I just left a comment on John Jantsch’s excellent Duct Tape Marketing blog, an interesting post titled Sometimes You’ve Got to Burn the Boats. John is recommending building brinkmanship deadlines into your marketing *gulp*. I’ve done it but I don’t want to write about it. It’s something like managing to make it across a rickety burning falling bridge — you don’t want to call back to others to follow you, for fear of watching them not make it and fall.
What I do want to write about is the late Adam Osborne, founder of Osborne Computers, writer, columnist, and inspiration to a generation of computer writers turned entrepreneurs.
I had the privilege of dealing with Adam Osborne a few times during the early Silicon Valley days. Two of his sayings come to mind:
- "Adequate is good enough," he said, more than once. He was talking about product development and technology business. "Ship it."
- He also espoused what he liked to call the Adam Osborne Trade Show Theory of Productivity, which was, in detail: "80% of the GDP is finished the night before the trade show opens."
— Tim