Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 103

In entrepreneurship courses around the world one of the first things that they teach you is to find a problem that your business can solve. We all have problems, so there should be plenty of inspiration. And no doubt, there are many successful businesses that start with this simple question in mind. But how often do they ask if the problems they are solving are big enough?

This weekend I read an article about a fascinating experiment in San Francisco to get panhandlers off the street. The cit...

One of the most popular forms of content creation today is interviews ... but great interviews take a lot more than just coming up with a list of questions. The sad fact is, not everyone who creates interviews to post online is actually good at doing them. So you might wonder, what do the people who ARE really good at it already know?

Over the last month I've done over 30 interviews as part of launching Likeonomics (that's more than one a day). Across that time, I've done everything from answ...

Most of us have a love affair with the big idea. We memorialize and romanticize it. We attend workshops or read books to learn how to come up with it. And the celebrate the achievements of anyone who has had one. Yet for all of our focus on this big idea, perhaps there is something even more fundamental that powers real world changing ideas.

The Case Foundation thinks so, and many of their peer foundations do as well. Foundations are one group that don't generally get recognized enough for th...

Someone recently asked me to guess how many events I had spoken at in the last 3 years. I honestly can't remember ... and I'm not saying that to try and impress you. The fact is, in the last three years, I have participated in easily more than a hundred corporate events of all types. Some are internal seminars, while others are larger scale annual events or conferences. I've been invited to speak at everything from workshops for the military to networking events for young professionals. The t...

NOTE: This is an excerpt from Chapter 8 of my new book Likeonomics all about Timing, the 2nd principle of Likeonomics. I hope you enjoy it!

In 1855, a Scottish clergyman named James Gall had an idea that should have changed every map ever created, but didn’t. It was four years before Charles Darwin would publish his Origin of Species, and Gall was presenting his world-changing idea at a Glasgow meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The world he lived in had long...

NOTE:This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of mynew book Likeonomicsall about Simplicity, the 4th principle of Likeonomics. I hope you enjoy it!

Annetta Cheek is a 25-year veteran of the federal government who now runs a nonprofit called the Center for Plain Language. There has never been a more important time for the Center to exist. ‘‘When you’re supposed to be a democracy, and people don’t even understand what government is doing, that’s a problem,’’ Cheek says. This is not just an American p...

NOTE: This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of my new book Likeonomics all about Unselfishness, the 3rd principle of Likeonomics. I hope you enjoy it!

The biggest clue that Jim Sinegal is not your ordinary CEO came in an article in The Seattle Times a few months before his retirement. The headline read: ‘‘Jim Sinegal takes pay cut in last year as Costco CEO.’’

If that seems like an extraordinary thing for a CEO to do, it’s not all that makes Sinegal and the members-only warehouse retailer Costco...

NOTE: This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of my new book Likeonomics. I hope you enjoy it!

Sometimes making a big statement is the only way to break through the noise. We often describe things in terms of love and hate, but there is a third and more powerful category that explains how most of us act when it comes to the vast majority of issues in the world—indifference.

It is impossible to care about everything. Things like irrelevant products and over-the-top sales people are easy to tune out....

NOTE: This is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of my new book Likeonomics. I hope you enjoy it!

The truth is more important than the facts.

—Frank Lloyd Wright

Always tell the truth. That way, you don’t have to remember what you said.

—Mark Twain

Phil Donahue didn’t know it yet, but his days were numbered. His self-titled Phil Donahue Show had been nationally syndicated since 1970, and by 1984 he had risen to become the undisputed king of daytime television, watched by millions every day.

That year,...

NOTE FROM ROHIT: Likeonomics is now AVAILABLE - if you read my previous post and decided to wait to buy it because I asked you to, thank you!!

Please purchase your copy of Likeonomics RIGHT NOW!

About four months ago I was sitting at home during an unseasonably warm evening in late January. It was the night of the State of the Union address, and was feeling that unshakeable mixture of happiness and sadness that happens usually on the last day of an amazing vacation. That day I had just deliv...