Author Archives: flybrand1976

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About flybrand1976

Find me on twitter @flybrand.

CrossFit is for the Cheap and Lazy (Like Me)

CrossFit entered my life two years ago while working as an advisor with The Startup Factory to a health metrics company that was focused on the space.  If you are working as an adviser, then you should at least understand the … Continue reading

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Seven Red Lines (3): Anderson the Expert’s Failings

Anderson the Expert is in a tough spot, his value as an expert wasn’t well defended, but he doesn’t do very much to help himself out.  Stuck in a meeting with a customer who is uncertain of their goals, a … Continue reading

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Seven Red Lines (2): Technical Sales Meeting Mistakes

The biggest mistake made by the vendor involved in the Seven Red Lines / “The Expert” video is that from a strategic standpoint, they are failing to defend their technical resources.  However, there are a series of other mistakes that … Continue reading

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Fraud in Industrial Technologies

GigaOm’s article on green energy snake oil highlights the challenges faced by investors in any industrial technology.  We’re not investors, but over the past six years of applying our process and equipment in this industrial technology space, we have certainly seen many unusual … Continue reading

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Seven Red Lines (1): Defend Your Technical Resources

Working with the world leaders in filtration and technical fabrics we get all kinds of inquiries that sound surprisingly similar to the meeting that Anderson the Expert sits through.  Requests aren’t fully thought through, the vocabulary of the technical needs … Continue reading

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Seven Red Lines (aka “The Expert”): The Transcript

[If dealing with absurd situations like those outlined in this hysterical sketch is part of your work life – learn about how to deal with them better following Goldratt’s Major Concepts or by reading this Chapter by Chapter summary of … Continue reading

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Personnel Strategies & Revolutionary War

O’Shaughnessy’s The Men Who Lost America (21 hours) follows the Revolutionary War theme and contains two great personnel stories; the value of concentrating a team and managing a team’s utilization. The book is a series of biographies beginning with King George III … Continue reading

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The Breeze iOS App for iPhone 5s is Great

The Breeze iOS app by RunKeeper is amazing and very disruptive towards the personal pedometer / intelligent fitness tracker space within wearables. Software Only = No New Hardware I’ve looked at FitBit and other devices many times.  My wife has … Continue reading

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Doing the Math: Munitions & Nonwovens Production

Running numbers is crucial to understanding where you are with a new technology, especially if it is a physical product or tied to heavy industry.  Even if you’ve only got three numbers in that initial .xls sheet, your ability to … Continue reading

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Policy and Innovation History (Radar, Manhattan Project and Apollo)

Innovation is a newborn baby that politicians love to kiss – regions and municipalities want more of it, but are uncertain of how to proceed.  Metrics are challenging – for the politician and bureaucrat it isn’t clear whether they should … Continue reading

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