Seth says

Seth Godin has his 1002 post today and provides this advice:

1. Make something worth making.
2. Sell something worth talking about.
3. Believe in what you do because you may have to do it for a long time before it catches on.
4. Don't listen to the first people who give you feedback.
5. Don't give up. Not for a while, anyway.

Good advice.

What do you think?

smart glasses - a challenge

From sonjab over at http://www.tmtd.biz/2005/09/28/smart-glasses/ comes this interesting posting on the development of some smart glasses.

This invention describes devices and methods that can help people process images and text. More specifically, it can simplify text for those who may have a learning disability, assist individuals with color blindness, and enable a person to see translated language. All of this is accomplished with glasses or goggles that actually transform the content that an individual sees.

“I was in Haifa for work and had a hard time finding my way around because I could not read the street signs,” said Sorensen, one of the inventors. “Something of a science fiction fan, it occurred to me that a simple combination of a number of technologies that IBM was working on could be used to solve this very real problem.”

Now, this sounds like synergy to me!

What's next?

If you had the magic wand that could create something, what would you create?

What problem would you solve?

Dignity is deadly - Paul Graham

Kathy Sierra writing at Creating Passionate Users has another excellent posting about a talk by Paul Graham that she heard recently.

My head was already spinning by bullet point six, but the one simple thing that stuck in my head was "dignity is deadly." Specifically this thought (I'm paraphrasing):

When you evolve out of start-up mode and start worrying about
being professional and dignified, you only lose capabilities. You don't add anything... you only take away. Dignity is deadly.

Read the whole thing and let's talk about this. I think one needs to walk the fine line here.

There are start up behaviors, and there are corporate behaviors.

Or is there just an evolving business behavior?

What do you think?

The Long Tail Analogy Raises a Question

From Chris Anderson writing at The Long Tail comes this excellent explanation by way of an analogy on what the long tail is and how it is used.

Read the whole thing.
Don't worry it is short and well written.
Well worth a few minutes.

Now, we are living along the Long Tail.
How do we use this info?
What can this do to help our own individual and group goals?

Should we always use the highest words in the count (read: hit or tag) list to ensure that we come up when looked for?

Or do we just go about our business and let the chips fall where they may?

What would you do?

Our Life in the Their Hands

I spend a lot of my time talking to and working with Family Doctors and Hospital Doctors here in the United Kingdom. The essence of my business is healthcare.

I just wanted to share how impressed I am with the commitment and conscientiousness of doctors. They sometime get bad press

Part of my work at the moment is to assist in a major UK National project on ‘assessment'appraisal’ of doctors by their colleagues and by their patients.

This has been bought about largely by concerns following the case of Harold Shipman, who killed 200 or more of his patients – in his time as a Family Doctor. In a nutshell no individual and no agency seemed able to alert the appropriate authorities to any suspicions about what was going on.

I spent 35 years as a manager in healthcare until I became a freelance healthcare consultant 10 months ago and I have worked with hundreds of doctors.

I am convinced that at least 98% of doctors I have known are hard working, caring and patient centred practitioners who are altruistic in their career aspirations.

The awesome responsibility that society has given to doctors brings with it many personal challenges for those doctors and many responsibilities for us as patients whose lives are often given over to the care of doctors.

Of course we have to find secure and robust methods of appraising doctors effectively to prevent the sort of Shipman incident ever happening again.

At the same time we have to make sure all doctors are not ‘labeled’ as 'another Dr Shipman' when the reality is that almost all doctors I have known are wonderful caring people just trying to help their patients at times of great need.

One of my closest colleagues - a Family Doctor - put it this way.

“Harold Shipman was first of all a murderer and secondly a family doctor. Don't label us all in the same way."

Innovation - Definition Discussion

Excellent posting over at CPH127 by Niti Bhan:

"Yesterday I attended a conversation on innovation hosted by MIG at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. It was a small informal gathering, and Victor Lombardi had kindly invited me to join the discussion. It was kicked off by Scott Hirsch, a principal of MIG with a definition of innovation he had found on the web. I'd link to it, I think it's wikipedia but as there was no source given I'm not wholly sure. This is what he used,

Innovation: An implementation of a new or significantly improved idea, good, service, process or practice intended to be useful. [ I would add the words revenue or profit in there, for the business context, else why innovate?] "

This is a good start and I liked how Harry Max from Dreamworks Animation revealed that he has trouble defining the word. He listed four things that innovation is not:

Reacting - Innovation wasn't reacting, that is, responding to changes in technology or the market
Dreaming - Innovation was not dreaming, that is, envisioning a better future as dreaming was not time dependent but free floating.
Planning - Innovation was not planning, as that was nothing more than structured dreaming, or creating a road map to achieve a goal or get somewhere
Designing - Innovation was not designing, as designing is making an idea or concept tangible, solving a problem or making something better.

He also listed five things that innovation should take advantage of from Improv

Trust.
Listening & Self-Awareness
Accepting and making offers (Yes, And...)
Moving into action with full commitment
Staying nimble

For the full posting read here.

Pressed to come up with my own definition of innovation, I believe I would have started with one or more of the items that Harry tosses out, so I would have had to go back to the drawing board.

With a little luck, reflecting upon the good things that have come from working in a group, I should have come close to Harry's second listing.

Then if I had not already, I would have turned to some associates and asked for help.

What do you think? Can you help to improve upon the definition for innovation?

Bringing Good Insights to Life

Phil Dusenberry, the BBDO marketing genius, provides some insights from his new book in the September 2005 issue of FastCompany Magazine.

He highlights the following points:

1 - Be really tough on the work
2 - Never let them hear you bitch and moan
3 - Judge an insight on its merits
4 - Don't compete with your people
5 - Protect insights from their enemies
6 - Let your client own your best insights

As I have mentioned previously, I am an environmentalist. I believe in creating a positive environment to nurture cooperation, learning, and life in general. Phil's second point hits right on this mark.

When people hear you complain, they take it as permission to complain, too. Whatever misgivings you have about a client or a superior, keep them to yourself. Complaining deflates morale, makes you look weak, and creates an environment that breeds negativity like a contagion.

Carefully phrase what you say. Negativity grows quickly.

Focus on the positive.

There is much we have to do but many happy hands will make for light work on the task before us.

High Expectations = Success

This article from the Boston Sunday Globe (9/4/05) (free registration required) makes some very good points about dealing with teenagers. I would suggest that these same points can be applied to others with equal validity.

In an interview with Globe correspondent Luis Andres Henao, Susan Rodgerson spoke about her work to empower youths through jobs and art education and was quoted as saying:

"... I believe that we have to have the highest expectations for young people. We have to believe that young people can give you 100 percent..."

Expectations are so crucial to determining success. What do you expect? What you expect you'll think about. Your thoughts will help determine your actions. Your actions will determine the outcome.

If you avoid the little voices of the gremlins that can distract, decieve, distort, etc... You will succeed.

Now, the major caveat here is that the expectations must be somewhat realistic. Yes, in my 51 year old body, I am not going to set a world record in the 400M run. In my prime, it was not possible. I just did not have those genes. But within that harsh reality, there is still a world of progress. There are still personal records to work towards.

The sports/athletic analogy is an easy one to grasp. It is more difficult to talk about work situations in the same way. Gee will this spreadsheet analysis convince them that this deal is the best ever? But the concept is the same.

What expectations do you have of yourself?

What expectations do you have of others?

If they are not high (but within the bounds of reality) expectations, I suggest you go back and think about readjusting them.


BTW - Congratulations to Susan and the others who are assisting in making her program a success. We need more of this.

Reading & seizing

From the September issue of FastCompany I find this timely article by Bill Breen on leadership. (Bold is mine for emphasis)

What are the elements of this alloy we call "leadership"? Certainly, they include vision and integrity, perseverance and courage, a hunger for innovation, and a willingness to take risks. But in building their list of the top business leaders of the past century, Harvard Business School professors Anthony J. Mayo and Nitin Nohria have unearthed an immutable attribute that's shared by all of the giants of business: They had an innate ability to read the forces that shaped the times in which they lived -- and to seize on the resulting opportunities.

The article continues to identify three types of leaders: the entreprenuer, the manager, and the charismatic leader. I particular I found the story of C W Post enlightening. I grew up eating some Post cereals. I did not know the connection.

... Post's real genius lay in his ability to sense that a new, national consumer was emerging in America. He saw that as the nation was becoming increasingly industrialized -- as women entered the workforce and families spent more time on the job -- time itself was becoming increasingly valuable. People were willing to pay for convenience.

Post also seized on publications such as Ladies' Home Journal. They were perceived as credible purveyors of information, and Post used them to reach this new national consumer. He started off selling door-to-door, but he used changing demographics and social mores to launch a product that was nationally distributed, nationally advertised, and nationally consumed. He was one of the first to recognize the power of a national brand.

An entrepreneurial leader's genius lies in bringing things together in a combination that no one has ever seen before. Post was one of this country's great business visionaries, but he failed at the managerial act -- which is to build a system in the organization that routinizes the entrepreneur's creation.

Read more about Post here.

With the disaster caused by Katrina, it will be interesting to see leaders develop. If there is one thing a crisis will do, it will make or break a leader. Who will step forward and execute to help the recovery?

Time will tell.

I hope and pray for those displaced that the time it takes is not too long!

Flood Perspective

From Shelley Powers at Burningbird comes this history lesson to put the Katrina caused mess in the South in perspective:

When floods happen, people move, but when the waters recede some return, while others move in. Life goes on, because flooding, no matter how tragic the losses, is a part of life. It is a part of the delta, a legacy and a price for living by the river.

Right now, the delta is being hit again, but this time it isn’t Old Man River who is to blame. Lots of stories about this new flood, too; lots of cries of doom and destruction: Thousands are dead, exclaims the mayor, even while he has people on roofs listening in on radio;Katrina leaves a trail of death and destruction, says the papers, even while people desperately hope for a green cot in a dome in another city; The Mississippi coast is gone, says the governor, even as people pick through rubble and find a single shoe. The recovery will take years, says the President, even as the finger pointing and blaming has begun. Stories about looters and havoc and ruin and how nothing will be the same again.

As usual Shelley writes with passion and spices her work with pictures. Check it out!

Awesome destruction

The TV footage and newspaper pictures of the devastation in New Orleans and the surrounding regions shows the awesome power of nature.

What an awful tragedy is unfolding there.

From over the pond here in England our thoughts and prayers are with you.