Nikos Moraitakis
(@moraitakis) is Vice President of Business Development at Upstream where he is responsible for mobile marketing business in Africa and the Middle East. Nikos is 33 years old, lives in Dubai and is passionate about behavioral economics, consumer psychology and game design.
There’s a lot of debate and – perhaps justifiably – a lot of desperation in the private business sector about the fortunes of the Greek economy. Regardless of each one’s political and emotional views on the matter, I think we will all be better off if we spend less time hoping that the government...
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To be creative, you must be prepared to be wrong. To make great things, you must be prepared to fail. Creativity requires the willingness to think the unthinkable, to articulate the untested, to experiment with the unknown. And you will often be wrong. Making stuff is mostly a trial error affair. In fact, error...
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Veterans of the trade will tell you that a fundamental tool for business development is information. The stereotype of the salesperson who is highly social, talks to a lot of people, listens a lot, asks many questions and knows the backgrounds of people, companies, and entire industries inside out, is because of this fact....
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Sometimes there’s no “best of both worlds”. The “middle of the road” solution is not adequate, may not even make sense. Sometimes you just have to choose one or the other. Some choices only make sense if you fully embrace them. But it’s tempting to try to build consensus. To avoid taking a stance....
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If you have a strategy then there must be some things that are not part of it. Unless of course everything is part of it, in which case it’s not much of a strategy, is it? Sid Meier famously defined a game as “a series of interesting choices”. In a world of infinite possibilities...
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Don’t try this at home: Guy: “If I gave you a million dollars, would you sleep with me?” Girl: “A million dollars is a lot of money, and you don’t look that bad, so I guess I would consider it” Guy: “Ok, since I don’t have a million dollars, would you sleep with me...
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Effective management structures are those that can be operated through people who are less than perfect. This should not need any explaining. Unless you think your employees are in fact, or can be, perfect. Isn’t it paradoxical then, that most employee assessment and development programs focus on improving people’s weaknesses? (“areas of improvement”, if...
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb shares this intriguing story in his (excellent, by the way) book The Black Swan The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those...
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