. Upon the buy-out of his company (for many millions) the over-powering feeling was relief (that he hadn’t messed it up).

Coming from one of the success stories of our time, these are sobering words for an entrepreneur indeed.

Bikes and Corners

So, here I am, sitting in the office on a Thursday evening. Why you may ask? Well it is not that I have one of my usual evening conference calls – those are all done (got to love daylight saving and the fact that it means that I’m 1 hour closer to US East Coast). No, I’m here because some idiot didn’t realize that you can’t take a 90 degree corner at 50km/hr + on a bicycle.

Let me explain. On Sunday I joined 35,000 others in riding The Argus, a cycle 109km race around the Cape Peninsular. It is pretty spectacular – you head over 4 mountain passes, riding most of the race next to the sea. But, as I’m sure you can imagine, 35,000 people anywhere makes it pretty crowded. I was fortunate enough to be “seeded” which meant I got an earlier start and which meant that I was aiming for a decent finishing time. All was going well until about 3kms from the finish and this idiot careered past me and then into the safety bales. Unfortunately (for him and me) he ended up lying (with parts of his bike) across the road in front of me. The decision was: person or bike. I chose bike. The end result was a rapid greeting of the road, gutter and pavement. Amazingly my bike was ok but to add insult to injury (literally) I also got a flat. I still finished in a decent time but…… it could have been so much better (and I could be sailing instead of gingerly using my leg and arm)….

The good news is that my incident was the worst of all my colleagues and friends that did the race (unless of course if you include the case of sunburn that our supporters on the route ended with) and I should be ok for a mountain bike on this weekend.

What's in a Name?

After having sat on the sidelines for, shall we say a while, I finally took the plunge and set this blog up. The actual process of doing this is really easy, that is until I came to the url...... now I know just how many blogs are out there (millions), as every name I could think of (that had some sort of relevance, or not) was taken! Ah well, I think that I finally got it nailed!