Different investor types have different momentum tolerances. VC’s have the shortest (<1y) followed by IPO shareholders (<2y) and the patient money is in incumbent businesses buying new technology. When they buy a disruption business, it's a protection strategy. They don't like to cannibalise their old technology revenue streams, so they don't mind a slow change that they can control.

I’ve read The Power of Less by Leo Babauta twice now. It really cuts to the point of simplicity and the impact on productivity it can cause. Dropping a simplicity nuke into your life/business could have a big impact.

The crux of the book is identify the essential and eliminate the rest. The idea being that you are essentially knocking off the most important things first on your list and so on. Many people and organisations run with dozens of projects, tasks or work in parallel. Babauta argues for a more serial approach which I agree with. In many ways this is very similar to using Pareto’s principal to help you decide what to work on next in your projects or life that will cause the biggest impact for the smallest use of available resource. This approach also allows you to operate in a state of flow and actively tries to remove the interruption tax that causes much of the poor productivity you can see in office environments.

Image credit: Smemon

One of the things I get to do on trips is think about decisions I need to make. It’s easiest away from home. Having four kids and a busy life causes a huge amount of unclear head chatter in my thinking. Some quiet time to think is scarce.

Thinking results in good choices, and that is the key to business. A friend reminded me of this recently, and as he said it I new it but like many things, even the important stuff, it was tucked way under a sheet in the back of my mental attic of ideas.

In business it’s not funding, team size, location, or any of these factors. They are influencers but not the dominent cause of success. It’s about making the right choices. Understanding that choices are options in the literal financial market sense of the word is an important distinction you can make. A choice is a “right” that you own. So making a choice is “exercising” an option you own and it will have a payoff good or bad, just like options do. Good choices ends with good results, so investing time in thinking before making them is worthwhile.

In what seems to be an accidental tradition in the Lehmann family we took our 4th newborn child to a Wallabies v All Blacks Bledisloe on Friday night. He slept through the whole event.

I always love going to these games. I’m a wallabies fan obviously, but of all the international teams, I admire the All Blacks team the most. I love the Harka, the type of game they play, they are simply a brilliant team.

Recently our company Saasu did a deal with an NZ company called Acclipse and just like my experience dealing with Kiwi’s at Deutsche, same applies here. Acclipse is full of really good people. NZ really does produce quality.

• Automation is more than machines doing work for you. It’s about MACHINES and HUMANS following RULES religiously.
• Keeping multiple todo lists is very bad. That would then be a list of lists = FAIL. One work list and one personal list is plenty.
• Coincidental results are when you shift your approach to a task in such a way that it causes other tasks to be completed or progressed.
• Relying on memory = FAIL. Write down enough that you can act on. Do you write down phone numbers and later look at them in mystery?
• A few big theme based spreadsheets with more tabs trumps lots of single tab spreadsheets.
• Search your email to find emails don’t file them. Mind shift » Search is in effect treating every piece of text in an email as a folder/label.
• I need one many of these (pictured)

Apple shops are a good example. They sell coolness. The stuff they sell implies you’re not cool if you don’t have it. You almost feel guilty if you don’t have their cool stuff. Maybe that’s just me?

We think of traditional monopolies as being about a business having some unique advantage or forming some sort of cartel to dominate a market. While most economies have mechanisms to prevent this they equally create what I call systemic monopolies through their solutions and also by the academically simplistic view on what sets prices of products and services in a capitalist system.

I believe Systemic Monopolies tend to exist where there are only a few key players and many very small players (the residual having near zero influence). They also exist where it seems they have competition but when you look at barriers consumers face to buying products from their competitors they are actually in a situational or localised monopoly.

So what are some examples and what trait(s) lead to the effect of a monopoly even though in the strict sense of the definition there isn’t one. Let’s call them Systemic Monopolies:

Mega Shopping Centres

Suburban locations can’t usually support multiple large shopping centers for consumers to choose between. You can only have one large Westfield or Centro shopping center as an example. Accordingly you get a localized monopoly situation where the time and financial cost of travel introduces a barrier sufficient to cause only shopping at one major location or center to be viable. As you get lower down the socioeconomic curve this barrier gets even larger on a relative basis.

Local councils enhance this effect, possibly not intentionally, by dis-allowing the development of alternatives due to their ability to deny projects and business ideas on the grounds of ensuring local economic stability. An example might be disallowing approval to build too many child care centres in a suburb.

Banks

Pre-agreed or regulated transfer pricing fees between banks exist to compensate banks when customers use services such as ATM’s that belong to the other bank. When you use another banks ATM, your bank gets charged a fee. They then charge you. The result is the system tends toward a price equilibrium for the product. Quite standard ATM fees in this case. So the effect is you have no choice, just one choice in fact, "the fee system". Each banks prices tend to replicate each other over time or the differences are so small that the cost of changing bank doesn’t allow for any choice or opportunistic consumer behavior around price.

There is also tendency for new bank entrants not to compete on price because equity markets will punish their stock price accordingly. This syndrome is about conformity to peer group pricing levels. Not in a cartel manner, but more in a "I don’t dare to be different" kind of way. Much like how a school girl won’t wear anything to different to her friends at a party. Consistent bank pricing and product behavior relative to their competitors equates to a stable stock price. As a bank you are encouraged by the market not to compete aggressively on price.

None of this is good for consumers

I think the systems of government, regulation and markets cause these Systemic Monopolies to occur. Governments at all levels need to pull themselves out of the monopoly dark ages and look more closely at Systemic Monopoly situations and attempt to prevent them. Councils should reinvigorate the "High Street" shopping strip, farmers markets and other choices to compete with the Westfields, AMP’s and Centro’s of the world.

There just doesn’t seem to be enough choice in some situations.

Photo: NatalieMaynor

Personally I can switch off from tech for about a week but that is about as long as I can handle going dark (as Geeks call it).

Here’s 7 reasons supporting an argument for staying connected:

1. You’re the tech guy/gal
You can’t avoid tech anyway because someone is going to get a geeky present for Christmas and you are going to have to get it working for them on their outdated Windows Me PC.

2. You just love it, it’s like a hobby anyway.
If tech is your passion in life then taking a break from it may not be a great holiday for you. Be careful not to confuse Passion with addiction. Addiction is more of a love-hate relationship to something while passion is pure love-love. Passion makes people very happy.

3. Your customers might not like it.
I confess to have at least one unhappy customer (that I know off) this Christmas because they couldn’t personally reach me. I make myself far more available to customers than most people in my position. I make no excuse, I needed a break. It’s a personal choice and there is a personal brand cost attached.

4. You could break your flow (your work mojo).
Flow is that space you get in where you can operate really quickly and effectively almost without thought. Martial arts experts, artists, writers, coders are typical environments where flow can be achieved. Stopping breaks your flow and it can be hard to regain it without a lot of Red Bulls and caffeine (in my industry at least).

5. Avoiding the e-mail buildup.
When I take holidays I find that the buildup of e-mail is overwhelming on return. You could adopt an email bankruptcy method to deal with this (I don’t have the guts to do it). If the size of your email inbox generally matches the size of your peptic ulcer then maybe it’s a good thing to keep the inbox small.

6. Avoiding "behind anxiety" can keep you happy.
When I take holidays I find that the buildup of work-flow, thinking and decision making that needs to be done is huge. While you think about your work constantly then you aren’t really on holidays. You’re not present. Your little voice in your head is busy chatting to yourself about what you are really committed to mentally. Keeping digitally connected, if only for half an hour per day can release that mind energy into e-mail, your blog and the like.

7. Work and play are the same thing to you.
Why does your life need to be separated into groupings like work, play, tech, art, family etc. Can’t they just be collapsed into one if you can manage it. I personally love the web, blogging, digital photography and to me they all cross over to my personal life. My digital life enhances my personal life. I regard technology being a part of me and my existence, not separate to it.

Top Web 2.0 Teams would be the article I’d love to see. I wish they had mentioned Jusa who was instrumental in the last 5 years to get us to where we are today. He’s the young brains behind our now quite old company. He’s created the engineered application that Saasu has become. There is always more behind the success than the cliché entrepreneur. Our team who built Saasu which also included Kas, Pete, Emma, Dympna, Nik, John and Will all caused the success.