42Projects

Innovation Through Exhilaration

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:37:00 +0000

Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these summaries of 5 GREAT articles that inspire better management. Enjoy!

Want to innovate? Develop top leaders

That is a key finding of a new study by the Hay Group, a talent management consulting firm, that identified the best-managed U.S. companies for 2011.

The top 20 highest-rated companies for leadership development included corporate stalwarts such as General Electric (GE), Procter & Gamble (PG), IBM (IBM) and Microsoft (MSFT). One common ingredient -- these businesses all place a premium their leaders emphasizing flexibility, customers, new ideas, and collaboration. It is in this last category where leaders show their stuff because as the study concludes, "collaboration is the process that brings [people and resources] together."

Forget Empowerment – Aim for Exhilaration

MiX

There is no doubt that there is tremendous goodwill, not to mention countless exciting experiments, when it comes to making the world of work more deeply human—designed to promote more freedom, equity, and engagement, and passion. Why, then, can those words sound so cheap and drained of their juice when we hear them repeated over and over by leaders of all stripes? Probably because they’re spoken so much more often than they’re ever enacted.

That’s why it’s so very refreshing to spend time with a leader who is relentlessly inventive and impressively effective as a champion of the fullest expression of humanity at work. We aim too low, says Ricardo Semler, the irrepressible force behind Brazil’s Semco Group. “We constantly talk about passion—serving customers passionately, filling in forms passionately—but what if we created the conditions for people to feel exhilaration, to get involved to the point they shout ‘yes!’ and give each other high fives because they did if their way and it worked?” What if, instead of assuming passion will just show up when we invoke it, we focused on designing organizations to unleash human flourishing?

Are Failure and Mistakes the Same Thing?

Kevin Eikenberry

if we value innovation; we must expect mistakes, help people learn from them, and don’t let them hide them from the rest of the team.

At the break one of the participants from American Honda Motor Company suggested I watch a video on failure on their website. I watched it and loved it – this well-made video gives us great food for thought about failure. I highly recommend it.

At the time, I was thinking about failure and mistakes as synonyms. Then I found the quotation I sent to my Powerquotessubscribers this afternoon.

“Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.” — Jim Rohn, speaker and author

I think Jim was right, and that leads me to think that failure and mistakes are not the same thing. Failure is, by Jim’s thinking, something that occurs over time. We all can think of mistakes we have made that we learned from, that become incredibly important in our growth and development, and in fact far from being failures, they contributed to our success.

Twitter Chat Reverse Mentoring as a Means of Cross-Generational/Cross-Life-Stage Engagement

WeKnowNext

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” – George Orwell

Please join @weknownext on May 16 at 3 p.m. ET, for #NextChat for a discussion on “Creating Generational Engagement with Reverse Mentoring.” We can’t wait to hear your thoughts on the following questions:

Q1. How are four generations in the workplace affecting the way we work today?
Q2. What strategies is your organization using to successfully manage four generations in your workplace?
Q3. What is your experience with reverse mentoring?
Q4. Should managers think differently about how they manage age groups?
Q5. What benefits can companies expect from reverse mentoring programs?
Q6. Based on your specific Reverse Mentoring experience, what roles do you feel HR can play in organization’s generational silos?

Build This: Your Culturematic Laboratory

ChangeThis

“Every organization needs a Culturematic laboratory... It gives the senior manager a “landing party” with which to search for navigable spaces, habitable worlds, futures we want as opposed to ones that will be otherwise forced upon us. Managers can wait for the future to “happen” to them. Or they can use Culturematics and choose. Culturematic labs are a new management tool.”

Download

Collaboration for Innovative Management

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these summaries of 8 GREAT articles that inspire better management. Enjoy!

Collaboration Will Drive the Next Wave of Productivity Gains

HBR
Technology adoption only improves productivity if it is accompanied by concurrent changes in the way work is done. For example, there was a substantial increase in productivity during the twenty-year stretch from 1980 to 2000, fueled by companies' investments in enterprise-wide information technology. However, research on the returns generated by these investments found that productivity growth occurred only when the technology was accompanied by thoughtful business process innovations tailored to sector- and company-specific business processes. In fact, technology adoption alone, without the accompanying changes in work practices, had little or even a negative impact on productivity.

Today, a new wave of technologies — collaborative or social technologies, most of which appeared only within the last decade — is entering the workplace. But as with the technology of the 1980s and 1990s, the ability of these technologies to drive real productivity growth will depend on whether or not they are accompanied by thoughtful changes in the way work is done.

Freedom

Aspire-CS

If you want to be a leader….
Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts, And the world will govern itself.

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.
The more weapons you have, the less secure people will be.
The more subsidies you have, the less self-reliant people will be.

Therefore the Master says: I let go of the law, and people become honest.
I let go of economics, and people become prosperous.
I let go of religion, and people become serene.
I let go of all desire for the common good, and the good becomes common as grass.

~ from the Tao Te Ching, 600 B.C. China As translated by Stephen Mitchell

4 Keys to Collaborative Leadership

WeKnowNext
The world of work is a complicated place. Technology, globalization and the great recession have accelerated the pace of change and brought about category disruption, new competition and what can feel like never ending chaos. 4 keys to developing a more collaborative leadership style.

Lead to Inspire
Lead to Influence
Lead to Innovate
Lead for Impact

7 signs of a dysfunctional boss

CBS
…a composite of all those wacky and colorful executives: 7 signs of a dysfunctional boss.

The game has rules, but the rules keep changing
Major focus on minutiae.
A "man of the people."
Hypersensitive and vindictive when rejected.
Failure is not an option.
Loves distraction, hates surprises.
Sees conspiracy everywhere.

Clay Christensen's Life Lessons

BusinessWeek
At the turn of the century, The Innovator’s Dilemma became a surprise best-seller and a holy book for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, where Christensen’s theory arrived ready-made to explain what Internet companies were going to do to established businesses. Andy Grove swore by it. Steve Jobs admired it, although Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, points out that Christensen predicted that if Apple (AAPL) kept on using only its own software, the iPod would likely remain a “niche product.”

Pointedly, Christensen demonstrated that it wasn’t because of obsolescence or ineptitude that top companies falter. In conversation, Christensen puts it this way: “There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.” As to whether his advice in How Will You Measure Your Life? will save ambitious careerists from themselves, he’s circumspect. In his experience, when something isn’t going well—when, despite outward success, one’s life falls apart—“the vast majority of times it’s because someone hasn’t gotten causality right.” They aren’t necessarily bad people, they simply aren’t enacting a strategy for the life they really want. He has great faith in the capacity of overachievers “to change in ways that previously were unthinkable.”

Barriers to Change: The Real Reason Behind the Kodak Downfall

Forbes
Kodak has recently declared bankruptcy. Usually, when this hits the news it is analyzed by the numbers people who, looking at five years’ worth of financial data, give their quantitative and financial explanation of the failure. More qualitative types will go back 10 years sometimes, and even go beyond finances to talk about strategy, CEOs, competition, and the like. Recent well-done Financial Times articles (here and here) go back even further for Kodak. And yet people still fail to see Kodak’s real problem. Great CEO, people buried in the hierarchy who had all sorts of good ideas, and still poor strategic decisions. Why?

Answer: The organization overflowed with complacency. With the complacency so rock-solid, and no one at the top even devoting their priorities toward turning that problem into a huge urgency around a huge opportunity, of course they went nowhere. Of course strategy sessions with the BIG CEO went nowhere. Of course all the people buried in the hierarchy who saw the oncoming problems and had ideas for solutions made no progress. Their bosses and peers ignored them.

Why Ask, Who Cares?

BrainLeadersandLearners
Have you ever heard a well-placed question light up a table? Or have you seen young people beam from questions that invite their talents to sparkle in ways that benefit all? While just about anybody can learn to ask questions, it takes practice to wield them well. In other words, not all questions are equal. Great questions tend to have two feet – one foot steps up ideas and one foot steps up people’s capabilities. Two-footed questions engage both sides of the brain. Questions are often more talked about than engaged well, as stated at John Hopkins University.

Do You Use Verbal White Space?

AllThingsWorkplace
Graphic designers know how to focus your attention. They frequently communicate through the use of white space. Less is more. The message is clear. There's no clutter.

Use Verbal Whitespace.

You can increase your verbal impact the same way. How many times have you wished that someone would just "say what they mean?"

Innovative Management and Instagram's Buyout

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:48:00 +0000

Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these 9 articles that inspire better management. Enjoy!

Growing People: The Heart of the Organizational Transformation

MiX
Every year companies spend billions of dollars on training and development, trying to help their people become more engaged, more innovative, and better leaders. Training programs excel in introducing new ideas and perspectives, delivering feedback and assessment data, and teaching basic skills. Yet today's tools and programs leave so much human potential on the table. What is needed to inspire learning and development that is truly transformational and lasting?

This was the question asked and answered in the creation of the Personal Excellence Program (PEP), first inside Genentech's IT department and now spreading within the company and beyond. This is the surprising story of what happened by radically rethinking an organization's responsibility to its people and creating a genuine culture of human development.

For People to Trust You, Reveal your true intentions
HBR

… if you want to lead and influence others, you must reveal your intentions. People won't believe you will do the right thing unless they're convinced you genuinely want to do it.

That requires more conscious effort than most bosses understand. We all more or less assume that others will see our positive motives or at least give us the benefit of the doubt. But it often doesn't work that way. As a leader and manager, you must often make tradeoffs among the competing interests of your own group, other groups, the organization as a whole, important outsiders, and the individuals who work for you. That obviously creates many opportunities for people to misinterpret your intentions.

They Ain’t Making Any More of Them: The Great Engineering Shortage of 2012

TechCrunch
Corner any up-and-coming Kevin Systrom wanna-be and have a heart-to-heart about the challenges of building a successful company and at some point you’ll likely wander into the territory of bemoaning how tough it is to hire people with technical skills. At a party recently a startup founder told me “If you could find me five great engineers in the next 90 days I’d pay you $400,000.” Which is crazy talk. Unless you stop to consider that Instagram’s team (mostly engineers) was valued at almost $80 million per employee or that corporate development heads often value engineers at startups they are acquiring at a half-million to million dollars per person. $400,000 actually might not be so crazy for a basketball lineup’s worth of guys who can sling Ruby or Scala code.

So with all this widespread talk about the value of hiring great engineers and the apparent dearth of technical talent in the market, college students must be signing up to computer science classes in droves. This is the next California Gold Rush is it not? The era in which a self-taught programmer can emerge from relative obscurity and land a mid-nine figure payday. Engineering enrollments surely must be at an all-time high? Au contraire, mon frère.

Read Valve’s Employee Company Handbook *

Kotaku
Check out the employee handbook from Valve (Bellevue based game company founded by two former Microsoft employees). Not only is it a beautiful example of great design, as employee on boarding experiences go, it’s pretty innovative and a fascinating insight!

http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

Behavior Change as Value Proposition

Adaptive Path
There's a lot of academic research around the areas of persuasive technology and design for behavior change. It's getting more exposure as technology has allowed products and services to have an increasingly pervasive role in people's lives. But where does persuasion live? How do we recognize these products in the wild? And what has caused the tipping point for the growth of these products and services?

Engagement Isn’t Enough

Strategy+Business
As leaders, we often miss critical indicators that can improve the likelihood of organizational and personal success. Consider the ubiquitous employee satisfaction survey, which is usually administered once a year and, as long as the scores are respectable, crossed off the corporate must-do list. Typically, these surveys measure employee engagement levels. But as Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton explain in the excerpt below, that’s not enough. They rightly contend that employee energy and enablement are as essential to high levels of performance as engagement.

The Power of Small Wins

The Talent Code
Most of us instinctively spend a lot of time and energy seeking the big breakthrough: that magical moment when, after a lot of effort, everything finally clicks: when you play the song perfectly, ace the test, win the big game. Those moments are incredibly satisfying. But they’re also a problem. Here’s why: focusing on the big breakthrough can cause you to overreach. It can create a steady diet of disappointment (after all, breakthroughs are rare, by definition). Worse, you stop focusing on the smaller, incremental things that really matter. The best performers and teachers I’ve seen don’t get caught up in seeking big breakthrough moments. Instead, they hunt the little breakthroughs — the small, seemingly insignificant progressions that create steady daily progress. In short, they love baby steps.

What Creates a High Performing Organization

HR BartenderSharing
That’s right – Sharing. Not sharing staplers or a filing cabinet drawer. I’m talking about sharing information. I was reading the ASTD research study “The Rise of Social Media: Enhancing Collaboration and Productivity Across Generations” for a presentation I’m putting together on social learning. The report talked about the primary uses of social media in the workplace and it really focused on collaboration as the “thing” social media does exceptionally well.

Basically high-performing companies share more knowledge. Having more knowledge makes the company smarter and therefore, perform better. When you add social media tools enhancing the sharing of information…well, everything seems to just fall into place.

Inspiring the Future of Work By Unlocking Innovation Through Chaos, Creativity and Collaboration

MiX
Gangplank is revolutionizing the world of work. By providing a collaborative workspace to encourage creation instead of consumption for creators. The unique model is working with local government and business to provide a public private partnership that boosts civic engagement, sets community vision and collaborates to unlock innovation. The model is rapidly growing in Arizona and changing how cities view relationships with the creative workforce. The challenges are listed in our manifesto competition, agendas, observation, saying, formality, assurance, expertise and personalities. We find these items to be the status quo and what prevent community building and innovation. Examples of disrupting the status quo.

Collaboration over Competition Community over Agendas Participation over Observation Doing over Saying Friendship over Formality Boldness over Assurance Learning over Expertise People over Personalities

http://gangplankhq.com/category/values/
http://whatisgangplank.com

Lessons I Learned Reading Over 200 Books

InOverYourHead
I recently realized that I’d been reading a book every week now for about 5 years straight. It kind of made me wonder: what did I really learn? Am I smarter than I used to be? I started to wonder, and this is what happened. 140 characters per book, for 200 books… 200 things you may not know. Are you curious? I sure was when I started.

The Millionaire Next Door: Those that are wealthy are not those who ACT wealthy. Those that look wealthy are usually in just debt, while the rich tend to act broke.
Blink: “Sometimes we’re right about things– especially when we’re experts. Other times we’re wrong.” With a bunch of examples.
How To Succeed in Anything by Really Trying: The three A’s of careers are Ability, Ambition, and Attitude. If you have those three down, you’re good.
The No BS Ruthless Management of People and Profits: If your employees suck, nobody is happy. So fire them– fast. Stop being so bleeding-hearted about it.
The Dip: The real rewards come to those who can outlast the competition. If you can do that while staying unique, you win.

Innovative Management Inspired by Earth Day

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Happy Earth Day!

Tom Peters: Best of the Cool Friends Tom Kelley

Tom Peters
One of Tom's favorite topics is innovation, and you'd have a hard time finding a more expert person on the subject than Tom Kelley, General Manager of IDEO. His business is innovation, and we spoke to him twice, following publication of his first and second books. By reading his two interviews (links below) at tompeters.com, you get a very good overview of an innovative organization, and perhaps some tips on making your own organization more so.

Best quote: "So part of the message of my book and the message from people like Tom [Peters] is that it's okay to act differently."

Tom Kelley Interview No. 1, following his first book, The Art of Innovation.
Tom Kelley Interview No. 2, following his second book, The Ten Faces of Innovation. Feedback from readers of the first book prompted him to write the second.

If you would like to learn more, we also have an interview with Tom Kelley's brother David Kelley, CEO of IDEO, who describes some of the history of that very cool innovation factory.

How to Make Learning Addictive

The Talent Code
Here’s a video-game term that might apply: replay value. It refers to how much a user wants to play a game over and over. You know the feeling — the irresistible itch to repeat a game just one more time, and just one more time after that (Angry Birds, anybody?).

Though the motivation feels internal, in fact replay value doesn’t come from the user; it comes from the design of the game itself. Games that provide lots of roles, lots of paths, lots of possible outcomes have high replay value — people love to play them, and get addicted. Games with few roles, few paths, few outcomes have low replay value; people play them once and then quit.

If you look at the practice routines of high performers, you’ll find they have high replay value. They are designed in such a way that you naturally want to do them again, and again, and again. For example:

Bubba Watson, who won Sunday’s Masters golf tournament with an “impossible” curving shot from the woods, learned to control the ball by hitting a small plastic ball in his yard when he was a small boy. The game young Bubba invented was to see if he could go around his house clockwise, then turn around and do it counterclockwise.
Earl Scruggs, the greatest banjo player who ever lived, practiced his sense of timing by playing with his brothers. The game went like this: the brothers would all start a song, then walk off in different directions, still playing. At the end of the song they’d come together to see if they’d stayed on time. Then do it again. And again.
Pretty much any skateboarding or snowboarding practice has a high replay value: think of how the sides of a half-pipe or ramp literally funnel the athlete into the next move. No wonder they learn so fast: the replay value in most gravity sports is off the charts.

The larger pattern here is that practices with high replay value tend to be practices the learners design themselves. One of the reason the learners can’t help but repeat them over and over is that they have a sense of ownership and investment — they’re not robots executing someone else’s drill; they’re players immersed in their own fun, addictive game.

Managing a Virtual Team

HBR
Teams that are geographically-dispersed, or virtual, have now been used and studied for more than three decades — yet we all still wrestle with how to get them right. Managers frequently ask for best practices for managing their global teams, and recently we've noticed some common themes. Here are the three questions that keep coming up again and again, and what the research tells us about how to address them:

When and how often do we need to meet face-to-face (FTF)?
What is the best technology solution for my team?
How do I coordinate work among dispersed members?

Leadership Encourages Hope

Bret L. Simmons
The process of leadership flourishes when people assume responsibility for the choice to pursue substantive changes that enhance a shared purpose. This process is potent when its participants have hope – the belief that one knows how to perform and is willing to direct and sustain consistent effort to accomplish goals that matter. Hope requires three steps from leadership:

Help identifying meaningful goals that really matter
Help understanding what it takes to achieve those goals
Encouragement to assume responsibility for investing effort

How Leaders Can Build a Change-Friendly Culture
Great Leadership
Organizations today are caught in a leadership perfect storm. The forces of internet transparency, rapid technology and young generations demanding empowerment are challenging organizations of all sizes across every industry to sail differently. Yes change is a constant … but it has bigger waves and smaller waves. Currently, we are about 25 years into a 50-year cycle of massive transformation. At the end of this cycle, every part of our society will be unrecognizable. *History tells us this is the 8th mass transformational era since the dawn of writing. This particular stage is unprecedented in its global scale and speed. No industry or economic power is immune.

In such an era, existing power structures crumble like the levees in New Orleans. What flows forth are new, transparent, and ways of thinking and leading in a global society. Leaders who can harness people together in shared power, collaboration, and transparency will help their organizations avoid extinction.

Research Roundup: The 'Dark Side' of Teams; the Risks of Social Comparisons; and the Transfer of Entrepreneurial Skills

Knowledge@Wharton
Does working in teams make people less receptive to outside input? How can social comparisons undermine trust in working relationships? How do the training and technical knowledge entrepreneurs take from previous employers impact the success of their new ventures? Wharton professor Jennifer Mueller and lecturer Julia Minson, and professors Maurice Schweitzer and Evan Rawley, respectively, examine these issues, and what they mean for business, in recent research papers. When Failure isn’t Free

Strategy + Business

Chris Trimble, coauthor of Reverse Innovation: Create Far from Home, Win Everywhere, introduces an excerpt from Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, by Tim Harford, which offers a troubling perspective on the outlook for innovation. Companies often develop crisp stories about how they have nurtured a “culture of innovation.” They say that all their employees can be innovators, and even take some initiative to move their ideas forward. Not only that, they claim, but failures are tolerated, if not celebrated. Failure is, after all, an integral part of the innovation game.

Is there a payoff from top-team diversity?

McKinsey
There are many reasons companies with more diverse executive teams should outperform their peers: fielding a team of top executives with varied cultural backgrounds and life experiences can broaden a company’s strategic perspective, for example. And relentless competition for the best people should reward organizations that cast their nets beyond traditional talent pools for leadership. To understand whether reality is consistent with theory, we looked at the executive board composition,1 returns on equity (ROE), and margins on earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) of 180 publicly traded companies in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the period from 2008 to 2010. To score a company’s diversity, we focused on two groups that can be measured objectively from company data: women and foreign nationals on senior teams (the latter being a proxy for cultural diversity).

Unless You Lead...

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these 7 articles that inspire better management. Enjoy!

Can Creativity Save the Business World?

The Guardian
The key questions: is creativity really more sought after now than ever, and if so, why? How does the corporate sector value creativity and vice versa? What are the pros and cons of government intervention in cultivating creativity?

Academics such as professor Clive Holtham from Cass Business School argue that …creativity might be encouraged in the middle, or indeed recruited for in the lower echelons of a company, but when push comes to shove, the driver for decision making at board level is all about the bottom line. The finance men rule. If graduates have been recruited on criteria that require creative input how long they will last in a company which does not nurture it?

The creative industries know that it takes fresh thinking and innovation to stay ahead of the game in an international market place and increasingly, the government seems to be looking to the creative industries to drive the UK economy out of recession. How then is creativity best managed, and what does creativity in leadership look like?

The Arts as a Management Tool (from The pARTnership Movement)

ARTSBlog
When we think about creativity, we need to think of it as something we do every day—like thinking. We cannot avoid thinking and creativity is the same. We cannot avoid being creative.

Organizations need the arts. They need culture in their business. We are living in a transition time and this time calls for new models, a new management mindset, and new management tools. 21st century organizations are managed and organized for the 20th century business landscape.

But we are in a completely new landscape. Today’s organizations need new competencies because they are dealing with new challenges, and these challenges I summarize in what I call the five E’s:

Experience.
Emotion.
Energy.
Ethics.
Environment.

The Resonant Team Leader

HBR
Teams need leaders, both formal and informal. They need leaders within the team to create purpose and excitement, and provide social glue, what Harvard professor Richard Hackman calls "bracketing." Resonant leaders are able to build trusting, engaged, and energizing relationships with others around them.

To illustrate, let's look at the world of sports. Fans become strongly connected to a favorite team. They derive a social identity from that team — but often miss the multiple layers of leadership needed for any team to develop and sustain performance. Sustained performance requires a resonant leader within the team — the "real" team captain (not necessarily the formal one), who provides the emotional glue and fosters attachments. The coach is the person who links the team and organization. The team owner or general manager has to move between the organization and the community, managing public relations, fans, and the political community.

Unless You Lead…

Leadership. Life. Legacy.
Most of us typically think about what –if… We can let our imagination and dreams run wild with what-if scenarios. These times can fuel our creativity and help us to innovate, challenge ourselves and even better prepare for what may lie ahead.

What-if thinking can help us ponder so many possibilities. It’s interesting, though, to consider a different perspective. The Lorax’s challenge: unless. In addition to dreaming about the what-if we do scenarios, should we also be thinking about the consequences of what if we don’t? What if we don’t do what’s right? What if we don’t do our best? What if we don’t help others? What if we don’t care? What if we don’t stand up and lead?

5 ways you can help younger managers view older workers differently

WeKnowNext
There is an explosion happening all around us. We are getting grayer as a society - much grayer. As a result, organizations are faced with a diversity-related challenge. Younger managers, on a much broader level than ever before, are finding themselves in the position of having to supervise older subordinates. Here are five ways you can help younger managers view older workers differently:

It's not about the process, it's about the outcome.
Communicate and then communicate some more.
Let them share their knowledge.
You don't have to be the boss.
Train them.

How to Set Your Employees Free: Reed Hastings

Business Week
We call Netflix’s corporate culture the “freedom and responsibility culture.” We want responsible people who are self-motivating and self-disciplined, and we reward them with freedom. The best example is our vacation policy. It’s simple and understandable: We don’t have one. We focus on what people get done, not on how many days they worked. Prior to 2004 we had the standard vacation model, until we realized no one was tracking how many hours in a day they worked. Why were we tracking whether someone takes two weeks or four weeks of vacation? It was an industrial era habit. I make sure to take lots of vacation to set a good example, and I do some of my creative thinking on vacation.

How to Manage Creative Talent: Angela Ahrendts

BusinessWeek
We’ve learned that EQ is often more important than experience and IQ when working with creative thinkers. Watch how people speak to your assistant when visiting your office, or take a candidate to lunch and see how they treat the restaurant staff. Both will give you insights into someone’s character. It’s important to build the right atmosphere for creativity to flourish. To encourage creativity, we value feeling as much as knowing. Of course, we try to confuse ourselves with relevant facts, but we always lead with intuition. After all, you can’t prove something will be successful if it’s never been done before.

Trust is the New Core of Leadership

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these 22 articles that inspire better management. Enjoy!

Why Trust is the New Core of Leadership

Forbes
Not long ago, most discussions of leadership were about leaders – their personality traits, how to identify and groom those with ‘leadership potential,’ and what were the skills that leaders employed.

Leadership theorists nowadays stress authenticity, EQ and relationships. This makes intuitive sense. But it isn’t just a fad; there is a solid reason behind the shift. It is driven by changes in the world. Above all, it reflects the growing importance of trust.

We're All on Billie Jean's Team Now

HBR
Because HBR is running a special Insight Center right now on the secrets of great teams, I listened especially to hear what Billie would say on that topic. What a happy surprise when she moved to that part of her talk by saying "I've just been reading this fascinating article about teams in the Harvard Business Review ..." (Billie Jean King is an HBR reader!) The article that had caught her eye was Sandy Pentland's "The New Science of Building Great Teams." She went on to read from it, annotating each quoted bit with her own experience.

"The 'natural leaders' in teams are charismatic connectors," she read aloud from her HBR, and then paused to emphasize the point. "I was thrilled to read that," she said. "And I know we all like to project, but that's me that he's writing about." She read on: "They are democratic with their time—communicating with everyone equally and making sure all team members get a chance to contribute." She looked up at the crowd. "I've been in plenty of situations where that doesn't happen at all."

Billie Jean did offered her own hard-won wisdom on teams. To her, great teamwork comes down to two factors: the leader has to be trusted; and the team members must be not only involved but committed.

King also shared what she'd learned from longtime DuPont CEO Ed Woolard (surprisingly described by her as "one of my few mentors"). His philosophy of managing people's performance was to "reward personal achievements that helped the team." He lived by legendary basketball coach John Wooden's advice that "it's better to have a person who makes the team stronger than to have a superstar."

Unlimited Vacation Doesn't Create Slackers--It Ensures Productivity

Fast Company
By tossing the two-week standard in favor of an honor system with unlimited time off, some companies are seeing an exponential rise in productivity. Now, they just have to be mindful of staff burnout. Sharon Rosenblatt confesses she suffers from self-diagnosed workplace paranoia--and even her company's unrestricted vacation policy sometimes (negatively) affects her psyche.

A contractor who serves as communications and accessibility support at Accessibility Partners, Rosenblatt operates under the edict, "as long as you get your work done, it doesn't matter where you do it.” Sounds nice--but what it can mean is checking email multiple times per day on weekends and on vacation. “I once wrote part of a federal proposal response while I was stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge because my client extended our services into my vacation time.” Sound familiar?

Though Rosenblatt asserts her guilt trips are self-generated, a recent study of more than 5,600 workers conducted by CareerBuilder found that 12% of participants say they feel guilty that they’re not at work while they’re on vacation.

How Future Leaders of the World will Lead

C-Level Strategies
In the same way the world as we know it is coming to an end, so too is leadership. …what the planet is moving toward is not the “Armageddon” of the movies but rather an emergence into a higher level of human consciousness. Formulaic and hierarchical approaches to leadership are no longer going to work in this new era. They’re no longer going to motivate followers to pursue your vision or inspire employees to work 12-hour days. Nor will employees of the future feel compelled to follow leaders who lack ethical standards or have a low EQ. They will have too many other choices. Leadership of the future will come from within, be driven by purpose, and will find its foundation in a connection to the true inner self.

Can This 'Online Ivy' University Change the Face of Higher Education?

The AtlanticMeet
The Minerva Project, the chest-beating, Silicon Valley-spawned, Larry Summers-backed "E-lite" college that just might reshape the worldwide market for education. Traditionally, for-profit colleges have operated on the lowest rungs of America's educational ladder, catering to poor and lower-middle-class students looking for a basic, convenient degree or technical training. Aspiring Ivy Leaguers have remained far out of the industry's sites. That is, until now.

This week, the Minerva Project, a startup online university, announced that it had received $25 million in seed financing from Benchmark Capital, a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm known for its early investments in eBay, among other successful web companies. Minerva bills itself as "the first elite American university to be launched in a century," and promises to re-envision higher education for the information age. The chairman of its advisory board: Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and Harvard president. Among others, he's joined on the board by Bob Kerry, the former United States senator and president of The New School.

The Titanic's Tragic Employees of the Month

Business Week
…on Monday, April 9, the man who located the shipwreck back in 1985, Bob Ballard, will host a second National Geographic program, Save the Titanic, in which he investigates an over-looked subplot of the disaster: the Guarantee Group. “It was sort of like the Employee of the Month, or the Employee of the Ship award,” Ballard says. “The shipyard had all these different divisions. You know, the people that built the boilers, the electricians, you name it. It was a very mammoth effort. And it was divided into all these different divisions and [the Guarantee Group] was drawn from each of them.”

Toward the completion of each new vessel, Harland & Wolff, the Belfast boat-builders that made the Titanic, had the heads of various technical divisions select their best apprentice, then rewarded these apprentices with passage on their new ship’s maiden voyage. Given that thousands worked on these monstrous ships, it was a big deal—and frequently, a step up in lifestyle, as if a contractor specializing in window installation were to win a month’s stay in a new Richard Meier penthouse apartment. “It was a Harland & Wolff tradition,” Ballard adds. “And it was not only an honor, but a bit of a punch list. You what I mean? I can imagine these ships sailing and they’re going: You know, we’re not quite done with this part of it yet. … You want the people who know the ship best on-board for any trouble-shooting.”

How Great Leaders Inspire Action

TED
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?" His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright Brothers...

In 2009, Simon Sinek released the book "Start With Why" -- a synopsis of the theory he has begun using to teach others how to become effective leaders and inspire change.

If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.” (Simon Sinek)

Best Leadership Books of All Time

Inc.
12 great recommendations

The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time

Energy Project
Why is it that between 25 and 50 percent of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work?

It's not just the number of hours we're working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.

What we've lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It's like an itch we can't resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.

Maintain meeting discipline.
Stop demanding or expecting instant responsiveness at every moment of the day.
Encourage renewal.

It's also up to individuals to set their own boundaries.

Consider these 3 behaviors for yourself:

Do the most important thing first in the morning
Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically.
Take real and regular vacations. ‎

Wisdom, Integrity, Discernment

All Things Workplace
How often do you hear the terms wisdom, discernment, and integrity used during the business day? And just what are organizations looking for when they are hiring or promoting? We hear words like intelligent, problem-solver, action-oriented, results-driven, and good decision-making ability. But what good are any of those if they aren't carried out with wisdom, discernment, and integrity? It's possible to be action-oriented and still take a lot of wrong actions. Does intelligence guarantee sound leadership?

The Dirty Little Secret Of Overnight Successes

Fast Company
As Chris Dixon pointed out in a recent blog post, Angry Birds, the incredibly popular game, was software maker Rovio’s 52nd attempt. They spent eight years and nearly went bankrupt before finally creating their massive hit.

James Dyson failed in 5,126 prototypes before perfecting his revolutionary vacuum cleaner. Groupon was put on life support and nearly shut down at one point in its meteoric rise.

When looking at the most successful people and organizations, we often imagine geniuses with a smooth journey straight to the promised land. But when you really examine nearly every success story, they are filled with crushing defeats, near-death experiences, and countless setbacks.

We often celebrate companies and individuals once they've achieved undeniable success, but shun their disruptive thinking before reaching such a pinnacle.

In your life, you've probably had a setback or two. When you stumble, it's tempting the throw in the towel and accept defeat. There's always an attractive excuse waiting eagerly, hoping you'll take the easy way out. But the most successful people forge ahead. They realize that mistakes are simply data, providing new information to adjust your approach going forward.

When Being Distracted Is a Good Thing

Dr. Shelley Carson
Why do we get some of our best ideas in the shower? Harvard University researcher and psychologist Shelley H. Carson, author of “Your Creative Brain,’’ says distraction isn’t always a bad thing. If you are stuck on a problem, an interruption can force an “incubation period,’’ she says. “In other words, a distraction may provide the break you need to disengage from a fixation on the ineffective solution.’’ Mark Fenske, coauthor of “The Winner’s Brain’’ and an associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Guelph in Canada, puts it this way: “It’s paradoxical. You need to be able to focus to shut off distractions, but sometimes you can focus too hard. You get stuck on something that is not helpful.’’

When we focus on a problem, we may be biased toward certain brain signals and suppressing things that we see as unrelated, he says. In the shower, “shampooing hair and lathering up doesn’t take a lot of cognitive focus,’’ he says. “Other parts of the brain can start to contribute.’’

We engage in more free association and mind wandering, he says, “And that’s really critical for innovation.’’

Pipeline to Programming Jobs Has Leaks

NY Times
The effort to propel women into programming jobs is losing women at a discouraging rate as the pipeline winds its way from high school through graduate studies. Even women with computer science degrees might not obtain programming jobs, and those familiar with the hiring process say recruiting is part of the problem. Some companies hold 24-hour hackathons, which reinforce the geeky, high-testosterone stereotype of the industry. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 19 percent of software developers are women, but the percentage is in the single digits at many prominent tech firms. The bias in the system affects women's willingness to go into these situations because they know what they are in for, says New York University psychologist Madeline Heilman. Still, there are signs of hope in the corporate world, such as IBM, an industry leader, winning the 2011 Top Company for Technical Women award. The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology started the competition two years ago, and American Express will receive the 2012 award. IBM's Sharon Nunes says women want to use their skills to make a difference, and also want to maintain a work-life balance. Women comprise about 20 percent of IBM's technical workforce.

Google Takes CAPTCHA Security to the Streets

InfoWorld
Google researchers are experimenting with using street-number images from Street View to strengthen the reCAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) authentication technology. The new technique would present users with one set of distorted text characters and one random digital picture of a street-address number taken from Street View. "We often extract data such as street names and traffic signs from Street View imagery to improve Google Maps with useful information like business addresses and locations," Google says.

"Based on the data and results of these reCAPTCHA tests, we'll determine if using imagery might also be an effective way to further refine our tools for fighting machine- and bot-related abuse online." The company says the experiment is not intended to turn users into data-entry workers by having them fill in Street View data, nor is Google planning to use it to confirm its existing map data. In addition, Google is not using the images of street names or traffic signs for the experiment, according to a company spokesperson.

DoE to Launch "Apps for Energy" Challenge

CCC Blog and Apps for Energy website
The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has launched the Apps for Energy competition, which challenges developers to use the Green Button data access program to take advantage of residential and commercial utility data. DoE says the Green Button initiative gives access to energy usage data in a streamlined and easy-to-understand format. DoE is offering $100,000 in cash prizes to the software developers and designers who submit the best apps, as judged by a panel of government officials, energy industry leaders, and information technology experts. "The competition is all about creating tools and products that help consumers get the most out of their Green Button data--from apps that track personal energy savings goals to software that helps businesses optimize building energy usage," DoE says. "In addition, the 27 million households that will have access to Green Button data by the end of the year represent an untapped market that can serve as a catalyst for an active, energy-focused developer community." DoE says the best app ideas will be featured on Energy.gov and used to inspire developers who are participating in the competition. The winners will be announced in late May.

The Secret Science of Memorable Quotes

Technology Review
Cornell University researchers have found that there is an inherent quality to memorable movie lines that makes them easier to recall. The researchers took memorable lines from about 1,000 movies and compared them against other lines spoken by the same character. They then asked individuals who had not seen the films to guess which of the two lines was the memorable one. On average, the participants chose correctly about 75 percent of the time, confirming the idea that the memorable features are intrinsic in the lines themselves and not the result of some other factor.

The researchers then compared the memorable phrases with a standard corpus of common language phrases taken from 1967. The researchers found that they can measure the distinctiveness of the memorable phrase by seeing how likely various-sized segments of it are in the corpus. The researchers discovered that memorable phrases have a tendency to use pronouns, the indefinite article, and verbs in the past tense. "Future work may lead to applications in marketing, advertising, and education," says Cornell researcher Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil.

The Benefits of Data Talking to Data

WSJ
Some companies on the cutting edge of technology are combining data streaming with advanced data-analytics methods that let them tie information they already possess to what is happening now. This promises to transform a host of industries via the real-time application of customer information as it is being collected. For example, work by IBM researchers has facilitated item-level data communication with other item-level data, which could enhance shopping, especially in stores where impulse buys constitute the bulk of transactions. The store would electronically offer purchase suggestions to shoppers based on their current actions through their smartphone.

Meanwhile, the use of real-time data streaming is enabling online dating services to offer new ways for people to get together. For example, integrating global positioning system data from members' smartphones with members' recorded dating preferences could find matches for singles at a specific locale, or even within a certain radius of their current whereabouts. Another application of the data-mining and data-streaming combination enables airline maintenance crews to receive up-to-the-minute data on aircraft in flight, accelerating repairs and reducing delays and service disruptions. Pilots also receive constant updates on weather and air traffic conditions, enabling them to plot the fastest flight route.

What Ever Happened to the American Arcade?

Ars Technica
In North America, gamers are now generally divided into two distinct generations: those that grew up in the midst of the vibrant video arcade culture of the '70s and '80s; and those born since.

Brad Crawford is a member of the first generation. "I remembered growing up with [arcades], and going [to Japan] and seeing what they had become was just mind-boggling," said Crawford, who became enamored with Japan's arcade culture while spending three years living there starting in 2005. The experience inspired Crawford to create 100 Yen: The Japanese Arcade Experience, a recently funded indie documentary (currently in post-production) that tries to capture a thoroughly modernized Japanese arcade experience completely unknown to most in the West.

"Whether we just talk about nostalgia or a movement, I think it could come back," he said. "I think we could see the culture revitalized—maybe not to its former glory, but at some level. There's people out there trying, and I applaud them for it, but it's definitely an uphill battle."

Creating Spontaneity for Creativity

ArtistThink
Sounds a bit like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? But, I do think there are ways to incorporate more spontaneity into your day or creative process and for some, this may generate more ideas for your art! Make a list of resources that will aid in your creative development. When you have a free moment or need spontaneity in your life, review those resources and do something you haven’t done before!

Artwork that Inspires

Computer Science Transitions From Elective to Requirement

US News & World Report
Although many universities offer computer science as an option to satisfy science or math requirements, some schools are now making it a required course in order to graduate. For example, each of the nearly 2,000 freshmen entering the Georgia Institute of Technology each year must take a computer science course regardless of their major, says college of computing associate dean Charles Isbell. In addition, every student at Montclair State University must complete a computer science course in order to graduate. Most Montclair students take "Introduction to Computer Applications: Being Fluent with Information Technology," which is designed to teach students majoring in nontechnical fields about network security, artificial intelligence, databases, and e-commerce, says computer science department chairman Michael Oudshoorn. "It's not aimed at making them experts; it's aimed at making them aware," Oudshoorn says. "They do live in a digital age ... they have an obligation to know something about the technology." University of California, Irvine professor Geoffrey Bowker says more schools should make computer science a requirement. "All aspects of our personal lives and our work lives are affected by computers," he says. "We need to know about the tools that we're working with."

Wollstonecraft - Sciency, girl-positive steampunk kids' adventure novel on Kickstarter

Kickstarter
This is a pro-math, pro-science, pro-history and pro-literature adventure novel for and about girls, who use their education to solve problems and catch a jewel thief. Ada and Mary encounter real historical characters, such as Percy Shelley, Charles Babbage, Michael Faraday, and Charles Dickens – people whom the girls actually knew. If Jane Austen wrote about zeppelins and brass goggles, this would be the book.

Why "Wollstonecraft"? Mary names the detective agency after her mother, the famous feminist writer. If this is the kind of book you'd like to see, please support this project.

March Madness and Innovative Leadership

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

The Ideas Behind a Prank

TED
As may or may not have been clear from reading the internet today: it’s April Fool’s Day. At TED, it came a bit early: At TED2012 Charlie Todd staged a beautifully colorful prank. An actor (Eugene Cordero) played a speaker who had a technical difficulty with his talk, and then another, and then another, and… then it got weird. Then it got wonderfully fun. (Watch the video above.)

Todd was the perfect person to pull that off: He’s the creator of Improv Everywhere, “a New York City-based prank collective that causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places.” They’re the group responsible for the annual No-Pants Subway Ride, as well as staging a scene from Ghostbusters in thew New York Public Library, putting guerrilla dancers in the windows of a massive retail building, freezing time for five minutes in Grand Central Station, and many, many more. (Also watch: A musical staged at the GEL Conference.)

In the course of all of that, he’s done a lot of thinking about what a prank is, and why we do them.

Don’t Dismiss Your Gen X Talent

HBR
The Labor Department recently reported that the number of Americans quitting their jobs has begun to rise.

One particular demographic poised to jump is Generation X. At just 46 million in the U.S., Gen X is small compared to the 78 million Boomers and 70 million Millennials, but they wield a disproportionate amount of influence. Born between 1965 and 1978, they are the bench strength for leadership, the skill bearers and knowledge experts corporations will rely on to gain competitive advantage in the coming decades. Approaching or already in their prime of their careers, they are ready and willing to lead.

Yet their career progress has been threatened by leapfrogging Millennials and blocked by Boomers, who are postponing retirement to bulk up recession-ravaged 401(k)s.

A recent survey from the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI) shows that 37% have "one foot out the door" and are looking to leave their current employers within the next three years.

Ideas Change Culture or Culture Changes Ideas

Innovate on Purpose
There is both an opportunity and a challenge embedded in that statement.

First, let's describe why the statement is true. If you have interesting, radical, truly different ideas, then you either have a culture that embraces ideas and innovation, or your innovation team has been isolated from the decision making and priorities of the rest of your business. Arthur C Clarke, the scientist and science fiction writer, had three laws about predicting the future. They are:

When a distinguished scientist predicts that something is possible, he or she is probably right. When they predict something is impossible, they are probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It is the third law that is most interesting to us in this discussion. Any new idea, suitably radical, is indistinguishable from magic and therefore likely to be laughed at or ignored. Most corporate cultures don't deal with "magic" very well.

What Does March Madness Tell us About Leadership Promotions?

Great Leadership
We all know that the odds heavily favor those highly-talented teams, but there are typically a few major upsets each year—including this year where two #2 seeds (Duke and Missouri) fell to #15 seeds for only the sixth time in 20 years.

But does this phenomenon occur in the business world? You bet your college mascot it does. Every day companies are making decisions about which individuals to promote on a system similar to the NCAA seeding process: the odds are heavily weighted to those individuals deemed to be the most talented with talent typically being defined as possessing the best technical skills. If performance on the job is the equivalent to moving to the next round in the NCAA tournament, you expect to see the top individual contributors to win. However, as with March Madness, some lower seeds actually do better.

In last year’s Finding the First Rung study, we asked frontline leaders how they got their job. We took a look at how frontline leader assessment participants answered this question. It probably isn’t surprising that a significant chunk of managers said that they were promoted because of their “technical expertise.” What may be surprising—like Duke losing to Lehigh—is that those managers promoted because of their technical expertise were more likely to have development needs than all other promotion reasons in 6 of the 9 Manager Ready competencies (see table). Some competencies—like Guiding Interactions—were not even close.

If you were armed with this information prior filling out your promotion brackets—would you continue to automatically promote the technical experts?

Channeling Sports: A Conversation with ESPN Founder Bill Rasmussen

Wharton
When Bill Rasmussen launched ESPN on September 7, 1979, he gave the world its first 24-hour television network and changed the way people viewed both television and sports. His innovations include the creation of "Sports Center," wall-to-wall coverage of NCAA regular-season and March Madness college basketball, and coverage of the College World Series baseball tournament. Rasmussen, who wrote a book titled, Sports Junkies Rejoice! The Birth of ESPN, talked with Knowledge@Wharton about the challenges of founding a 24/7 sports network in the face of nearly universal skepticism, what entrepreneurs need to succeed and why he doesn't ever plan to retire. Watch the full video.

Big Insights, Big Air, and A Future that is Already Here

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:31:00 +0000

Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these 6 articles that inspire better management. Enjoy!

Bizarre Insights from Big Data

NY Times
On Sunday, The New York Times ran my article about Gilad Elbaz, who made a fortune helping Google map the Internet. He is now building a company called Factual, which he hopes will be one of the world’s largest and most accurate repositories of facts.

The idea is to have a lot of data of all kinds on hand, because sometimes unexpected combinations of information can lead to valuable insights.

For example, if you buy a used car, your best bet is an orange one. Data scientists at Kaggle, a pattern recognition start-up in which Mr. Elbaz has invested, have matched previously separate data sets on buyers, colors and after-purchase problems. They figured out that if a car’s original owner chose an odd color, the car was most likely a means of self-expression. That self-identification raises the odds that the owner cared more than usual for the vehicle.

Point of View is Worth 80 IQ Points

LindaStone
During the years I worked at Apple, Alan Kay, a creative visionary, was also there. Kay’s wise memes were often quoted. One of my favorites, “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points,” is a constant guiding consideration for me. It comes to mind when I convene groups or organize advisory boards for companies: Is there a diverse mix of thinkers, personalities, and expertise represented? It’s on my mind when I organize dinner parties. In the years I spent working at Apple and Microsoft, it was on my mind when I made hiring decisions and assembled teams to work on any type of project. In December, I ran into Chris Young, and as we caught up with each other, he related a fascinating, “point of view is worth 80 points,” story. The story, Milk in Kenya, is below.

2014 - The Future is Here

GigaOM

The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.

-William Gibson, quoted in The Economist, December 4, 2003

The question we need to ask ourselves about the future is not if it will be digital, there seems to be a unison agreement that it will – the question is what digital means? There are two scenarios:

In the future things stay the same.
The second scenario suggests a generational shift to how we think – brought on not by the digital platform, but by the abilities of digital that no longer remain niche, but become mainstream.

First 1080 on a Skateboard

Kottke.org
Tom Schaar is the first person to land a 1080 on a skateboard ramp. He's 12 years old.

Paul Allen Backs Wiki Project

NW Innovation
Paul Allen, via his Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is one of the major backers of a new Wiki project from the group Wikimedia. According to Wikimedia, it is starting the development of a new project called Wikidata, an online, collaboratively edited database of the world's knowledge. Wikimedia said the effort is being funded by a major donation of 1.3 million Euros ($1.7M dollars), half of it provided by Allen....

The Human Voice, as Game Changer

NY Times
… executives are plotting a voice-enabled future where human speech brings responses from not only smartphones and televisions, cars and computers, but also coffee makers, refrigerators, thermostats, alarm systems and other smart devices and appliances.

It is a wildly disruptive idea. But such systems are already beginning to change the way we interact with the world and, for better and worse, how we think about technology. Until now, after all, we’ve talked only to one another. What if we begin talking to all sorts of machines, too — and, like Siri, those machines respond as if they were human?

Don't Follow Passion, Follow Effort

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Listening to Shame

TED
Shame is an unspoken epidemic, the secret behind many forms of broken behavior. Brené Brown, whose earlier talk on vulnerability became a viral hit, explores what can happen when people confront their shame head-on. Her own humor, humanity and vulnerability shine through every word.

James Cameron Now at Ocean's Deepest Point

National Geographic
As of 5:52 p.m. ET Sunday (7:52 a.m. Monday, local time), James Cameron has arrived at the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep, members of the National Geographic expedition have confirmed.

His depth on arrival: 35,756 feet (10,898 meters)—a figure unattainable anywhere else in the ocean.

Reaching bottom, the National Geographic explorer and filmmaker typed out welcome words for the cheering support crew waiting at the surface: "All systems OK." Folded into a sub cockpit as cramped as any Apollo capsule, the National Geographic explorer and filmmaker is now investigating a seascape more alien to humans than the moon. Cameron is only the third person to reach this Pacific Ocean valley southwest of Guam (map)—and the only one to do so solo.

Hubris and the Data Scientist

Cloud of Data
ReadWriteWeb‘s Joe Brockmeier captures a recurring issue from last week’s O’Reilly Strata conference, asking “Can Big Data replace domain expertise?” According to Brockmeier, the audience (of data scientists) apparently narrowly agreed that their arsenal of tools and algorithms trumped the knowledge and experience of the meteorologists, financiers, and retailers to whose domains data scientists are increasingly turning.

Is Kindness a Strategy?

HBR
Here’s how it works. When a problem occurs, swift and effective resolution can elevate repurchase intent to a level that’s actually greater than if the problem had never occurred at all. Every problem, if managed well, is thus an “opportunity” to boost overall loyalty among a company’s already loyal customers. Spill soup on a guest in the hotel dining room? Solution: offer on the spot to dry clean the suit or, if the damage is severe, offer to replace it entirely. The customer is delighted; the employee has done the right thing; the hotel raises that customer’s lifetime value.

The Origins of Positive-Constructive Daydreaming

The important difference between mind wandering and daydreaming

Psychology Today
Once accused of being absent-minded, the founder of American Psychology, William James, quipped that he was really just present-minded to his own thoughts. William James didn’t just live in his own head, but he also studied the phenomenon, coining the term “stream of thought” in 1890. In his famous textbook Principles of Psychology, he opened an early chapter with the following: “We now begin our study of the mind from within”. He clearly saw the internal stream of consciousness as an important topic within psychology.

Daydreaming may be regarded as a feature of William James’ stream of thought. It is characterized by a shift of attention away from focusing on a physical or mental task to a series of thoughts derived from long-term memory (often taking a narrative form). Daydreaming may be regarded as falling within the general phenomenon of mind-wandering except that much of mind-wandering may be characterized by shifts of attention from an already ongoing task towards new sensory reactions in the individual’s physical, social, or bodily environment rather than towards one’s thoughts derived ultimately from long term memory.

Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort

BlogMaverick
"Follow Your Passion' is easily the worst advice you could ever give or get. Why ? Because everyone is passionate about something. We are born with it. There are always going to be things we love to do. That we dream about doing. That we really really want to do with our lives.

Think about all the things you have been passionate about in your life. If you really want to know where you destiny lies, look at where you apply your time.

Time is the most valuable asset you don’t own. You may or may not realize it yet, but how you use or don’t use your time is going to be the best indication of where your future is going to take you:

When you work hard at something you become good at it.
When you become good at doing something, you will enjoy it more.
When you enjoy doing something, there is a very good chance you will become passionate or more passionate about it
When you are good at something, passionate and work even harder to excel and be the best at it, good things happen.

The Godfather of Punk on Creativity and Innovation

InnovationExcellence
Richard Strange is ‘punk rock’s illegitimate Godfather’, having preceded the Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Ramones and The Clash with his highly influential pop art band ‘The Doctors of Madness’. Richard’s career has spanned pop art, punk, writing and acting, most famously for his film roles in Batman, alongside Jack Nicholson and in Robin Hood and Harry Potter. Kiss Hello Tomorrow – Strange but wise advice for innovators.

Richard concluded by offering 3 pieces of advice to the aspiring artist trying to carve out an innovative niche for themselves.

If you want to be more productive, do less work

Thought Leaders
Want to be more productive? Just do less work.

I know you’re probably scratching your head right now wondering how to not get fired by taking this recommendation. The truth is you’ll probably be on your way to a promotion if you pull this off correctly.

Step 1: Eliminate the Extremely Stupid Crap.
Step 2: Stop the Moderately Stupid Crap.
Step 3: Make the Remaining Stupid Crap Simpler.
Step 4: Take all that newly-found time and spend it on crap that matters. You’ve freed up time, bandwidth, and energy. Reinvest those into the projects you know will make a difference. Or simply spend a few hours less at the office to get your life back in balance. See? Do less work. Be more productive.

Gamification

TopTrends Now And Next
Gamification is the application of online gaming techniques, like gaining points or status, to engage the attention or alter the behaviour of individuals or communities. Wearable devices linked to game-like systems, for instance, could induce overweight people to take more exercise or eat healthy foods.

Gamification works on three principles:

First, people can be competitive (with themselves and with others).
Second, people will share certain kinds of information.
Third, people like to be rewarded.

That’s why if you regularly buy a coffee at your local coffee shop you might end up with a nice badge courtesy of a company like Foursquare. And perhaps why, if you drink enough coffee at the same place, you might be crowned the coffee shop king – for a day. Or there’s Chore Wars, where people battle the washing up in return for virtual points or avatar energy boosts.

Lead Differently

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Lead Differently

Change This
"Leaders and leadership are often thought of in a poor light. Leadership is often viewed as a necessary evil. There is even a growing voice to the idea of leaderless organizations. I’m not sure where that is headed, but I do know I don’t want to be a part of a leaderless organization.

People and organizations are much more likely to thrive if the leader subscribes to what Robert Greenleaf called Servant Leadership. It is not a new idea—Greenleaf didn’t invent it nor did I. However, it is an idea whose time has come… It is time to Lead Differently!”
Blog

IT Management should not begin and end with a spreadsheet

Enterprise CIO Forum
…every person in each room was measuring and managing the old fashion way—after the fact by manual manipulation of Excel spreadsheets. This is problematic at multiple levels.

According to Derek Abell, “control is different than ‘reporting’ in that it implies the possibility for management intervention if things go out of control. Control implies feedback in which management is actively involved. Reporting, on the contrary, is passive. For control to be effective, therefore, data must be timely and provided at intervals that are effective for intervention.” (Derek Abell, Managing with Dual Strategies, pg. 275). At the very least, this means the IT companies participating in the roundtables are not controlling their IT environments the way they should. And apparently this is true across industries as participants came from commercial banking, healthcare insurance, entertainment, property and casualty insurance, and local government and public sector.

The Hard Science of Teamwork

HBR
Like many people, I've encountered teams that are "clicking." I've experienced the "buzz" of a group that's blazing away with new ideas in a way that makes it seem they can read each others' minds. We think of building teams that operate on this plane as an art, or even magic. It's not something you can plan; it's lightning-in-a-bottle stuff that you just embrace when you're lucky enough to come across it.

My feature article in HBR's April Spotlight on teams describes in detail the new science of building great teams. We can summarize those points here. Our data show that great teams:

Communicate frequently. In a typical project team a dozen or so communication exchanges per working hour may turn out to be optimum; but more or less than that and team performance can decline.

Talk and listen in equal measure, equally among members. Lower performing teams have dominant members, teams within teams, and members who talk or listen but don't do both.

Engage in frequent informal communication. The best teams spend about half their time communicating outside of formal meetings or as "asides" during team meetings, and increasing opportunities for informal communication tends to increase team performance.

Explore for ideas and information outside the group. The best teams periodically connect with many different outside sources and bring what they learn back to the team.

6 Warning Signs That You Are Not Ready to Lead

Harvest Performance
Here are some warning signs that you are just not ready (though you will be on the right path once you read this post!):

You have never heard of Servant Leadership
Focusing on people seems too soft for your work environment
The thought of providing authentic feedback makes you hide in fear
Empowerment is an individual sport
You don’t have time to reflect and work on yourself
Your “Trust Dial” is set to mistrust

Listening to Shame

How Convergent and Divergent Thinking Foster Creativity

Psychology Today
The relationship between intelligence and creativity has long been debated and studied.

One of the hallmark tests of "general intelligence" is the Raven's Progressive Matrices Test. This test gives you a matrix of figures and you have to figure out the missing piece that completes the pattern.

Here's an example...

6 ways to get shy employees to speak up

CBS
Some people are born introverts and some, extroverts. Neither personality type makes someone inherently good or bad at their job, but shy employees may have trouble expressing their ideas in a group setting. Younger worker may be particularly reticent.

A good manager knows how to draw these employees out, making them feel comfortable enough to contribute. Here are 6 tips if you suspect someone on your team has something to say, but is hesitant to say it:

Finding a New Sense of Wonder and Other Keys to Better Management

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these 10 articles that inspire better management. Enjoy!

How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries

TED

Adam Savage walks through two spectacular examples of profound scientific discoveries that came from simple, creative methods anyone could have followed -- Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference around 200 BC and Hippolyte Fizeau's measurement of the speed of light in 1849.

It’s time for a new definition of big data

InfoDrivenBusiness

Two words seemingly on every technologist’s lips are “big data”. The Wikipedia definition for big data is: “In information technology, big data consists of datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools”. This approach to describing the term constrains the discussion of big data to scale and fails to realise the key difference between regular data and big data. The blog posts and books which cover the topic seem to converge on the same approach to defining big data and describe the challenges with extracting value from this resource in terms of its size.

Big data can really be very small and not all large datasets are big! It’s time to find a new definition for big data.

Finding a Sense of Wonder

Kevin Eikenberry

Often we look at kids and wish we could recapture some of that magic of childhood. One of the many things that make children magical is that complete willingness to have a sense of wonder.

“We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.”
- E. Merrill Root, educator and poet

Kelli Anderson: Design to Challenge Reality

TED

Kelli Anderson shatters our expectations about reality by injecting humor and surprise into everyday objects. At TEDxPhoenix she shares her disruptive and clever designs.

3 Steps To Pursuing Your Ideal Career

Fast Company

There's often a gap between identifying what you naturally gravitate toward and gain energy from and how that translates into your full-time work. Take a deep breath and dive in with these three steps that'll start closing it.

Here are three steps that will help you gain internal clarity so you can plan toward your ideal future.

Gain clarity around what to focus on.
Define the world you imagine.
Replace old thoughts with new ones.

IDEO: Big Innovation Lives Right on the Edge of Ridiculous Ideas

The 99 Percent

Imagine for a second if you could somehow wrap up the creative chaos of a kindergartner's life and apply it at work. You'd go on field trips, make stuff, hatch crazy ideas, and be awed by the world on a daily basis. Sound ridiculous? At the renowned international design consultancy IDEO, it's how work gets done every day.Psychologists tell us that as we age, we become self-conscious in classroom and other public settings, and quietly begin to suppress our playful tendencies for fear of being childish or breaking with social norms. Creativity requires that we fight against this trajectory.

At IDEO, being playful is almost an obsession. The company believes that great, innovative work cannot happen without trial-and-error, experimentation, and maybe even a little tomfoolery. Few know this better than Brendan Boyle and Joe Wilcox of IDEO's Toy Lab.

Building Babel: Lost in Machine Translation

BBC

Automatic language translation is a long way off, given the overwhelming complexity of language. University of Edinburgh's Philipp Koehn says there are so many possible language rules that they cannot all be written down, and there also are too many exceptions to those rules. The statistical approach to translation currently is the chief focus of most machine translation research. "Essentially, we are translating using probabilities to find the best solution," says University of Oxford's Phil Blunsom. "The computer doesn't understand the languages or know any grammar, but might use statistics to determine that 'dog the' is not as likely as 'the dog.'"

Vast numbers of source texts are required to improve computers' ability to make such decisions, with Blunsom noting that at least 30 million words or 1 million sentences are typically needed. Automatic spoken language translation is even more challenging than text translation because of a multitude of factors that include false starts, references to things that were said earlier, or the lack of a written form.

Software Translates Your Voice Into Another Language

Technology Review

Microsoft researchers have developed speech recognition software that can learn the sound of a user's voice and translate it into a new language. The researchers say the system that could be used to make language learning more personal or make traveling easier. "For a monolingual speaker traveling in a foreign country, we'll do speech recognition followed by translation, followed by the final text to speech output [in] a different language, but still in his own voice," says Microsoft's Frank Soong. The researchers also note that providing sample foreign phrases in a person's own voice can make learning a new language easier for users.

The system requires about an hour of training to develop a model able to read out any text in a user's own voice. The model is converted into one that can read text in another language by comparing it with a stock text-to-speech model for the desired language. The software can convert between any pair of 26 supported languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Italian. University of Southern California professor Shrikanth Narayanan says using a person's own voice for speech translations could make interactions that rely on translations more reassuring for users, particularly in situations such as doctor-patient consultations.

12-Year-Old Speaks The Truth About Plain Doughnuts

BuzzFeed

A bit random - but I suspect you’ll get this from somewhere else too :)

Visualization Technologies for Human-Environment Interactions

CCC Blog

The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), a national fusion center funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, has invited computational and domain scientists to participate in a workshop on visualization technologies that support research on human-environment interactions. The workshop will focus on the visualization and use of spatial datasets from the social and environmental sciences. Domain scientists will have an opportunity to learn about visualization tools and resources available for their work, and computational scientists will get a chance to learn about the as-yet unmet visualization needs in the domain sciences. The workshop will address some of the visualization challenges in using spatio-temporal datasets, recommend possible collaborative information technology efforts that could be supported by SESYNC's programs or through other funding mechanisms, and establish a network of researchers to share information and exchange ideas on a regular basis. SESYNC will accept abstracts related to the main topics of the workshop until April 20. The workshop is scheduled for July 23-24 in Annapolis, Maryland.

12 Ways Leaders Can Use Twitter, and Other Innovate Management Techniques

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:00:00 +0000

12 Ways Leaders Can Use Twitter

Leadership & Learning

How can leaders best use Twitter?

Share thoughts
Share reflections
Share an inspirational quotation
Share a lesson
Help people focus on their goals
Ask a great reflective question
Help build community
Stay connected with your team
Ask for and receive feedback
Watch competition and be aware of environment
Practice concise thinking and communication
Stimulate creativity – by trying new things

All of the things on this list are the stuff of great leadership! Perhaps the biggest aha from this list for me comes not the items themselves; but that thought these suggestions, Twitter can become a leadership development tool, or a part of a leadership development program.

Diego Rodriguez: This is What Leadership Should Look Like at IDEO

BobSutton

Diego's IDEO colleague, Tatyana Mamut, stopped by Stanford last week to serve as judge for the final project in our course on scaling-up excellence. Somehow, we got to talking about leadership and she told me about a video that Diego had shown people and told them "This is what leadership should look like at IDEO." Watch it here. You have to see it, I won't tell you anything else.

P.S. As a bonus, if you click on the link for Tatyana, you get a great short talk on how tools, rules, and norms and how they explain the spread of deodorant use in Russia. It reminds of when my dissertation adviser -- Bob Kahn, half jokingly -- defined organizations as "rules, tools, and fools."

Climbing the Great Wall of Trust

HBR

In recent conversations with US executives doing business in China, Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Roy Y.J. Chua heard about a new trend. In an East Asian version of cutting deals on the golf course, Chinese executives often take partners to teahouses to discuss business and negotiate deals. The problem, according to these executives, is that foreigners are rarely invited.

Building on past research, Chua and his colleagues investigate two types of trust: cognitive trust, which is based on confidence in a partner's technical competency, and affective trust, which is based on a shared concern for a partner's welfare and personal interests. "Cognitive trust is trust from the head; it's a very rational way of assessing ability and reliability," says Chua. "Affective trust is trust that comes from the 'heart.' This type of trust involves considerable emotional investments."

Finding a Sense of Wonder

Kevin Eikenberry

Often we look at kids and wish we could recapture some of that magic of childhood. One of the many things that make children magical is that complete willingness to have a sense of wonder.

“We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.”

- E. Merrill Root, educator and poet

3 Steps To Pursuing Your Ideal Career

Fast Company

Here are three steps that will help you gain internal clarity so you can plan toward your ideal future.

1. Gain clarity around what to focus on.

2. Define the world you imagine.

3. Replace old thoughts with new ones.

How to completely, utterly destroy an employee’s work life

Washington Post

Recall your worst day at work, when events of the day left you frustrated, unmotivated by the job, and brimming with disdain for your boss and your organization. That day is probably unforgettable. But do you know exactly how your boss was able to make it so horrible for you? Our research provides insight into the precise levers you can use to re-create that sort of memorable experience for your own underlings.

Over the past 15 years, we have studied what makes people happy and engaged at work. In discovering the answer, we also learned a lot about misery at work. Our research method was pretty straightforward. We collected confidential electronic diaries from 238 professionals in seven companies, each day for several months. All told, those diaries described nearly 12,000 days – how people felt, and the events that stood out in their minds. Systematically analyzing those diaries, we compared the events occurring on the best days with those on the worst.

What Pi Has to do with Innovative Management

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these 8 articles that inspire better management. Enjoy!

Find your human middleware

Gartner’s Mark McDonald

Where is your human middleware? Every organization has it, but few people see it for what it is – a sign of distortion. Human middleware are the people in your organization whose responsibilities revolve around greasing the skids to keep things moving. Just like their technology counterparts, human middleware sits in the gaps between processes, they coordinate corporate messages, and they are both the grease that keeps things moving and the glue that keeps things from falling apart. Human middleware can be difficult to see in your organization.

Celebrate Pi Day – this week!

Pi Day.org

Pi, Greek letter (), is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world on March 14th. Pi = 3.1415926535…

With the use of computers, Pi has been calculated to over 1 trillion digits past the decimal. Pi is an irrational and transcendental number meaning it will continue infinitely without repeating. The symbol for pi was first used in 1706 by William Jones, but was popular after it was adopted by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1737. Learn more about Pi.

The Difference Between Management and Leadership

Bret L. Simmons

In the new chapter to the paperback edition of his book, Good Boss, Bad Boss, Bob Sutton asserts that there is a difference between management and leadership, but focusing on it is dangerous (p, 263). He concurs as I do with Warren Bennis that “managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing.” Bob thinks this distinction is accurate; however, focusing on it is dangerous because:

“It encourages bosses to see generating big and vague ideas as the important part of their jobs – and to treat implementation, or pesky details of any kind, as mere “management work” best done by “the little people.” Even if left unsaid, this distinction reflects how too many bosses think and act. They use it to avoid learning about people they lead, technologies their companies use, customers they serve, and numerous other crucial little things.” (p. 264).

Do Your People Trust You?

HBR

When we talk to managers, we often ask, "Do your people trust you?" Most are taken aback. It's not something they're often asked or a question they've even asked themselves.

After some thought, most eventually say something like, "Well, I think so. I hope so. No one's said he doesn't." In fact, as they ultimately admit, they don't really know for sure.

It's a question worth asking. Do your people trust you?

Chances are, you don't know for sure, either. If so, that's potentially a problem because your ability to elicit people's best efforts depends on their trust in you — their confidence that they can count on you to do the right thing.

When nobody (and everybody) is the boss

MiX

Few figures are simultaneously as reviled and revered as "the boss." The problem isn't with the people who fill the role (that's another story), but the role itself. The "modern" organization was founded on the principle of control--a central authority sets direction, corrals information, curtails decision-making power, and punishes deviations from the norm.

That might have worked in a world in which standardization, predictability, conformity, and discipline were enough to mass produce profits. But it doesn't work in a world of constant change, competition from everyone and everywhere, and commoditized knowledge. And it certainly doesn't work in a world in which there is so much hunger for greater humanity, freedom, voice, and meaning.

We've reached a real inflection point when it comes to how we organize human effort. The most inspiring organizations today are actively experimenting with what gets people out of bed in the morning--and what fires up their imagination, initiative, and passion. And the best bosses understand that their power comes not from maintaining control, but from devising ways to unleash more freedom, creativity, and contribution.

MasterCard's Chris McWilton: Embracing 'Thoughtful' Risk-taking

Wharton

Growing up in upstate New York, Chris McWilton witnessed the rise and fall of local icon Eastman Kodak due to executives' resistance to change. Now president of U.S. markets for MasterCard, McWilton noted during a recent Wharton Leadership Lecture that the same fate could have easily befallen the credit card company. MasterCard has been able to thrive, he said, by revamping its culture from one of complacency in the face of high margins, to one that promotes more creative risk-taking.

Successful people are successful

Swombat

One interesting observation I've made over the last few years is about the myth of the overnight success. This is a persistent idea in the startup world (much like in any star-dominated field) - the idea that someone is unknown and unsuccessful for many years, and suddenly they shoot to fame through a combination of luck, timing, hard work, perseverance, and other assorted goodies. The problem with this myth is that it's true, but it's also misleading. For most of my working life, I was under the spell of this "some day it will all change" myth. Having observed both myself and other successful people around me, I found that this is not true. Rather than having a long history of self-sacrifice followed by a sudden rise to fame, successful people (even those that shoot to fame) seem to have a long history of building bigger successes on top of smaller successes. In other words, as the title puts it, successful people are successful - for a long time before you get to hear about them. Success seems to be a lifelong habit.

A Multiverse of Exploration: Magic and Neuroscience

IFTF

Recently, IFTF's Technology Horizons Program hosted a conference where we presented our new map, titled A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021 (featured on CNN's What's Next and BoingBoing). The map focuses on six big stories of science that we think will play out over the next decade: Decrypting the Brain, Hacking Space, Massively Multiplayer Data, Sea the Future, Strange Matter, and Engineered Evolution. As we were conducting the research that informed the map, I was constantly reminded of Arthur C. Clark's famous quote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." After all, we were exploring real science around invisibility cloaks, quantum consciousness, designer lifeforms—I'd say those are pretty magical concepts.

Innovative Management Update - Week of March 12, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Every week, we try and publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these 8 articles that inspire innovative management. Enjoy!

1. Why are We so Afraid of Creativity?

Scientific American

We may say we value creativity, we may glorify the most imaginative among us, but in our heart of hearts, imagination can scare us.

We're not always willing to take the risks that come with innovation.

As a general rule, we dislike uncertainty. It makes us uneasy. A certain world is a much friendlier place. And so, we work hard to reduce whatever uncertainty we can, often by making habitual, practical choices, choices that protect the status quo. You know the saying, better the devil you know? That about sums it up.

Creativity, on the other hand, requires novelty. Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don’t exit, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. In other words, it is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening—even if we aren’t aware of just how much it frightens us personally. It is also potentially embarrassing (after all, there’s never a guarantee of success).

Consider a common paradox: organizations, institutions, and individual decision makers often reject creative ideas even as they state openly that creativity is, to them, an important and sometimes even central goal. Or another one: teachers have repeatedly been found to dislike students who show curiosity and creative thought, even though creativity is held as an important goal of education.

2. Hacker Historian George Dyson Sits Down With Wired’s Kevin Kelly

Wired

The two most powerful technologies of the 20th century—the nuclear bomb and the computer—were invented at the same time and by the same group of young people. But while the history of the Manhattan Project has been well told, the origin of the computer is relatively unknown. In his new book, Turing’s Cathedral, historian George Dyson, who grew up among these proto- hackers in Princeton, New Jersey, tells the story of how Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and a small band of other geniuses not only built the computer but foresaw the world it would create. Dyson talked to wired about the big bang of the digital universe.

3. Our Lin-sane attraction to terrible puns, explained

MSNBC

Lin case you hadn't noticed, people have become Lin-fatuated with the Lin-spiring rags-to-riches story of New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin. He's a regular Linternet phenomenon!

It's already been about two weeks since Linsanity took hold, and yet headlines, sports commentators and homemade signs at Madison Square Garden still haven't run out of awful new ways to play on the Harvard grad's name: Lin long and prosper. Lin-credible. "All he does is Lin Lin Lin." (That last one comes courtesy of Shaq's Twitter feed.)

4. The Building Blocks of Better Ideas: Vision

Creative Liberty

…start with the most basic building block of idea-making: vision, which can be more broadly interpreted to refer to two specific abilities:

1) The ability to observe (see, hear, sense, etc.) the fine details or “little things” that others overlook.

2) The ability to take the broad view and understand the underlying context of a scenario crying out for a better solution.

Details, details
Tom Kelley from the design consultancy IDEO, in his book “The Art of Innovation,” says, “innovation starts with an eye,” implying that creating a product or service improvement breakthrough rarely happens without close observation of the situation in which the service or product functions. Design firms such as IDEO often send teams into the field to watch users in action. These observations sessions often cut through assumptions about how users “should” (or do) interact with the item/process.
Of special interest to such teams are users who are “rule breakers,” people who use the item “improperly” yet get results anyway. These users often point out design limits, common pain points for users, and can lead the way to new pathways for the product to achieve its goal.

5. Driven to Worry, and to Procrastinate

NY Times

SINCE time began, it seems, people have been putting off till tomorrow what they could have done today — berating themselves and inconveniencing others in the process.

It wouldn’t be a problem except that time eventually runs out. “You may delay, but time will not,” said Benjamin Franklin.

In the world of work, procrastination has “expensive and visible costs,” said Rory Vaden, a corporate trainer, who points to research showing that the average employee admits to wasting two hours a day on nonwork tasks.

People know that procrastination hurts themselves, others and their work, so why do they do it? One answer, especially in these times, is that they are overwhelmed, said Julie Morgenstern, a productivity consultant in New York and author of “Time Management From the Inside Out.”

6. City with Superfast Internet Invites Innovators to Play

Technology Review

A Tennessee city with one-gigabit-per-second Internet runs a $300,000 contest to find ways of using it.

Citizens in Chattanooga, Tennessee, have access to one-gigabit-per-second Internet—that's 100 times the U.S. national average, and fast enough to download a two-hour movie in about five seconds. The only question is: what to do with it?

The city is hoping a contest with $300,000 in prize money will help answer that question. Entrants are invited to come up with clever ways of making use of the city's blisteringly fast Internet, which was installed in late 2010 with a $111 million U.S. Department of Energy grant, as part of federal stimulus efforts that also built out the city utility's long-planned smart grid.

7. How To Guide Your Creative Life With A Simple “More Or Less” List

A Big Creative Yes -- ßgood idea

The reason we sometimes (maybe often) feel we don’t know, and feel that our lives are floundering, even out of control, are when we’re not giving ourselves time and space to stop and listen to that inner knowing.

Using a simple “More or Less List” is a great way to give yourself that time and space, and get you back on track with what matters, what’s good for you, what you truly enjoy.

8. Time to Kill off Captchas

Scientific American

Overall, the Carnegie Mellon team estimates that we spend a cumulative 150,000 hours at the gates of these irritating obstructions every single day. In a newer variant, called reCaptcha, at least that time is put to public use. You see a muddied-looking word that comes from a wonky scanned Google book; when you type what it really says, you’re actually helping out with the process of cleaning up and recognizing an actual text.

Nevertheless, we the law abiders are still wasting 17 person-years every single day. That’s a disgraceful waste of our lives. Surely there are better solutions worth exploring.

Innovative Management Update - Week of March 5, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:02:00 +0000

Every week, we try and publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these 7 articles that inspire innovative management. Enjoy!

1. The Alchemy and Mystery of Leadership

Three Star Leadership

You will never know the impact you have on most of your team members, but you will have an impact. Set a good example. Treat people right. Leave the world better than you found it.

2. Highly Flawed, Messy, Chaotic - Gotta Love #Management!

Management Craft

1. How managers, and everyone, is highly talented and highly flawed. Even the best performers are highly flawed. What does this mean? It means that we need to be tolerant and flexible to bring out everyone's talents. And it means that great teaming, collaboration, and collective work can only happen if we don't let idiosyncrasies get in the way. Relationships - friendship even - do not require full agreement. In fact, they are richer when we challenge each other. The idea that we are highly talented and highly flawed does not excuse us for being annoying or inadequate managers.

2. Management is, by its nature, messy and chaotic and will always be. Get over it and then love it. Managing people is neither a linear nor logical practice. We know this! So why do we expect people who report to us - or our bosses and peers - to act logically and predictably? Human systems are more like the weather than they are like a manufacturing line - they are chaotic, unpredictable, and sensitive. This messiness and chaos are not conditions that get in the way of management - they are the reasons that management is needed.

3. Reward Value, Not Face Time

HBR

Too many companies continue to operate by the premise that their employees can't be fully trusted, and so treat them as children, who must be continuously monitored.

The solution is to hire people you're prepared to trust, and then treat them as adults, capable of making responsible adult choices. Do that, and it's a good bet they will. Indeed, considerable evidence suggests that the more confidence managers have in their people, the better they perform.

4. The Evolution of a Point Guard

NY Times

Beyond the mystique and the mania lies a more basic story — of perseverance, hard work and self-belief.

5. Trust or Mistrust: What Should Be Key Mindset for Open Innovation?

15inno

What happens when these mindsets collide when it comes to open innovation?

6. When to Share Sensitive Information with Your Team

HBR

Being the boss means you are often privy to information that your team isn't.

There are of course times when you are not allowed to share the news — your company has been acquired but the deal is not finished, or someone on your team is being let go. But there are a whole host of instances when it is up to you. At those times, you're likely to feel pressure from one side or another. "It's very rare people don't want to know the news even if it's bad," says Michael Useem, the William and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management at the Wharton School and author of "Four Lessons in Adaptive Leadership." But it's important to assess each situation individually and to remember it's not your job to coddle employees. "We're not their parents, we're their bosses," says Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and coauthor of Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader. Telling or not depends on the situation, but these guidelines can help you make the decision.

7. Lessons in Gaming: Jury out on Zamzee, other forms of 'gamification'

SF Gate

While gamification is a relatively new concept, the science of human motivation is not. And critics of the gamification concept - and even proponents who feel the concepts are misapplied - say many examples so far fundamentally misunderstand what drives behavior.

The most basic mistake is thinking that people play games for external rewards like points and badges, whereas in fact people play games because games are intrinsically fun or rewarding. The points are just a way of keeping score, an almost incidental add-on to the process. Sudoku has no points, for instance, but that hasn't stopped millions from playing.

"Actual games and gamification are at complete opposite poles on the motivation continuum," said Kathy Sierra, a writer and game developer. This isn't a big problem when rewards and points are applied to rote work, like chores or brushing your teeth. After all, there's little worry of making those things less engaging.

Leaders Must Grow Faster Than The Led

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 05:26:00 +0000

To have an innovative team, you must be an innovative leader. This post shares 4 tips to help you grow to be even more innovative and effective. According to the Harvard Business Review:

As we go through different phases in our personal and professional lives, we're called upon to adapt, to marshal skills different than those we've used in the past. And in the modern world — where the pace of technological and social change is as fast as at any time in human history, those demands on our adaptability are greater. An exceptional grocery store cashier, for example, will need a different set of skills to be a store manager as her career evolves. And those in computer repair have had to learn and unlearn a myriad skills over the past 30 years to keep pace with the changes happening around them.

The top 4 skills to help you grow are actually quite simple:

Stop seeking answers; start asking questions.
Focus on people, not problems.
Stop working as a generalist.
Stay hungry.

Want to read more? Here is the full article from the Harvard Business Review titled To Grow, Leave What You Know Behind by John Coleman.

Last year, I was fortunate to moderate a fascinating panel discussion with Harvard's Center for Public Leadership on the topic of "Next Generation Leadership." One of the panelists, Rosalinde Torres, encouraged us to ask the following question: "What has made you successful in the past that you need to change to move forward as a leader?"
As we go through different phases in our personal and professional lives, we're called upon to adapt, to marshal skills different than those we've used in the past. And in the modern world — where the pace of technological and social change is as fast as at any time in human history, those demands on our adaptability are greater. An exceptional grocery store cashier, for example, will need a different set of skills to be a store manager as her career evolves. And those in computer repair have had to learn and unlearn a myriad skills over the past 30 years to keep pace with the changes happening around them.
So what skills do you need to modify or leave behind to grow? For me, a few suggestions come to mind.
Stop seeking answers; start asking questions. In our 20+ years of education, we have been trained to get ahead by having the right answers — to tests, to class questions, to business problems. But the most difficult challenges require leaders who can identify and ask the right questions.
The world needs great problem-solvers, but it also needs people who can make sure their organizations focus on the right problems and miss nothing in the process. One of the more intellectually impressive senior executives I've worked with asked questions twice as often as he offered answers. As a result, the people who worked for him always took full responsibility for their work — because they knew they'd have to answer a stream of deep and thoughtful questions as soon as they entered the boardroom. This leader's questions not only showed his thoughtfulness and helped drive deeper solutions, but they created ownership among the people who worked for him.
Focus on people, not problems. Junior businesspeople often work on heavily analytic, stand-alone problems. They're asked to build models and plans — to find the "right" solution. But the most difficult problems can't be solved and implemented by individuals alone. Good leaders can't just get the right answer. They have to involve people — those who will ultimately implement their programs and those teammates who can help them solve the problem faster and better than they could on their own.
When an individual becomes too rigid about his or her "own" solution at the expense of working collaboratively with others, that individual often loses the momentum to generate change and misses the valuable insights of his or her peers in the process. A famous example of collaboration in the face of a difficult problem — no matter your thoughts on the project itself — is the Manhattan Project. The project, which ultimately led to the construction of the first atomic bomb, was led by General Leslie Groves. Knowing he couldn't handle the project by himself (and neither could anyone else), he called upon as many great minds and competing perspectives as possible to come to the right solutions collaboratively and created an environment in which they could implement against that plan.
Stop working as a generalist. Many of us have lived life so far as generalists — "Jacks of all trades," so to speak — focused broadly on a variety of skills, functions, or industries. Sure, we may have picked some topics on which to become knowledgeable, we've chosen professions, and we've completed "majors" or built specific skills. But by-and-large, we've cast our nets wide, learning broadly to gain context about the world around us. At some point, however, most of us will need to generate proficiency in a very specific topic, both because it makes us valuable sources of expert knowledge and teaches us the habits of mind to generate deep insight.
Take, for example, Steve Jobs's early obsession with calligraphy. After dropping out of Reed College in 1972, Steve spent months immersed in calligraphy, which, at Reed, was an incredibly strong program. In his words, "I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture." That experience not only helped Steve build the practical toolkit to create beautiful text and designs, but also improved and sharpened his mind, attention to detail, and his fascination with design.
You may be at a different stage in life — a great "people" manager who needs to work on her problem-solving or a specialist who needs to broaden his experience — but I've found that as my professional career evolves to include more collaboration, management, and implementation, the skills I've depended on, while helpful in their time, need to evolve for successful growth. These adjustments provide new areas of focus that may be common to a number of young leaders who are making the transition from individual contributor to manager as they advance in their careers.

Innovative Management Update - Week of January 30th

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Horoszowski) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:21:00 +0000

Every week, we try and publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. Enjoy!

Where Creativity Meets Technology

Boston Globe

In an interview, Jennifer Chayes, managing director of Microsoft Research New England, says the industry represents science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) wrong to young people, especially women, who often have an image of a nerdy guy at a computer, programming. Chayes, who chose science over a career in visual arts, says STEM fields can be very creative and collaborative, noting that she has never just sat at a computer and programmed. Chayes says she always works with other people and loves the human interaction, which is what she tries to explain to young women. "I love when another person's thinking sparks something in my mind, and my thinking sparks something in others." Chayes also notes that Microsoft employs a lot of nontechnical people to better understand how people want to use technology, adding that technology is moving toward greater interaction with social sciences. "So much of technology really depends on this interaction of engineering and technology with social sciences," she says. "So if someone gets interested in the social sciences, and starts doing work in this space, I think they put themselves in a much better position to get reemployed."

Re-Start

The New Yorker and Anti-Aging Games

Nolan Bushnell stopped by the office the other day, to play an anti-aging video game. “It’s what I call a ‘looking forward by looking backward’ game,” he said, settling in at the keyboard and loosening up his shoulders. “Meaning that you have to be able to solve a problem using information you received before you were distracted by something else. That’s why older people lose their cars in parking lots. They park, then they go in and shop—that’s the distraction—and then they can’t remember where they put their car.”

Anti-Aging Games—a Web site with games that are designed to improve short-term memory, focus, and concentration in older people—is one of his recent ventures, in a fifty-year career of serial entrepreneurship that began with TV repair, the founding of Atari, and the introduction of the first commercially successful video game, Pong, in 1972. He has made and squandered several fortunes since then, and missed out on a few more, notably in 1976, when he declined to buy a third of Apple Computer, for fifty thousand dollars. “I’ve been in navigation systems, robotics, restaurants”—he founded the Chuck E. Cheese chain—“communications systems, touch screens, and now I’m back in games,” he said. “I like to say I have five-year A.D.D.”

A Scientific Explanation for the Emergence of Mattering from Matter

Psychology Today

Are we getting any closer to a scientific explanation for the emergence of mind from matter? According to cognitive scientists Jerry Fodor, "Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious."

Fodor's is a minority position. Cognitive scientists are on the whole optimistic. Most would claim that, thanks to advances in life science, complexity theory and information theory, we are fast approaching a fully materialist account of consciousness.

In his new book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerges From Matter (Norton 2011), U.C. Berkeley's Terry Deacon takes up the gauntlet thrown down by Fodor. Deacon argues that the mainstream approach to cognitive science has a lot in common with Zeno's Paradox: In our race to a fully scientific account of consciousness, no matter how finely we dissect neurological processes, or how elaborately we flesh out our algorithmic computational models of complex informational processes, we are getting nowhere nearer to an explanation of consciousness. To Deacon, we need a different approach to the pure physics of consciousness, an approach that parallels the calculus that enabled swift Achilles to ultimately catch the tortoise.

5 Creativity Tips from Betty White

CreativeInstigation

1. Be grateful.

2. Don't take yourself too seriously.

3. Find work you love.

4. Give back.

5. Surround yourself with friends

YouTube: Birthday Roast and from the President

Innovation and Engineering in America

Business Week

Thomas Edison’s Secrets to Creating Innovation Leaders

Lisa Petrilli

Sarah Miller Caldicott began researching and writing about Edison’s world-changing innovation methods after spending more than 15 years in corporate life as a senior Marketing executive. Her book, “Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of America’s Greatest Inventor” delineates Edison’s five competencies of innovation.

1. A Solution-centered Mindset

2. Kaleidoscopic Thinking

3. Full-spectrum Engagement

4. Master-mind Collaboration

5. Super-value Creation

TEDx Video: “Inventing the Future, Edison Style” ()

100 Tips About Life, People, and Happiness

In Over Your Head

Here are the first 42 :)

True wisdom and insight is always free.
Give your power over to no one.
Going into the unknown is how you expand what is known.
Get a library card.
Spend more time around people that both challenge and respect you.
Remain skeptical forever.
Fight for what matters.
There is a method that works. Find it.
Join a movement.
Drink your coffee black.
Never let anyone photoshop a picture of you. It creates a false sense of self-confidence.
Read more. Especially things you disagree with.
Get used to feeling stupid. It’s a sign of growth.
It’s easy for people to talk a good game, so watch how they behave instead.
Learn something from everyone.
Find things that inspire you and pursue them, even if there’s no money in it.
Starve if you have to, for as long as you need to.
Survive on a little just to prove you can do it.
Get one big success at an early age. It’ll help build your confidence for bigger things.
Do what you say you’ll do. No one is reliable anymore.
Be comfortable with abandonment, even of parts of your identity.
Learn a new language.
Eat more protein.
Keep people around you that will tell you the truth.
Genius gets you nowhere. Execution is everything.
If given the choice of equity or cash, always take cash.
Meet new people as often as possible. Offer to help them.
Don’t discriminate. Connect anyone in your network to anyone else.
If you can’t do a pull-up, you have a problem.
Nobody likes a know-it-all.
Get a passport. Fill it up with stamps no one has ever seen.
Quit your horrible job.
Read biographies. It’s like having access to the best mentors in history.
Go to bed, and wake up, early. No one will bother you, letting your best work emerge.
Scare yourself a little bit every day. It will expand your inner map.
Learn to climb trees.
Don’t buy a lot of stuff, and only buy the stuff you really love.
Be humble and curious.
Twitter followers don’t keep you warm at night.
Be as useful as you can in as many circumstances as possible.
Show up.
Repeat people’s names when you meet them.

dot dot dot - you should read ‘em all…

Lenovo to Launch App Programming Class

US News & World Report

Lenovo is collaborating with the National Academy Foundation to teach teens how to design, program, and market their own Android apps. Lenovo and the foundation will offer an app programming class in five U.S. high schools in the spring, and expand the pilot program to 70 schools nationwide in the fall. Students will be required to take an introductory programming course before they are admitted into the 12-week program. Participants will work in small groups, use the standard Android developer toolkit to create their own app, and eventually release their app on the Android market. "We want to make sure they have a good experience doing something that is potentially marketable at the end of the course," says Lenovo's Michael Schmedlen. "We want students to be prepared for the future." A Lenovo survey found that 80 percent of teens are interested in learning how to create apps, and nearly 25 percent believe app development will be the most marketable technology skill in the future. The program will make the curriculum, materials, and lectures available free online for teachers who want to emulate the class.

JFP in SEA

John D. Berry

If you’re in Seattle in mid-February, you might want to come to one of these events to hear and meet Jean François Porchez, who is probably the most widely-known French type designer today. JFP will be giving a free talk on Wednesday, February 15 at Kane Hall at the University of Washington, as part of a week-long symposium: “Letters From France: On Designing Type.” He will also be speaking the following day at the Good Shepherd Center (4649 Sunnyside Avenue North, Seattle), with a Q&A session in both French and English. And I hope to entice him to our monthly typographers’ pub, on the second Tuesday, which will be February 14 (yes, Valentine’s Day), at the Pub at Third Place (6504 20th Avenue NE, Seattle), from 8 p.m. on; anyone interested in type is welcome. (Look for the table full of obvious typographers.) A bientôt!

Digital Engagement Through Transmedia Storytelling

Cisco

According to Wikipedia transmedia storytelling, also known as multi-platform storytelling, cross-platform storytelling, or transmedia narrative, is the technique of telling stories across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies. Henry Jenkins officially defined transmedia in 2006 in his book “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide,” as a story that “unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole.” So given this transmedia storytelling is just the tip of the transmedia iceberg with transmedia branding/activism/performance/etc. waiting in the wings so to speak.

The U-Bend of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Rosss) — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:29:00 +0000

The Economist

Happiness doesn’t just make people happy—it also makes them healthier. John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help counteract their crumbliness.

Happier people are more productive, too. Mr Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who had seen the funny film performed 12% better. This leads to two conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose the economists’ experiment rather than the psychologists’ or psychiatrists’. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive skills—a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with an ageing workforce.

The Top 10 HBR Blog Posts of 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Rosss) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 01:33:00 +0000

HBR

10 most popular posts of 2010, as measured by that most inarguable of website metrics, pageviews:

1. 12 Things Good Bosses Believe

2. Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

3. How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking

4. Why I Returned My iPad

5. The Best Cover Letter I Ever Received

6. How to Give Your Boss Feedback

7. You've Made a Mistake. Now What?

8. Define Your Personal Leadership Brand

9. Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps

10. Six Social Media Trends for 2011

50 Acts that Enhance Novelty at Work

noreply@blogger.com (Rosss) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 02:42:00 +0000

Brain Leaders and Learners

50 doables below add brainpower to derail workplace toxins and launch innovations leaders crave for a new era. Understand your proclivity for novelty, and begin to step toward more innovative outcomes for success in a new era.

New research about novelty’s power in the brain – only yields its elixirs to those who take advantage. How so?

Rethinking How We Learn and Work

noreply@blogger.com (Rosss) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 14:43:00 +0000

Ellen Galinsky Huffington Post

Why, asked psychiatrist and author Edward Hallowell, do we get our best ideas in the shower? He was addressing an audience of educators and families sponsored by the 92nd Street Y in New York City, asking them to rethink how we are raising and teaching children.

Hallowell answered himself. It is the one last refuge, he said, the one place where we aren't being bombarded by media and where we can be alone with our thoughts and feelings.

Why The Best Bosses Are Confident But Not Really Sure

noreply@blogger.com (Rosss) — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 18:21:00 +0000

Psychology Today

You're confident but not really sure. That's a state of mind that sounds paradoxical, but at times it really is true. In fact, it's the essence of what developmental psychologist John Meacham called the "attitude of wisdom." And it's a good description of some bosses who strike a healthy balance between knowing and doubting.

Meacham's insight, which was developed much further by organizational psychologist Karl Weick, was that the people we consider wise have the courage to act on their beliefs and convictions at the same time that they have the humility to realize that they might be wrong, and must be prepared to change their beliefs and actions when better information comes along.

The Fallacy of the Great Idea

noreply@blogger.com (Rosss) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 01:45:00 +0000

ChangeThis

The simple truth is that it is quite possible to create a thriving business without a big idea.

Yes, the world needs people with grand ideas who are willing to take big risks to further progress. In truth, most “great ideas” will never make their investors a penny. True, some companies have made billions from a unique product, but close inspection of many world-beating businesses reveals that their unique selling point is hard to pin down. Can anyone honestly tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi? And at the end of the day, McDonalds and Burger King both sell burgers.

In almost any industry you consider, the incumbents will be stuck in their ways. Small, nimble businesses can quickly integrate the latest ideas into their offerings. A lack of resources can act as a great spur to thinking laterally. Make it a mission to implement industry best practice into all areas of your business, and the next “great idea” may be a seemingly minor change you make to an existing industry.

50 Awesome Quotes on Risk Taking

noreply@blogger.com (Rosss) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 10:47:00 +0000

from Blogging Innovation

1. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” – Goethe

12. “Do one thing every day that scares you.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

21. “The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you. Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.” – William Jennings Bryan

45. “You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky

48. “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” – Andre Gide

Big Smilers Live Longer

noreply@blogger.com (Rosss) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 21:55:00 +0000

British Psychological Society

Researchers rated the "smile intensity" of 230 baseball professional baseball players. Focusing on the 150 players who'd died by the time of the study and controlling for extraneous factors such as BMI and marital status, the researchers found that those who were flashing a genuine 'Duchenne Smile' were half as likely to die in any given year compared with non-smilers. Indeed, the average life-span of the 63 deceased non-smilers was 72.9 years compared with 75 years for the 64 partial smilers and 79.9 years for the 23 Duchenne smilers.

The question, of course, is does smiling make you healthier, being healthier make you smile more, or perhaps most likely, a smile is a sign of an upbeat personality, which has been linked to longevity in numerous studies -- check out this cool study of nuns in particular.