Autopilot by Elliot P.

As an entrepreneur with a growing business it is easy to spend your entire day focusing your time and energy toward moving the needle – whatever your measures of success might be. Along these lines it is easy to forget that in order to effectively link your strategy with execution, you must always be thinking about building a culture that will facilitate effectiveness, and not just mindlessly managing the next deliverable from your list of key initiatives.

Let’s be clear: Mindlessness is not a failing of cognition per se, but rather a failing of attention leading to a restricted flow or worse still, the capturing of misinformation. Sound familiar? It should, as this phenomenon diminishes our effectiveness as managers, parents, friends, and learners. If you think this concept is frivolous, think about the consequences of inattention during an important negotiation. Presence counts, and should be developed among managers and staff continually.

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George Bernard Shaw:
“…All progress depends on the
unreasonable man”

If you are anything like me, you loathe household duties. But they have to get done, so I try to use the time as constructively as possible by listening to podcasts (you don’t need a fancy player, just a computer with an internet connection and some speakers).

Recently, Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast interviewed John Elkington, Founder and Chief Entrepreneur of SustainAbility and author of The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World, along with Social Entrepreneurship Summit speaker and Managing Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, Pamela Hartigan. The two distill their observations about what makes a highly effective social entrepreneur tick, and how other business leaders can learn a few things along the way.

During this interview, they tether out three traits of social entrepreneurs.

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Reach Out by DIP

One of the things I am really passionate about is making sure that each of us takes the time to help others in their journey. Whether this is serving as a mentor for a budding entrepreneur or helping someone think through their ideas, we all can contribute to the growth of others.

That said, there are many factors that can inhibit what could be termed as direct mentorship, but, as I have alluded to in a past post, we need to expand our purview of where such opportunities can originate. But what can an emerging leader do in the absence of a mentoring figure?

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For the “read” file

There are five sources that I read regularly; for entrepreneurs and business managers alike they provide perspectives on a range of topics from current global events to understanding the intricacies of markets, to learning more about the foundational social sciences that contribute to business like sociology, psychology and economics.

This content from the world’s leading minds comes to you free of charge.

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AXS helps users understand Glaucoma

AXS Studio specializes in the art of science communication. Recently, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) launched our latest collaboration: an animated, on-line learning tool, The Glaucoma Challenge.

Now, let’s just pause a sec – I don’t know about you, but I can look back on that last bit and ask:

“On-line animations for the blind?!�

However, armed with recent CNIB “schooling,” I can now answer: You bet!

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Insights from San Fran

I just returned from a trip to San Francisco, Menlo Park/Palo Alto, and Mountain View with fellow classmates at Harvard Business School. Our small group had a fantastic opportunity to have some personal interactions with top Venture Capitalists in the area, where we were able to ask challenging questions and gain insights on the state of the industry and VC’s investment philosophies.

As a former MaRS Venture Group Associate, I wanted to share some thoughts on common messages and personal takeaways that I gathered from the trip.

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Biosign’s UFIT solution for personal health monitoring

A Workshop on Adverse Response Monitoring (WARM) catalyzed partnerships between MaRS tenant Biosign and IBM as well as with Telus with the aim of getting Biosign’s UFIT® health monitoring system to the commercial market.

Working with the IEEE, the world’s leading professional association for the advancement of technology, Biosign brought together this world-first, multi-disciplinary panel to address patient safety. This workshop launched an international initiative to find solutions for detecting and reporting adverse responses to medications, and to help optimize their efficacy.

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The dotLabâ„¢ System

On November 27, Axela (a MaRS tenant and Venture Group client) was featured along with Dr. Alex Levin from Sick Children’s Hospital on a CTV Canada AM special series, “Canadians on the Cutting Edge.”

The interview highlights Axela’s dotLabâ„¢ System which detects protein biomarkers related to Shaken Baby Syndrome in emergency rooms. These markers may also be of value in the diagnosis of other spinal and brain injuries. Axela is working with collaborators at health research facilities across North America including McGill University, Johns Hopkins, the National Institutes of Health and others to help address key diagnostic challenges in diseases like cancer and cardiology.

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We are all interconnected - but to what end?

Collaboration and social networks have become an incredible cultural phenomenon. The opportunity for the internet to bring people together and collaborate in ways that were previously impossible (or at least really inefficient) is an interesting curiosity. But, while there is definitely fun in social networking sites and social media (those of you who haven’t seen the Fatboy Slim video with Christopher Walken on YouTube are in for a treat), I continue to look for the utility and value.

So far, these sites have just been a source of entertainment and fancy for me, but at the same time interconnectedness and interdependence are shaping our world and the internet is unquestionably a major force in making this happen. People much smarter than me have been writing and speaking about this for the past couple of years. While I am convinced that interconnectedness is an incredible enabler and that it is having profound impacts in our world, I continue to struggle with finding the utility for technology transfer and the commercialization of research.

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Problems are like buried treasure.
Photo, Courtesy of DogFromSPACE

I was reading a very politically-correct article the other day in which the author suggested, “let’s focus on solutions, not problems.� It suddenly struck me that this is part of the reason for our country’s lack of achievement in innovation. We are afraid to focus on problems. In our culture, the word “problem� conjures up emotions of fear, anxiety, and panic. For myself, on the other hand, there is nothing more exciting than facing a difficult problem. Why? Problems point us in the direction of hidden opportunities. They are the “X� that marks the spot where the hidden “treasures� of your business are buried. If you choose to ignore them, you spend a lot of time (and money) “digging� for treasures that you’ll never find.

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