Blog Host: Brent Toderash

Would you believe that despite being online for quite a num­ber of years now, being widely con­sid­ered a gen­uine tech-type, hav­ing run a Linux news site for sev­eral years (yes, we even got Slash­dot­ted back in the sum­mer of 2000 when it still meant some­thing) and being a part-owner of an ISP and con­sult­ing firm, it wasn’t until Jan­u­ary of 2007 that I reg­is­tered the van­ity url for this blog. Who said all the good domain names were gone?

Strate­gic Intu­ition: About This Blog

So what’s the blog about? I’ve cov­ered some of that in the first three posts, the third of which attempts to sum­ma­rize it… but to cut to the chase, Coup d’Oeil is a mil­i­tary term mean­ing some­thing like, “Power of the Glance,” an attribute ascribed to a mil­i­tary com­man­der who has the rare abil­ity to take in the field of bat­tle “at a glance” and know how to respond. Though the term is more recent, the idea is not. Also called “strate­gic intu­ition,” Sun Tzu had it, and to extend the con­cept beyond the mil­i­tary, around the same time period some 2,500 years ago, the Bible speaks of the Men of Isaachar, who “under­stood the times and knew what to do.” The abil­ity to sort the sig­nif­i­cant from the insignif­i­cant details and know what to do is inte­gral to busi­ness. And that’s what this blog is about.

Free­lance Think­ing: About Brent Toderash

Brent Toderash is a free­lance writer, thinker, strate­gist, and con­sul­tant… a true eclec­ti­cian. Prior phases of his career include gen­eral insur­ance bro­ker, hav­ing held the pro­fes­sional des­ig­na­tion of CAIB, and entre­pre­neur, co-owning an ISP and con­sult­ing firm… nei­ther of which are in the same field as his under­grad degree. In Jan­u­ary 2007 he left the “reg­u­lar” employ of the ISP and con­sult­ing firm Rainy Day, but con­tin­ues his involve­ment as a co-owner and mem­ber of the board of direc­tors. He has been writ­ing and pub­lish­ing online in var­i­ous forms since 1999, and is based in Win­nipeg, Manitoba.

A sig­nif­i­cant Rainy Day project man­aged by Brent Toderash in 2003 has been fea­tured as a case study for Indus­try Canada on suc­cess­fully deploy­ing rural broad­band Inter­net, and in con­nec­tion with var­i­ous fea­tures or indus­try news sto­ries he has given inter­views for a num­ber of pub­li­ca­tions and media out­lets, includ­ing ITBusi​ness​.ca, The Ottawa Cit­i­zen, Wi​-fiPlanet​.com, The Stein­bach Car­il­lon, The Inter­lake Spec­ta­tor, Wire­less Broad­band Busi­ness Mag­a­zine, Dec­ima Publishing’s Report on Wire­less, The Stonewall Argus, The Selkirk Jour­nal, and the Cana­dian Wire­less Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Asso­ci­a­tion (CWTA) Newslet­ter, as well as CHEX Tele­vi­sion (CTV Affil­i­ate in Peter­bor­ough Ontario), and CHVN Radio and CBC Radio One.

Brent Toderash is avail­able to work on projects of inter­est in his areas of exper­tise, and can be reached in the most typ­i­cal way by fir­ing mail in the gen­eral direc­tion of .

The dif­fer­ence: No box. Just thinking.

It’s been pop­u­lar for quite some time now to talk about “think­ing out­side the box,” a catch­phrase whose mean­ing and usage has now grown to the point of irrel­e­vance. I’ve had an issue with the term for many years, as there are times when the straight­for­ward “in-the-box” solu­tion is the best one. Why are we still so con­cerned about the box? When we reach the point of being so con­cerned to find an unortho­dox or orig­i­nal solu­tion that we miss the obvi­ous ones, we have epit­o­mized “in-the-box” think­ing in the name of try­ing to be “out­side the box.” Either way, we and the solu­tions we con­ceive are defined by the box… every­thing is stated in rela­tion to the box.

I began a few years ago to attempt a return to ignor­ing the box com­pletely. Am I propos­ing some­thing inside or out­side of the box? Who cares — the ques­tion is irrel­e­vant. Is it a good solu­tion? That’s rel­e­vant. this became a kind of mantra for me, some­thing by which all of my solu­tions can be char­ac­ter­ized. “No box. Just thinking.”