Projectionists took four minutes to change films, so he and the other volunteer speakers to those large captive audiences were simply known as the Four Minute Men. (Of course the name also was meant to recall the Minute Men back during the American Revolution). They used just one or two slides. The entire program cost the government just $102,000.

Those volunteers were an important part of the Committee on Public Information, a federal propaganda agency run by a journalist named George Creel. During the war there were about 75,000 Four Minute Men, who gave an estimated 755,000 speeches to a total audience of 314 million people. The average audience was 416 people. On the average everyone in the US got to hear 3 speeches.

The whole post is worth reading at The Joy of Public Speaking.

Location:Whitehall,United States

He provides four sample questions that are well worth remembering for a kick-off meeting:

• “What is the one thing we must get right to make this website/application worth undertaking?”
• “How does your organization define success? What is the role of the website/application in achieving that success?”
• “What aspects of the internal culture or external environment could put this redesign/application at risk to fail?”
• “(Follow up question) Assuming we mitigate that risk, what would exceed your wildest dreams?”

I think there’s a lot of promise in the facilitation games he suggests for design-oriented kick-off meetings. I can imagine those activities engaging a large group and at the same time giving them sympathy for the challenges that designers confront. It’s easy for a client to imagine himself as a brilliant creative mind until confronted with pencil and blank sheet of paper.

It looks like his site GoodKickoffMeetings.com is stocked with plenty more good ideas for facilitation games. I could invest a lot of time there.

The first approach achieves the appearance of simplicity by shoving complexity into places where it is unmanaged or poorly managed. It’s a form of denial. That sounds bad, but simplicity by denial is often the most efficient solution. It achieves a good outcome without the cost involved in optimization.

We tend to over complicate our lives. Even (or maybe especially) our businesses. Often the greatest cost of doing without is the pain of knowing you’re doing without. The demands of “More” is the siren’s song of our age of abundance.

There are times, however, when the first approach is more costly than it appears. Simplicity through one-size-fits-all denial shoves complexity into spaces where it is unmanaged or poorly managed. While it solves a subset of the problem, it often makes other aspects of the problem worse. Sometimes the costs of the “simple solution” dramatically exceed its benefits.

When are reflexive efforts to simplicity through denial counterproductive? When the “needless complexities” actually turn out to be important parts of the problem. The trouble is, with our fondness for “more”, it’s hard to figure out whether a particular complicating detail is “needless” or “important.”

The only way through that challenge is to pay careful attention to your edge cases. Ask “What does this have in common with core examples?” “Is this really an edge case, or evidence that we haven’t formulated the problem elegantly?”

How much longer they can continue to rely on the best sales force they never had to pay is open to question. One would think that IT departments would catch on that the priorities Microsoft has educated them to care about entail significant hidden costs. And if IT doesn’t get it on their own, one would think that their increasingly tech-savvy CEO’s would find someone who does.

Maybe, just maybe, the company that can’t manage to knock off a two-year old Motorola mobile phone design after reportedly spending hundreds of millions isn’t best equipped to understand what features are beneficial in a mobile tablet computer.

But it’s good to see Microsoft confident again. It seems like just yesterday they were predicting 80% market share in a couple of years in mobile phones. I wonder how that turned out?

Ouch. Not only did this traders’ drunken black-out purchase lose $9.7m and lead to a $7.6m loss for the year for his firm, it also moved the global price of oil $1.50 overnight.

Amazing. In other news, Steve Perkins was relieved of his job as a oil futures trader last year.

Count me with the neighbors who are “concerned about nuclear reactions taking place near their homes.”

The match has now past nine hours. The fifth set is longer than any other match played at Wimbledon this year. They’re in danger of being stopped for darkness for the second day in a row.

Even more remarkable? The Wimbledon Live Blog reports: “There have been no toilet breaks in this match, not one.”

This morning, this email was in my inbox:

Hi Matt! Thanks for your quick payment and I have already packed this, printed the label and it will be headed towards Michigan in the morning. Have a great week and you should get this in the next several days.

It’s a pretty simple email, but at the end of the two lines, I know exactly what’s happened and when I should expect to get the package. I’ve been thanked. And the author’s casual tone, greeting, use of “I”, and the concrete verbs leave me with both a sense of dealing with a real person, one who is both personable and professional.

You could certainly do worse. And most companies do.

The Finance Ministry is trying to bolster native demand for Japanese bonds. How would they do this? By targeting “the untapped market”, men of marrying age and convincing them that buying bonds will make them, wait for it, more attractive.

As Bloomberg explained:

“I want my future husband to be diligent about money,” a 27-year-old woman says in an ad being run in free magazines promoting a fixed-rate, three-year note that Japan started selling last week. “Playboys are no good.” She’s one of five women featured in the page, which says “Men who hold JGBs are popular with women!!”

The ministry commissioned the ads to appeal to citizens for money at a time when record government borrowing threatens to outstrip demand. Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who took office yesterday, said he doesn’t have an instant fix to rein in the world’s largest public debt.

The government’s plan to attract marrying-age men comes after a campaign aimed at retirees started last August. …

“It strikes of desperation,” Christian Carrillo, a senior interest-rate strategist in Tokyo at Societe Generale SA said about the ad campaign. “I doubt this will be a successful strategy to attract retail investors.”

To make it even more worrying, they’re struggling to meet their obligations at a time when their three year bonds are yielding on a real basis (with inflation) negative 1% per year. (Women in Japan, apparently, aren’t looking for good investors.) What happens if their interest rate moves to just 2%, let alone 4% or 8%?

A nominal 1% return might be worthwhile when Japan experiences sharp deflation, but if that’s followed quickly by the debasing of their currency, it will be a disaster. What dominoes will fall globally? If the world’s financial system was brought to its knees by trouble in US subprime mortgages, and it took everything we had to avoid a depression, what is the remedy for a Japanese default? Surely the seizing up of the world’s largest bond market would have a catastrophic impact on the global economy and financial system. Right?

Which just goes to show how much more difficult it is to forecast rates and returns and to hedge risk in the current economic environment. This time isn’t different, but it sure doesn’t bear any resemblance to the world we’ve grown accustomed to over the last seventy years.

Stay tuned …