As kyosei is both the name of our company and the fundamental philosophy on which all of our work is based, I thought I would use my next few posts to blog more specifically about kyosei, its meaning, origin, and the way that it can and is being used in business and life today.

With roots in (more…)

Recently my husband and I traveled to the heart of Silicon Valley to meet my new nephew. While for me the baby was the star attraction, my hubbie was more enthralled with the wheeling and dealing of my brother-in-law, a senior lawyer in a law firm that has assisted such tech heavy-hitters as Google and Sun Microsystems with their IPOs and acquistions.

And so, between baby coddling sessions, I managed to tear myself away from our adorable new nephew long enough to join in their candid conversations about the lessons of Silicon Valley.

Having lived in Vancouver, my brother-in-law was passionate that Vancouver has all the critical ingredients to become a booming Silicon Valley itself – yet has not developed the spark to ignite the mix. Like the San Francisco Bay area, the Lower Mainland has great universities and colleges, is a great place to live, and has a thriving economy with sophisticated investors ready to go. In spite of this, the leadership and long-term thinking have not emerged to integrate these resources sufficiently to achieve the hotbed of technological business seen in Silicon Valley.

Ultimately, the key ideas that emerged from our discussions were relevant for businesses of all sizes to thrive. Here are the top three themes:

1) Blur the Lines

In Silicon Valley, Stanford University maintains close ties with the venture capital community and encourages research and development with practical business possibilities, spawning such companies as Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Google and Yahoo!. While the mentality is changing in Canadian institutions about the many benefits (for students, businesses and society) of such collaboration, in the past these links were often discouraged due to an academic purist view that considered research tainted if it was skewed towards business spinoffs.

While scandals in the pharmaceutical industry illustrate the importance of separating research from business interests to some extent, purists often lose sight of the fact that without business-funded research, much of the life we take for granted today would not exist. Rather than advocating all-or-nothing approaches, business, government and academic leaders need to become more comfortable with diving into the gray zone and, in so doing, leverage the highest benefit for the common good.

2) Compete – Together

In a global economy, larger businesses are conscious of the economic necessity of looking beyond their borders in a literal sense. Closer to home, however, small and mid-size businesses need to stop focusing solely on developing internal skills and expertise in order to become more competitive in their industry. They must learn to adopt a wider view and identify long-term strategic alliances by asking which other organizations have a complementary mission, vision, product or service and challenging themselves to think about collaborating to maximize the strengths of all concerned.

3) Be Willing to Fail

The final thing that stood out for me about Silicon Valley was that, while there are many successes, there are even more failures. My brother-in-law had numerous stories of friends and acquaintances on their second or third attempt at startups. In fact, stemming perhaps from a ‘debugging’ mentality shared amongst truly geek entrepreneurs, business failures were considered necessary steps towards success, creating learning to be implemented in the next version – Business 3.0, perhaps?

Entrepreneurial success is not just about good ideas getting adequate funding – it requires commitment, passion and ingenuity on the part of the entrepreneurs to follow through to success. Of course there are those “lucky” ones who were in the right place at the right time, but business success still comes from a unique vision combined with the courage to persist until the dream is realized. In the end, the main source of “financing” any dream is still the currency a person holds in his or her own heart.

Andrea Jacques

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There are many different ways of gauging the price of a business for sale. Some of the more common include valuing the business based on profits, cash flow, assets or sector. But how do you ascribe a value to intangible assets such as customer goodwill, corporate culture, staff relationships, and brand, which are crucial ingredients in the lasting success of any business? (more…)

I make my living showing leaders the importance of keeping their priorities straight in both their business and their lives, so I was shocked recently to recognize how far I had allowed a current project to take over both my life and my business and cause me to lose sight of my own priorities. (more…)

What does it really take to motivate people to bring joy, along with their best effort, to work in a retail environment? Keep the following core principles in mind to remove the barriers that keep workers in every industry hovering on the distaste side of the equation. (more…)

Everyone has blind spots…. Those wonderful places where how we see ourselves is in blissful ignorance of how the rest of the world knows us to be. Blind spots also exist in organizations, often as cultural black holes of denial that threaten their very survival. Yet survive they do.

Surviving, however, is not the same as thriving.

To thrive, it is important to recognize that blind spots can undermine the integrity of even the most well-conceived brands, eroding relationships with customers and employees in the same way that one’s individual blind spots erode integrity and relationships at a personal level. (more…)

As my understanding of open-source software, such as Linux, has grown, it has given me time to ponder the lessons organizations of all sizes can take from understanding its underlying philosophy.

In lay terms, open source software gives the public free access to source code for redistribution, modification and creation of derivative works as long as any changes are made available to others to use. The speed at which this allows evolution to occur is astonishing compared to the slow pace of conventional software development in closed proprietary systems.

What is most thought provoking, however, is that open-source offerings have grown (and continue to do so) primarily through a pool of passionate volunteers who freely contribute their time to improving the source code. In the 21st century knowledge economy (where speed to market and the ability to harness the full creativity, commitment and intellectual capacity of one’s workforce has been identified as a key driver of business success and sustainability) understanding what has inspired so many to contribute so much without financial compensation bears examination. (more…)

In the early 90s I spent six months traveling throughout Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma. While I was struck by the extreme poverty and poor living conditions of the majority of people in these countries, I was also impressed by their creativity in making full use of what little they had.

Old equipment is kept running as long as possible and broken machines are scavenged for parts and recycled back into the market. Every part of an animal is used for food. While some of the things they ate challenged my western palate, I certainly admired their ability to follow the principle of “waste not, want not” to its utmost degree.

I contrast this with the five years I spent in Japan where regular dai gomi or “big garbage” days saw some streets near my home piled two feet high for a full block with ‘fridges, stoves, stereos, televisions, dishes, desks, kitchen tables, chairs and even computer equipment that was in perfect working condition. (more…)

Conflict between work and life responsibilities, while by no means a new issue, is becoming increasingly high profile as research pours in on its direct and indirect costs to organizations. A study by Duxbury and Higgins, The Report on Work-Life Conflict in Canada in the New Millennium (Duxbury and Higgins, 2003), estimates costs associated with work-life conflict to range from $4.5 to $10 billion annually. As a result, programs promoting and supporting work-life balance are on the increase.

Now I may be too much of a Type- A personality, but “balance” has never been something that excited me, so this trend led me to investigate this topic and eventually to begin writing my forthcoming book, Beyond Balance. The book will examine why balance, while part of the solution, is also a barrier to creating healthier individuals and organizations. (more…)