TrustDecisions: A "New" Innovative Future...

During this “Holy Week” in the USA, what shall you have learned about your new future?

What decisions have you recently made, that will change your life forever?

Before you were mature enough to truly understand what “Trust” means in the course of your relationships, you relied on someones tone of voice, their behavior and perhaps even a smile.

As time goes on and you immerse yourself in exponential new experiences, meet new people and endure real life challenges, your definition of “Trust” will gradually change:

• Every transaction creating wealth first requires an affirmative decision to trust.
• Building trust creates new wealth.
• Sustaining trust creates recurring wealth.
• Achieving trust superior to your competition achieves market dominance.
• Leadership rises (or falls) based on trust (or the absence of trust).

Jeffrey Ritter - Page 35 - Achieving Digital Trust

“Trust Decisions” are now your focus:

Trust decisions are the most complex computations possible. Yet trust decisions have consistency, design, and structure that are possible to visualize and express with remarkable congruity, regardless of the complexity of the variables or the time during which a trust decision must be completed.

Trust decisions, properly executed, take account of the circumstances in which you are about to act; the qualities of the person, thing, or information on which you intend to rely; and the value you intend to invest, and realize, from giving your trust.

Jeffrey Ritter - Page 50 - Achieving Digital Trust

Now after your proactive actions, how will you proceed in pursuit of your latest

“TrustDecisions" ?

Your new future and true destiny shall reveal itself in the days and years ahead of you.

You shall continuously pursue it with the following innovation process:

• Map / Target
• Sketch / Solution
• Decide
• Prototype

Learn and repeat this process in order to create new innovative wealth…both personally and professionally!

Godspeed…

AI Start-Ups: Dot-com "Lessons Learned"...

Remember when we used to visit the “Chill-Out” room after work for some Foosball, Billiards or just having a few beers.

You could just feel the enthusiasm, anticipation and collaboration in the air with our growing Team of Technologists, Analysts, Marketing & Business Professionals.

It was the summer of 1999 in Reston, VA outside the United States capital 30 minutes and ten minutes to Dulles International (IAD).

The Internet was only a few years old and the “Dot Com” revolution was attracting the Venture Capitalists (VCs) by the dozens.

Our idea was to become the USA “One-Stop” shop on the exploding Net to compare mobile phones with relevant telecom carriers plans and with a few clicks have the box on the way via FedEx or UPS. We named it “Simplexity”.

There were long hours, in and out of our low profile modern office building at 11600 Sunrise Valley Drive.

The buzz every early morning and late evening was that mobile phones were going to get much smarter, with increased processing power, storage and displays. There was already government standards on only using a “Blackberry” for sensitive work.

As January 2000 approached, we had already outgrown our office space and moved to a much larger multi-floor space closer to IAD in Herndon off the 267 Dulles Access Road.

At the height of our growth change was in the wind and our equity shares were ready to cash in as new management was hired to take the next stage of growth.

Looking back on those early Dot Com days reminds us of what we had learned especially as the new AI era in 2025 consumes our technology and VC bandwidth.

Developing prototypes and new business models is every entrepreneurs dream to then become the next “Unicorn”.

Key Lessons Learned:

• Growing your firm with the right technology and innovation will require more time “Out-of-the-Building” then you may anticipate.
• The Trusted Relationships that you built in the beginning will be tested by the new investors and Board Members who think they know more than the Founders.
• Your ambitions and future success could depend on your clairvoyance on the timing of your own exit from the company.
• Never under estimate the behaviors possible by another human when it comes to real competition in the work place.
• The AI era will no doubt see the same kind of actions and results as we witnessed in Northern Virginia during the“Dot-com bubble”.

AI innovation is far from the end and yet the companies formed today, may not even exist in three years.

Contribute your best now, make new lasting relationships and never forget your fun times in the “Chill-out” room…

Starfish: A Community of Resilience…

When is the last time you were in an environment where trust was implicit? A place where the people you were working along side, shared a unity of purpose and a single mission.

Once you experience this, it is forever engraved in your mind and felt deep in your soul.

A "Starfish Community," walking together with such a high degree of mutual trust, it will endure and remain resilient against all Operational Risks that may be encountered.

Enabled by the wisdom and thinking from Rod Beckstrom and Ori Brafman's book "Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations", the "Starfish Community" is growing rapidly across the globe.

A group of decentralized networks that are able to work without hesitancy and with moral courage. It does not matter if the model is used on the battlefield or in business, the desired outcomes are the same.

The ability for the Starfish Community to evolve, adapt and to consistently execute against its agreed upon mission manifests itself in terrorist acts and simultaneously in humanitarian and disaster response.

The ability for the human race to at one moment be so evil and at the same moment so forgiving and good, will continue to amaze us all.

The business world evolves around us with mergers and acquisitions, incidents of fraud and corruption while a silent and clandestine army of cyber warriors wage conflict on our critical infrastructure and copy or steal our intellectual assets.

The ability for the "Starfish Community" to survive in the virtual environment of the Internet is no different than the cities of Amman or Washington, DC.

This is why Wikipedia and other open source projects are able to continuously adapt, grow and survive the threats or vulnerabilities to this resilient and self-healing network.

A crisis appears in your business only when you are unable to adapt and withstand the impact of the virtual or physical forces thrust upon you.

"Whether it is the economic well being of the U.S. or the privacy laws in Europe. The shock wave of a VBIED or Insider Threat."

Your organization could reach an Operational Risk crisis state, if you have not embraced the architecture of the "Starfish Community". Learn from the best on how to withstand the test of time and all that humanity has in store for us.

And to all of those who are on the front lines of crisis everyday. God Speed. You know who you are.