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Last month, from May 20-23, I had the honor of leading an intense four day workshop on Disciplined Entrepreneurship for about 80 participants who were either entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs or entrepreneurship amplifiers (i.e., educators, people running incubators/accelerators, government agencies supporting entrepreneurship). This is my third year doing it and I really enjoy it for many reasons.

As the Disciplined Entrepreneurship 24 step methodology has become more refined and robust from all the utilization it has gotten of the past five years, it has become clear to me that more and more the gating factor to success is the quality of the information utilized in executing the framework. This is Primary Market Research (PMR). If we put garbage PMR in, we will get garbage results out.

After spending three incredible sunny days in Rome, I could try to wax poetically about the history, culture, and people of this truly unique city but many books have been written about this topic by people far more qualified than I to comment on these topics, so I will not. I will focus on observations on the entrepreneurship dimension of the city.

This past week (March 20-22), I had a full immersion into the Paris entrepreneurial scene. It was highly energizing and eye-opening since my last visit. My previous visits (over two years ago now), had been quick visits to “City of Lights” – so called because it was one of the first cities to have lights due to early adoption of electricity. This early adopter mentality strangely did not apply to entrepreneurship or a translation of the first Disciplined Entrepreneurship book. It was surprising…

On March 16th and 17th, I had the good fortune to run a two-day seminar on “Introduction to Disciplined Entrepreneurship” at the University of Luxembourg. In the process of this and the following Monday, I had a chance to directly experience what was happening with entrepreneurship in the Grand Duchy of 600,000 inhabitants, or more specifically, in its dominant city, the City of Luxembourg.  These types of experiences always generate interesting data points to refine my worldview of…

Brad Feld, Fred Wilson, and Bill Gurley have impressed me on how they write so often (and there are many others). In discussing it with them, they say it really helps them process thoughts, events, and information as well as forcing them to continue to push them forward to be innovative. I have publicly applauded them and encouraged others to do the same but not done it myself.