MaRS

How can you deliver a clear message?

There’s lots of information about the investor pitch (see our Entrepreneur’s Toolkit, “Elements of a pitch deck”). Building a deck is one thing — delivering the message is quite another.

I recently reconnected with an old colleague, David Doze of Pilot PMR, who has helped shape a number of key messages for my companies. With a little liquid encouragement, I convinced him to help package a program for some my early-stage clients: “Sound Bites for Success.”

In our room of 12 CEO’s, David lamented that “The world does not need more information, more fine print or more arguments – leaders need to take the complex and make it digestible.”

Here, his three guiding principles of messaging:

Time for a change? Time to plan

Thinking about joining a new start-up this year? A friend of mine recently contacted me for some assistance. She’d been promoted to the top of her company and would be President and CEO in a couple of weeks. “Do you have any advice?”

“You bet! You’ll need to build that 99 Day Plan for your first quarter on the job. It’s one of the most valuable things  you can do to maximize the start of your new role.” 99-Day Plans are based on the theory that, in the first ninety-nine days of a new assignment, an individual will be consuming more value from the organization then they are able to contribute. My two favourite books on the topic “The First 90 Days” (Watkins) and “You’re in Charge, Now What?” (Neff & Citrin). Some of the key principals follow.

3D everywhere at CES 2010

This year I had the good fortune of being able to get out to the 2010 International CES, the world’s largest tradeshow for consumer technology. Set amidst the expansive Las Vegas Convention Center, some 20,000 new products are on show to a global audience of geeks, buyers, analysts and media luminaries. While one gets a little toxic immersing oneself in four days of meetings, conference sessions and tradeshow booths, this year did not disappoint. A lot of “stuff” got launched this year, from 3D technology, mobile DTV, tablets, netbooks, eReaders, health apps, connected TVs, embedded Internet technologies and new green technologies. Here’s some ramblings (and rants) that capture some of the technologies and trends that caught my attention.

What should come out of COP15 ?

As the rhetoric at Copenhagen heats up, all of us in the cleantech space hope for some clear breakthroughs: meaningful and binding targets, funding support for the developing world to adopt clean technologies (which rich countries sell, by the way, so it’s not exactly charity), clear price signals on carbon emissions, an acknowledgment that the political targets should match the scientific reality and so on. Those macroeconomic conditions will pave the way for the third industrial revolution – a low carbon economy (the first two having been based on coal and oil).

But in the meantime, cleantech entrepreneurs around the world are simply getting on with the job – they innovate and try to bring economic value to technologies that help us live in a sustainable manner.  MaRS is home to many of those entrepreneurs:

Minato Mirai, Yokohama, BIO Japan 2009

In October I was in Yokohama to attend BIO Japan 2009 – a major Japanese life sciences partnering event.  This was my second visit to BIO Japan.

The event attracted 15,000 visitors over three days, drawn mostly from major Japanese pharma companies and biotechs and also a sizeable contingent from Western and Asian small-to-medium sized companies and institutions.