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Trundle Bed Plans (66)

Trundle beds are usually considered a pair of beds, one slightly smaller than a twin bed that is on rollers or casters so that it may be put beneath the upper twin bed for storage. Trundle beds allow for two separate beds to be available when necessary, but do not require the space constantly. It is a space-saving idea. The lower bed on some trundle beds can "pop-up" to be the same height as the bed they are stored beneath, creating a larger bed that may be used for guests. Often used as daybeds, trundle beds are less common than bunkbeds for children. Due to storing one bed beneath the other, neither bed usually has a box-spring.

Sifted Home Archives dream job sift everything innovate by knowing “do only what you only can do” Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 It was hot. Having Chernobyl just a few hours away didn’t help. I was lying on my back, slung between two seats in the bottom of the row boat. My self-appointed advisor sat sweating in the bow. His fat white stomach glistened in the heat of the Ukrainian afternoon. While we drifted along the river, the missionary earnestly jabbered about his work in the country. It was getting uncomfortable. Eventually, for lack of distraction, I started making internal wagers betting on which two beads of sweat would first jump together on the man’s expansive, sweaty chest. His words droned along, joining the monotonic voice of the city. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Passion metric Thursday, March 1st, 2007 I battle an internal suspicion that I’m too naive for business. Maybe I think too big, measure obstacles as too small, and expect too much? But maybe we live too small, ask too few important questions, focus on the middle insteand of the edges of possibility, and because we don’t expect achievement of any significant magnitude we never get to see it. Obviously, I usually settle on the second side, naivety be damned. One particularly naive thing I expect is that if something is worthwhile, you should first do it for free. If it really sings, then sing. Do it on your own when no one is looking and no one is paying. Of course it’s plain silly to do everything for kicks. So, the other naive expectation I harbor is that I should be paid exhorbitantly well for things I’m willing to do for free. As a friend said, “I don’t expect much, just $350,000 per year to work three days a week at something I’d do for free. Oh, and a yacht. A big one - really, really big.” Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Blue ocean revival Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 Within my small circle of aquaintences, Blue Ocean Strategy is popular again. Reading it through for the third time (the last time was more than a year ago), the book is so smooth and so rich compared to the business books I’ve read lately. Most books are limited to pure analysis that is easy to back up with numbers. Afraid of being soft, most set aside our capacities for insight and intuition. Blue Ocean embracing those abilities and provides a system for their use. It’s immensely refreshing. The book is also an arterial injection of confidence for companies facing an uncertain future. In such circumstance, many turn to consultants. With a consultant in the room it’s easy to convince ourselves that they hold all the marbles. A flashy, heavily educated, showman is mesmerizing - especially if they’ve written “strategist” somewhere on their business card. Books like Blue Ocean Strategy show that a process and some discipline can push a company further than any outside expert. For those interested, here are comments made previously on this site: Blue Ocean StrategyThe best sort of blueWhen blue oceans turn purpleWhen sharks visit your blue ocean Image posted by noisehead.Technorati Tags: Blue+Ocean+strategy, strategy, insight, intuition, business+opportunity, W+Chan+Kim, Renée+MauborgneSite Search Tags: Blue+Ocean+strategy, strategy, insight, intuition Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (4) Fiction society: moving beyond crowds Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 Before moving on to a review of John Ruskin’s book, On Art and Life, there’s one more bit to synthesize from the first two (here and here). Trouble is, I’m not sure how to say this best. I even dreamt about this last night. But it’s still a bit muddled. If these authors are right, we need to diligently set up the information that drives decisions. Concept packages are critical and usually ignored. Poul’s comment about the sinister consequences of capitalism made me realize that markets drive off insufficient information too. The information used to inform capitalistic decisions is both too narrow and too broad. It is too narrow in its focus on efficiency, cost effectiveness, and rate of return. It is too broad in its focus on “society” rather than individuals. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) De-patterning: refining the first stage of thought Friday, February 16th, 2007 After finishing New World, New Mind I was convinced of two things. First, more attention is needed around staging our thinking processes. Second, the authors didn’t had no idea how to do it. So, while Cuban waves tickled the beach, I grabbed Edward De Bono’s book, Po: Beyond Yes and No. I discovered that this book is everything New World, New Mind should have been. To be fair, De Bono’s work is light. The book doesn’t dig deeply into the supporting facts. He takes his authority as granted and plunges into the concepts. The Ornstein and Ehrlich book set up all the points that De Bono makes in his. De Bono’s book is about the process of informing the process of thinking. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Set up your mind for better decisions Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 My wife and I just got back from a week’s vacation in Cuba. Long days on the beach, hiding in the shade of a thatched roof hut gave plenty of opportunity for reading. I rolled through three books and intend to write reviews of each. The first book was New World, New Mind: Moving Toward Conscious Evolution by Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich, 1989. Next was Edward De Bono’s book Po: Beyond Yes and No, 1972. Finally, On Art and Life by John Ruskin, 1853. What follows is a review of New World, New Mind. The other reviews will come out in the next few posts. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Experiencing insight: which comes first, age or beauty? Sunday, January 28th, 2007 The whole idea we’re talking about here is based on a group of eclectic and divergent innovators tackling focused opportunities together to create experimental companies … really, really quickly. A few days ago, another friend wrote in to suggest that insight is too much a function of experience to expect anything remarkable from this kind of crowd. Ultimately their experience is too shallow to drive out anything tight enough to commercialize. From his note: “Sometimes I wonder if being insightful is not more a function of experience at this stage. Oh, I always hope there are moments of brilliance of course, but how does one distinguish between what questions should be parroted as each opportunity presents itself versus ‘thought gems’? Even race horses know that all that needs to be done is to run around the tack one more time … though the prep consists of all sorts of training/experience.” In the reply back I suggest that the ability to generate insight is independent of experience. Some are insightful right from the start. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Forget tailor-made, just get it second-hand. Saturday, January 27th, 2007 In an offline note a good friend challenges the concept of new, tailor-made companies. Instead he asks, “What about companies that need tailors … companies that need a new dress, ugly companies, those ones that need new shoes … couldn’t this group help them?” Absolutely. And, as he suggests, perhaps it is a better place to start. The riddle behind this idea is how to find cash flow early. Dropping into and refining an existing company is a good way to take care of that problem. He also debates the suggestion that this is possible without a champion … it may need a benevolent totalitarian. It might. But I haven’t met the person to do it yet. This is small enough (just four right now) that an alpha dog isn’t even an idea worth entertaining. But will we ever need such a change? Why do we need leadership of this kind? Does defaulting to the “single great leader” system do anything to position us for the ways of the future? If we could somehow cast off the preconceptions we’ve built or mindlessly accepted, is such a thing even an option? Image posted by stickerHelsinkiTechnorati Tags: you&company, collective+intelligence, work, careers, tailored+companiesSite Search Tags: you&company, collective+intelligence, work, careers, tailored+companies Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (4) Creating tailor-made companies Thursday, January 18th, 2007 I think it’s possible to tailor-make successful companies. What I’d like to try isn’t new. I bet someone else is doing it. And I bet tons of people have tried and it tanked. I think predecessors have tried and failed because they thought money mattered - it doesn’t. I think previous attempts hit the ditch because they thought ideas were the key - patents, trade secrets and the like - they’re wrong. People matter. That’s it. Take $2M, a great concept, and a group of three people who are technically, socially, and financially savvy - the trick will still be finding those three people. But, funny thing, I keep running into people who are absolutely amazing. Each one is stuck in some job that uses just a tiny part of the stuff they’re great at. And they feel lousy because most of the time they work on stuff they readily admit they have never been good at doing. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) A master at play Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 Henry David Thoreau’s taste for life is, for me, unmatched in its perception, power, and vitality. From earnest to silly, most of it sings. His journal … it’s like watching Michelangelo whittle. The rippling strength of a master at play. January 14, 1854 “I just had a coat come home from the tailor’s. Ah me! Who am I that should wear this coat? It was fitted upon one of the devil’s angels about my size. Of what use that measuring of me if he did not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang it on. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Synchronizing greatness Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 Here’s an unsolved riddle: How do we get the minds of widely dispersed, brilliant people to focus on critical problems/opportunities? How do we synchronize greatness? Dave Pollard brought this up a few days ago. He writes: “… we don’t need more leaders, more gurus, more one-size-fits-all prescriptions. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Invoking innovation: moving beyond serendipity Sunday, January 14th, 2007 Inspiring brilliance A large part of brilliance is inspiration triggered by a convergence of information, creativity, and insight. But here’s the hitch: innovative brilliance is still fortuitous, it’s basically an accident. The challenge is moving innovation beyond serendipity and into an intentional process. Part of enabling a consistent process of innovation is creating many rich sources of inspiration. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Invite and inspire brilliance Saturday, January 13th, 2007 If I gave you everything you need to completely and absolutely celebrate your brilliance, would you come to the table? If there was a way to see your genius come to life within a handful of small companies of which you might see a small share in each - would you come to play? Here’s an invitation: Let’s create a hand-picked group of individuals. Choose inventors, entrepreneurs, and VC’s who are insightful, wise, and influential among their peers. Let this group meet regularly, at their own cost, and give them just one thing: a tangible opportunity to be brilliant. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Up on a soapbox Friday, December 22nd, 2006 When do we get to play? I mean play for real - like NHL-hockey-player playing. Where it’s for real money in a real game against real opposition. Where we’re invited - or better yet, commanded - to completely unload. To grab our brimming grail of rich potential, look for the whitest, untouched canvas we can find, and with absolute abandon splash its red brilliance on everything in our lives. When does that happen? There’s this scene in the last X-Men movie where Juggernaut, this massive brute who’s mutant power is giant strength, is chasing Kitty Pryde (another mutant) through a building. Instead of racing through hallways and doors, Juggernaut just puts his head down and smashes through the brick walls. Bursting through one impossibly thick wall after another, he’s unstoppable. Meanwhile, Kitty, who’s power is phase shifting, zips along in front of him, flashing in phases through the matter in front of her. The intoxicating thing about all the super-hero stuff we’ve seen is that deep down we believe a tiny, microscopic fraction of it is actually true. Some have a seemingly inhuman or unfathomable strength that isn’t a direct result of experience, or schooling, or career path. That, without even trying, a few can touch things that most people take a lifetime to achieve. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (5) Never provoked Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 From the Thoreau blog: “Some men make their due impression upon their generation, because a petty occasion is enough to call forth all their energies; but are there not others who would rise to much higher levels, whom the world has never provoked to make the effort? I believe there are men now living who have never opened their mouths in a public assembly, in whom nevertheless there is such a well of eloquence that the appetite of any age could never exhaust it; who pine for an occasion worthy of them, and will pine till they are dead … The age may well go pine itself that it cannot put to use this gift of the gods. He lives on, still unconcerned, not needing to be used. The greatest occasion will be the slowest to come.” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) A distinct view of the naked whole Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: “When an object presents itself to your perception, make a mental definition or at least an outline of it, so as to discern its essential character, to pierce beyond its separate attributes to a distinct view of the naked whole, and to identify for yourself both the object itself and the elements of which it is composed, and into which it will again be resolved. Nothing so enlarges the mind as this ability to examine methodically and accurately every one of life’s experiences, with an eye to determining its classification, the ends it serves, its worth to the universe, and its worth to men … What is it? Whereof is it composed? How long is it designed to last? What moral response does it ask of me; gentleness, fortitude, candor, good faith, sincerity, self-reliance, or some other quality?” A distinct view of the naked whole … love that. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) That one fleeting instant Monday, November 27th, 2006 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, Roman Emperor from 161-180: “… the passing minute is every man’s equal possession, but what has once gone by is not ours. Our loss, therefore, is limited to that one fleeting instant, since no one can lose what is already past, nor yet what is still to come - for how can he be deprived of what he does not possess? [T]he sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his.” How does this change the way you see your moments? If you carried this as a filter for an entire day, what would be different? Do we have the tools we need to make choices in this way? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Codex Sunday, November 26th, 2006 I’ve been working, since the canoe trip this summer, to refine a few of the most important pieces I’ve written about on this site. These ideas are important to me as I seek to understand both my way forward and the way I see the people I advise. Most of these ideas came out of my work with small companies and entrepreneurs but the ideas have more relevance in my life that I would have guessed. None of these ideas are new. All of them have been written about and held to by others. I’ve only glued them together in the way that they’ve built on each other in my life. Peerless “A gracefully executed work has no peer.” Si-Ma of the Song Dynasty (1019-1086). If we would touch peerless, how can we find grace? Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Tatts and cards Saturday, November 25th, 2006 Life bulges with banality. Quantifiers like unanimous, majority, and average somehow dominate decisions. If it’s at least above middle, then it’s worth doing. Even vices like poker and tatoos can finally trumpet their triumph at conquering the middle-class. Yet, would these vices have become popular if they were vices first? Does exclusivity breed intrique? Are Ughs hot because they are ugly and expensive? Is scotch interesting because there’s only a few distilleries, it’s limited to Scotland, and the good stuff costs more than your groceries? Is first class sweetest because we’ve never been there? Isn’t there something marvelous about a consultant charging $1,650 an hour? Doesn’t the absurdity actually attract you? Why then do we choose average when we’d rather nibble on insane? Why fight for unanimous when just one (and barely one) is where we’d rather be? Technorati Tags: manufactured+exclusivity, elite, secret+societySite Search Tags: manufactured+exclusivity, elite Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Concrete straightjacket Friday, November 17th, 2006 This summer’s canoe trip was, for the most part, a fairly placid experience. Smooth water, subdued weather, genial wildlife. But there is a stretch of river where things get pretty inspired. Rounding a corner the river suddenly picks up its pace. The shoreline dramatically changes from stately cedar to uprooted trees - root systems pawing vainly at the sky. Just below the water’s surface, ghost-like trees lie naked and white, violently strewn about the river bed. Everything sped forward into time, like the gears of my watch had suddenly let loose. As we shot forward a waterfall began calling for us, its menacing roar growing and growing until it and several destroyed canoes, wrapped with terrifying finality around half-submerged tree trucks, sent us careening for the shore. Those moments on the river stand in sharp contrast to the photos Geoff Manaugh posted of the Los Angeles River. It too was once a wild river. Now, 3.5 million barrels of cement later, the river has been literally paved over. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Life imagined Friday, November 17th, 2006 Are we not always livingthe life that we imaginewe are? - Henry David Thoreau Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Gatherings that changed the world Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 From wikipedia on the Slovay Conference: “Perhaps the most famous conference was the October 1927 Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons, where the world’s most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory. The leading figures were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Einstein, disenchanted with Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principle,’ remarked ‘God does not play dice.’ Bohr replied, ‘Einstein, stop telling God what to do.’ Seventeen of the twenty-nine attendees were or became Nobel Prize winners.” This is related to an interest in collective intelligence. Can anyone point to other gatherings of people on the brink of brilliance? Technorati Tags: collective+intelligence, genius, Site Search Tags: collective+intelligence, genius Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Of foxes and pixies Saturday, November 11th, 2006 A fox came to visit yesterday. The first I’d ever seen outside a zoo. A cascade of red, white, and nearly blue color - she poured down the hill. Her hair glistened, rolling with her tiny muscles. She trotted along the fence line toward the front yard only to come back a few seconds later. Skirting the edge of the house, she walked right under my feet where I stood in the bay window overlooking the back. Her little ears twittering around, collecting sounds like children collect marbles. This morning I see a new set of tracks. She’s been back. A new trail down the fence, a detour to the mountain ash, and back through the gap in the spruce. Find a fox in a city and something thrilling takes bloom. It’s not just the relief of knowing we haven’t utterly gutted this place of life, it’s almost magical. The city is so dark, faithless, and menacing. It gets easy to hide out in front of the TV worrying that evil wanders the streets. Not so, it turns out that foxes do. So do pixies, gnomes, and giant jolly slugs. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Thoreau as poet Sunday, November 5th, 2006 Thoreau’s prose turned to poetry: it is only when we forgetall our learningthat we begin to know. to conceivewith total apprehensionapproach it as somethingtotallystrange. if you would make acquaintancewith the fernsforget your botany. Technorati Tags: beginner’s+mind, learning, education, observationSite Search Tags: Thoreau, beginner’s+mind, learning, education, observation Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) How would you be? Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 When you dream of an ideal space to do what you do best, what does it look like, sound like, and feel like? What is done there? Who is with you? Does it look like this? A white-blue sky. Clouds rise, billowing into the heights. Far off, a single bird wheels above clear, green water. On either side are tall cedars and spruce. They stand at the water’s edge, brooding over the forgotten years and bending to glance thoughtfully at the waves. The waves slip up to kiss their feet and spill tiny energy into the earth. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted, you&company - Permalink - Comments (0) Of avarice and spiritual penury Friday, October 27th, 2006 As written yesterday - Thoreau was tuned to nuances in life that most of us pass without noticing. More than that, he recorded the observations and, by the account of many others, he regularly revisited and rewrote those tiny tales. Below is a gentle nod to the curiousity of young men: “I had gone but little way on the old Carlisle road when I saw Brooks Clark, who is now about eighty and bent like a bow, hastening along the road, barefooted, as usual, with an axe in his hand; was in haste perhaps on account of the cold wind on his bare feet. When he got up to me, I saw that besides the axe in one hand, he had his shoes in the other, filled with knurly apples and a dead robin. He stopped and talked with me a few moments; said that we had had a noble autumn and might now expect some cold weather. I asked if he had found the robin dead. No, he said, he found it with its wing broken and killed it. He also added that he had found some apples in the woods, and as he had n’t anything to carry them in, he put ‘em in his shoes. They were queer-looking trays to carry fruit in. How many he got in along toward the toes, I don’t know. I noticed, too, that his pockets were stuffed with them. His old tattered frock coat was hanging in strips about the skirts, as were his pantaloons about his naked feet. He appeared to have been out on a scout this gusty afternoon, to see what he could find, as the youngest boy might. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Observing our moments instead of the future Thursday, October 26th, 2006 Today my son is 568 days old. He runs like a champ, throws a mean pitch, and can jump clear off the floor. Just barely approaching two-years he already opens doors (and slams them), can tell you everything that’s hot in the house, has favorite foods which he demands by name and he knows trucks, planes, and heavy machinery by sound which he exuberantly mimics. He can climb stairs standing, recognize his reflection, spot a plane at 300 feet, call dogs, put simple puzzles together, empty a box of raisins in seconds, and understand almost every simple verbal phrase. We haven’t intentionally taught him any of this. He just figured it out. And almost every single one of these achievements is a consequence of observation. While I trot blithely through life, he is paying attention. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Time management Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 From the Thoreau blog: “Nature never makes haste; her systems revolve at an even pace. The bud swells imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as though the short spring days were an eternity. All her operations seem separately for the time, the single object for which all things tarry. Why, then, should man hasten as if anything less than eternity were allotted for the least deed? Let him consume never so many eons, so that he go about the meanest task well, though it be but the paring of his nails. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Want raw Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 It’s been surprising how much people have resonated with the canoe trip stories. Not just the “week away” part … actually, not that part at all. Interest has been in the expression of that trip. The emerging strength of the experience. They want raw. I only noticed because my wife would like to go somewhere warm next month. Somewhere with beaches, nice rooms, and inclusive drinks. Mexico, Bahamas, etc. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Lost winters Friday, October 6th, 2006 From the Thoreau blog: “Thinking this afternoon of the prospect of my writing lectures and going abroad to read them the next winter. I realized how incomparably great the advantages of obscurity and poverty which I have enjoyed so long (and may still perhaps enjoy). I thought with what more than princely, with what poetical, leisure I had spent my years hitherto, without care or engagement, fancy-free. I have given myself up to nature; I have lived so many springs and summers and autumns and winters as if I had nothing else to do but live them, and imbibe whatever nutriment they had for me; I have spent a couple of years, for instance, with the flowers chiefly, having none other so binding engagement as to observe when they opened; I could have afforded to spend a whole fall observing the changing tints of the foliage. Ah, how I have thriven on solitude and poverty! I cannot overstate this advantage. I do not see how I could have enjoyed it, if the public had been expecting as much of me as there is danger now that they will. If I go abroad lecturing, how shall I ever recover the lost winter?” Technorati Tags: Thoreau, obscurity, poverty, observationSite Search Tags: Thoreau, observation, solitude Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Give me eyes to see Sunday, October 1st, 2006 From the Thoreau blog: “The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse. I omit the usual—the hurricanes and earthquakes—and describe the common. This has the greatest charm and is the true theme of poetry. You may have the extraordinary for your province, if you will let me have the ordinary. Give me the obscure life, the cottage of the poor and humble, the workdays of the world, the barren fields, the smallest share of all things but poetic perception. Give me but the eyes to see the things which you possess.” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Beyond the edges Saturday, September 30th, 2006 I don’t want to make a big show out of that canoe trip. It really was just six days paddling around a lake. But it was also a window to a part of me that lay nearly forgotten. There are many mornings when I sit in the library and watch the sun come up. On those mornings there is always a moment when I ask my self what the day will be for. It’s a casual question, easy to ignore, and it usually is ignored. The question comes from some small place in me. As though it came from a corner of the dawn lit room. And when I actually think about it, it surprises me that the question comes at all. It’s not “me” asking. I don’t wander through my day paying attention to what it is. Instead I long for what it some day will be. All my attention is focused on the future and so it surprises me that I can still even hear that question. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Find a niche, get happy Thursday, September 28th, 2006 In a sudden veer from all things philosophical into the more tactile topics of entrepreneurism, a few thoughts: As investors, particularly in natural resource ventures, we want to see opportunities that target a market niche. It’s easier to navigate a start-up when competition’s minimal. Plus, in exclusive markets there’s less pressure on price - margins are wider. And that’s as far as the thinking usually goes. But maybe there’s an even better reason. Listen to these TED presentations: the first by Dan Gilbert (a psychology professor at Harvard talking about happiness) and the second by Barry Schwartz (a sociology professor at Swarthmore College talking about choice). Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Collective intelligence Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 From Les invasions barbares (2003): “Intelligence isn’t an individual trait. It’s collective, national, and intermittent. Athens, BC - Euripides premieres his Electra. Two rivals attend, Sophocles and Aristophanes. And two friends, Socrates and Plato.Intelligence was there. Firenze, Palazzo Vecchio, on facing walls, two painters: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. An apprentice: Rafaello. A manager: Niccolo Machiavelli. Philadelphia, USA - Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton and Madison. No other country has been so blessed.” In spare moments I’m dabbling around the edges of genius. Unresolved are the questions: Can genius be created? Is genius collaborative or individual? Following the idea presented in the movie above, where are the flashes in time where collective intelligence emerged? Any comments? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Socrates Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 Just finished reading the Apology of Socrates. Three things stood out: 1. Socrates was at home. He knew everyone. It’s a record of conversations with people he knew all his life. 2. Socrates believed that the wisdom expressed by poets, artists, carpenters, and philosophers wasn’t known by those expressing it. The wisdom came through them and they were innocent of its meaning. 3. Socrates was delighted to confess the width and depth of the things he knew he did not know. Why do I expect everything great to be somewhere else? What wisdom comes through me and what comes from within me? Why am I so reluctant to betray my ignorance? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Is this elitist? Sunday, September 24th, 2006 From the Thoreau blog: “As I go through the fields, endeavoring to recover my tone and sanity and to perceive things truly and simply again, after having been perambulating the bounds of the town all week, and dealing with the most commonplace and worldly-minded men, and emphatically trivial things, I feel as I had committed suicide in a sense. I am again forcibly struck with the truth of the fable of Apollo serving King Admetus, its universal applicability. A fatal coarseness is the result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been associating even with the select men of this and the surrounding towns, I feel inexpressibly begrimed. My Pegasus has lost his wings; he has turned a reptile and gone on his belly. Such things are compatible only with a cheap and superficial life.” Is it elitist? Thoughts? Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Attending intention Friday, September 22nd, 2006 Two nights ago my wife and I were watching “Flip This House”. On the show two guys in designer clothes are trotting around buying garbage houses, repainting them and selling again (mere days later) for twice what they paid. A sweet gig if you can get it. Anyway, the Prada shoes are working well for them and they decide to hire an intern. This guy they bring in is super keen and they start tyring to show him the ropes - make him a millionaire in a day - so he can be just like them. So they’re at this beater house and they keep asking him what needs to be fixed so they can flip the place for a mint. Problem is, every time they start telling him something he answers his cell. Eventually they just give up, hop in their swanky truck, and leave him there chattering away on the phone. When the kid finally realizes he’s been dumped he calls one of the guys for a ride. They tell him they will pick him up if he catches a peacock (they run wild in that part of the States). So, for an hour and half this kid runs all over the place, chasing peacocks up onto rooftops, out into the road, and into everybody’s yards. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Dying to remember Thursday, September 21st, 2006 My Dad, brother, brother-in-law and I just finished a week-long canoe trip around the Bowron Lakes circuit in B.C.. It was wonderful. The lakes run along the foot of several mountain ranges. Peaks rise up on either side to tower amongst the mist. Snow hugs the valleys. Each morning it spreads out - white and shinning against the bare mountain tops. Water rattles down in cascades and tumbles into the lakes as waterfalls and cold creeks. Moose, osprey, bald eagles, king fishers, squirrels, moles, mice, owls, deer, trout, salmon, muskrats, beaver and even a cougar watched nonchalantly as we slid past. The water is clear, green, and clean. We drank right from the creeks. Peering over the edge of the canoe, it’s often clear for several meters. Plants dance on the lake bottom, far below the surface. That wholesome quiet and untouched clarity touch something soulful. When the bottom of the lake drops away and the canoe slips out into the darkest depths of the water, the heart begins to sing again. Long hours in the canoe were somehow shaped and stretched … time slips into the water and dissipates. It comes back as something rich and immense. Wispy minutes that slip by untouched as I sit at work became treasured moments. I kept looking around, turning to burn into memory the places we were passing. It felt like searching for a last drop of dark, peaty scotch or longing for some forgotten fragrance or finding a picture of a great friend I hadn’t seen for years - a deep, melancholic joy that true beauty was pouring past us. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (3) Reviewing profound Saturday, September 16th, 2006 Time away brings introspection. Long hours in a canoe give lots of room for thought. While I sort through those ideas - here is a compilation of favourite ideas from the past. It’s a series of posts about purpose, perfection, and art. These ideas have become foundational for me. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Low-tech sabbatical Saturday, August 26th, 2006 Am leaving today for a mini-sabbatical - a canoe trip deep in the sticks of British Columbia. No net. No phones. No batteries. Posting will be even lighter this week than it has been the last few. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Keystone questions Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 As investors we ask a lot of questions. It’s the part of the job I enjoy the most. I’ve always been attracted to important questions … this work has cemented that interest. Here’s a question I found a while ago. Still think it’s great: “Why are you choosing this?” It’s complete answer either reveals: - all the information included in decision making,- the criteria by which choices are being made,- the rank of alternative paths to action,- the final goal in mind,- the strategy for achieving that goal or … … it provides a simple indicator of the gaps. Anyone got a better one? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Begging for wonderful Monday, August 14th, 2006 From sites around the net: “brilliant”, “genius”, “inspiring”. The world is begging for wonderful. P.S.: If reading this via RSS - Go here. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) More taps Friday, August 11th, 2006 While doing my MSc, I explored the economic costs of a massive ice storm in Eastern Ontario. One of the women on the project focused on the costs specific to maple syrup producers. Maple syrup production is lovely - tucked deep into old stands of trees, far from the ebb and flow of cities. It’s a quiet and wholesome work. It feels so mysterious; it is ancient. Little beads of sap forming in the taps, dripping silently into the tubing, joining the million other drops slowly flowing to the tanks. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Staring at the meek Sunday, August 6th, 2006 What do you think of this? Is it a power worth using on trifling things like brow-beating gas boys or getting a window seat? It feels a bit more special than that. A friend and I used to talk about the power of rhetoric. The art of argument … or, even more accurately, the art of presenting argument. A master of rhetoric is a force of nature. And such power demands responsibility. On the heels of those discussions, the same friend told me the story of meekness. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Abductive thinking — not about kidnapping Friday, August 4th, 2006 Retro post -143 I love design (even if my vanilla background and black text don’t prove it). In grade five I discovered that Ms. Faulkner gave A’s for illustrated stories and B’s for the plain text version. By 13 I knew that ladies preferred a poem to shouted declarations of undying ardour. My early conviction that design was distinctive kept me following design even when I wandered off into the “real” things of life (like regression equations, Brownian motion, and sodding elasticities of substitution). This month’s issue of Fast Company does a great job laying out the intersection of design and business. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) sift experiment no. 1 Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 So, I’ve been fiddling lately. Toying really. Poking and prodding. Dilly-dallying. A bit itchy actually. I’d like to play a little. Something related to biomimicry I think. Biomimicry or biomimetics is the study and imitation of nature. Taking inspiration for natural design and processes. Extracting learning from nature (rather than just resources). I’d like to play with any of these issues: waste management (preferably municipal), water treatment, or energy efficiency. But it’s important to me that, when describing the play, one must say “like a -” where the blank is filled with some natural phenomenon or mechanism that is both a metaphor and a real-life example of what is being done. For example: “Cleans water like … the Florida Everglades” or “Creates and secretes specific enzymes like … a fungus” or “Maintains temperature like … a termite nest” etc. Because the story is as important as the mechanism … this is business after all. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) I am … Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 A good friend and I were chatting about personal branding, it started with the regular hoopla: posture, piercings, language, work ethic, body odour, etc. Gradually we got to talking about how we perceive ourselves and how we each perceive the other. That got interesting. It’s surprisingly difficult to make explicit and vocal how I want to be seen and how I am seen. If much of our reality is a consequence of our own mental images, it strikes me that tuning up our own personal brands on a regular basis is important. To get an intentional read on how I see myself and, from those I trust, a sense of what I’m communicating to others. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (5) Everything else is proofreading Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 Retro post: No. 99 Philip Pullman in the Guardian: “It’s when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won’t make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It’s when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading.” Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Creative execution Monday, July 31st, 2006 Retro post -89 There are at least two ways to effect change. One is to complain liberally and bitterly until noone can stand itand the move is made. Many bloggers live here. Another is to criticize by creating (Michelangelo). Wrapped up within each of us is an explosive creativity. Leveragethis. Healthy expressions of critical creativity are more productivethan a sharp eye (and sharper tongue) for things that suck. The next play – the razor that separates the changer from theyapper – is movement. The greatest destroyer of mediocrity isexecution. Do what you know needs to be done. Get off the bandwagon; get on the workhorse: Creative execution. Technorati Tags: creativity, execution, creative+execution, entrepreneurismSite Search Tags: creativity, entrepreneurism, execution p.s. - the graphic on the right is a scanned copy of an exam paper. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) The evolution of intuition Sunday, July 30th, 2006 Answer both of these questions based on intuition alone. Who’s going to win the NFL playoffs this year? What is the future of your company? Bet you’re ready to answer both but only willing to put one answer on the boardroom table. Why? Intuition is a way of knowing that’s both revered and abhorred - particularly in business. There seems to be an inverse relationship between sophistication and attitude toward intuition. No one’s really confident that they understand intuition. Who, exactly, trains in intuition? Who’s got some and knows how to use it? One of the reasons we like an MBA so much is we can tell who’s got them. With an MBA there are at least some grades to look back on and the pedigree of the school, but what have I got to show for intuition? Nothing. Which is why its difficult to respect. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Going up Saturday, July 29th, 2006 “I don’t know why people feel unhappy when the curveof a graph fails to keep going up, but they do. Evenwhen we find something we’d like to reduce, such ashighway fatailites, it doesn’t always sound as thoughwe had our heart in it.” E.B. White, A Report in January, 1958 Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) reawakening eccentricity Thursday, July 27th, 2006 I get a big bang off the ideas of Christopher Alexander, George Santayana, and Edward O. Wilson. Their ideas are so complex but somehow they seem to have a common substance. I enjoy the structure of their thinking and think they must have broad implications for innovation, creativity, and design. And more deeply for thought, insight, and wisdom. But I struggle to sort out the rhythm of their thoughts. Every time I pick up one of their books, I hear a quiet song from my subconscious that therein lies the key to many of our most sophisticated opportunities. In The Sense of Beauty (1896), Santayana linked eccentricity to awakening: “… if a circle is presented, the eye will fall upon its centre, as to the centre of gravity, as it were, of the balanced attractions of all the points; and there will be, in that position, an indifference and sameness of sensation … It is a form, which, although beautiful in its purity and simplicity, and wonderful in its continuity, lacks any stimulating quality … The straight line offers a curious object for analysis. It is not for the eye a very easy form to grasp. We bend it or leave it … The straight line, when made the direct object of attention is, of course, followed by the eye and not seen in one eccentric position. In the curves we call flowing and graceful, we have, on the contrary, a more natural and rhythmical set of movements … certain points make rhymes and assonance … we find ourselves at every turn reawakening …” Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) dream job Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 Put up a page on the definition of my dream job. If you’ve got something in mind, need the kind of guy described there, send me a note. P.S. I’m currently a very happy investor in natural resource technologies, I’m excited about the stuff I get to learn every day, and am not a bit desperate for a switch. So, whatever you got, it’d better be sweet. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Killed by ninjas Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 Retro post -91 Great find by Johnnie Moore, John Kay’s article on Obliquity is excellent. Kay writes that goals are often best achieved when pursued indirectly - this is the idea of obliquity. Like Johnnie it reminds me of a sports metaphor. Late last year CBC ran a show “Making the Cut.” The show followed a heap of people, mostly guys, through a torturous trial to see which six would get to try out for NHL teams. People came from all over Canada to give it a shot. Cops, firefighters, labour guys, students, ex-pre-pro players, and even one guy that played pro. This last guy got my attention. He was fat and cocky and I loved hearing him rave about his skills. During one of the first scrimmages the producers had the camera follow him around and they interviewed him after while watching the footage. His perspective has stuck with me (despite his self-proclaimed magnificence): The camera is angled wide, he’s coasting around mid-ice and he says, “Right here I’m really uptight and anxious to show these guys the difference between me as a pro and these other guys. I’m feeling like I’m out of shape and can’t keep up. I feel like I need to make a great play.” He fumbles a pass. Gets smoked on the boards. Suddenly it’s clear something changed. His face moves from strain to intensity. His clumsy gait evolves into a sure, smooth action. His next pass is crisp. He dodges a vicious younger player. “Right there I remembered why I love hockey. I just love to play. I just decided to have fun with these guys and enjoy myself.” He stopped striving; he started playing. Entrepreneurs are often brilliant in a few key areas. This brilliance carries them through the first stages of their company. But it’s not long before their gaps begin to glare. The natural reaction is to plow forward. Head down, determination burning they try to make it through with brute force. An early consequence though is they push themselves off their game. Their brilliance starts to fade. Like Johnnie says in his post, profit might look like the purpose of this bull-headed rush, but it rarely is. Most entrepreneurs start things because they love the idea and start new stuff. They start off to have fun. When then fun stops it’s time to find an oblique alternative. Technorati Tags: obliquity, strategy, play, brillianceSite Search Tags: play, perfect+for+purpose, brilliance Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) How to be introspective Sunday, July 23rd, 2006 Loner, elitist, selfish, arrogant … self-centred. That’s me in a nut shell - so they say. Man have I fought that perception; one I so naturally reflect. I’ve tried so hard to be more social, more interested, more cultured, more engaged. But I’ve never been able to get around the corner. It’s always felt contrived. And left me exhausted. I’ve never been confident in my introversion. Gradually more confident, but never convinced. But my short career leads me to believe that it isn’t as horrific a personality as I’ve been lead to believe. And I’ve begun to suspect it’s actually a very important, valuable, and helpful way of being. For every great brilliance there is an equal and opposite darkness. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (4) One thousand paintings - got mine Sunday, July 23rd, 2006 Got it - 945, the smallest odd abundant number. Sweet. Thanks Sala. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Making my name Friday, July 21st, 2006 There’s an unobservable line between ambition and growth. Where movement can be too early, just right, or too late. When does growth stop and stagnation take over? When is a switch premature? I don’t think the answer is outside us. No one has the answer … besides ourselves. I’ve never really loved my work .. well maybe that job just after my MSc. That little stint consulting was as close to brilliant as I’ve come in my career. Yet, there are lots of jobs I hated that I needed to keep; they were good for me. They made me grow. Movement too early would mean I’d miss that growth. Growth and movement are sometimes complimentary but often paradoxical. To grow, one has to stay yet to continue to grow, one has to move. While thinking about this, I suddenly and surprisingly thought about water. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (8) Higher levels of life Thursday, July 20th, 2006 David Thoreau Journal - July 13, 1857: “The price of friendship is the total surrender of yourself; no lesser kindness, no ordinary attentions and offerings will buy it. There is forever that purchase to be made with that wealth which you possess, yet only once in a long while are you advertised of such a commodity. I sometimes awake in the night and think of friendship and its possibilities, a new life and revelation to me, which perhaps I had not experienced for many months. Such transient thoughts have been my nearest approach to realization of it, thoughts I know of no one to communicate to. I suddenly erect myself in my thoughts, or find myself erected, infinite degrees above the possibility of ordinary endeavors, and see for what grand stakes the game of life may be played. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Never look like an artist Thursday, July 13th, 2006 Spent the weekend with a good friend. Both of us love words. Somewhere on one of our hikes we started rolling through favourite quotes. He pops out with this: “True artists never look like artists.” It’s something his Dad said and he’s never forgotten. Does the truly brilliant actually appear brilliant? Why is profound often so simple? Isn’t real art purposeful expression? Does this explain why we always pick the middle: it just looks better? Is this why is popular so loud? Maybe this explains why the most obvious is the most celebrated. Maybe another more important question is this: Should are true artist look like one? Maybe they’d be more successful. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Pitching, flipping, and pinging - forgotten principles Sunday, July 9th, 2006 At a recent meeting I watched five of six major players in a major decision take tiny, incremental steps toward an outcome they had completely opposed when entering the room. The experience got me talking about the importance of flipping. I thought I’d come up with an important principle … one worth writing about … Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Imagine a future … Saturday, July 8th, 2006 This talk by Sir Ken Robinson is gorgeous. I’ve listened to it four times and watched the video twice. I’d love to meet him some day. Even before I had my son I was passionately interested in education. Since he was born I’ve thought of it constantly. It is, I think, one of the most significant choices I must make for him. About this time last year I was reading an article on Erik Demaine, a scientist who’s peers said he was “promiscuous” Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) I will not be that man Thursday, July 6th, 2006 From the Guardian, “The former Enron chairman whose name became a byword for boardroom deceit and corruption, Ken Lay, died in an exclusive ski resort yesterday while awaiting sentence for his involvement in America’s biggest ever corporate fraud.” What a sentence. What an epitaph. That man was once someone’s little boy. He was a little boy. And sometime, way back in time, chairmanship of a world-class corporation was a miraculous dream. An incredible, unfathomable hope. It was clean and pure and right. It was the pinnacle of achievement. It is so easy to place an exclusive resort, a massive company, and a life of wealth at the top … at the front. And to leave integrity, honor, and honesty as servants to that goal. “These are not servants …” I remind myself of that daily … and I forget that almost instantly. On the floor, crumpled in a heap, sawing frantically for life, Ken Lay had nothing. Nothing. Nothing! For all that work, for all he gave away, for every second of every day, for every thing: nothing. I will not be that man. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) The gift I’d give Friday, June 30th, 2006 Ever looked at your CEO? Ever watched the Prime Minister when he isn’t speaking? I don’t mean: glanced at his shoes or hair style. I mean really looked - actually observed. Did you see her eyes darting around the room, searching the faces for meaning? She was terrified. Did you see him shift uncomfortably in his chair? He wasn’t sure he really knew what the conversation was about. Did you recognize yourself in her eyes? You should, you were there - we all are. CEOs, Deputy Ministers, world leaders are people. Same fears. Same uncertainty. Same risks. Trouble is: they’re not allowed to be. One of the jobs I was offered, before leaving the federal government, was a chance to help Deputy Ministers learn to do their job. And a task to help them see the future and provide an environment away from their tremendous responsibilities - to give them a place where they were allowed to not know. My dream? To create a space where these people can be people. I’d love to bring them to a place bigger than any of their decisions. Where an ocean, or massive mountain, or raging river stands in juxtaposition to the aching uncertainty they face. Strong, massive, unending … these cornerstones of nature run untouched by the turmoil we fight in our hearts. There is nothing on the planet more potent than bigness and silence to settle a anxious soul. I’d like to give those as gifts to the people who change the world. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) The edge of greatness Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 Look across all “great” achievements and imagine what it was like to be on the verge of those things. Imagine the youthful, burning passion from which that accomplishment was borne. Look across the spectrum of actions and decisions and sacrifices that finally led to that single, glorious finale. And then look inside yourself to see what it is about greatness that sings for you. If you long to be great for the single shinning moment, visit this link. Each building is a monument to someone’s passion for greatness. Every single one of these architects has been forgotten by time. It is not our achievments that make us great. It is what we must be to achieve them that is important. Site Search Tags: greatness, purpose, principles Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Things as they are (rather than what we wish they were). Sunday, June 18th, 2006 Retro post: Revised based on “Look!” from November 30, 2004. John Oliver (past President of DowElanco Canada Inc., a joint venture between Dow Chemical and Eli Lillys), once told me what he looks at when considering novel products. He said, “Everything I see, I try to understand what it does instead of what it’s for.” One of coolest things I hear Doug Hall do on his Eureka Ranch show “Brain Brew” is juggle people’s ideas away from their purpose and into their function (here’s one of the best). One of our most powerful capacities is to shift paradigms. Those that can reframe, re-jig, and reverse will ultimately succeed. Those that only see what is in front of them will be fed by the first group. Technorati Tags: copy+cat, paradigm, perspective, strategySite Search Tags: copy+cat, strategy, paradigm, perspective, Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) What’s in? Saturday, June 17th, 2006 Retro post: September 12, 2004 (A Billy Collins poem. Rated PG) Purity My favourite time to write is in the late afternoon,weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.This is how I go about it:I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pileas if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of onlya white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea. Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.I do this so that what I write will be pure,completely rinsed of the carnal,uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body. Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange themon a small table near the window.I do not want to hear their ancient rhythmswhen I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat. Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter. I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter. In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,most of them exploiting the connection between sex and death. I am concentration itself: I exist in a universewhere there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting. After a spell of this I remove my penis too.Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.Now I write only about death, most classical of themesin language light as the air between my ribs. Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.I replace my organs and slip back into my fleshand clothes. Then I back the car out of the garageand speed through woods on winding country roads,passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet. I’m thinking again about economics, experiments, and human action. There are few examples that betray more clearly our inability to understand human action than the ways we build our cities. To understand human action a bit better, I read Jane Jacob’s classic, The Life and Death of Great American Cities. Jane describes how the “science” of city planning was built on a few foundational assumptions. One of these assumptions was that it’s possible to sift and sort city functions into a few simple uses, and arrange these functions into relatively self contained units. Jane goes on to explain how completely this science, built on the scientific method, fails to account for city dynamics. The scientific method is a response to complexity. Too many compounding factors make for confusion. The natural human inclination is to seek patterns and order. But one of the problems with the scientific methods is it’s usually used by scientists. And, as Edward O. Wilson often says, we pay scientists to climb silos not span disciplines. So, by nature, most scientists are of necessity the sort of person that prefers isolation. But isolation breeds insularity. Invariably we end up with a skull and bones description of a human problem. It’s no wonder we can’t solve our greatest problems, especially when their complexity is increasing exponentially. So, what is needed? Well I keep thinking about Maslow’s new kind of human. Maslow said that in a world of colossal complexity, we need a type of human that greets problems with a set of cross-walking skills instead of an encyclopaedia. That new human runs by intuition, insight, innovation – basically if it starts with “in” we need it. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Bahauddin’s flower Saturday, June 17th, 2006 Bahauddin, the father of Rumi: When I deeply know my senses, I feel in them the way to God and the purpose of living: Look at this surprising flowerwhich cannot be seen, and yetits fragrance cannot be hidden. God is the invisible flower. Love is the flower’s fragrance, everywhere apparent. So much of spiritual thought has meaning for all of life. Too often it gets sequestered into the tiny, quiet corners of life where it lives without power or meaning. Like the surprising flower, described by Bahauddin above, we often stop at the fragrance. We blissfully sniff about but never look for the flower. We sit in front of colleges who’s eyes betray a passion we have never understood; we let it go untouched. We watch our bosses physically ladden with guilt and doubt and we never reach for the soul of that pain. We greet our spouses with the veneer of a successful day but never describe that one, single moment when our hearts leaped for joy or when every ounce of hope drained from our being. I wrote earlier about a kind of knowing that’s independent of academic pedigree. That whole idea pivots on an intention to find Bahauddin’s flowers. Site Search Tags: category+two, knowing, spiritual, Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Where taking is giving Friday, June 16th, 2006 Found this beautiful application of economic thought: A company I know works through an application process to build a long-term service relationship with its clients. The process involves an initial meeting, a written application, an internal review, a period of revision (done by the client) and then a final submission. Lots of back and forth. The company struggled to get its clients to take the final steps. In particular that last bit of revision done by the client takes way too long which is frustrating. Clients get distracted, loss heart., whatever - that last bit of work takes months to finish even though its just a fraction of the work that preceded it. The innovation, which is wonderful, was to take away the perceived freedom to procrastinate. The company now tells every revising client that they have 48 days to complete the revision. If the revision isn’t done in 48 days, the file is closed and the clinet must start again. 48 days is tonnes of time, way more than needed. Actually, its even more than the average wait time which is around 30 days. But the response is dramatically different. Now most clients come back within a week. The threat of loss, even though it’s perceived rather than real, is just the right incentive to incite action. By suggesting that something will be taken away, the company gives its clients everything they need to get a deal done. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Purposeful thought Friday, June 16th, 2006 Ludwig von Mises in Human Action: “Action is always directed by ideas; it realizes what previous thinking has designed.” Too often I hear that tactics trump strategy. That execution is more important than ideas. I don’t agree. Ideas and thought are the bones and skeleton on which design is hung. It is only out of this body that purposeful action can come. If anything, execution/action is more rare than ideas. But purposefully designed thought is rarer still. Site Search Tags: perfect+for+purpose, strategy Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Innovation begets innovation Friday, June 16th, 2006 Jared Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Guns, Germs and Steel. In it Diamond describes one of the key principles of innovation: technology begets technology. Using examples of neighbouring New Guinean, North American Indian, and Mexican Indian tribes, he shows that there’s really no way to show why one group successfully adopts innovation where another does not. Similarly, he shows how Chinese and Islamic societies once led but now follow in technological progress. The key is that innovation seems to be nearly random. Diamond explains that copying and “blueprint” innovation often leads to innovation of greater importance than the earlier invention. Consider examples such as the steam engine “invented” by James Watt (1769) but built on the inventions of Thomas Newcomen (1712), Thomas Savery (1698), and Denis Papin (1680). Or Edison’s incandescent light which improved on the many patents of others preceding it. Or even the Wright brother’s airplane which was preceded by Otto Lilienthal’s and Samuel Langley’s innovations. William Gibbson has said that the future is here but just unevenly distributed. The trick is to find it. If one of the banes of the internet is the overwhelming volume of information then one of the boons is the almost unlimited access the information around the world. It’s important to synch that reality with the understanding that someone is always innovating and the challenge is to find out who it is. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Principles Sunday, June 11th, 2006 In the midst of a conversation last Friday, in a talk that swayed unexpectedly into philosophical things, I surprised myself by saying: “… all my life I’ve looked at the man I want to become and looked with guilt and regret at the man I’ve been. Since becoming a father, something has changed. I am more conscious now of the man I am. I chose to be instead of become. If I live intentionally in this moment and am the man I ought to be, I’ve realized now, that I will inevitably grow to be the man I’ve struggled to become.” Surprising because I was talking with a client about the future direction of his company and his career. Surprising because I abandoned regular business talk and communicated more in 13 seconds than I’d been able to say in nearly 30 minutes. Site Search Tags: principles, wisdom, GTD, to+be Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Intentions Saturday, June 10th, 2006 I was looking at a bit of art yesterday. A small, elegant sculpture made of marble. Polished, flawless, stationary; it seemed to dance. This morning, thinking of dreams and aspirations, the image of that sculpture slipped unbidden into the mix. There are parts of life that flow as water. And there are others (those where goals and intentions are relevant) where definite choices must be made. Choices that act as chisels, or hammers, or sandpaper, or drills. Decisions that drive directly and ruthlessly in a single direction. Deliberate action. Creating art and creating dreams can be a long, tedious, intentional process. But both art and dreams require a set of intentions instead of a series of responses. Site Search Tags: intention, you&company, career, purpose, art Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Bit of art, bit of history: perfect. Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 I’m a sucker for a good story. Just bought number 945, the smallest odd abundant number. Smallest … odd … abundant … number. Hilarious. Brilliant. Thanks to Seth Godin for the link. Site Search Tags: perfect+for+purpose, viral, story Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (6) Goad us to action Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 From the Blog of Henry David Thoreau: “With all this opportunity, this comedy and tragedy, how near all men come to doing nothing! It is strange that they did not make us more intense and emphatic, that they do not goad us into some action. Generally, with all our desires and restlessness, we are no more likely to embark in any enterprise than a tree is to walk to a more favorable locality.” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Finding your genius Monday, May 22nd, 2006 Related to category two is Dick Richards’ book “Your Genius at Work”. A workbook that walks through 32 exercises for finding where we’re unique and genius, deciding if we’re using that brilliance at work, understanding our purpose, and putting our genius and purpose together. I’ve always believed that the great differentiator between those that are successful and those that wallow in obscurity (despite having comparable carrying capacities) is self-knowing. Those that understand themselves reach for challenges where they are confident of success. Those that don’t understand themselves play a lottery with every opportunity, unsure of the outcome. What I appreciate most about Dick’s book is the way he leads the reader. Like a trail guide, but one that’s open source. At the bottom of the mountain he explains why it’s worth climbing, he points out the advantages of each route, describes the benefits of each alternative destination, and leaves ample room for individuality. In the books are 13 exercises for helping us understand our genius. Each one is an alternate path to discovering our brilliance but he doesn’t insist that each step will work … if it doesn’t work there’s lots of permission to skip over to the next path. Also freeing is his attitude to what genius might be. From angels and daimons to core process, Dick frees us to see this idea as spiritually or technically as necessary. I’ve spent an enormous amount of time looking inside myself. Beside my desk is a printer paper box overflowing with journals, notes, articles, and diagrams I’ve used to try and understand myself and my capacities. In my life I’ve always wrestled with two questions: What am I great at? and What was I built for? What is my genius? Oh, I don’t know for sure. Here is my response to Dick’s kind invitation to sort through some of these questions in an online discussion group. Out of that process came a stronger conviction that within us are two ways of knowing. And that I can confidently rely on either source when making decisions. For other reading on these ideas: - Dave Pollard’s got several posts: book review, some additional ideas, a crack at purpose, and a further extension. - A review on Slacker Manager. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (5) Category two Monday, May 22nd, 2006 You know what’s right, don’t you? In that meeting, where the big cheese was confabulating about external pressures, internal shortages, and murky outcomes — you knew what needed to be said. So why didn’t you say it? For lack of experience, lack of authority, lack of time in the company, lack of hard skills, lack of support, lack of track record, lack of resources, or something else lacking: you told that little voice to be quiet. That voice that’s so easy to ignore and sideline. That voice that goes quiet the minute you tell it to, but at the cost of a small chunk of your heart. At the board room table we each arrive with two capacities. Unfortunately only one gets recognized and used. Category one includes education, academic certifications, previous job descriptions, job performance, and current projects get counted. Personal genius, intuition, artistic sensitivity, and insight are in category two and they don’t count. That voice that told you the truth is in the second category. You couldn’t listen because it wasn’t in the first category. So, what does that mean? What are its implications? First, that we’re not after truth but a fragment or shard that everyone can understand. A sliver of purity driven into a block of confounding historical perspectives. That we’re not after perfect. That we are after suitable. Second, that the burden of proof is left to the individual but the prize of success is shared with the group. How different would things be if you could share your genius while others shared their experience, hard skills, and track record? Third, that there’s only two ways into this second category of understanding. Either, respect its value and accept it as an appropriate feed for decision making or learn to translate its implications into category one type offerings. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) all that can possibly concern Monday, May 8th, 2006 From Thoreau’s blog: “All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind, is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love — to sing …” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Real-time never existed before Monday, May 1st, 2006 Related, to the earlier thoughts on time, but found after (honest - trust me) — René Berger on real time: “A dozen years ago something happened that was unexpected and unforeseen, the invention of the World Wide Web and the networking of the world introduced the idea that anyone can establish a contact with anyone else on the planet, in real-time. It’s a Quixote-like idea, in a way. Real-time never existed before, and it brings a total transformation of our spirit, cultural categories, and behaviors”. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Not enough time is all about trust. Monday, May 1st, 2006 Time. The regular theme is that we haven’t got enough. No time to chat, no time for the rest of my coffee, not enough time to play, not enough time to listen, no time to read it again, haven’t got time to go there myself. No time. Where did time come from? Didn’t the Romans make it? In a world where everything else is changing, fragmenting, becoming more modular — what about time? In an Industrial world, time mattered. Mostly because you wanted everyone there at the same time. We needed to be together on the line, in the factory, in the field. I couldn’t work without you. You needed to hold that side while I held this one. Not anymore. That’s why we can outsource in tidal waves. We can give nearly everything away because I don’t need to be there while you get your stuff done. When you’re done, I can start. I can even work while you work because we have real-time synching. Real time? Isn’t real time … modular time? Your piece of time plus my piece of time, together they land at the same place in time when someone else is making a decision. Isn’t that real time? Isn’t that modular time? So doesn’t real time (meaning modular time) mean that work time … isn’t? Isn’t it fake … a bit contrived, to have an nine hour time slot carved into my day where I sit like a line worker at my desk? And isn’t time management more about stress management where my stress is driven higher while sitting at my desk in fake time trying to be interested in something that the rest of me can’t possibly care about right then? Because while there’s real time, there’s also natural time. Like sessions, like migrating birds, like erosion … there are cycles in everything. Including me. Like lightning, there are moments when I can change the world, literally. It’s my time. There are times when I can carry bricks from one end of the yard to the other … forever … or at least until it’s done. And there are times when I couldn’t lift a finger or move a fly. It’s not my time. So it’s not really about time at all. At least, not in the sense that we regularly mean when talking about it. It’s about something else. At the dirty end of the stick, it’s about trust. I trust that you will get this done. That in real time, I will have what I need when I need it. And if it takes lightning or carrying bricks, either way, it’ll be there when I need it. And I trust that while you loll there, gazing at that pesky fly, something is happening in natural time that will eventually lead to you getting back up again. I trust you to give me your brilliance (because that’s what I paid for). And I won’t ask for anything less. I won’t ask for less by asking where you were at 2:00. I won’t ask for less by asking for an update every three days even though the real time deadline isn’t for another fifteen. I won’t ask for less by describing how you’ve spent to much time on inconsequential things. Because when I trust you, I free you. I unload you’re brilliance. I call out from you everything I hired you to do. I ask for you … as a person. Time is a tool. Like a cattle prod’s a tool. It isn’t an invitation. And it’s an invitation that’s needed. It’s a standing invitation to be human that will bridge the gulf between all the time management courses you can handle and a brilliance few of us can imagine. Not because time’s the bane of all that’s worth having … but because lack of trust is. Lack of trust is the gate keeper of myriad insidious things like gossip, doubt, envy, jealousy, insecurity, indecisiveness, and frustration. Lack of time’s just a symptom. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Quote Monday, May 1st, 2006 Marianne Williamson: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do.” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Character Friday, April 28th, 2006 From Thoreau’s blog: We falsely attribute to men a determined character; putting together all their yesterdays and averaging them, we presume we know them. Pity the man who has a character to support. It is worse than a large family. He is silent poor indeed. But in fact character is never explored, nor does it get developed in time, but eternity is its development, time its envelope. In view of this distinction, a sort of divine politeness and heavenly good breeding suggests itself, to address always the enveloped character of a man. I approach a great nature with infinite expectation and uncertainty, not knowing what I may meet. It lies as broad and unexplored before me as a scraggy hillside or pasture. I may hear a fox bark, or a partridge drum, or some bird new to these localities may fly up. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Quotes Thursday, April 20th, 2006 Einstein quotes. My favs: “The only real valuable thing is intuition.” “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” “Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.” “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” “Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.” “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) listen child Thursday, April 20th, 2006 by Shel Silverstein Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) whats this for? Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 Leached here. Site Search Tags: metaphor, meaning Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Lemmings … Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 Click anywhere. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Just asking: Hugh on speaking out loud Saturday, April 8th, 2006 Hugh, you’re doing way more talks right? I think it’s so bizarre to be able to follow you around the world, watching/listening through all these little web portals. I got a question for you: In which conversation (this one or this one) did you best say what you meant to say? And related, but different, in which were you best heard? I think it’s the second one, on both questions … in a huge way. Why? And, next time you’re asked to speak, can you get to that “way” more quickly? Technorati Tags: Hugh+MacLeod, presentationsSite Search Tags: just+asking Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) philologr: apt Friday, April 7th, 2006 apt — apt (apt) — an adjective describing something/someone exactly suitable; appropriate; having a natural tendency; inclined. It comes from Old French apte, which is from Latin aptus, which is the past participle of apere, which is “to fasten”. Found on productdose: Technorati Tags: philologr, reference, dictionary, language, english, writingSite Search Tags: philologr, language Filed in sifted, philologr - Permalink - Comments (0) philologr: obsequious Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 obsequious — ob·se·qui·ous (ob-se’kwe-?s) — an adjective describing one who is full of or exhibiting servile compliance; fawning. Excessively eager to serve or obey: menial, servile, slavish, subservient. A Middle English word, from Latin obsequiosus, from obsequium, compliance, from obsequi, to comply : ob-, to; see ob– + sequi, to follow. By Hugh MacLeod in praise, praise, praise the competition etc: “This is my favorite English Cut post for a while. Not only is a great story, full of local history and color, it does a superb job of pulling off what has become my favorite thing to do as a marketer: i.e. Praising one’s competition to the hilt: ‘If you fancy a new suit, he’s one of the best. Hardcore old school.Brian Staples: +44 (0) 207 734 5069.’ Of course, you can only do that when [A] your praise is sincere and [B] your own product is up to snuff. Otherwise you just sound obsequious.” Technorati Tags: philologr, reference, dictionary, language, english, writingSite Search Tags: philologr, language Filed in sifted, philologr - Permalink - Comments (0) mistaken beliefs Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 © sift (Jeremy Heigh) Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Breeder wanted Saturday, April 1st, 2006 There’s been a big dust up between Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, and Werner Vogel (CTO Amazon). The hubbub brings to a point several interesting dynamics: 1. Bloggers are entrepreneurs unable to strategically quantify their intuition (and that’s fine).2. The corporate executives trying to understand blogs are looking to crunch some numbers (and that makes sense).3. These guys, and almost all influential bloggers/executives, aren’t the people to carry this up the evolutionary chain (and that’s the gap). What we need is a younger, new kind of player: a breeder. Someone capable of intuition and strategic thinking. Technorati Tags: Robert+Scoble, Shel+Israel, Naked+Conversations, Amazon+CTO, Werner+Vogel, Seth+Godin, Hugh+MacLeod, breeder, strategy, blogs, corporate+blogging, evolutionSite Search Tags: breeder, strategy, you&company Filed in sifted, you&company - Permalink - Comments (0) ASCII me Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 me: from this: from here. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) In all its glory Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 I’ve been thinking lots more about “perfect for purpose” (more here). And, related to that, having a voice that calls for such things. My ego feed caught someone quoting a comment of mine on Hugh’s blog. Hugh was describing the link between blogs and a global microbrand (a small, tiny brand, that “sells” all over the world). He makes a reference to the glass box most corporate types live within. But he seemed to stop there — like the alternative was the point. I thought it could be pushed further and wrote the following: “It’s more than employed … right? It’s more than blog+suits=pastoral … isn’t it? It’s that the guy with the beemer, who works in the top floor office, and wears a Thomas Mahon suit is straight-jacketed by the brand he works for. He can’t choose; there’s no time and no room. He must do. If he stops “doing” for a second … he’s gone. A truly global microbrand gives you more than pastoral sans glass box. It lets you roar. Spread-out, bicep flexing, head-thrown back roaring in a way untouched by corporate protocol or urban ethic. A perfect expression of potential that’s only possible if absolutely unfettered by artifical constraint. This used to be the exclusive field of CEOs and rockstars. The barbarians hopped the gate. Now, the meaty question: We’ve got the foundation (net), tools (blogs), material (experience/passion) … what’s this beauty going to look like?” See, I think you need to know what perfect is … then you need to have the credibility/capacity to build it … then you need to have the eloquence/clarity to describe it in all its glory. Technorati Tags: perfect, purpose, perfect+for+purpose, blogs, microbrand, Hugh+McLeodSite Search Tags: perfect+for+purpose Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Howto get attention Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 Akan proverb: “A good soup attracts chairs.” Want attention? Focus on your recipe. Spotted here from here. Technorati Tags: attentionomics, strategy, businessSite Search Tags: attentionomics Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Howto talk to busy people Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 Yesterday I spent too long in a conversation. It was my fault. I wandered, got enamoured with my story, and lost the purpose of my visit. It’s embarrassing and something I need to rein in. Brad Feld describes two conversations he recently had: One successful and the other … sort-of. To help myself, and maybe you, here’s a list to review before every important chat. Do: - Stick to 30 minutes or under (unless a pre-set agenda).- Provide a reminder of the context for your introduction.- Describe what you want from the conversation and lay out a mini-agenda.- Get right to the point of the conversation.- Hit the end zone with time to spare.- Thank the other side for the time and offer to follow-up. Don’t: - Flounder with the attention of busy people.- Assume the context is set and explode to the highest levels of the conversation.- Start the conversation without thinking of your goals for the conversation.- Fail to hear the sound of the busy person pulling the plug on the conversation.- Remain sufficiently ungracious as to fight for more time. Update: Related (albeit much longer) note from Dave “purveyor-of-all-things-tabled-or-graphically-boxed” Pollard. Technorati Tags: howto, conversationsSite Search Tags: strategic+conversations Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Embracing obscurity and the b-side career Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 Jason Fried (37 Signals) posted about embracing obscurity. “The beauty of starting a side business is that you can fail in obscurity. Many people worry that they’ll languish in obscurity. Don’t worry about having a great idea that no one knows about. Worry about having a bad idea that everyone knows about.” Reminds me of this. Technorati Tags: b-side+career, Jason+Pettus, you&companySite Search Tags: b-side, career, experiment Filed in sifted, you&company - Permalink - Comments (2) (un)sift’d: Feb/Mar links for review Sunday, March 19th, 2006 Here’s a list of pages I’ve cruised by lately that seemed to merit another peek. Mostly a list of pages I want to get back to, but may be of interest to others too. Flickr: Scaling Fast and Cheap — A talk by Cal Henderson (Flickr) describing the construction of a web-based, open source, scalable enterprise application. Gorgeous pictures of China. Paul Graham’s website — A viral essay writer, Paul Graham dominates most social tagging sites. Has done so without a blog (until recently). Has done so while writing essays (in a time when everyone calls for short and terse, he goes long).Critical, creative and associative thinking: Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking — I want to look more at associative thinking. Artful Sentences: Syntax as style (Virgina Tufte) — Have been seeing this book pop up often. I’m big on style, so want another peek. Bruce Sterling speech about emerging technology (Viridian Design) — Noted this earlier, but want to stick it here too. Very interested in these spimes, blogjects, thinglinks, and everyware ideas. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Celebrating my friend Monday, March 13th, 2006 My good friend, Bob Klager, just got a swanky new job. Details aren’t available but I wanted to celebrate his change. Congrats Bob. I’m proud of you. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Too much noise: Chaos and communication clarity Monday, March 13th, 2006 Seth wants less noise. Citing the mounting tidal wave of blog posts he suggests that “by writing too much, too often, we’re trouncing on the attention of the commons.” He’s right if the singular value of blogs is communication to single readers. But there are other perspectives from which more noise looks better and better. For example, an economist might really like this. You wouldn’t believe the convolutions most economists go through to get a rich data set. In this case, blogs are exactly what you’re after: lots of voluntary indications of preferences. You might also like the noise if you’re keen on understanding emerging trends. In the world before blogs you’d have to poll hundreds of people in rigorously defined ways to just get a sliver of new information. Now, thanks to blogs, this stuff is lying all over the place just begging to be picked up. Seth’s a writer and he’s pointing out that vigorous noise generation isn’t doing much to promote one-to-one or one-to-many communication. I’m wondering if we haven’t missed the real promise here: many-to-one. Technorati Tags: many+to+one, blogs, communication, Seth+Godin, Web2.0Site Search Tags: many+to+one, metadata, communication, Web2.0 Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Planning: Goals versus resolutions Monday, March 13th, 2006 Speaking of resolutions … what’s the difference between a goal and a resolution? Isn’t a goal a “to-do” and a resolution a “to-be” or “to-become”? Better look these up: goal — goal (gol) — is a noun meaning the purpose toward which an endeavor is directed; an objective; what one intends to do or achieve; an ambition, design, end, intention, or purpose. resolution — res·o·lu·tion (rez’?-lu’sh?n) — is a noun meaning the state or quality of being resolute; firm determination; a resolving to do something; a course of action determined or decided on. A goal is an end; a resolution is a course of action. Both are definitive. At least “resolutions” are within the accepted framework of planning … if anyone has a better, more fluid system of projection, I’d be interested to know more. Throw it in the comments if you like. Technorati Tags: planning, you&company, goals, resolutions, purpose, GTD, getting+things+done, languageSite Search Tags: goals, resolutions, principles, language, purpose, planning, you&company Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) The seventh resolution of Jonathan Edwards Sunday, March 12th, 2006 I read Jonathan Edwards Resolutions when I was eleven. I’ve never forgotten the seventh. “Resolved, never to do anything, which I should be afraid to do, if it were the last hour of my life.” I just can’t fit it practically into my life. In my last hour, I would NOT go to work and NOT do almost all of what I do every day. How can this idea change to be truly profound? Site Search Tags: profound Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Get your awe on Sunday, March 12th, 2006 My son is 11 months old. If he’s inherited anything helpful from me, it’s irrepressible curiosity. And there are few things more inspiring than seeing him pull open a door. If he has a line of sight, Keaton can spot the crack in a barely opened door from impossible distances. With dogged determination he’ll cross all obstacles to get there. Normally distracted by anything that moves, there’s nothing that distracts Keaton from the chance to push open a door. A connoisseur of door-opening, a dilettante in all things hinged, he relishes the moment of unveiling a room. The awe and joy shine in his eyes as he purveys the mystery of a cordoned off space. Even more than all the touching, grabbing, and tasting of physical things … Keaton is the only one I know who can taste a room and touch it’s unseen character. It is delightful. I’d like to find my awe again … any tips? Site Search Tags: awe, inspiration Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Web 2.0: Cutting through the hype Saturday, March 11th, 2006 Why do I keep reading blogs … keep surfing aggressively … keep sifting? I ask myself that at least once a day, usually more. It seems so aimless. So profitless. But within me is a quiet suspicion that we haven’t yet seen the reality of the internet. I wonder if we aren’t just seeing its reflection. Its chimera. Of course, no conclusions here but this talk by Bruce Sterling feels like it’s cutting close to the bone. I still need to digest it some more, but thought I’d refer readers to it. It’s an area I intend to spend a great deal more time understanding. Any thoughts? Site Search Tags: web2.0, language, design, metadata Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Where questions are windows not battering rams. Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 I must have known this before and forgotten: One can not plan without a purpose. What is mine? Is it describing a set of goals that describe a kind of person and trusting that is the person I will come to be? Is it making a choice and striving forward through all obstacles to become that single, refined thing? Or is it being, right now, what I am? Living completely and wholly and allowing the next moment to arrive in its due course? Of the three I’ve only tried the first. It’s fruitless. If goals are as they should be (ie. tough), there isn’t sufficient clarity to incite all the effort required to get there. When the enthusiasm wears off … the goals disappear. The second one seems … decisive. Decisive is good; decisive is preferred in my culture. But decisive assumes that the necessary information is available. It isn’t. My experience in life has always revealed doors I never new existed. Not merely unconsidered, these doors were absolutely unknown. I started university to be a medical doctor. Until I sat down to pick a few courses outside my major (biology) I’d never understood one could get an education in economics. Today I’m an economist. Today when I visit old friends I have to first describe all the things an economist is taught to perceive … then I point out I’m an investor, like a VC. Unanimously the question is: “What’s a VC?” I never knew of these things when I set out to decide what to do with my life. How much more is left out there undiscovered? How am I better positioned today to make a choice than I’ve been in the past? I think there are good reasons to suppose that the main driver behind our compulsion to define our purpose is not necessarily to find the answer for ourselves but to find the answer for everyone else. For some reason, everyone else assumes it’s their privilege to ask about our purpose and their privy to pose surprised at the answer. Is it really? Boss’s are absolutely beside themselves with anxiety when there isn’t a definite answer to the question: “What are your three-year goals?” Why? Because there’s only two responses to the indefinite answer. First, the now befuddled boss can accept the assumption he’s got a rudderless man-o-war within the fleet. Or, Second, he must actually ask some thoughtful questions instead of the cope out he started with. Most of us are intimidated by the heavy work of forming and asking thoughtful questions. That’s why we spend so much time discussing the weather and politics. And when we come up against someone who actually does ask these kinds of questions our instinctive response is to defend our ignorance. We hammer our flag into the mount of all-things-banal and vehemently defend our reluctance to come off the hill. We get prickly. So the group that has the audacity to ask this sort of question is obligated to find a hefty shield to get behind. And the best that’s been found is the “Socratic Method”. Lugging around that ideology, one gets absolution from most of the fiery reprisal … because every one knows where that idea fits in our culture. It goes in the “oh-that’s-a-philosophical-question” category. And that’s where is stops. We don’t go past the Socratic Method to the Socratic Foundation and as a result we remain uncomfortable without the label and, more relevant to where I began, we remain violently opposed to indefinite answers to life-purpose questions. The Socratic Foundation is formed around a single principle: Truth lives within us. Because, if the Truth that is sought is outside us, how could we know where to seek it? And how can we seek something that is within us? Truth is not introduced from the outside, but is within us all the time. And Socrates suggested that all learning and inquiry is a kind of remembering where one only needs a nudge to come to the consciousness of what is already known. Now, getting back to purpose and the discomfort of thoughtful questions and the defaulting laziness of the “three-year-cope-out” and the devastating consequence of not accepting the indefinite; it’s about principles. We presently put them in jeopardy. They get no support. And we, as a result, live in a world of second best. In our pursuit of definite answers (whether that’s purpose statements or annual reports) we immediately erode what ought to be the dominant position of principles and replace them with second-best, approximations called goals. The consequence is that where we needed room for new revelations, we have none. Any response is now wishy-washy rather than wise and we doggedly stick to the predefined path despite our better knowledge. Flustered by the consequence, we turn to people close to us and seek clarity in their purpose (if ours is unclear, maybe theirs might be) and we crowd toward people who seem to have something definite in mind. And as a result we build herds of people unresponsive to emerging Truth. We call these groups families, churches, businesses, and governments. How much different would the world be if we didn’t have permission to ask that silly question about purpose? How much different would our decisions be if the indefinite answer was appropriate? How would my life change if I greeted each moment within myself instead of three years into the future? How much different would we be if questions were seen as windows instead of battering rams? Technorati Tags: purpose, principles, Socrates, culture, planning, decision+makingSite Search Tags: purpose, principles, culture Filed in sifted, you&company - Permalink - Comments (5) Simple is dignified; easy is brutal Sunday, March 5th, 2006 I’m big on dignity. Refined, sophisticated, classy, savvy, eloquent, dilettante … all favourite words. And favourite images/brands too. In my career one of the biggest differentiators between me and the other guys has been clean-cut, tidy, well kept and well chosen clothes, politeness, and careful attention to the ways in which I act and speak — and I’ve tried to be dignified. It’s made a huge difference. So I am sceptical when Paul Graham tells Amazon that “when you evolve out of start-up mode and start worrying about being professional and dignified, you only lose capabilities. You don’t add anything… you only take away.” He suggests that dignity is deadly. I didn’t really buy into the rhetoric then but I do agree with Kathy Sierra’s comparison of her experiences with start-ups versus the corporate world. Just not for the reasons she might hope I would. See dignity isn’t risk-averse, profit bound, incremental, Windows 2000, fake etc. It’s lazy to suggest it is and it clarifies why dignity is still advantageous. Dignity is grace, outbound interest, high-minded thinking, respectful, honourable, and worthy of esteem … you can be these things and still tote a Tablet PC. You can be dignified and still wear jeans … if that matters for much. Kathy’s after simple and somehow thinks it’s an antonym of dignified … I’d suggest it’s a prerequisite. Simple is to dignified as easy is to brutal. It’s easy to confuse grace with indecision, or politeness with insincerity, or interest with concession. But the differences are simple. Don’t give away the best of people for a misnamed preference. When you ask for simple, be sure you don’t really mean easy. So, it boils right down to a simple question: Do you always want to be starting? Isn’t there a time in every one’s evolution when we ought to become less and be more? Because this is essentially the difference between start-up (becoming) and dignified (being). As much as we need the first and should always spend energy on continuing to grow … don’t we also need at least a few of us to the second? Do we really want a purely start-up culture? As jazzy as that sounds? Technorati Tags: dignity, simple, Kathy+Sierra, Paul+Graham, principles, start-up, corporateSite Search Tags: dignity, simple, principles, corporate, start-up Filed in sifted, you&company - Permalink - Comments (0) The nobility of nature and the wrath of our indifference Sunday, February 26th, 2006 “On behalf of the elephants, thank you for listening.” — Photographer Gregory Colbert at TED 2006 Of course it’s anthropomorphic and a tad melodramatic but still I get that tiny chill in inspiration reading Colbert’s quote above. It’s easy to pretend … transpose … the bigness of elephants into some measure of intelligence. And while that might be fake, I still have a hard time shaking the idea that intelligent animals like elephants, dolphins, primates watch humanity with a great depth of sadness. They haven’t the voices to share what wisdom they’ve built across time. They haven’t a means to communicate their understanding of the unseen costs of our actions. Have you ever seen a wounded animal? Have you ever marvelled at the nobility with which they bear their pain? There is something profoundly humbling in the way an animal will greet its death. So, I ping a little when a man or woman stands between humanity and some endangered species and with grace and dignity thanks the human race for turning aside the wrath of our indifference. On the side: the TED conference is on right now. It’s my goal is to get to one … to be paid to go to one … within the next three years. I think it’s absolutely spectacular. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) The desperate fear that lives in every man: Saturday, February 25th, 2006 … more … Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Metaphors of re-innovation Saturday, February 25th, 2006 I was fiddling around with some stats generators one of which includes links back to my blog. Most of them end up being me commenting on someone else’s posts or linking back to my blog within my own posts … kindof a circular conversation with myself. I wandered into a post by Fred at A VC because I was following a comment I’d made that included a link back to my site. I think Fred’s post and my comment are rather good. So … I’m reposting Fred’s post on my blog in which I comment about myself and linking back to Fred’s post which of course continues the conversation with … myself. How’s that for insanity? The Open Source Metaphor: December 13, 2004 in Venture Capital and Technology - Permalink “Open source is a metaphor for the way innovation works best in all ways of life. Rarely does brilliance come out of nowhere. It usually comes from being inspired by something and taking that inspiration and adding a little more. That’s how open source software works. That’s how blogging works. That’s how a lot of things work. So with that thought rattling around in my brain, I came upon the Trickster’s discussion of bluesman Robert Johnson this weekend. Robert Johnson is an inspiration to many of the great musicians of our times, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, etc. But many debate his contribution to the world of music and claim he was a “minor figure” in the development of the blues. Well I have tried to get into Robert Johnson more than a couple times, but his music is too sparse and too thinly recorded for my enjoyment. That said, Trickster’s post is worth reading because in it he asserts the exact same point that I was making about the open source metaphor. To quote from Trickster’s post: ‘Johnson did what hundreds of great artists have done–he took folk material from around him in the world and through an act of creative molding, turned that material into something more than just found stuff. He turned it into literature.’ This is how open source works. It is how blogging works. And with the digital revolution upon us, I believe this is how much of the innovation that will result from the digital revolution will work.” Comment posted by: Jeremy - Dec 13, 2004 6:25:50 PM “Good take on music. All things with a deep heritage must, of course, be the products of what went before. It’s a subtle aspect of what Newton may have meant when he said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Which, incidentally, was copied from a Jewish sage, Isaiah ben Mali di Trani (b. 1200). The saying’s obvious meaning is that those that went before are holding us up and allowing an unprecedented perspective. More subtle meanings might include: If you want to be innovative, climb up the mountains of learning around you. Open source is amazing because it finally puts a business face on old traditions. Traditions like the roles of a father (surely you’ve caught glimpses of your children copying you) are suddenly interesting from a business perspective. When your kids learn and improve on your ideas, they are moding and hacking previous versions. When they take what they see and do it themselves somewhere else, they are copying and replicating working versions into different applications. I’d be interested to read ideas you have on open-source type ideas in business outside software development. You might enjoy a post I wrote earlier this month: Copy-cat. Let me know what you think if you drop by. Thanks for your blog, I enjoy your ideas.” Technorati Tags: copy-cat, innovation, creativity, metaphors, music, wisdom, traditions, principles, Site Search Tags: copy-cat, innovation, creativity, metaphors, wisdom, traditions, principles, Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Regaining the helm of time Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 Henry David Thoreau on steering time: “The whole of the day should not be daytime, nor of the night night-time, but some portion be rescued from time to oversee time in. All our hours must not be current; all our time must not lapse. There must be one hour at least which the day did not bring forth — of ancient parentage and long-established nobility — which will be a serene and lofty platform overlooking the rest. We should make our notch every day on our characters, as Robinson Crusoe on his stick. We must be at the helm at least once a day; we must feel the tiller-rope in our hands, and know that if we sail, we steer.” For most of my life, the two most powerful ways to get me to move were guilt and urgency. If you could make me feel bad, I’d fix it. And if it needed to be done now, I’d drop everything and get on it. Trouble is, both of those drivers are external. So it didn’t take long until I felt like my entire life was being run by everyone else but me. I tried desperately to make choices of my own but was inevitably distracted by watching, listening, and reacting to others. Of course this quickly led to internal chaos. The guilt and urgency expressed by others was rarely in my better interest. I wasn’t growing like I hoped to. I wasn’t becoming who I wanted to be. This internal struggle became most acute during my first years of college. In response, I plunged into myself. Internally lost, I shuffled around the campus, barely aware of anything but this mess within me. I wandered aimlessly and eventually gravitated to the place I’ve always felt safest … most whole: the library. Slowly my attention was pulled from within myself up to the titles streaming down the rows. Somehow, among the thousands of books lining the shelves, I chose the most unlikely: Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom. And honestly, I think that book has had the greatest impact on my life of all the books I’ve read till now. Much like Thoreau, Bloom reminds us that time can be our own. He describes a swirling world of responsibilities, obligations, and other social noise. Time screams past like a flock of angry crows and most of us hurtle along with it — trying desperatly to keep up. Bloom invites us to stop. Simply stop, he suggests. See what happens. Wait for the moment when time is moving with dizzying speed. And quit. Quit for just five minutes and take note of the change. Counter-intuitively, astoundingly, astonishingly the world continues to spin, lives continue to exist, and everything continues to function. Those five minutes can break the chains Thoreau has described above. They put you on a growth curve toward regaining the helm of time. This understanding has been my single greatest weapon is smashing down panic, guilt, and urgency (when I remember it). It’s made a observable change in the way I approach work and my life. It’s also made me more sensitive to other drivers, both external and internal. How else are we driven? Where else have we given away the rights to part of our lives? Technorati Tags: GTD, getting+things+done, time+management, Thoreau, careers, principles, wisdomSite Search Tags: GTD, getting+things+done, time+management, Thoreau, principles, wisdom Filed in sifted, you&company - Permalink - Comments (0) philologr: poignancy, sublime, prosaic Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006 poignancy (of poignant) — poign·ant (poin’y?nt) — an adjective describing something profoundly moving; piercing; incisive; agreeably intense . sublime — sub·lime (s?-blim’) — an adjective describing something characterized by nobility; majestic; of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth. prosaic — pro·sa·ic (pro-za’ik) — an adjective describing something matter-of-fact; straightforward; lacking in imagination and spirit; dull. By George Santayana in Sense of Beauty: Being the outline of aesthetic theory: Sensuous beauty is not the greatest or most important element of effect, but it is the most primitive and fundamental, and the most universal. There is no effect of form which an effect of material could not enhance, and this effect of material, underlying that of form, raise the latter to a higher power and gives the beauty of the object a certain poignancy, thoroughness, and infinity with it otherwise would have lacked. The Parthenon not in marble, the king’s crown not of gold, and the stars not of fire, would be feeble and prosaic things. The greater hold which material beauty has upon the senses, stimulates us here, where form is also sublime, and lifts and intensifies our emotions. We need this stimulus if our perceptions are to reach the highest pitch of strength and acuteness. Nothing can be ravishing that is not beautiful pervasively. Technorati Tags: philologr, reference, dictionary, language, english, writingSite Search Tags: philologr, language Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Wholemindedness: The brilliance of an unfettered mind Monday, February 20th, 2006 Among the myriad benefits of a lifestyle managed with a system like Getting Things Done (GTD), the most worthwhile is not the number of things that get done. The GTD system is designed to free up bandwidth. It unleashes the psychic energy required by most to track the multitudinous tasks of corporate life. It achieves this by defragmenting tasks. Unranked and unrelated, the subconscious effort required to keep up with the ever increasing load of tasks is enormous. By collating and synthesizing tasks, most of us can reaccess a surprising amount of previously wasted energy. But almost everybody stops at this first-level benefit of more time spent on better things. More time with better stuff isn’t the only benefit of these systems and may not even be the best. Even better is the new freedom to point an unfettered mind at the present. The creativity and insightfulness that springs loose when complete attention is available is something rarely experienced by corporate types but regularly experienced by great artists. People passionate about their art are consumed by their art. Their whole mind is given to their work. This is the greatest gift of a reorganized life: wholemindedness. If presence is important, the system that enables it is priceless. Technorati Tags: wholemindedness, GTD, getting+things+done, principles, leadership, creativity, insightSite Search Tags: wholemindedness, GTD, getting+things+done, principles, leadership, creativity, insight Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Deliberate attention to presence Monday, February 20th, 2006 From Chris Corrigan via Johnnie Moore: The second kind of waiting is the one that really fascinates me. This is waiting when we are fully engaged in the present. The most powerful experience I have ever had of this was when my children were born. Being with my partner through two long labours was a very interesting kind of waiting. Time starts to do funny things - it gets shifty and stretchy, and your awareness of it detaches and solely rests on the emergent moment. A child will soon be born, and the best you can do is to be fully alive to that possiblility. Distraction serves no purpose. In fact, with our second child, my partner commented that at one point it felt as if she was living in a ghost world. As we walked around with her living through this long and low grade labour (40 hours!) she noted that none of people we were walking past had any idea of what was going on between us and within her. She felt in the world but not at all a part of it - like a ghost. But she was deeply within the moment. This is a deep presencing. It is waiting for something to emerge, something life changing, possibly life threatening, and yet with no way to know how it will all unfold. Radical trust into the moment, radical readiness to accept what will come. Brilliant example Chris. If you’d used anything but a story, I’d have missed it. Prescence is something I barely understand — but on “distracted” I’m a viking. I am always somewhere else. If I’m not, I feel like I’m wasting time. Chris’s example is great for me because I so recently came through the same experience. For 24 hours, Lori labored for our son. And one of the things that never happened during my experience was distraction. Not a single flicker … not even a second of thought. For me, that is rare. Rarer than rare: exceptionally scarce. Actually, my interest in prescence is motivated by the same event. Well, the outcome of said event. Namely the boy. I’ve discovered I am distracted with him. I lay out on the floor, ball in my hand, with his bright eyes on my every move and every expression — and I’m thinking about tomorrow’s schedule, or fixing the squeaky floor, or getting back to my book. But never too far from my thoughts is the understanding that I’ll never lay with him on that floor in that way again. Also rare. But even bigger … even more generally compelling … know that every moment, whether at work or at love, is the last we can ever have of it’s kind. Rarer than diamonds and rarer than the last of any species: our moments. For me it doesn’t motivate a maniac attention to seconds but it does evoke a deliberate attention to presence. Technorati Tags: presence, moments, leadership, scarcity, principlesSite Search Tags: presence, moments, leadership, scarcity, principles Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) philologr: bumptious Sunday, February 19th, 2006 bumptious — bump·tious (bump’sh?s) — an adjective describing actions that are crudely or loudly assertive; pushy. It is, perhaps, a blend of “bump” and “presumptuous”. From Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “As children get older, outdoor activity becomes less bumptious physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, by they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.” Technorati Tags: philologr, reference, dictionary, language, english, writingSite Search Tags: philologr, language Filed in sifted, philologr - Permalink - Comments (0) The brilliance of moments: how success is ultimately determined by now Friday, February 17th, 2006 I travel from Edmonton to Calgary and back almost every week. It’s a three hour drive one-way, so I have a big chunk of time to listen to podcasts. This week I listened to an interview, by Todd at 800CEOread, of Sander and Jonathan Flaum, authors of The 100-Mile Walk: A Father and Son on a Quest to Find the Essence of Leadership and a series of talks given by Alan Watts. Both include fragments of discussion around the importance of the present (versus the future or past). This is something that’s been nipping at my attention. I’ve learned, and am naturally inclined, to greet all new things in life by trying to understand how they relate to the future. I look past everything. It’s not only because I naturally lean forward but, as Watts explained, our society teaches us to look forward to “arrival”. Alan Watts describes how we, from kindergarten on, are taught that next year is better than this year and the end is better than now. In kindergarten there is grade one! In secondary school there is post-secondary school. Then graduate school. Then our first job and the ladder starts again until sometime in our forties we decide we’ve arrived and can’t figure out what we’ve worked so hard to get. We realize we’ve lost or never knew all the things we had. We trade our moments for our future. In his interview, Jonathan Flaum suggests that the most significant leaders he interviewed have learnt how to recapture their moments. They block out the past, the future, and all other distractions to simply achieve within the moment. Using elite athletes as an example, Jonathans describes how spectacular success is achieved by the accomplishments of single moments. Unlike our education or employment system, athletes are taught to improve momentarily: in this moment, strive to exhaustion; in this moment, lift to failure; in this moment, be one-hundred thousandths of a second faster. And, tada, almost unexpectedly, Olympic gold. It’s an important reminder as I paddle through all these new things in my life, especially as I seek to understand success in this new position. I’ve been looking far into the future, trying to understand how the chaos and monotony of today relates to the things I hope to do. These metaphors suggest that I am at risk of missing the lessons and beauty of this moment. Watts illustrates this opportunity the best when he compares a journey to a dance. In a journey we are constantly seeking our destination. One hour more today is an hour less to spend tomorrow. One last step now is a step I’ll never have to take again. But in a dance we aren’t seeking the end. We are seeking the moment. We don’t dance to get anywhere; we don’t sing to finish songs. We do these things for the joy they bring to our moments. And anyone focused on some climactic conclusion will miss the brilliance of the moments. Our lives, our careers … my life, my career … isn’t just a series of steps to the end. It can be a series of brilliant moments where I touch the art of all that lies before me. Technorati Tags: career+success, leadership, art, moments, principles+of+successSite Search Tags: career+success, leadership, art, moments, principles+of+success Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) It is only fear and it’s mine to own. Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 The first scene in the Matrix shows a woman, Trinity, sitting alone in a dark room. It’s obvious she’s hiding from something, wispering away on the phone. Her back is to the only door in the room. With the requisite commotion, a bunch of cops burst through the door, guns drawn, yelling for her to put her hands behind her head. Slowly she stands. … One cop, the biggest guy, flicks out some cuffs as he gets ready to haul her in and suddenly she goes nuts. The big guy slams into the wall. The rest of the cops panic. Gunfire blazes into the dark room. She’s a blur. And then, as suddenly as it started, it ends. They’re all dead. She’s amazing. … Into the building comes an unarmed man. When Trinity sees him it’s plain she’s afraid. She runs. He follows. Leaping from building to building, rolling after impossible jumps, Trinity sprints off while the man behind her pulls a hand gun and rattles off several shots. The bullets pound into the bricks beside her. Ahead of Trinity is an impossibly small window and it’s an impossibly long distance away. But it’s her only hope. She hurtles herself off the building, levels into a dive and crashes through the window. She’s escaping. … Glass explodes everywhere. Trinity crashes through the window, tumbles down a flight of stairs, and lands on her back at the bottom with two hand guns pointed back the way she just came. She’s terrified. Lying there, heaving and broken she says, “Get up, Trinity. You’re fine. Get up — just get up!” — These are the three milestones of success: 1. We are amazing and we can prove it. After proving so much, some decide they’ve proven enough and stop growing. After having come so far, some decide they’ve come far enough and stay down.2. We are afraid and we run from our fears. After climbing so high only to still find fear, we finally run instead of fight. And once we begin to run, the fear overtakes us. Panic sets in.3. And each of us, sometime, lies heaving and broken on the floor. For each of us that will continue to grow, there is a moment in the blur of panic that we either set it aside or let it take us completely. It is our fear that holds us down; the obstacles can not keep us there. — In this transition from government to private company … from advisor to investor … I forgot why I was amazing. I’m not amazing in the most general sense. But in some things, honestly, I am stunning. I forgot. And in this time I’ve chosen fear instead of reality. I made up barriers, constructed misperceptions, and manufactured suspicion. I let these things pin me down. Looking at this clearly I saw what I had done. I recognized that all these walls were mine. And I’ve decided to let them go. It is fear that holds me down; but fear is mine to own. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) People first. Marketers … later. Monday, February 13th, 2006 I’ve hit a snag with the Foundation Series. It reads like crap. I’m still wobbly on what I ought to say so I default to obfuscation. Orwell said it best, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” I’m not bogus, but perhaps affected. You can see it in the buzzy words that start to slide out. Terse plus undecided almost always equals gibberish. And spotting gibberish in my posts set me down. For me, there’s three lessons here. First, there’s a lot of rhetoric about how we’re all marketers (ahem … Hugh MacLeod, Kathy Sierra). Yeah, sure, that’s fine — but what about it? See, it’s great to acknowledge there’s a need to market but there’s nearly zero translation from the people who draw up Budweiser ads to the folks who rattle off briefings to the Minister. So, while I’ve got loads of experience in banging up recommendations to senior officials, I’ve got close to none in using marketing verbage in a corporate setting. But verbage is where most marketing people stop. So there’s a gap. That’s the lesson. Second is form. Blogging is good for lots of things but running deep into complex ideas isn’t one of them. For this series I should’ve used essays. It was the same story in government. We were always writing one page briefing notes or 11 page powerpoint presentations (with 13 words per slide) while trying to provide depth and understanding around massively complicated issues. Bad form. Bad decision. Alright, I get that people are busy. I understand (perfectly) that important decision makers make many decisions daily. But there’s a trade off between many, crappy decisions and fewer, better decisions. In the short-term there’s going to be a backlog, but the hope is that fewer come back to be made again. Anyway, blogs aren’t a great form for working out complex dynamics like power in large organizations. The lesson is: Pick the right form. Third, while many talk about marketing and some talk about form, few talk about daily corporate issues like: power struggles, pushing up ideas from relatively low power positions, tracking issues using fragmented information sources, getting time with decision makers, muscling out high-experience, low-passion deadbeats, etc. These are the daily fights of a massive number of people. These same people flock to Apple’s carnival of products, the Spiritual/Relationship section of Chapters, and Starbucks and all the marketing people pretend it’s a consequence of marketing. Balloney. It’s not that they’re instinctively pulled to high design, high thought, and high caffeine. It’s because they’re attracted to richness. Corporate life is vulnerable to desertification. In the past we’ve invested lots of energy in driving out nourishment like passion, ideas, and responsibility. In their place we’ve put career plans, meetings, and hierarchy. And the most important result has be that today people left aching to find color again. So rattling about marketing and writing styles and all that other entrepreneur garbage misses the point if it doesn’t implicitly link to that powerful corporate worker’s hunger for depth and meaning. And that’s where I got off track. Buzziness betrays insencerity and inauthenticity. We’ve got too much of that already. P.S. Neither Kathy nor Hugh are wrong, the cartoon by Hugh below is brilliant, and I’m a big fan of both … but that’s not the point. Technorati Tags: foundation+series, marketing, corporate+dynamics, workSite Search Tags: foundation+series, marketing, corporate+dynamics, work Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Anniversary Monday, February 13th, 2006 Today my wife and I share our 8th anniversary. And tomorrow is Valentines. So … a love song. Get the tune here. “If single words like love mean more than ever before:you’ve brought back life to timeand through you I’m forever changed.” Who says I’m no rockstar? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) RSS: Pick your watershed Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 Eric Schwartzman recently interviewed Doc Searls. In the chat, Doc talked about the ways he uses RSS. Listening to that conversation I finally understood the tremendous power of RSS functionality. Until now I’ve just used RSS to keep me up to speed on the many blogs I frequent. Any new post shows up in my aggregator and I don’t wander through all the various sites that haven’t been updated. Doc’s changed that. In the interview, Doc explained how he uses Technorati, PubSub, Icerocket, Google blog search, and Feedster to track conversations. He made a distinction between what he calls the “live web” and the rest of the web. Where the regular web is made of static, architected web sites the live web is an organismic, dynamic environment made up of constantly changing publications like blogs and podcasts. None of that stood out for me. But his explanation of how he aggressively subscribes to topic searches did. He called it “watching the river of fresh posts”. That phrase alone let me see how widely I had missed the importance of RSS. Instead of watching single conversations roll out on blogs, I can listen to all conversations. Moving past favorite bloggers, I can watch favorite ideas. I bet it’s obvious to everyone else but for me it was a revelation. Ever been in a room with seven really cool conversations happening at once? Ever struggled in vain to both track your own conversation and hear the other ones around you too? RSS lets you do that without looking like a fop. Even better, it lets you listen to every conversation … everywhere. Doc likens it to drinking from a firehose, only you get to make your own firehose. I’d suggest it’s more like drinking from the municipal supply, only you get to pick your watershed. Technorati Tags: RSS, conversations, intelligence, ideasSite Search Tags: conversations, ideas, intelligence Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Advice for visionaries Sunday, February 5th, 2006 Christopher Alexander in an interview with Kenneth Baker: “If you start something, you must have a vision of the thing which arises from your instinct about preserving and enhancing what is there. … If you’re working correctly, the feeling doesn’t wander about. If you have a feeling-vision of the thing — a painting, a building, a garden, a piece of a neighborhood — as long as you’re very firmly anchored in your knowledge of that thing, and you can see it with your eyes closed, you can keep correcting your actions. … It’s not a question of holding onto every little detail, but of holding onto the feeling.” Technorati Tags: Christopher+Alexander, visionary, strategy, designSite Search Tags: Christopher+Alexander, visionary, strategy, leadership, design Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Unfussy and whole Saturday, February 4th, 2006 Have you heard of Christopher Alexander? I’ve written about him before (1, 2, 3). I’m fascinated by his ideas and have yet to read a single book he’s written. But his interests in the human response to patterns and space seem to be narrowly applied. They could explode beyond architecture. These ideas seem to count for anything where the decisions of one determine the environment for many — whether that’s physical, emotional, or mental space. In particular, Alexander’s ideas on wholeness have captured my attention. I’ll say it now: I’m a suspicious guy. It’s something I try to keep tamped down but, honestly, I’d love to be a conspiracy theorist. I just think there’s way more to life than we acknowledge … aliens … not so much … but deeper levels of sensation and mental capacity … oh yeah. So I’ll publically throw in a vote on this: wholeness. I keep wondering if all the things we’ve got, can buy, or are given are just fragments of thier whole. A bit metaphysical, maybe. It’s a lot like the prime discussed by Plato/Aristotle. Are we only getting fragments of perfection? Is all this just a broken off piece of something spectacularly beautiful? And to be really whacky … I think it pushes on Nelson Mandela’s proposition that “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate … our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” Anyway … All that to say, Kenneth Baker’s review of “The Nature of Order” series got my attention. The paragraph that spurred on this post is below. “Every critic of the arts learns to discern wholeness or the lack of it in artworks, even in the temporal media of musical performance, theater and film. And all of us discern the wholeness of situations and things and respond to them, as when we spontaneously delight in the unfussy warmth of a well-used room or effortlessly recognize a person’s face despite its never-ending fluctuations of expression, age and well-being.” Oh man, I think this is fun stuff. Technorati Tags: whole, Christopher+Alexander, design, beautySite Search Tags: beauty, design, wholeness, Christopher+Alexander Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) philologr: platitudinous Friday, February 3rd, 2006 platitudinous — plati·tu’di·nous — a derivative of plat·i·tude (plat’i-tud, -tyud), a noun meaning a trite or banal remark or statement, especially one expressed as if it were original or significant. Without freshness or appeal because of overuse: banal, bromidic, clichéd, commonplace, corny, hackneyed, musty, overused, overworked, platitudinal, shopworn, stale, stereotyped, stereotypic, stereotypical, threadbare, timeworn, tired, trite, warmed-over, well-worn, worn-out. Even better are platitudinousness, another noun, and platitudinal, an adjective. Summarized by Johnnie Moore, written by Dave Pollard, talking about leadership: “American business leaders are treated with deference and wild adulation, as if they were direct descendants from God. Autobiographical business books ghost-written for insanely overpaid CEOs, pontificating on how to be a successful leader, sell like hotcakes. Case in point: The platitudinous blatherings of Rudolph Giuliani in his book Leadership, featuring chapters on The Importance of the Morning Meeting, Preparing Relentlessly, Making Everyone Accountable, Surrounding Yourself with Great People, Reflecting, then Deciding and on and on. Common sense that any five-year-old would know, sold with enormous success for $25.95 a copy.” Technorati Tags: philologr, reference, dictionary, language, english, writingSite Search Tags: philologr, language Filed in sifted, philologr - Permalink - Comments (0) philologr: flibbertigibbet Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 flibbertigibbet — flib·ber·ti·gib·bet (flib’?r-te-jib’it) — a noun meaning a silly, scatterbrained, or garrulous person. A derivative of flibberty-gibberty. Quoted by Malcolm Gladwell in Troublemakers — What pit bulls can teach us about profiling: “There are a lot of pit bulls these days who are licensed therapy dogs,” the writer Vicki Hearne points out. “Their stability and resoluteness make them excellent for work with people who might not like a more bouncy, flibbertigibbet sort of dog.” Technorati Tags: philologr, reference, dictionary, language, english, writingSite Search Tags: philologr, language Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Comprehensive character Monday, January 30th, 2006 Today in Thoreau’s Journal: “I doubt if Emerson could trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets, because it would be out of character. One needs to have a comprehensive character.” Is this part of the never answered tension between generalist and specialist? Is there only a philosophical recognition of holistic people? I spent the last two days on my knees, pulling staples from our floor, and getting ready for hardwood. Quite a few times I thought that I might make a grand renovator. The simplicity appeals. I could spend my days on my knees and my evenings in my mind and never fumble again with the ideas of a passionate career. Why? Because I yearn to be comprehensive and only see opportunity for specialists. And I find the long tunnel to expertise in economics (or anything else) as tiresome as a life spent on my knees pulling staples. Technorati Tags: life, principles, careeringSite Search Tags: life, principles Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) philologr: jubilant Friday, January 27th, 2006 jubilant — ju·bi·lant (ju’b?-l?nt) — an adjective meaning exultingly joyful; full of high-spirited delight; bursting with happiness. Derived from mid-17th century latin it’s the present participle of jubilare which means to call out and shout for joy. Peekaboo Paradox by Gene Weingarten: “On the floor in front of us, the kids — 2, 3 and 4 year-olds — were convulsed in laughter. Literally. They were rolling on the carpeted floor, holding their tummies, mouths agape, little teeth jubilantly bared, squealing with abandon. In the vernacular of stand-up, the Great Zucchini was killing.” Technorati Tags: philologr, reference, dictionary, language, english, writingSite Search Tags: philologr, language Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Yes (and other lies): Know thy enemy Friday, January 27th, 2006 Every new seat at the power table must weather the intense scrutiny of all ordained power holders. Perched precariously between a growing power holder and the ensconced, legacy power holders – every neophyte endures just one important question: Are you valuable to me? While attempting to answer that question, never underestimate the usefulness of the word “yes”. “Yes” is unique. It is one of the few remaining plastic but still potent words we’ve got. “Yes” assuages bloated egos like no other word in the English language and can mean anything from unconditional consent to not opposed. Fortunately not opposed is still understood to mean unanimous support and it will be your conveyor belt, transporting formidable foes into the lukewarm waters of indifference. If everyone at the table believes you are useful to them personally, or at least not opposed to their opinions, they will languish in apathy until disturbed. While this initial power dynamic is easily recognized; regularly overlooked is the need to choose enemies from among the hot-tubbers. Too few of us are ready to admit that, right down to the smallest working unit, there is competition at work. You have allies and enemies. Being one who intends to climb into power, you must know that power is a finite good. To get some, you take some. And everyone you take it from will be angry. The trick is that while everyone is focused on the winning and everyone fears the losing, almost everybody forgets about not winning. You should care about this. These are power holders who are hungry for more that won’t win. They’ll make a play and it’ll fall flat. You want to be there when that happens. You want this to happen to your banker. Why? Because every power holder, including your banker, is in the category of enemy. You are in the business of taking. No one likes that. But being in this category is independent of anyone realizing this is true and if you’re good, no one will. Technorati Tags: you&company, entrepreneurism, corporate+innovation, foundation+seriesSite Search Tags: you&co, corporate+innovation, foundation+series, yes+and+other+lies Filed in sifted, you&company - Permalink - Comments (0) Wrestle or dance Thursday, January 26th, 2006 To some, my thoughts on beauty and on power are contradictory. While juxtaposed, they aren’t opposite. Most see Sun Tzu’s advice as the “Art of War” but a few see it as the “Art of Peace“. And many read Machiavelli for his insights on struggle and neglect his advice on grace. In every moment of contention we can choose brutality or grace. But choosing grace does not mean deference. If I aim to change your direction we can wrestle or dance. Either way, you’ll be turned around. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) philologr: specious Thursday, January 26th, 2006 specious — spe·cious (spe’sh?s) — an adjective meaning having the ring of truth or plausibility but actually fallacious; deceptively attractive or superficially correct but actually worthless “The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.”Niccolo Machiavelli Technorati Tags: philologr, reference, dictionary, language, english, writingSite Search Tags: philologr, language Filed in sifted, philologr - Permalink - Comments (0) Not for us. Thursday, January 26th, 2006 It is too easy to grow desperate. As though life were a hill. The greasy floor of the slaughter house. At the bottom lies the gaping maw of desperate living, foul choices, and black thoughts. It seems so but isn’t that a deception? Isn’t that a consequence of laziness rather than a consequence of life? Aren’t we surrounded by beauty, by great thoughts, by brilliance? What is so hard then … so impossible … to be intentional and strong in our response to the desperation that threatens us daily? Why is it so taxing to stand and face that dark wave which rolls in with the dawn? I would look for the song today, the art, the purity … this darkness is not for me … it is not for us. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Dollars and scents: Bagging the loot Thursday, January 26th, 2006 To get inside with a power holder: see where they are vulnerable. To see where they are vulnerable: stop watching them. Just as you stopped watching the speaker, now stop watching the obvious power holder. Hiding behind a quiet façade is the remaining ocean of power. The ensconced legacy power holder. Those not building power are defending it. The legacy power holder is the quiet, mirthless, furrowed brow at the table. These people are always invited to every important meeting, they rarely carry the floor, and they rarely agree. But are never negative. The openly negative opponent is not a power holder. This is a derisive distraction. A wanna-be. Ignore them. Look for people with enough independence that they can oppose without open warfare. They’ve got something to defend. Watch what they do. When they get their way, you’ve found your banker’s vulnerability. Knowing your banker’s intentions and their vulnerabilities; you now know their needs. Needs can include knowledge gaps (technical issues, positions of legacy power holders, etc.), intelligence gaps (misses non-verbal cues, misses underlying assumptions, generates logistical mine-fields), or just plain horse-power. Whatever the need, figure out how you can satisfy a few. Technorati Tags: you&company, entrepreneurism, corporate+innovation, foundation+seriesSite Search Tags: you&co, corporate+innovation, foundation+series, dollars+and+scents Filed in sifted, you&company - Permalink - Comments (0) Dollars and scents: Picking the lock Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 The fledgling power holder is continually distracted by the need to build more. That’s why they’re so negligent. They are looking way up above them and don’t see what’s happening where they are. This leaves them vulnerable, though they usually don’t see it, and this is why you go after them first. These are the keys of your initial success: intentions, vulnerabilities, and needs. To begin the borrowing process, figure out what they’re looking at. Understand their need. Know what they’re trying to build and decide how you complement that quest. Know what they intend to do and know how you can help make that happen. Technorati Tags: you&company, entrepreneurism, corporate+innovation, foundation+seriesSite Search Tags: you&co, corporate+innovation, foundation+series, dollars+and+scents Copyright Jeremy Heigh Filed in sifted, you&company - Permalink - Comments (0) Dollars and scents: Debt and investing Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 Debt is easier to generate than equity. This is as true for corporate-types as it is for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs always max out their lines of credit. Max out yours. In this case your credit is bandwidth. The time and resources you’re given to do your job. You have a maximum capacity. A portion of it is used to get your job done … to satisfy your job description. The rest can be used to grow. Most corporate types use this bandwidth for surfing, complaining, or lunching. Use your bandwidth to find and borrow power. Finding starts by observing. Every conversation, whether you’re in it or not, is a chance to learn about power. The trick is to never watch the person that’s talking. To know who to borrow from you’ve got to know who has some. A good indicator of rich and readily accessible power is the person who’s late, who isn’t listening, or who is interrupting. Readily accessible is key. There will be power, lots of it, held by people that don’t meet these characteristics, but you won’t be able to get it when you need it – which is now. Once you’ve mustered some of your own, you can begin to tap some of these other sources. The always late, never listening, constantly interrupting power holder is your first connection because of one, single defining characteristic: that person is still building. Technorati Tags: you&company, entrepreneurism, corporate+innovation, foundation+seriesSite Search Tags: you&co, corporate+innovation, foundation+series, dollars+and+scents Copyright Jeremy Heigh Filed in sifted, you&company - Permalink - Comments (0) Celebrate milestones (no matter how small) Monday, January 23rd, 2006 Unlike Hugh, I still check my stats fairly regularly. I enjoy it. It’s marvelous that we can own words or ideas, even if it’s just for a flicker of time. Imagine owning the two-word phrase “sift experiment“. Remarkable. So, I’ve been watching this month to see if the site traffic would pass the highmark set in August when Kottke blinked my way. Today we rolled past. This is quite a milestone. Mostly because I didn’t have a “Kottke blink” this time. It’s just … growth. But also because I’ve tried to stop trending. I chose to start writing about things that are real to me … instead of real to someone else I admire. And finally, because I haven’t posted regularly until quite recently. So … no conclusions or anything. Just a note of interest. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Dollars and scents: Know your banker Monday, January 23rd, 2006 The first job of every entrepreneur or corporate dilettante is to know your banker. The mistake made by entrepreneurs is assuming their key resource is ideas. And corporate-types always mistakenly assume it’s knowledge. For entrepreneurs the key resource is cash. How to get it, how to keep it, and what to do with it are the primary questions. For corporates it’s power. Having power, as a young or new employee isn’t a possibility. So, much like an entrepreneur that’s always trying to borrow more money, you’ve got to begin by borrowing power. How to find it and how to get it? Come back tomorrow. Technorati Tags: you&company, entrepreneurism, corporate+innovation, foundation+seriesSite Search Tags: you&co, corporate+innovation, foundation+series, dollars+and+scents Copyright Jeremy Heigh Filed in sifted, you&company - Permalink - Comments (2) You&Co: Foundation Series Sunday, January 22nd, 2006 I’d like to start working through some parallels between entrepreneurs and corporate/bureaucratic types. Before extending the role of any aspiring corporate player, there’s something to be said about the foundation that it’s built on — a common paradigm needs to be constructed. In the series of posts that follow I’ll try to explain how I see the root of a corporate workers job and they tools they get to play with. Areas to cover include: - Dollars and scents: Where power smells like cash,- The answer is yes (and other lies), and- Watercolor for corporate artists: Landscape painting and simiar pastimes. Technorati Tags: you&company, entrepreneurism, corporate+innovation, foundation+seriesSite Search Tags: you&co, corporate+innovation, foundation+series Copyright Jeremy Heigh Filed in sifted, you&company - Permalink - Comments (0) Role of wisdom Sunday, January 22nd, 2006 Are you allowed to want to be a CEO? I’m not sure if I do. And no one has ever asked me — except one lunatic headhunter. But isn’t CEOing something that requires an invitation? Where else … name any other situation where you show up and ask to the leader. Aren’t the best leaders invited to be leaders? Listening to the 800-CEO-READ podcast of an interview with Justin Menkes, author of Executive Intelligence, I kept quietly hoping I was bright enough … intelligent enough to rank. Again, I’m not convinced the CEO spot’s for me. But I sorta, kinda want to find out if I could do it. It’s a bit like the server job I tried to get while in university. The restaurant was trendy and exclusive. Once I found out I got the job, I didn’t want it anymore. It might be the same here. But casting out a screen on the things I am … I don’t really know a lot. I can’t tell if I’d need to. What really gets used … what’s the gap a CEO fills? Knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom … in what ratio? If knowledge is like construction materials — you either got them or you don’t, then intelligence is like knowing where to put all the pieces in a house that hasn’t got a blueprint, and wisdom is understanding if the house should be built and where to put it. In order of rarity it’d go wisdom, intelligence, then knowledge. But, according to Menkes, the ranking for CEO goodness is intelligence and knowledge. Wisdom isn’t discussed. And if I could pick one I’d take wisdom. Technorati Tags: wisdom, CEO, intelligence, knowledge, rankingSite Search Tags: wisdom, intelligence, knowledge Copyright Jeremy Heigh Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Wheelbarrow: Metatags Saturday, January 21st, 2006 What’s with the wheelbarrow? This is a placeholder where I want to begin to use and understand the humanity of tags. More here. Metatags: first derivative of thought. Metatags are key to meta-knowledge Clay Shirky: “Taggers are good at characterizing material in ways that search engines are incapable of, and tags are thus good for letting you find material whose characterization does not appear in the text itself.” Remeaning the world: the fundamental drive of modern humanity. Are metatags culture? Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn: “Culture is a product; is historical; includes ideas, patterns and values; is selective; is learned; is based upon symbols; and is an abstraction from behavior and the products of behavior.” Are metatags a world view? Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A world view is a theory (interpretation of all things) and a technology (precept for action). This includes metaphysics, religion and philosophy. “Human thoughts and ideas are not the achievement of isolated individuals. Thinking succeeds only through the cooperation of thinkers. No individual could make headway if he must start from the beginning. Older generations have formed the tools, concepts and terms, and have raised the problems.” “Action is always directed by ideas; it realizes what previous thinking has designed.” Promise of metatags Liz Lawley on Many-to-Many writes: “I understand completely the value of controlled vocabularies and taxonomies. I don’t want to have to look in six different places for information on a given topic—I want some level of confidence that the things I want are grouped together. On the other hand, I don’t share the optimism that so many of my colleagues in this field seem to have that the collective “wisdom of crowds” will always yield accurate and useful descriptors. Describing things well is hard, and often context-specific.” There’s a nearly universal hope that someday, somehow we will discover some fall-over, easy way to do difficult things. Fortunately for those practioners of perfection - beautiful, brilliance, and clarity remain hard work. Metatags tell you who you are Jeremy Wagstaff has a summary on folksonomies. Citing Wired’s Folksonomies Tap People Power: “The job of tags isn’t to organize all the world’s information into tidy categories,” said Stewart Butterfield, one of Flickr’s co-founders. “It’s to add value to the giant piles of data that are already out there.” The article describes the website of contemporary design magazine Moco Loco, to which 166 Delicious users had applied the tag “design.” “But 44 users had also assigned the URL the tag “architecture,” 28 “art,” 15 “furniture” and so on. That means that because so many people applied so many different tags to Moco Loco’s site, it could be located in a number of different ways.” One of the great values of getting your company into the community of taggers is the wealth of information the tags provide about your company. Rules for priceless metatags From Clay on Many-to-many: “I think cheap metadata has (at least) these characteristics: 1. It’s made by someone else2. Its creation requires very few learned rules3. It’s produced out of self-interest (Corrolary: it is guilt-free)4. Its value grows with aggregation5. It does not break when there is incomplete or degenerate data “And this is what’s special about tagging. Lots of people tag links on del.icio.us, so I gets lots of other people’s metadata for free. There is no long list of rules for tagging things ‘well,’ so there are few deflecting effects from transaction cost. People tag things for themselves, so there are no motivation issues. The more tags the better, because with more tags, I can better see both communal judgement and the full range of opinion. And no one cares, for example, that when I tag things ‘loc’ I mean the Library of Congress — the system doesn’t break with tags that are opaque to other users.” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) philologr: incredulity Saturday, January 21st, 2006 incredulity — in·cre·du·li·ty (in’kri-du’li-te) — a noun meaning the state or quality of being incredulous; disbelief, dubiety, dubiousness, incertitude, uncertainty “There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all who would profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit … the lukewarmness arises from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.” - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513 Technorati Tags: philologr, reference, dictionary, language, english, writingSite Search Tags: philologr, language Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) You & Company Friday, January 20th, 2006 I’ve been thinking about the things corporate salary-type folks could learn from entrepreneurs. It’s actually an old idea of mine … not really an idea I guess … more of a recognition — entrepreneurs have lots to teach innovators within large organizations. I even bought a domain: you & company. It seems to me that I’ve got a unique chance to share something on this topic. I just left a fairly successful stint in the federal government: 2.5 years, four levels of promotion, and lots of opportunities to go back … not bad. I worked happily (at least from my side) with several entrepreneurs throughout that time through sift. And now I chug away with myriad entrepreneurs as an investor. I’ve got an unusual perspective too. I’ve come from a position in international discussions to an unmarked office in the industrial sector. From a need to be very visionary to a need to be very tactical. From an organisation of thousands to an organisation of seven. From the nation’s capital to a tiny, rural Alberta town. These are big changes. Polar changes. And if nothing else, offer mildly interesting observations. Perhaps one of the most best things I can share is my take, and changing understanding, of what it took to be successful in an organisation like the one I left. And the things I’m learning now that would have changed the way I did things then. This is a big group of people. A quick scan for stats gave me an Inc. article that suggests there were more than 6,000 companies with more than 1,000 employees in 1998. Not sure what the number is now, eight years later, but that’s quite a niche. So, here it comes: You & Company — council for corporate entrepreneurs. (For now I’ll post it here … to busy to make a whole other site.) Technorati Tags: corporate+entrepreneurship, innovation, bureaucracySite Search Tags: corporate+entrepreneurship, insight, you&co Copyright Jeremy Heigh Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) philologr: brouhaha Friday, January 20th, 2006 brouhaha — brou·ha·ha (bru’hä-hä’) — a noun meaning an uproar; a hubbub; a confused disturbance far greater than its cause merits. Spotted at Bloglines Highlights: “Crashes in Japan, Chocolate Cities and Body Armor Brouhaha” Technorati Tags: philologr,reference, dictionary, language, english, writingSite Search Tags: philologr, language Filed in sifted, philologr - Permalink - Comments (0) Avoid prestigious Thursday, January 19th, 2006 From Paul Graham on How to Do What You Love: “It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious. Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what’s admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) philologr: randy Thursday, January 19th, 2006 randy — ran·dy (ran’de) — an adjective meaning lascivious, lecherous, or if you’re a Scot, ill-mannered. Likewise, it has meant obstreperous, unruly, rampant (The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose). Spotted at 43Folders, by Merlin Mann: The randy clusters of zeroes and ones which power the index cards which run the servers which make the 43 Folders blog come to your home computer set have apparently decided to unionize without telling anyone. Consequently, I suspect a wildcat strike may be behind a lot of the unreliable site behavior in the last day or so. So it goes. Technorati Tags: philologr,reference, dictionary, language, english, writingSite Search Tags: philologr, language Filed in sifted, philologr - Permalink - Comments (0) sift everything; experiment Thursday, January 19th, 2006 the sift everything experimentsift. everything. experiment.sift/experiment … sift everything; experiment s-e Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) philologr: flummoxed Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 I’m a fan of words. It’s the biggest reason I love T.H. White, Billy Collins, and E.B. White — their delightful choice of words. So, for kicks, here’s philologr: A pop of perfectly placed words in a world of abused terms. Cheers.- flummox — a verb meaning perplex, vex, stick, get, puzzle, mystify, baffle, beat, pose, bewilder, flummox, stupefy, nonplus, gravel, amaze, dumbfound Spotted in Made for CES by David Hoffer: The ubiquity of the iPod was the most notable thing this year at CES. Standing in the Microsoft booth at the Playsforsure kiosk, an attendee looking at the 40+ MP3 players before him said, “Where’s the iPod?” “Apple doesn’t come to CES,” the flummoxed Microsoft responded. “They have their own show.” - Technorati Tags: philologr, reference, dictionary, language, english, writingSite Search Tags: philologr, language Copyright Jeremy Heigh Filed in sifted, philologr - Permalink - Comments (0) Slow design Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 My days are a blur of chaos. Too many new things. New son. New house. New city. New job. New friends. I don’t mind the pace … usually. But just the idea of slow makes me realize how fast I’m going. Before leaving Ottawa I read the book, In Praise of Slowness. Actually, I sped read it. But as attractive as the idea is … I didn’t like the book. From my perspective, the malady of chaos isn’t addressed by reducing speed. Slower isn’t the point; it’s really about intentional change. Two days ago Michael Bierut posted an article in the Design Observer. In it he reviews the intentional changes made in The New Yorker magazine. Building forward from the first issue on February 21, 1925 he illustrates how little this “standard for sophisticated urbanity” has changed. Michael argues that there’s a case to be made for slow design. That in a time when “designers are used to lecturing timid clients that change requires bravery … after 80 years — not changing begins to seem like the bravest thing of all.” Quoting slowLab he writes: “‘Daily life has become a cacophony of experiences that disable our senses, disconnect us from one another and damage the environment, say the designers of the not-for-profit . But deep experience of the world — meaningful and revealing relationships with the people, places and things we interact with — requires many speeds of engagement, and especially the slower ones.’ … slow design is not just about duration or speed, but about thoughtfulness, deliberation, and — how else to put it? — tender loving care.” When panic threatens to overwhelm me … when my knees are bouncing a jittery staccato rythum … when my bandwidth spikes repeatedly before 10:00 a.m. — I don’t ache for slowness. I’m after loving care. Technorati Tags: design, slow+movementSite Search Tags: design, intentional+change Copyright Jeremy Heigh Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) three point oh Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 Web 1.0 … 2.0 … 3.0 … is well ahead of me. I still muck around with tables, html, and color schemes. And my friends think that’s impressive — both of them. But I could understand Jeffrey Zeldman and that’s a big deal. Go here. For me isn’t the technology or even the new toys. It’s small teams, plugging into unbridled human passions, and leveraging the oceans of data swishing around us all. Bracket it with whatever numbers you like, but that’s the point. Technorati Tags: Web+3.0Site Search Tags: evolution, teams, passion Copyright Jeremy Heigh Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) sift experiment … evolved Monday, January 16th, 2006 [posted January 16, 2006] Below is the purpose I had for sift when I started this experiment. I’m still all in on those ideas but I think the purpose is quickly evolving away from purely entrepreneurs and purely business. Just as I am evolving past these things. While in my government job … while living on two great incomes without kids … while living in the nation’s capital … while representing Canada internationally … life had a different flavour. I saw a different set of rich things. I enjoyed different colours. Now I am an almost VC … a father (and not so wealthy one) … I live in a tiny Alberta town … and represent a very small company … the old richness has faded and a new set of colours has emerged. While I learn to paint with these new colours I don’t have the heart for those old things. At least not in those old ways. I’m changing. I am picking up different parts of myself. I am rebecoming. Instead of tactics, I choose strategy. Instead of bestsellers, I choose classics. Instead of buzzwords, I choose parables. Instead of knowledge, I choose wisdom. This is my experiment. [posted September 24, 2004] “A gracefully executed work has no peer.” Si-Ma (1019-1086) Peerless. Imagine that. A place where your greatest competition is … you. This is the niche, the blue ocean strategy, the true art of war. Where is peerless found? In the essence of business … the art of graceful execution. Perfect expression of purpose. Flawless code. Brilliant design. Simple strategy. Perfect, flawless, brilliant, and simple only come from complete knowing; graceful execution is a consequence of absolute understanding. To fully know, you have to have looked, studied, analyzed and described the depth and edge of your art. Only after knowing can you express the essence of purpose — to fully know you must give up narrow, focused, and singular thinking. You must go deeper and wider. But to be a great entrepreneur — to beat the terrific odds against your success — you must focus narrowly on a single opportunity. A paradox. Paradox is opportunity. An opportunity to seek another perspective, a higher perspective — sift. Sift lets you see opportunity at its highest level, while you focus at the lowest level. Sift ignores the existing order, while you strive to impose order. Sift thinks about everything, while you think about surviving. Sift uses observation and fluid thinking to cross all silos of learning and bring you the best knowledge from art, science, culture and business — because this is the way that peerless is found. Perfect, flawless, brilliant and simple. Peerless. Your choice. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (9) A genius … Sunday, January 15th, 2006 “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of taking walks daily … who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.” Henry David Thoreau I am of two opposing natures. On one side stands the enigmatic, aggressive, strategic, dominant, chaotic self. On the other: a reflective, melancholic, wise, introspective, envisioning self. Thoreau always calls out the second. We play together for hours. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) How to get paid more Sunday, January 15th, 2006 Here’s a chore: Define what you’re worth for a day. Don’t turtle and say it’s your wage; or if you’re an entrepreneur, what you pull down — you’ll miss too much. Include your thought time, all the stuff you decide not to do, every time you say no, relationships you build or refortify, egos you caress so they keep chugging. These and a vast pool of forgettable decisions are a part of your worth at work. Define that number and then decide how to get paid. Way back at the end of this podcast, Joe Liemandt (Founder and CEO, Trilogy) describes how he changed what he asks for. Jack Welch and a few other clients were telling Joe that his software was great but they weren’t getting what it was worth. The value wasn’t apparent. So Joe took them up on their gripe and changed how he was paid. Now he asks for a percentage of the difference he makes. Which is way bigger than the up front cost his clients were paying. And everybody’s lots more happy. Why? First, people want to know that the things they get are worth paying for — and are willing to pay more for the knowing. And second, people want to get paid for what they put on the table — and are willing to work harder to prove it. Technorati Tags: measuring+valueSite Search Tags: perspective Copyright Jeremy Heigh Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Three ingredients for change: talkers, wallflowers, and movers Thursday, January 12th, 2006 I love conferences. There’s no better example of how dedicated we are to ignoring everyone else. Conferences are even better than meetings because we actually pay to be there. We pay for speakers to come just so we can ignore them. We spend a great deal of time and energy explaining why each one of them is wrong. And when we get frustrated enough, we go out into the hall to make expensive long-distance calls on our cell phones. Yesterday I went to my first conference on bioenergy. So, we all piled into this tiny room in the basement of the hotel. Around 70 of us. And for nearly eight hours we tried to get past the filters of “agriculture”, “forestry”, and “energy” paradigms to build a “use everything that grows for it’s best purpose” paradigm. We didn’t get far. Breaking molds is tough work. I left the room with three pseudo-conclusions: Anyone with a sliver of expertise and a tonne of eloquence could hijack the show. Five players hold fragments of the whole story and none of them work well together. Only two in a room of 70 are ready to move. It felt like a bloggers conference. All the jazzy ideas, a few funny speakers, lots of “we” that means “me”. A bunch of earnest seekers trying to find their edge. Lots of talk about change without getting any. We were talking about a revolution. For us it was changing how the world things about energy. For bloggers its changing how the corporate world thinks about its customers. Hugh included the thoughts of Marketing Hub and Johnnie) in his summary of how bloggers are doing. There are three suggestions in his post that are just as useful in the bioenergy area: Few companies are ready to move, most are waiting for their partners or clients to move instead, and the best that’s come from all the conversations to date isn’t inducing someone else’s evolution — it’s our own. Isn’t that good enough? Not just good enough, but actually the whole point? Look around for the biggest players you really wish would change. Figure out how long they’ve been around. And make an intentional assessment of how important that company really is. Is that thirty-five year old company, who’s already being hunted by a three-year old company, really the best target for your change? If: conversations are actually changing us, corporate/political life cycles are relativly short, and tiny companies can behead juggernauts, then caring about giants is exactly the wrong focus. It’s point two in the list above where change can be engineered. Ignore the rehetoric. Forget the other 68 wallflowers. Just focus on the five fragment holders, grab the two that want action, and get stuff done. Then get really good at telling the story. Technorati Tags: bioenergy, blog, conference, organizationsSite Search Tags: innovation, conversations Copyright Jeremy Heigh Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Integral to strategy Monday, January 9th, 2006 Strategy is a mindful, present response to hope. The difference between hope and strategy: hope is a prerequisite to strategy but not a sufficient condition. Action is also required but also insufficient. The equation must also include understanding and for most this is, or becomes, the critical issue. Hope is also a prerequisite to entrepreneurism. It is the belief that a possibility will become a reality. And for the entrepreneur this is where action begins. The problem begins because few understand that: action does not equal strategy and the nature of strategy is conditioned by an ability to influence the future. Constructed deliberately, here is the equation: Where, - Hope (H) is a vision of the future,- Action (a) is a response to that hope, and- Understanding (U) is the recognition of how action impacts the future. Then, Strategy (S) = H(a)-U And the first derivative of strategy is: a-U Hence, Understanding is integral to strategy and the impact is multiplicative. Technorati Tags: strategy, entrepreneur, Del.icio.us Tags: entrepreneur, business, strategy, Site Search Tags: principles, strategy, Copyright Jeremy Heigh Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Blogs are like flashers; books are like strippers. And six other similes. Sunday, January 8th, 2006 Blogs are like flashers; books are like strippers. Blogs give only a glimpse of substance where a good book builds to full revelation. Blogs present a snapshot of an idea’s evolution; a book constructs the idea from its creation to its current state. Bloggers are like privateers; book writers are like man-o-wars. Bloggers are more cavalier with their reputations, more wont to be careless, and less bound to a certain cause. A book writer is tactically deliberate, confined to a topic, and has made a massive investment that had better pay-off. Blogs are like jam; books are like bread. A pure diet of blogs threatens to decay any capacity (and any appetite) to build and hone an argument based on facts, iteration, and rhetoric. A pure diet of books may sometimes be bland but it is sustainable. Blogs are like gossip; books are like legends. There are no “classics” in blogs. Blogs are like topsoil; books are like bedrock. There is no blog (in it’s most broad and whole sense) that has withstood the assault of time and continuous scrutiny to emerge as a foundation for the next generation of writers. Blogs are like moths; books are like pearls. Blogs take moments to create, the ideas percolate for mere days before publication, and exist for as long as the main page takes to cycle. Books are the product of years, are refined continuously throughout their publication, and exist almost indefinitely. Blogs are like spruce; books are like oak. Burn spruce and you get minimal heat, lots of noise, and mostly ash. Burn oak for lots of heat, minimal noise, and hardly any ash. It depends what you’re after: entertainment or heat. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Optimize the ride Sunday, January 8th, 2006 Past, present, or future. What of strategy? In the fog of waking up I saw what seemed a clear picture: the answer depends. Depends on an ability to influence a future position. The answer’s been clarified by my recent career swerve. When working for the government, I was paid to understand and partially define the future. Looking forward I might see an opportunity or an issue and my job was to help design a set of programs that would answer what was coming. I made waves. Now, as an investor, I still see the future but can only barely influence it. The only real leverage I have is a stubborn resolve to invest in companies that act on the possibilities I too see on the horizon. My only action is to narrow my interest to those investments that achieve those potential outcomes. Here I understand currents. And as an entrepreneur, there is only one choice: ride the wave. No single entrepreneur has sufficient power to move waves nor perspective to truly understand them. The only decision is to move as the wave does and the only action is to optimize the ride. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Better with less? Saturday, January 7th, 2006 Malcolm Gladwell tells a story about symphony auditions. Until relatively recently, auditions required the player to walk out in front of the judges, sit down and perform. And while the pool of players was racially diverse and often included women, the winners were regularly white males. Believing that the results were a consequence of visual stereotypes rather than capacity, many symphonies now use a screen behind which the performer will play unseen by the judges. And the results are remarkably weighted toward female players. Malcolm’s conclusion is that less information (no more visual cues) can sometimes result in better decisions. It got me wondering about investments. Right now, when considering an investment: we meet the client, tour the facilities, ask for references, do a credit check, dissect the business plan, pursue rigorous due diligence on the proposition, invite outside opinions, approve at three levels, and disburse on milestones to mitigate risk. Would we be better with less? I’d be interested in what Brad Feld and Fred Wilson have to say. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Life is now Saturday, January 7th, 2006 Past. Present. Future. They are each chimeric and spin as ghosts. What is the future worth? What can the past teach? What is important about the present? Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen master, says that in every moment we can choose one of the three. In the past is our regret. In the future is our hope. And only in the present is life. It is only now that life exists. The only moments for color, joy, love, and grace are this moment. A plan to love isn’t loving. An remembered rouge isn’t. Getting past the love/joy bit, what is strategy or even thinking when only action creates the outcome we desire? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) “… crack cocaine of the thinking world …” Monday, January 2nd, 2006 The Edge Annual Question — 2006 WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? “The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Doesn’t guarantee nothin’ Saturday, December 31st, 2005 These may grease success but they can’t ensure it. Crappy looking, high quality still succeeds when high finish, low quality falls flat. Even Seth’s site isn’t super sharp. So, how does this reconcile with all the hubub around design? I guess it’s via order of priorities: Something good to say … … something good to look at. Web designers, if you aren’t teamed up with a content guru, better watch your back. That traffic you guaranteed isn’t going to stick around. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) In every entrepreneur Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 In the heart of every entrepreneur is an island. The saddest things I’ve done, as an investor, is convice an entrepreneur the island isn’t there. Filed in sifted, wheelbarrow experiment - Permalink - Comments (0) Wheelbarrow: Naps Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 Men’s Journal is no steadfast literary friend but I am fascinated by napping, so here’s their article. It’s almost worth a wheelbarrow, no? Heck yeah, toss’er in. A good nap is: - Had in the morning or just after lunch- Taken sans caffee/sugar and avec calcium/protein- Enjoyed in quiet dark places (just like mushrooms)- And less than 20 minutes long. Categories of Naps: THE NANO-NAP: 20 seconds - may be beneficial but certainly looks silly if taken at inopportune moments.THE MICRO-NAP: two to five minutes - good for batting off drowsinessTHE MINI-NAP: five to 20 minutes - increases alertness, stamina, motor learning, and motor performance.THE ORIGINAL POWER NAP: 20 minutes - includes the above and, in addition, improves muscle memory and clears the brain of useless built-up information, and improves long-term memoryTHE LAZY MAN’S NAP: 50 to 90 minutes - good for improving perceptual processing and great for repairing bones and muscles (sheesh! what’s going on at work?) Filed in sifted, wheelbarrow experiment - Permalink - Comments (1) Performancing Saturday, December 24th, 2005 Don’t know how I found it, but I’m using Performancing for Firefox to post. Brilliant. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Merry Christmas Saturday, December 24th, 2005 In case I forget, in all the hubub of tomorrow: Merry Christmas. Hope you have a rich time with people you love. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Swear as necessary Saturday, December 24th, 2005 [All technical words italicized for easy skimming] I’m no plumber but I like to pretend sometimes. In our new house the tub’s hot water tap leaks (leaked, past tense began 3 minutes ago). And feigning competency I decided to solve that problem (hey, entrepreneur, sound familiar)? So, lugging out the wrenches and screwdrivers, I pulled that puppy apart. Knobs, screw, rubber washers, o-rings, and copper tubing were scattered liberally about. Muttered swearing was soon heard. And vast amounts of very clean, very hot water were wasted. The saga began three weeks ago. Brute force was the first method employed. General swearing failed to produce any positive results. Frequent trips to Canadian Tire only served to burden the Visa but didn’t nothing about the leak. Finally, today, I decided to actually look at the problem. Pulling the entire apparatus apart for the eleventh time, I looked intently at each piece as it issued from the mysterious plumber’s (real plumber) hole in the wall. The last detachable piece, a tiny copper tube attaching the whatsit to the thing had a tiny fissure rendering the edge uneven and jagged. I immediately surmised that not only was a good seal impossible but this was the culprit shredder, destroyer of three previous jobbies. A-ha! Off to the batcave and two minutes later, five minutes ago, the problem was solved. Lessons: resist the urge to push harder, look intently, and swear as necessary. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Still juiced Friday, December 23rd, 2005 One late, introspective night in early 2003, I closed my eyes and typed till done. Dave Pollard’s recent post reminded me of this note to self: If I dream about what would make me happy or content. Satisfied. Stopped and geared up all at once. It would look like this: My house would be on the water. It should be the ocean. But a nice lake would be fine. The house is all one level, or at least we walk into the upstairs part and the basement walks out onto the beach. The beach is sandy, I own it, no one else walks there. There are hills around. Green. Lush. Loads of birds. The air is clean clean. Not just ‘better’ then other options. The weather is never super hot. I can’t stand hot. And never super cold. Lori can’t stand cold. We can reach a city in 30 minutes. An airport in 20. I get to swim lots. I run. We eat loads of fruit, drink water. I read. Lori plays piano. We have horses that I watch and she rides. Our car is black. Air conditioned. Leather seats. CD player. Sleek and professional. I give advice. Listen, read, go to meetings, then give advice. I sort through good ideas, pick out what will work and how to get it done. Sometimes I have ideas of my own. More often I am excited by someone else’s idea. I work with a group of smarties. Some are doctors. A few worked lots and long. We have an artist, musician, and a talker. The talker sells. The artists are creative. The workers sort through the ‘realism’. The intellectuals anticipate the trends. Give advice on ethics, marketing. Information management. I am vice president. I work for an energetic visionary who can’t get a single thing done without my help. We go halfsies on the left over cash. Holiday lots. Drink something insanely expensive after every big deal. He likes cigars and I like art. My greatest strengths are envisioning visions. Tying threads. Coupling innovations with people that need them. Thinking big. Getting the broad sense. Getting goose bumps and tingling back-of-the-neck hair at possibilities. Putting things together that ‘go’. Sensing matches. Tossing out clashes. Unless clashes are better than matches – I am the guy that knows if they are. I paint. Sort of real, mostly edges. Blurry edges. Like visions. I read. Books about the future, science, unanswered questions. Remarkable people. People that tried. I listen to music that is floating. The music must make my heart ache or sing. Reaches in, grabs my throat just above the heart and plugs it with a lump. My neck tingles here like it tingles at work. I have trimmed nails. Both toes and hands. My hair is grey. I wish it was black and grey. It isn’t. I have strong legs. I have a strong stomach and you can see the muscles if I cough. My pecks twitter in the morning when I yawn. I have nice white teeth. I had laser eye surgery. I see well. But I still wear fake glasses sometimes - I like thinking I look sophisticated. I drink wine and know why it’s good. When Lori is out I sip scotch or something else that is smart. I like feeling expansive. So I do that when she can’t make fun of me. I buy art and only get what feels right. I use technology but it never uses me. I have a soul that is at peace. I don’t worry about being good enough, right enough, or acceptable. I have enough self-discipline to not fight something I really love. I never cut corners on being true. I use my mind – all of it. I am not silly about being vain. I just love what I got going on. I really really love it. I smile and people get warmed up. I laugh liquid. Not starchy like now. I sit like a heavy bag of sand left for a week. Rooted and still. I breath long deep breaths. I play the piano late at night. It’s two year’s old, vain as hell, and still gets me juiced. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Functional todo’s Friday, December 23rd, 2005 Whilst lolling despondently on the sofa: “When will I start doing the things I am great at? I keep doing things that help me be greater.” Good friend in from old places: “Maybe guys like you just keep growing and never ‘get there.’”- Thinking about the deluge of newness that is my life these days; an idea popped into mind on the way to coffee at 5:50 this morning: Focus on todo. GTD, 43folders, etc do a great job on the basic tasks or todo’s of the day, but I don’t mean these. I mean the big ones that are less than purposes and more than checklistable activities. These are the functional todo’s rather than the tactical. I am a new father; what are my big todo’s? I am a husband, what todo? I am a new investment manager — todo? I am grandson, son, brother, friend, co-worker, threat, foe, arch-enemy: todo?- I’m too visionary and too strategic to settle for a daily list of stuff. Too far reaching to nail down a strategy for “this stuff” (in the narrow sense of today’s functions). And too interested in “that stuff” (meaning everything but this stuff). So I’ll try functonal todo’s … … hey, what’s that? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Sneezers Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 Seth Godin on idea viruses: “Delighting them, enraging them, hospitalizing them or surprising them–that’s how sneezers [or spreaders of viruses] are born.” Part of the viral framework? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) people part of Web 2.0 matters" href="http://www.siftstar.com/blog/2005/12/22/why-the-people-part-of-web-20-matters/" rel=bookmark>Why the people part of Web 2.0 matters Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 This map of the web was rendered in 1998 by Bill Cheswick and Hal Burch of Lumeta Corp. It was generated from data collected in mid-September and the color scheme is based on the IP address of the nodes. To see it in big, go here. Of course 1998 was a long time ago, but I couldn’t find a more recent graphic. Anyway, the potential of a people-centric technological movement is … apparent. Filed in sifted - people part of Web 2.0 matters" href="http://www.siftstar.com/blog/2005/12/22/why-the-people-part-of-web-20-matters/" rel=permalink>Permalink - people part of Web 2.0 matters" href="http://www.siftstar.com/blog/2005/12/22/why-the-people-part-of-web-20-matters/-respond">Comments (0) people" href="http://www.siftstar.com/blog/2005/12/21/267/" rel=bookmark>Ah … Web 2.0 is about people Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 Web 2.0 … first time I’ve typed out those words. Dion Hinchcliffe finally clarifies, succinctly, why it matters: “Web 2.0 ideas [are] successful because they effectively put people back into the technological equation … [it] fundamentally revolves around us and seeks to ensure that we engage ourselves, participate and collaborate together, and mutually trust and enrich each other …” It’s all over the web. I’m wondering when it’s going to hit corporate management? What about education? via Darren Barefoot Filed in sifted - people" href="http://www.siftstar.com/blog/2005/12/21/267/" rel=permalink>Permalink - people" href="http://www.siftstar.com/blog/2005/12/21/267/-respond">Comments (0) Circle of competence Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 In a Google-world, owning anything text based is a stretch. But somehow, Warren Buffet (renown investor, maker/breaker of fortunes, and deity of the stock exchange) has cornered the market on the phrase “circle of competence”. “The most important thing in terms of your circle of competence is not how large the area of it is, but how well you’ve defined the perimeter.” It’s easy for me to admit I don’t know something. The line between utter ignorance and sufficient understanding is pretty clear. I just struggle to stay inside the curve. If I don’t know it, I want to. While there are lots of arguments for following Buffet’s advice (and the most compelling is the great big stack of cash that cat sits on), I wonder who’s going to tell the bigger story if we all stick close to home? If I buy this story and my product/service needs to be clearly defined — do I? I’m still in student mode: packing myself plump with new knowledge and spasmodically seeking places to stick it … maybe my circle of competence is learning and sticking. Anyway, tight little phrase. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Black, pink, brown, white Monday, December 19th, 2005 A few months ago I was talking to a guy I grew up with. We were chatting about work. Me flashing over to Paris for international meetings and him driving truck. We had started out in the same place but now there is, literally, a world between us.- My friend’s dad used to have this tiny tank filled with oil and multi-colored sand of different grits. You’d shake it all around to mix up the sand and then put it back on its stand. The stand had this little motor that rocked the tank back and forth to get a wave going. Eventually, with the motion of the oil, the sand would sort itself out into individual layers - black, pink, brown, white.- We can all nobly chastise ourselves into thinking we’re all the same — but we’re not. There’s layers between us. We see the world differently and to see it my way you have to do as I do. Be as I am. Go where I’ve gone. Until then, we’re different.- The waves came. We settled out. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) the secret Monday, December 19th, 2005 there are thingsdowntherestillcoming ashore Loren Eiseley, translated by Dave Pollard Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) shedding Sunday, December 18th, 2005 every time we walk along a beachsome ancient urge disturbs usso that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garmentsor scavenging among seaweed and whitened timberslike the homesick refugees of a long war. Loren Eiseley, translated by Dave Pollard Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) universe at bay Saturday, December 17th, 2005 for just a momentI held the universe at bay by the simple expedientof sitting on my haunches before a fox denand tumbling about with a chicken bone. it is the gravest, most meaningful act I shall ever accomplish,but,as Thoreau once remarkedof some peculiar errand of his own, there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society Loren Eiseley, translated by Dave Pollard Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Three ingredients in a leader Saturday, December 17th, 2005 Beyond bellowing bunters and mussed hair, what makes a good leader? Who draws in the cash when everyone else is furiously writing proposals? Three must-haves: trustworthy, deeply knowledgeable, and all-in. 1. Being trustworthy covers a multitude of sins. A mistake made with the best of intentions is always more palatable than one made out of apathy. And an omission based on integrity is instantly forgiven where one made out of suspicion is never forgotten. 2. Deeply knowledgeable entrepreneurs are reassuring to investors. It’s difficult to be a leader and lots more easy to be a guide. From the back row we can holler out instructions without doing much else but the leader must make sense of all the ruckus because, ultimately, that’s where the buck stops. 3. Finally: “all-in”, “hooked”, and “lots of skin in the game” are metaphors for unquestionable commitment and need. The entrepreneur has to need to win. Win or die. Without that it’s just someone else’s money on the table and when push comes to shove, the investor’s money won’t count for much. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Create the game Thursday, December 15th, 2005 On the weekend we rolled past seven young boys playing a motley game of baseball outside the Swiss Chalet. Despite cigarettes lolling from their mouths and the weather being a balmy -20 degrees Celsius, they had a good thing going out there on the brown lawn. Ever interested in the forces that move dullards to productivity, I stopped to watch the players: One charismatic leader, his hat perilously pitched on the back section of an unruly head of hair, bounded around the front of the group hauling in new pieces for the game. One stolid and infallible partner stood bellowing out rules created in real-time from home plate. And the usual cadre of undeciders were milling around and pushing each other while they waited for things to be sorted out. Adding to the amusement was the Shelley-esque combination of ingredients they’d been able to muster. These include and were limited to the following: a bat (landline marker), a ball (someone’s lost gas cap), a home plate (for sale sign), and somewhere to run (ditch along the highway). Driving home I concluded: as in baseball, so in business. For business one needs a bunch of cash, a product/service, a place to make it, and somewhere to stick it. Those are the ingredients but you can’t get any unless you have the leader, supporter, and others. Which is obvious to everybody. But somehow what’s remained less than obvious is the role of the leader in creating the ingredients for the game. And this includes cash which then includes me in my new role as an investor. For that spontaneous baseball game, the leader created everything including the bat (which, remember, represents cash). But the general complaint in business is that sufficient cash does not exist. And I contend that it just needs to be created. And that my role is not dolling out cash at all but simply watching for leaders that are ready to create the game. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) People business Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 The company I work with invests in three areas: financial capital (of course), intellectual capital, and managerial capital. Financial capital is really the grease that gets everything else moving. Without it there’s mostly friction, lots of heat, but little else. Almost everything needs money to get rolling. Intellectual capital is anything you can own that isn’t stuff. Patents, trademarks, brandnames, recipes, etc. These are cerebral property and provide a competitive edge. Finally, managerial capital is the know-how, experience, and potential to deliver the end product. The executors. Of the three, financial and intellectual capital are the most well understood. Finance is highly sophisticated and evolved. Intellectual capital is growing, has lots of attention, and was the promise land when I was sliding out of school several years ago. But managerial capital lacks the depth that the other two enjoy. For either financial or intellectual capital we have a fairly tight checklist and filter that assures us the needs in these areas are met. For managerial capital, it remains a function of instinct and experience. Now we’re each hard-wired to assess other people. Within just few seconds we can accurately nail a wide range of characteristics on people we’ve just met. But as Malcolm Gladwell explained in Blink we can also get this stuff wrong. I might be missing something obvious, but isn’t there a huge opportunity for rigor in the “people” business? Isn’t there a host of assessment tools lying around, unattached, that could be fit together to make a sophisticated checklist in this area? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) beneath every no Sunday, December 11th, 2005 beneath every nolays a passion for yes that had never been broken - Wallace Stevens, Esthétique du Mal Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) So good Saturday, December 10th, 2005 pandora What I’ve been missing since the old Napster went away. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Innovation: tactics and strategies Saturday, December 10th, 2005 While I haven’t been posting at all, I have kept up on my reading. This post by Dave Pollard is worth noting. Dave has an incredible capacity for synthesis and generating copious insights across a wide range of areas. The end result is either succinct distillations of current understanding or a hugely encompassing grab at new learning. Either way: almost always valuable. Dave’s asked for a response and I’ll start at a higher level and beyond the scope of Dave’s post: Knowing where innovation comes from is only as valuable as your ability and intention to execute on it. In all the hubbub around creativity and innovation I have yet to find the requisite commitment to execution. We’re mad for new and stagnant on the response. That said, those interested in harvesting innovation and related insights need something like Dave’s matrix of inputs. Dave’s done something very helpful when he splits strategic and tactical sources. Too often organizations confuse the two and it’s great that the clarity is deliberately laid out first thing. Perhaps missing from the matrix are three important sources: internal crazies, internal hackers, and external hackers. Of course these terms don’t fit with Dave’s sober classifications but they’re key inputs to innovation. And I recognize that Dave may have looked at these sources and caught them inside of other categories but in an effort to be succinct didn’t acknowledge them explicitly. Internal crazies are those folks that well understand the interests of their organizations and are cerebrally free enough to experiment with those purposes. These people are generally useless in a room full of decision makers but someone savvy enough to translate their ethereal jaunts into new products is usually very thankful for their rants. Internal hackers are those that deliver a high quality company product despite the encumberances of the company’s process. Inside their personal process are hacks, work-arounds, and plug-ins that can be a valuable source of innovation. This might be caught up in Dave’s category of “Product Innovations” but I’ll leave it to him to flesh out. Similarly, hackers that use the company’s products in alternate ways are a pool of insights. These people either make up for deficiencies in the products with band-aid solutions or use the product in ways it was never intended to be employed. Some of the most important innovations have come via this source. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) I’d rather talk about $1 Million Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 Back to perfect, one million one-dollar products vs. one million dollar products, and all these entail: - the kind of client - the kind of product - the kind of work - the kind of peers - etc. In my new job I spend loads of time with entrepreneurs. Included in the opportunity, I get to look closely at a multitude of ideas (of varying degrees of quality). One thing has shined through: It’s easier to sell a one million dollar product than a million one-dollar products. To sell a million products you need: - all the suppliers necessary to feed production;- all the people necessary to handle the supplies, build the stuff, package it, and load it up;- highly efficient production to actually build it all;- hot distribution to get it from your door to where it is sold;- someone to sell all that stuff; and- identify 1,000,000 people, explain your product, convince them to pay what you’re asking, get them to go down to some store to wait in line while someone that’s paid $7/hr calls for price checks on every other one-dollar product for every other of the other 999,999 people in front of them. That’s a lot of work for a million bucks. Clearly that’s the ball-game that most of us are playing. And that explains my tiny house, crappy running shoes, my garbage cell phone, the busted-down stop-light outside, and why I feel a draft right now. We’ve got a world crammed full of a million-one-dollar type products. But this also explains why it’s so much easier to sell a one-million-dollar type product. First, it’s inheriantly rare. There isn’t the same competition. Toyota doesn’t tee-up Bugatti, they don’t even think about each other. Second, it’s usually the product of genius. A world-class engineer, tailor, chocolatier vs. a high-school drop-out making minimum wage in a factory. One is made with a great deal of regard, the other can be made without even the primary human capacity of senient thought. Third, when you only make a few, you make it at home. No multiple, generic factories here. Just one, high-end studio, lab, or shop. Finally, the product sells itself. The story is interesting and people love to tell it. When’s the last time you chatted about your lint roller? But how many times have you talked about the Concord? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Stupid … it’s obvious Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 Not every opportunity is hidden. I just spent a few hours hob-knobbing with Fed/Prov Ministers, Ambassadors, CEOs, and Commissioners. These events are always a frenzied fury of networking but fortunately I’m an accidental deviant and happened upon a glaringly obvious opportunity. See, I come hard-wired with a proclivity for swimming upstream or, in this case, not swimming when I ought to be. Standing in the midst of all those high-powered conversations I resisted the jittery inclination to leap at every fragmented conversation that skated my way and stood silent in the middle of the room. And that’s when I realized it … Ministers, Ambassadors, CEOs, and Commissioners don’t speak English. Sure, they all use the same words, nod at each other, and flash poorly tailored smiles but they don’t understand each other — their words don’t have the same definitions. You’d miss it if you were deep in the conversation, but from the outside it’s betrayed in their apathetic glances when the speaker’s eyes are elsewhere, their frequent off-rhythm nodding, and the quickly forgotten names. And when they leave the room, they each declare with utter certainty that the rest of the furious network is utterly loony. We’ve all heard that right? But what does it mean? When a room full of big-shots so obviously miss each other it deserves some attention. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (3) Less fat, more meat Thursday, October 20th, 2005 Holidays, long absences (or large abscesses), and in my case a gynormous move, threaten the very foundation of something like a blog. In reality a blog is incredibly fragile. Mostly carried by the resolve of a single author, a blog is susceptible to all the distractions of a just one brain. While thinking about that I spotted Merlin’s snip of Paul Ford’s take on distraction. Paul thinks there are two kinds of distractions–the wide kind that are the equivalent of a kitty toy for distractible humans, and the narrow kind, which stimulates you to follow a train of thought into untended tunnels and rapturous discovery. Distraction is necessary. Minds need to wander to get anything done. But the Internet is sort of the mental equivalent of the snack aisle at a convenience store, filled with satisfying fatty chips and tasty cream-filled cakes. God knows I’ve spent enough time with both the Internet and cream-filled cakes to see the similarities. And I now know that what I want, mentally, is a well-cooked meal. A book gives me that, a well-written, carefully-edited book. Even though your average book is filled with distractions–I mean, Ahab doesn’t just chase the whale. There’s all sorts of stuff in Moby Dick besides that. Otherwise it probably wouldn’t be that good of a book. But the distractions are useful. They get us from one point to another. Sailing wide seas of opinion in a million does not do the same thing. This is not to condemn blogs. They are often great. But there are so many of them, and I will be dead for a long, long time. And on my deathbed do I want to say, I sipped mightily of Metafilter, and saw many video clips that made fun of Rosie O’Donnell, and I am richer for it? Am I richer for it … more pointed: Are you richer because of my blog? Is it a fatty or meaty distraction? Absence raises abscesses such as these. I’m not frustrated with blogging or even tired of the effort … I still think this is lots of fun. I still read my daily quota of 100+ bloggers. But I can’t stop asking myself: In those days away, did I actually miss anything? Honestly, the only real reason I blog right now is best characterized by Hugh here. I am bigger and better than any single job can give me the opportunity to be and I need to make sure my subconscious remembers (even if the world doesn’t). My blog keeps me out of the cage I see so many people living in. My question: How to make this global micro brand meaty? That’s where perfect will be. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Skeleton of a plan Tuesday, September 20th, 2005 Johnie Moore on Hugh on marketing: 1. The tone of invitation. No hard sell, just the presentation of an interesting idea to take or leave as you please. No grandiose posturing. 2. The sprit of experiment. Selling isn’t all about certainty, it’s also about curiosity. Hugh is inviting us to play a game of let’s disrupt marketing to see what happens. 3. A cause to believe in, if you like. We’re not talking about saving the world here, but we are offered an interesting windmill to tilt at - namely the established way of marketing stuff. 4. A bit of provocation. There is actually a proposition in here somewhere too - the one of freshness being undervalued in the wine business. Take it or leave it, it provides a bit of interest. 5. The fact that this is so clearly a message from a real live human being, with a personality of his own, not a committee. 6. Transparency, that oft-quoted term. The whole thing smacks of “What you see is what you get, this is what we’re up to, what do you think?” You an entrepreneur? Pay attention. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (3) Offline Wednesday, August 31st, 2005 Big move to Alberta today. Will be offline for several days. Be back soon … ish. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Customers like commodities Saturday, August 27th, 2005 Hugh MacLeod from Jeff Jarvis on Dell: “The thing is, when you start turning your products into commodities, you start treating your customers like commodities.” Wondering: Is this what it takes to make a million $1 sales? Treat customers like commodities? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Rapid experience Saturday, August 27th, 2005 Love this stuff. Ever hear of the The Ad Lib Game Development Society (ALGDS)? The ideas behind it go anywhere. ALGDS is an attempt to rapidly gain experience which is usually hard-won and takes tonnes of time to build. Leveraging the experience of a group, game developers “attempt to challenge, amuse, and better ourselves through the frequent practise of spontaneous, rapid game design and development”. Read more about it here and at Kathy Sierra’s site where I found it. Aside 1: Founder, Brian “Squirrel” Eiserloh, “subscribes to the ‘Zen’ philosophy of programming, putting a high premium not only on quality of code but on craftsmanship, engineering, teamwork, and communication”. Aside 2: At the informal session where Kathy heard Squirrel, the most engaged participant was Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Design thinking Wednesday, August 24th, 2005 Dan Shaffer on “design thinking“: “… design thinking is creative, innovative, and focused on problem-solving. But so is the thinking of many different types of professions: lawyers, engineers, and contractors, to name only a few. So lets remove those as differentiators right away. No, if there is such a thing as design thinking, it’s probably shorthand for these things: - A Focus on Customers/Users. - Finding Alternatives. - Ideation and Prototyping. - Wicked Problems. - A Wide Range of Influences. - Emotion. … I think it’s the combination of these that people mean–or should mean–when using the phrase “design thinking.” (via cph127) Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Design as story-telling Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005 Design as Story-telling by Thomas Erickson. (via cph127) Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Either way, there’s money Monday, August 22nd, 2005 The cool part of Albert’s story is its utility. There’s no riddle to solve. Just choices to make. You can choose high design, narrowly defined clients, exceptional service, concierge-level attentiveness — and the lifestyle that goes with it. Or you can choose Walmart. Either way, you’ll make money. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Keynote by David Kelley Monday, August 22nd, 2005 Keynote by David Kelley, Founder and Chairman, Ideo, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Founder of Stanford’s New “D” School: - doing well in technological innovation, rounding the corner on business innovation, but still have lots to do on human-centred innovation - lots of opportunity for integrated thinking across the silos of knowledge disciplines - best model for innovation is observing the needs of potential clients (note: flash stops abruptly before finished … haven’t found a full version yet) Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) What kind of person? Monday, August 22nd, 2005 To me this is incredibly interesting. And maybe it’s obvious to the rest of you and you wish I’d clam up. But the gorgeous climax of these dynamics is the lifestyle and ether it affords Albert. Ever been to LensCrafters? Ever wish you could work there? Better yet, ever wish you could live there? What about the people that work there — want to dress like them? Ever wish you could hang out with their buyer in WalMart or Zellers or wherever they buy their frames — milling about with hacks that haven’t ever thought about paying more than $2 bucks a pop for a frame, let alone watched the word “design” crawl across their cerebral HUD? But you should have seen us at Albert’s. Me and an elderly couple were the singular focus of four employees and the owner. Every one was wearing beautiful clothing, trigged out hairstyles, and of course, superb glasses. Albert’s stories about buying trips had my wife glassy-eyed. All of this is situated just one street down the hill from Canada’s parliament buildings — forget your stomach for politics, these are lovely buildings. I guess it boils down to a pretty basic choice: What kind of person do you want to be? The kind it takes to make a million $1 sales or the kind that makes a single, annual sale of $1 million? Everything rolls out from that. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Pass protected Sunday, August 21st, 2005 Thought I’d try an experiment: Pass protected posts. My posts are sometimes a bit mysterious. Leave the punchline out. Let you think a bit. I’m trying harder to see what sings for people. But I often get questions like, “if that idea means this … then what does that mean for me?” To keep the mystery but still answer those questions, I’ll either package all the various pieces together in a sum total. Or more deliberately explain what I think it all means. To get this, I need your email. You can subscribe here (and get updates on sift posts too). Of course, I won’t share your email. That’d hurt my reputation in a way far greater than anything I might gain. Anyway, thought I’d give it a shot. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (6) Protected: Altogether Sunday, August 21st, 2005 This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below: Password: Filed in sifted - Permalink - Enter your password to view comments Upper-class, middle class, lower class Sunday, August 21st, 2005 I’ve kept thinking about Albert and two things he told me. 1. At this level, brand doesn’t matter, it’s all about reputation.2. I don’t blog because it gets me the wrong kind of client. Where brand doesn’t matter. It’s a great title for a philosophy (and sweet name for a book). I should have seen it coming. It’s everywhere. Look at milk: cream, milk, water. Look at earth: sky, water, ground. Look at music: rockstar, musician, Britney Spears. Upper-class, middle class, lower class. Those at the bottom are the average sheep. Those in the middle are micro-global-branders and the regular sort of branders. And those at the top … well we don’t hear about them unless we buy from them (or sneak into their stores). The creators Albert buys from are so keenly aware of this, they won’t sell to him unless he shows a list of other creators he has bought from. There’s a sharp sense of differentiation — the line is cut on reputation. Reputation in turn defines clientelle. You don’t pay $750 for frames unless you value design more than … well, actually being able to see. And, let’s face it, there aren’t too many people like that. But Albert made it crystal clear that he only wanted people that were like that. There’s a nuance here that shouldn’t be missed. Albert isn’t being crusty. Remember, I was wearing Gap jeans, a tee, and my drolling son. Albert is being exclusive on palette only — and wonders if blogging would draw in people that lack a sufficiently refined palette to appreciate his stuff. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Idea x Execution Saturday, August 20th, 2005 Derek Sivers on execution: Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. Explanation: AWFUL IDEA = -1WEAK IDEA = 1SO-SO IDEA = 5GOOD IDEA = 10GREAT IDEA = 15BRILLIANT IDEA = 20 NO EXECUTION = $1WEAK EXECUTION = $1000SO-SO- EXECUTION = $10,000GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000 To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20.The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. (via Rob May at Business Pundit) Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Better for the effort Saturday, August 20th, 2005 Perfect expression can only come from complete knowing and graceful execution is a consequence of absolute understanding. To name this goldfish … or strategy … or brand … or unquestionable! … or mountain … you’ve got to know — you have to have looked, studied, analyzed and described to the deepest level. Knowing is a depth of understanding beyond the superficial. Only after knowing can you express the essence of purpose — these are navel gazing words I know, but this is the stuff of viruses. Having found people that deeply know their business, I am suddenly very passionate about finding people that want to. Wouldn’t it be great to live within a network of business people, problem solvers, and decision makers who are dedicated to graceful execution? I and the world would be better for the effort. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) The present future of conversations Friday, August 19th, 2005 Kottke writes: “… can we have a discussion about where technology and user experience on the web are headed without using any of the following words or concepts: Ajax, web services, weblogs, Google, del.icio.us, Flickr, folksonomy, tags, hacks, podcasting, wikis, bottom-up, RSS, citizen journalism, mobile, TiVo, the Long Tail, and convergence. That all seems like the present and past, not the future, no? … What else is out there? Anything?” 103 comments ensued generating a very interesting conversation … well, a kind of conversation, more like many monologues at once. It was just this sort of phenomena that prompted a real conversation between Dave Pollard and I. When we first started talking we were trying to understand how to better leverage all the great, individual thinking being done on blogs because what Kottke hosted wasn’t a conversation at all. It was nearly 80 people carrying on their own conversations with themselves while others watched. That’s not a conversation — that’s philosophical voyeurism spiced with a hint of insanity. Since our first chat Dave’s put up a set of guidelines for what might become real conversations through blogs. And while the whole thing is worthwhile, I think there are some highlights to bring out. First, he’s deliberately steered us away from the usual format of blogs (no links, no graphics, and only people invited to participate). Second, it actually involves discussion (actual voices, slightly edited for palatability, etc.). Finally, the people need to be knowledgeable or clever — most blogs with 103 comments usually float a lot of dead wood. So, to Kottke’s list of over-played words I would add “conversation”. And to the ideas that form the future, I would also add the same. Update: After kottke picked this up, Will Femia of Clicked on MSNBC grabbed it and said: “We learned a similar lesson with our chat rooms and message boards; most people were going there to say their piece, not listen to others and discuss. Providing a forum is not the same as conducting a conversation. If the future is able to come up with a new way to conduct conversation it’ll be a bigger revolution than most people realize. Most of our media right now, even when there are guests representing “both sides” consist of nothing more than single perspectives presented in series.” So, what are we going to do about it? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (11) Unquestionable Friday, August 19th, 2005 When I went to Albert we must have tried 40 pairs of glasses … 40 pieces. Stacked up on the table in front of me were frames nearly indistinguishable from each other. And tirelessly he placed them on me, stepped back, readjusted … and rejected. Over and over until the 28th pair. “These … are excellent. Superb.” Placing them to the side (a place reserved for only two other pair) he continued on for another few pairs. But his eyes were on “Superb” and he soon put them back on me. “Unquestionable. Simply no question. These are the ones.” Back to a few more. Not three pair later they were back on my face. “Magnificent.” One more pair and he suddenly dropped everything on the table. He glanced with the sneer of a master at the other two previously reserved pieces on the table, carefully and respectfully placed the esteemed piece on my face, stepped back and with a flair that only the French can pull off — kissed his fingertips with a smack — and walked away. He was done. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Blackjack & entrepreneurs Friday, August 19th, 2005 In the theme of all things gamble — Steve Pavlina on blackjack: Novices miss golden opportunities. “Novice blackjack players will almost invariably play their hands too conservatively. They’ll stand too often when they should hit, and they’ll fail to double down and split pairs as often as they should … They give up a lot more to the house by playing defensively, trying not to bust. But expert players exploit every opportunity to maximize their wins, meaning that they’ll double and split far more often when the odds favor doing so. Expert players will bust more often, but they’ll also hit their big hands more often.” “You see a similar pattern in life too. High achievers will bust more often, while underachievers play too conservatively, afraid to take calculated risks for fear of losing what they have. In blackjack, it’s those splits and double down hands where you make your real money. Novice players think it’s the ten-ace blackjack hand that’s the best — the guaranteed win.” Novices don’t put in the time to fully understand the game. “Expert players understand the game inside and out because they’ve invested many long hours studying it. Experts work harder. Novices have a strong understanding of certain parts, but their knowledge is very fuzzy in other areas. They often get confused on how to handle situations that arise infrequently. But eventually those situations do arise, and that’s where novices lose. … aside from a lack of understanding, novices also have some false understanding.” “It’s the same with life. Novices don’t take the time to master the basics, like goal-setting, time management, motivation, and self-discipline. They do OK most days, but whenever an exception occurs such as the loss of a job, they’re thrown completely out of whack, and it takes them a long time to recover.” Experts are more disciplined. “Novice players tend to play their hands inconsistently. When the same situation arises, they often make different decisions with no rhyme or reason. They exhibit poor discipline … Experts understand that you can make the correct decision and still lose, but they focus on making correct decisions, not on trying to force a particular outcome. Experts have the patience to know that making correct decisions is all it takes to win in the long run.” “You see this in real life too, don’t you? Achievers tend to be more consistent in making decisions and taking action; they focus their energy. Underachievers, however, waste their energy, never applying enough force in a consistent direction to bring about a breakthrough.” (via Business Opportunities Weblog) Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Innovation … ? Thursday, August 18th, 2005 Rich Pan’s got some great questions on innovation. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Shake your tree Thursday, August 18th, 2005 Stuck in a rut? Maybe these ideas will shake you loose. (via Business Opportunities Blog) Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Organic knowledge Thursday, August 18th, 2005 Groove, watch Wikipedia grow — and mourn with London (or drink tea). This is absolutely stunning in its implications. (via Amit Gupta) Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Biomimicry Thursday, August 18th, 2005 Biomimicry.net: “Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems.” “The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. This is the real news of biomimicry: After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.” Very cool. (Spotted by Good Morning Thinkers and Innovation Weblog) Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Choices Thursday, August 18th, 2005 Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Goldfish Thursday, August 18th, 2005 Into the room walks a professor. In his hands is a jar, filled with water, and in the water swims a goldfish. Placing the jar and fish on his desk he turns to the single student in the room and asks, “What is this?” The student looks blankly from professor to jar to professor. “It is a fish … in a jar.” Faintly smiling, the professor asks, “But what is it?” The student, brow furrowed, looks again at the fish. “A gold colored Carassius auratus.” “But what is it?” repeats the professor. This continues each day for several weeks. Each day, for one month, the professor asks this question. Soon the student has compiled the chemical elements of the jar, water, and fish. Dissected the fish. Sketched it’s inner organs. Studied, illustrated, and described the life cycle, habits, and ecosystem of the fish. Finally, a pile of papers, books, and diagrams lie scattered about the room. And still, sitting calmly at his desk, is the professor. “But what is it?” The student looks up from a detailed drawing of the dorsal scales, stares intently at the fish in the jar, and states: “It is a goldfish.” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Master vs hack Thursday, August 18th, 2005 Binding every painter is the canvas, brushes, and paint he chooses. But, instead of constraints, are these not rules that define the task? Is it not the mastery of these rules that defines the master? I was talking to a web designer yesterday about the essence of web design. I was asking for perfect and he said, “Well, we’re bound by the rules of the size of the page, html, and the functionality of your blog.” But aren’t these just the tools of his art? Aren’t these things binding every designer? Yet, isn’t it easy to see the difference between the work of a master and the work of a hack? Art grows in two primary ways: through new expression using old tools and through the use of new tools. Business grows in these ways too. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Without peer Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 Chinese character “mountain” by Zhang Zhengyu Si-Ma (1019-1086) of the Song Dynasty said, “A gracefully executed work has no peer.” As in calligraphy, so in business. Of the many ways to express business, here are two: By getting things done or graceful execution. Getting things done is LensCrafters, McDonalds, and WalMart. Viable? Yes. Viral? Never. Graceful execution is the art … the essence of business. Perfect expression of purpose. Flawless code. Brilliant design. Simple strategy. Peerless. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Cool model Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 These guys just asked me to sign up. “We deploy the world’s most developed expert network: the Councils of Advisors.” Cool model, eh? And cool name. Who doesn’t want to be part of the swank Council of Advisors? How could you use something like this? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Less smack, more done Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 Conversation yesterday: Me: There’s loads of guys doing work that looks just like mine. CEO: Well, there’s guys that talk smack and guys that get stuff done. Be the second. Me: … CEO: So, how much do I make this check for? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Free under attack Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 Rich…! on free: “Think about it, cheap is probably one of the worst marketing strategies around, surely then it stands to reason that free, which is pretty much the deep-end of cheap, ain’t going to be much better, especially if you want to be taken seriously. Let’s face it, we’re shallow, and a wee bit simple. Too often we use the price tag as the sole measurement of value.” (For the flip side, go here) Rich…! what do you think about Fred Wilson’s defence of free? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Short and mysterious Monday, August 15th, 2005 Seth Godin on two kinds of writing: “If you’re writing for strangers, make it shorter. Use images and tone and design and interface to make your point. Teach people gradually. If you’re writing for colleagues, make it more robust. Be specific. Be clear. Be intellectually rigorous and leave no wiggle room. Takeaway: the stuff you’re putting online or in your blog or in your brochures or in your business letters is too long … Too many unanswered questions getting answered too soon. Takeaway: the stuff you’re sending out in your email and your memos is too vague.” From a marketer with a reputation like Seth’s this advice is worth noting. Notice the unanswered questions, gradual teaching, use of abstract — this is mystery. This advice works for more than blogging. It works for pitching, describing your interests, and getting more opportunities with old clients too. Update: Seth, given what you said above, what do you think drives the success of Dave “king-of-the-long-form” Pollard — proud father of the none too shabby blogpulse rating of 558? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) One creator, one piece, one city Monday, August 15th, 2005 I had a great conversation with Albert. Instantly piqued, I pummelled him with loads of questions: How much advertising? None. Just word of mouth. How long in business? 26 years. How long just buying one piece of each creation? 6 years. Big difference? Never been better. The place is packed. You know blogs? Yes. Why not blog? I don’t want those clients. What the … why not? The people that come through the door need to already know what we sell, why we sell it, and to be ready to pay this price. I don’t want curious, I want clients. Anything else takes too much time for this level of service … besides, I’m too busy already. (Hugh? Thoughts?) Any plans to expand? No way, I’m exactly where I want to be … I got the right set of clients, I travel to buy pieces, I couldn’t do this right and be any bigger. This is so rich. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Up sold by $400 Monday, August 15th, 2005 I just bought a pair of $750 eye glasses. They’re made by a group of 25 year-old German “creators” (which is important … read on) and there is only one other pair in the entire city of Ottawa — Albert, owner of Albert Opticians, is wearing them. I went in ready to spend $350 tops. Albert up sold me by $400 — here’s how: Albert is refined (wearing $250 trousers, a fine pair of shoes, and, need I mention, very sharp glasses), very selective in his approval, and persistent in his search for the ultimate piece, Albert and his people spent an hour zipping around the shop, snatching up new pairs, and with great flourish helping me try them on, For each pair I was educated on why they worked and why they didn’t, Albert pointed out the fine features of each pair:- “these lenses float inside the frame”,- “see here,” manicured pinky pointing, “no screws anywhere on this pair”,- “these lenses,” puffing and buffing very seriously, “are nearly invisible”,- etc., He explained where each pair was made, why he bought them, and why a brand name at this level was irrelevant — “You are buying design, creation, and sophistication — these guys are the very best — brand names don’t matter here … just reputation”, He explained his philosophy of buying — from “creators” only (the people that actually create the frames — there are mere hundreds in the world) and never designers (these are legion), and only one pair of each piece, And he gave me his deepest respect despite my Gap jeans and Westcoast tee. This is exactly what boutiqu-ing (1, 2) is all about. This is bespoke tailor and Hugh McLeod riffs on thousand year old cheese. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Which is easier to get: $1 Million or a million $1? Saturday, August 13th, 2005 Loved this mix between science and web-links. Mike Grehan’s dad in Filthy Linking Rich: “… in my experience I’ve discovered that looking for the million dollar deal is very difficult. Getting a million dollars from one person is hard. However, getting one dollar from a million people is really not so difficult.” If you were going to sell your stuff for $1 what would it look like? And for $1 Million? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Usable you Saturday, August 13th, 2005 Found this on Asterisk. Keith thinks it’s a great read for consultants — I think it’s a great read for entrepreneurs. With exploding personal networks, niche-marketing, and tribal companies entrepreneurs need to starting acting like the consultants described in this article: listen obsessively (ping), generously share knowledge and information, and treat people like people. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) VC without the C Saturday, August 13th, 2005 I’ve been given several great career options recently. Two were particularly fetching: 1. Stay in government but raise the game to another level — Start helping the highest level bureaucrats identify, learn about, and build strategies on long-range issues facing governments before they become a part of the political debate. Offered: strong ability to identify future, high-level issues and package learning in a persuasive and compelling way deep network with every high-level bureaucrat and CEO of government an opportunity to move government by influencing the head rather than the tail 2. Switch to a private, early-stage venture investment company and become an investment manager — Offered: deep knowledge of VC-type investments, business assessment, and business coaching opportunity to work with major players in the food, bio-product, industrial product, and financial sectors (in an industry poised to explode) an opportunity to move industry through entrepreneurism rather than political maneuvers Well, after a long and torturous deliberation, I chose the private venture company. I’ll be working with start-ups and early stage ventures in a really unique business environment: We are a not-for-profit venture investment company. Go figure. There’s like … one in Canada. We don’t take equity positions with our investments but this allows us to invest in ideas for renewable resource ventures that are either too risky or not yet sufficiently viable enough to attract equity-driven investments. It’s this sweet mix of soft social benefits, future-oriented visioning, and strategic long-range decision making. I gotta tell you: I’m tickled. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Pimp your brand Saturday, August 13th, 2005 I talked to Doug Hall last week — I’ve been trying to make a few important career choices and wanted his advice. He asked two questions: “where will you grow more” and “what adds more diversity”. Growth and diversity, these like NOS and 21? rims for careers. I’m including them more explicitly in my decision filter. The filter is a set of questions that start with “Which opportunity …” - Leaves sufficient room for me to be the husband, father, and friend I want to be?- Gives the most chances to be visionary?- Consistently asks me to be strategic?- Rewards spectacular performance (and punishes sub-standard performance)?- Is in a field I know very little about (encourages knowledge building)?- Builds hard skills I can take anywhere?- Puts me in the company of people I admire?- Makes for the best story?- Is an intuitive, adventurous, calculated risk? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) 3 minutes: An ocean of time Thursday, August 11th, 2005 43 Folders has an excerpt of an interview with Brian Eno. “Brian Eno … on the creation of “The Microsoft Sound” (the gentle little tune that plays when you boot your Windows PC): ‘The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas … the agency said, ‘We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,’ this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said ‘and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.’ ‘I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.’ ‘I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.’” Maybe if we’d innovate in tiny, tight spaces — keep it to the very essence of the change — then we’d look at our usual work and wonder what befuddled us before. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Masters of design Wednesday, August 10th, 2005 Fast Company: Masters of Design Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) In search of innovation Wednesday, August 10th, 2005 Invokative perspective on innovation. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) SMART vs FLUID Wednesday, August 10th, 2005 Related to the last post: If SMART is action steps that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound, and SMART doesn’t work with wicked problems, maybe we should look for ones that are FLUID. F is for Free: non-linear and obliqueL is for Little stepsU is for abdUctiveI is for Invoke mysteryD is for Deliberate chaos Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Intense curiosity Wednesday, August 10th, 2005 I don’t deal in issues as weighty as racism or as complex as a Nasa space shuttle — but I do work on thorny and complicated problems. But I still see, as Patti just experienced, a deep desire to choose SMART action steps instead of thinking. The problem is that SMART action steps put a quick stop evolution and necessary, non-linear meandering. Tell me where you have learned more: Flashing down the highway doing 60 or wandering aimlessly at the edge of dirt road. Something resonates in us when we simply explore. While we all share a strong pull to simplistic and quick problem definitions, we also share a natural (life-preserving, life-enhancing) curiosity. Maybe we should start experimenting in curiosity instead of problem solving. When faced by a CEO or bureaucrat bent on a quick fix try asking questions instead of giving answers. Describe a mystery instead of a problem. Instead of: “We have a knowledge management problem. Too many of our people are replicating someone else’s work, too few are sharing their experience, and we remain locked in departmental silos — this all needs to change.” Could we try: “I’ve noticed two things I can’t explain. First, Olga is always talking in the hallways, if she’s at her desk then she’s on her IM — Yet she’s the most productive and creative policy analyst in the group. Second, I’ve never been able to ask her a real question without her saying she wants to talk with someone else before she answers.” The first is a simplistic problem statement that lends itself nicely to a crippling set of SMART action steps. But the second is carefully hedged to avoid next steps and provoke curiosity — banal as the topic may be. Wicked problems require something different from us. But we are built for well-trod surfaces and love to follow old paths. I’m wondering if the trick is to avoid highways by inviting another natural response — intense curiosity. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) In defense of free Tuesday, August 9th, 2005 If you are an entrepreneur, you need to pay attention to this post. There is open source business like the business experiment and then there is open door business like Google, Red Hat, and Flickr — come in, walk around, and use what you like for free — but if you want to go pro, that’s going to cost you. Fred Wilson: “Free is a great way to make money. You just have to know how you are going to get paid for being free.” [thanks to Hugh for the link] Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Pitching, flipping, and pinging Saturday, August 6th, 2005 Not too long ago I wrote a series of posts on pitching. It was mostly for my own sake that I put those pieces together — I wanted to better understand what pitching actually meant and where it was best used. After doing all that work and looking critically at the process, I decided not to build a pitch — at least not one for getting clients. Instead I put together a short bit on what sift is, what I do, and why I think it’s interesting work. I felt that pitching tasted too used car and not enough like the sophisticated dilettante I want to grow up to be. And since then I’ve panned around for a clearer expression of what I believe works. Yesterday’s post by Seth Godin comes close. Seth explained how important small, initial wins are in the process of persuasion. Gunning for an initial big win is unrealistic, particularly if your intended audience isn’t interested in being persuaded. He suggested that the hopeful persuader should look for open-minded invitations from the persuadee (these can be unconscious or intentional — like thumbing through an innovation-oriented business magazine or subscribing to a change-agent’s email list). Instead of seeking a single, big win pursue a series of small changes. Seth called this flipping. — I just watched the interviews of the Oscar winning cast of “Million Dollar Baby”. In it Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, and Hillary Swank each said that listening is the most important part of acting. Listening determines your action — it’s the core of improv — that mysterious definer of great versus flat acting. A great actor, like Morgan Freeman, persuades us that he understands and lives in that moment. For those minutes on the screen he is that character. As in acting, so in persuasion. While pitching or flipping we hope to become the answer, the solution, or the next step — to step inside and manifest what we hope to sell. — Know what a ping is? Here, give it a shot: Open a MS-DOS prompt and type “ping www.siftstar.com”. You’ll get a read out of what was sent to sift, what sift received, and how long it all took to happen. Pinging is a protocol checking if another computer on a network is reachable. You send off a ping, the other computer bounces back a message that lets you know it hears you. —> To pitching and flipping I would add: pinging. In the game of pitching and flipping, pinging is important. Pinging is the listening part of persuasion and provides those bits of information needed to understand the persuadee. Pinging drives the improv that makes us real-time instead of scripted … dilettante instead of used car. And pinging endures. I can pitch and you can ignore it. I can flip and you can flip back. But when I ping, I learn something that is mine to keep. I learn what makes you tick, what burns you up, what makes you sing — I can be more persuasive now than before. These are mine to take home and use again. I’ve learned and gained more from pinging than I ever have from pitching. And I’ve made more clients from plain interest and curiosity than I ever have from savvy flipping. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Average sheep Friday, August 5th, 2005 Yesterday, Hugh posted on trust and blogging. He said that he’s increasingly reluctant to do business with non-bloggers — that cog in the trust wheel needs to be there. — Seth Godin recently wrote that “the only security you have is in your personal brand and the projects you’ve done so far.” — One of my clients is in communications and media and last night he was pointing out how much room he still sees for improving blogs, podcasts, and vlogs. There’s a niche, he says, for excellent and high-quality communication in these forms. —> In all things there is a baseline. It used to be that a high-school diploma done you good. Now we’re skittering between Master’s degrees and Ph D’s. The education baseline is rising. At one time, the people I knew from church were sufficient to guarantee a reasonably sustainable flow of local business. Then we started networking. And now we’re blogging. Our personal set of relationships is growing exponentially. The baseline to sustain a “personal brand” is hopping levels and broadening to encircle a wider range of skills — but that’s obvious. What’s catching my eye is the average sheep. Those people that ignore these changes. Before you could finish high-school and stay in Sunday school — done. In between then and now, you could spend two years and catch up. But now — the gap is huge (the gappingvoid is hugh, heh). To be near the top you need a high-end degree from a prestigious school, a huge sphere of relationships across a wide swath of the economy, and a personal brand so deliberately constructed that it can withstand the torturous strain of a non-linear career. Now you can’t catch up — you can either do it or you’re out — permanently. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) On the mind of Jeff Bezos Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005 via loic le meur blog That’s what’s on the mind of Jeff Bezos: Execution. Success is almost completely defined by execution. Too many ideas and too few actions. The trick is execution of the right things. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Economics of the brain Monday, August 1st, 2005 Science and economics meet: neuroeconomics. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Neuroesthetics Sunday, July 31st, 2005 From Zack Lynch at Brain Waves: “Neuroesthetics uses brain imaging and genetic analysis to understand the neural basis of artistic creativity and achievement … and has broad implications for all parts of society, including: our legal systems, business productivity and entertainment.” I’ve always loved the hope that our brains are the key to unlocking everything mysterious about life. Deep down I doubt that’s going to happen but I like to cheer on people that think the things described below: “Art is a human activity and, like all human activities, including morality, law and religion, depends upon, and obeys, the laws of the brain. We are still far from knowing the neural basis of these laws, but spectacular advances in our knowledge of the visual brain allows us to make a beginning in studying the neural basis of visual art.” - the institute of neuroesthetics Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Viral experiment Saturday, July 30th, 2005 More on viral marketing: The rules: Create a new site and launch it on May 19, and build the most traffic or get the most Technorati links by June 9 — with no paid advertising. The lessons: - the idea must be instantly accessible — got to get it immediately- it should provoke you to think- mix humour and gut-wrenching reflex reaction- the domain name doesn’t really matter much- meta-sites such as Slashdot, MetaFilter, CollegeHumor and Fark wield more traffic power than blogs- newspaper and radio reports from the UK, Eastern Europe and Japan bring the biggest influx of traffic Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Open-source Saturday, July 30th, 2005 Starting to see lots of open-source apps for business:Open-source — Information WeekThe Business ExperimentBlowfly What would open-source mean for your business? How many decisions could you give to a crowd? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Business checkup Friday, July 29th, 2005 Good list of things to do this summer for your company — like a pre-winter check-up for your car. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) What’s next? Thursday, July 28th, 2005 Gambling. It’s on my TV, in my online ads, fills my email, and spams my blog. So popular, so suddenly — why? Back in 3,500 B.C. young Egyptions were already gambling. Now, 6,000 years later, you’d think the hubbub would have died down. But it’s like we just discovered it … like it was Steve Jobs’ idea. — I’m reading Peter L. Bernstein’s book, Against the Gods: The remarkable story of risk. In it he plays out the history of our understanding of probability and its application to games of chance — good, ol’ Texas Hold’em. Bernstein points out how incredible it is that probability was not discovered until 1654 (by Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat). Thousands of years before, we had already filled the great library of Alexandria, charted the stars, and discovered the rules of Euclid’s geometry — but missed risk. The Greeks — rabid gamblers, snap logicians, gifted mathematicians, masters of logic, and obsessive seekers of proof — despite the nearly perfect fit, didn’t understand probability. Before we got around to probability we had to fight the Crusades (and learn numbers from Arabs), endure the Reformation (and learn we make our own choices), and discover capitalism (you don’t get rich without making a gamble). — This morning I’m wondering what else we’re missing. What looks us right in the eye, everyday, that we fail to see? What perspectives, world views, and religious beliefs keep us from an even clearer understanding? An Arab taught a Crusader to count. A Reformer taught a Catholic to consider his own future. A gambler taught a prince to be a businessman. What’s next? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Science’s remaining opportunities Wednesday, July 27th, 2005 Science has posted 125 big questions that remain to be answered. 25 of them are described in some detail. “It is not a survey of the big societal challenges that science can help solve, nor is it a forecast of what science might achieve. Think of it instead as a survey of our scientific ignorance, a broad swath of questions that scientists themselves are asking. As Tom Siegfried puts it in his introductory essay, they are ‘opportunities to be exploited.’” Opportunities to be exploited … if you’re an entrepreneur, click the link. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Nosepilot Tuesday, July 26th, 2005 I could talk about “perfection” versus “getting it done”. Or I could show you. Nosepilot versus LEVEL 10 DESIGN. Who you going to hire? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Avast ye scurvy dogs Monday, July 25th, 2005 John Moore got me reading the Business Week blurb on creativity. In particular I like Jeneanne Rae’s business model for Peer Insight … might have to pirate that. I was a bit surprised to read IDEO’s David Kelley saying his new design school mixes sustainability, superlow cost for the developing world, K-12 education, health and wellness, and medical stuff with industrial Corporate America. Didn’t know you could do that all through design. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Forgetting to remember Monday, July 25th, 2005 I love used bookstores; the messier the better. The owner can’t possibly know the value of all the books when they’re piled willy-nilly around the joint. I feel like a thief, pawing through the dark corners, earnestly listening for the footsteps of the owner, seeking that tattered treasure trove of lost knowledge. PBS has a series on the Medici family that includes a scene of Giovanni as a young man, gingerly picking his way through a moratorium strewn with diseased bodies. He’s on a quest for some long forgotten scrolls hidden in a back room. And watching that I thought … that would be the coolest moment … ever. Something about forgotten knowledge gets me going. I’d love to be some sort of geek knowledge pirate — pillaging buried libraries, discovering lost manuscripts on the back of some painting. So, when this story (via kottke) came out, I jumped right on it. The story of the tapestries has several layers. First, there’s the tapestries themselves: the mystery, the art, the creation. Then, the riddle of how to piece together the digital photographs the MET used to catalogue the tapestries: living, water-like tapestries, billions of variables and calculations, the multitude of relationships and dynamics. Finally the story of ancient history and hyper-modern mathematics dancing together — the seemingly simple becoming the unfathomably complex. — When I was reading Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, I saw an opportunity to leverage the learning of others. Diamond explains how innovation hot spots are scattered and constantly moving around the globe. While one economy is a wasteland of creativity another just a few hundred miles away can be white hot with new ideas. He also briefly discusses how knowledge can be lost. Some ideas don’t make it through the peak and trough cycles of cultural innovation. As a result many of the problems we face have already been solved once or many times — we just don’t remember. We have forgotten more than we know. - We do not know what we have forgotten.- We have known things in our past that we no longer know.- The sum of our historical knowledge is greater than our current knowledge. — Look up the Pyramids, the Notre Dame Rose Window, or Brunelleschi’s Dome. We don’t know how we did that. What have we forgotten and how could we use that knowledge now? — Boil it down. What, if anything, is new to humanity? We’ve faced these same problems before … they were just in different combinations. The same is true of opportunities. Our wants and needs vary less than the problems we face. — This all matters to an entrepreneur for several reasons. First, you are forgetting lessons you already learned. Second, you have knowledge that is useful in more ways than you realise. Finally, in your struggle to be new, you may forget that all these problems are very old. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Slavery Sunday, July 24th, 2005 cartoon by Hugh MacLeod Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) No more clichés Sunday, July 24th, 2005 I got one clients who’s going to hate this (if he follows this link, he’ll blow his cerebellum). But he’s well ahead of the pack now … he knows he’s doing it. But for the rest of you, if you aren’t patting your pockets, furtively scanning your website, and glancing at your business card — you should be. And while you’re at it: hit this link. Too trendy and webby for you? Listen to George Orwell (1946) on clear communication: - Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.- Never use a long word where a short one will do.- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Blogpulse profile Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 This is fun. Yeah, yeah, I know my profiles stinks. But look at my neighborhood — I really like most of those blogs. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) More on perfect Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 Rob’s asking some good questions about perfect. A few things to note: - He’s talking about a small company.- The pie shop is in a local, niche market.- This story is about you. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Improv Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 It’s funny, improv is teaching us to be ourselves. I think, at its core, it’s a method for freeing ourselves from the straight jackets we’ve been taught to wear in various social settings. It frees us up to collaborate, persuade, and lead naturally. I’ve seen Johnnie Moore’s ideas on improv before, but here are a few more links with book lists to boot: 800-CEO-READBrand AutopsyBusiness Blogcasting Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Blah blah blah … the simple reality Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 Tom Peters on how to eat WalMart’s lunch: - Be niche-aimed (Never, ever be “all things for all people”). - Never attack the monsters head on! Steal niche business and lukewarm customers. - Compete on value/experience/intimacy, not price. - DESIGN! (”Design” is a premier weapon-in-pursuit-of-the sublime for small-ish enterprises, including the professional services.) - Employer of choice. (A very cool, well-paid place to work/learning and growth experience in at least the short term … marked by notably progressive policies.) - Innovative! (Must keep renewing and expanding and revising and re-imagining “the promise” to employees, the customer, the community.) - Excellence! (A small player … per me … has no right or reason to exist unless they are in Relentless Pursuit of Excellence. One earns the right— one damn day and client experience at a time!— to beat the Big Guys in your chosen niche!) Summarised, I think it boils down to three things: 1. Be huge in a small place 2. Be excellent in a big way 3. Look outside for innovation and inside for delivery Sufficiently simple to be ignored. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Convergence or perfect Friday, July 15th, 2005 I just spent three weeks in Alberta with my wife’s family. While we were there her grandmother passed away. At and after the funeral we spent a lot of time marveling at the impact of that little lady’s life. Invariably, one of the awful things following the passing of someone we love is figuring out what to do with all their stuff. Since I was a bit more distant from the emotional impact of it all, I found the process mildly intriguing. Wandering around that 100 year-old school-house I watched a quiet feud focus on the most unlikely of objects — a doorknob. The one pictured here threatened the nearly unshakable fortitude of my wife’s family. Of course a great deal of sentimental value is associated with anything in the place but I got to wondering about this doorknob in particular — why does everyone care? One of the reasons is that it’s beautiful. It was carefully designed and has withstood a 100 years of constant abuse by rowdy children and frustrated, door-slamming parents. That glass knob is nearly perfect in its purpose. “Perfect in its purpose” has been on my mind since then. Is there money in perfect? Look at bespoke tailoring, haute couture (requires reg), and high-end architecture. Ponder the success of IKEA, Apple, and Herman Miller. So, where is perfect among the doorknobs, toilet seats, and running shoes we consume today? Why aren’t web pages brilliantly designed? Where’s the mastery in the songs we sing in church? Where’s the art in broader consumerism? — I’m finally reading Leading the Revolution by Gary Hamel and he describes the overwhelming inertia of industries toward convergence. Convergence, he says, naturally moves companies to look and act like everyone else in their industry. In the end we get, in economic terms, perfect competition and everyone makes the same minimal level of profit. When he wrote the book the economy was chin-deep in high-tech euphoria and (beneath the surface) rampant commoditization. In the five years since then we’ve seen the free-fall of dot coms, the crumbling of the twin towers, and the unnerving emergence of potentially pandemic, food-borne diseases — in the wake of these changes people are seeking things more tangible, unique, and intrinsically valuable. There is now a toe-hold for perfect. The new niche is the art of everyday things. Just take a gander at the zen section, design section, and culture section of your local bookstore — people are looking for quintessential not just essential. — When I finished my master’s thesis the cycle of rewrites, endless scrutiny, pawing supervisors, and stringent reviews drove me to swear off anything that required 99% quality. Among entrepreneurs I thought I’d found the players in the economy that work for 80% quality and then race to market. And, maybe, among the few in new markets, this is the case. But I’ve discovered, to my deep consternation, that the overwhelming majority of those in maturing markets really have just two choices: convergence or perfect. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Tribal companies … continued Friday, July 8th, 2005 Another discussion here of the rapid emergence of small, tribal companies. Look here for a deeper discussion of the same theme. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Imagine your board of directors Friday, July 8th, 2005 Brand Autopsy describes an imaginary board of directors (from ThinkerToys). If nothing else, it’s a brain jogging way to think through where you most need advice. Defining a dream team board of directors can help you see where you have gaps that need to be addressed. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Deleted comments and tardy posts Thursday, July 7th, 2005 First, among the latest slew of spam were interspersed some valid comments. Unfortunately, I deleted them (inadvertantly, of course). And I’m on holidays, so the posts are coming slow too. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Shifting gears Sunday, June 19th, 2005 I used to plant trees in the summer to put myself through university. It’s tough work but it pays well. Tree planting is one of those few jobs that are so hard, so miserable, and so deeply testing that those who’ve done it have a respect for each other that’s nearly unshakable. I was fortunate to plant with one of the best crews and one of the best planters that the company of 4oo+ people, 2O-year-old company had ever seen. And my foreman was bright enough to realize that he would make more money in the long-run if he taught me to plant well. So, rather than dilly-dally, he threw me in with that great planter on his crew. Now the best planters see their work as a bit of a game: every tree is part of the puzzle, the landscape’s a giant, multidimensional checkerboard, and you’re the queen of chess. As you can imagine, it nearly blows your cerebellum when you start out. So, I watched this phenom do his thing and spent a month trying to keep up. By the end of those four weeks I was as good as anyone else on the crew and making as much money as any of the veterans but I still wasn’t anything compared to the phenom. He continued to plant more trees, more quickly and of higher quality than me — every single day. He so thoroughly out-planted me, I was convinced he buried trees while I wasn’t looking. Most bitter was watching him plant his last tree, knowing full-well that he had started with more trees than me and I still inevitably had 1/4 of mine still to go. He’d usually finish with a grin and offer to help me finish off. But being arrogant, I’d refuse. One day, after seeing this happen for far too long, I finally spoke up. “How did you do that?” I gripped, glaring down at my bag full of trees, ”I’ve still got a butt-load of trees here … you do that every-friggen-run.” He shrugged and started to walk back to the truck, “You’ve got to find another gear Jer.” Another gear. One of my life’s best lessons. Somehow it’s easier to work harder and pedal faster than it is to find a new gear. There’s lots of times that I’ve been pedaling like a madman and suddenly realize there’s another gear I can grab. As on bikes, so with entrepreneurs. There is usually another gear you didn’t know you could grab — better strategy, more efficient, sharper information. You simply need to find it. Matt Blumberg has a good post on this. It’s worth a gander. [link via a vc] Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Incentives and idea generation Saturday, June 18th, 2005 This is fun stuff. Olivier Toubia, a Ph.D. candidate at the Marketing Group (MIT) has an article on Idea Generation, Creativity, and Incentives. He writes: “Idea generation is critical … However, there has been relatively little formal research on the underlying incentives with which to encourage participants to focus their energies on relevant and novel ideas. This paper examines whether carefully tailored idea generation incentives can improve creative output.” Previous research suggests that incentives enhance performance when it relies on making simple, routine, unchanging responses but that the role of incentives is far less clear in situations that depend heavily on flexibility, conceptual and perceptual openness, or creativity. Interestingly, one of the conditions under which incentives will have a detrimental effect on performance is when the solution to the task is open-ended enough that the steps leading to a solution are not immediately obvious (what does this mean for wicked-problems?). Toubia used three conditions or types of incentives to trigger idea generation: A “Flat” condition where participants got $10 for showing up, An “Own” condition where participants got $3 for every idea they submitted, and An “Impact” condition where each participant got $2 for each time an idea they submitted built on one of their previous ideas. Table 2 is interesting and you should check it out, but the figure I leached below is a surprise. 20 hours?!? Ideas really started to take off in the impact scenario but only after 20 hours of building the underlying foundation. There’s a lesson here for entrepreneurs because this represents individual effort. If you can’t spend this kind of time, how can you hope to come up with deep, novel, thought-provoking ideas? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Trendwatching Friday, June 17th, 2005 I’ve read this for almost two years - trendwatching.com. These guys can sift. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Don’t suck. Dig it. Friday, June 17th, 2005 Brian Scudamore, CEO of 1-800 Got Junk?, on his his company’s success (two franchises in 1997 to 152 today; expects revenue of $72 million this year, nearly double last year and 30 times higher than revenue from 2000): “Superior customer service in markets with weak competition.” Paul Graham on how to start a start-up: “I can think of several heuristics for generating ideas for startups, but most reduce to this: look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn’t suck.” Don’t suck. Dig it. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Designing viruses Friday, June 17th, 2005 This article is a really tight overview of the principles of design. I just keep saying this over and over but: designers have lots to teach entrepreneurs. Design works because it’s a natural interface with the ways we subconsciously gather information and make value judgments. How many times have you thought, “Geez, that i-Pod looks cool.” And how many times have you thought, “I wonder how to translate i-Pod design into that white paper I’m working on?” Part of the viral framework. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Return on design Wednesday, June 15th, 2005 Interesting piece on design. The return on investment pieces are worth the trip through the 1OO+ slides. This what I’m looking in my search for the viral framework. Any other leads out there? Tag it here. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Good artists copy, great artists steal Wednesday, June 15th, 2005 Another believer in the advantages of innovating on someone else’s (or your own) creativity. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Board of Directors for my life Wednesday, June 15th, 2005 I’ve been thinking about a Board of Directors — a group of advisors — chosen from a wide range of professions to give an eclectic spectrum of perspectives. This what I’d like to form to aid other companies. But I think I could use one to aid me. A good illustration of the benefits can be found here. My question: what would it cost to build a Board of Directors for my life? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Feed: Tailored by you, for me Tuesday, June 14th, 2005 This is stunning. I’m sure it will gum up in a matter of weeks, silly people will pile on the crap and Fred will abandon the feed but what a cool innovation. It’s such a great way to reach into the life of a busy person to deliver information - website, mpg, mp3 - in a tailored way. I plan on using this with my clients. A tailored feed for each one so I can keep them up on what I’ve found abroad. I want to try it for myself too: if there is something you want to me to read or listen to tag it as siftit — it will show up in my aggregator. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) A beautiful virus Sunday, June 12th, 2005 A client has given me the not-so-small task of helping make his company viral. This seems like an incredible challenge and I’m not sure if it’s even possible with a company like his. Nevertheless, I think about this assignment constantly and have slowly started building a conceptual framework for understanding “viral companies.” I’ve always believed that economics was the study of incentives - the drivers of decisions. And to understand incentives, I needed to understand how people perceive their options. It is in the understanding of perception that economics gets a bit wobbly. Having long been a student, I’m quick to grab a book when faced with something I don’t well understand and in this case I’ve turned to George Santayana and his book “The Sense of Beauty Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory“. Why here? Well, first I agree with Daniel Pink - we live in an age where commodities are many but beauty is rare. Second, I think being viral requires becoming the standard and ideal by which all other competition is judged. And, finally, I think this is a field still undeveloped despite the 1OO-year gap between the time when Santayana wrote the book and now. Santayana wrote: “Psychology has studied first the function of perception and the theory of knowledge, by which we seem to be informed of external things; it has in comparison neglected the exclusively subjective and human department of imagination and emotion. We still have to recognize in practice the truth that from these despised feelings of ours the great world of perception derives all its value. Things are interesting because we care about them, and important because we need them.” I think Beauty has been ignored for the sake of understanding how knowledge is built and leveraged but at the cost of not understanding how to best employ that knowledge. I think those things and those companies that do go viral somehow manage to combine both knowledge and beauty to, as Santayana says, furnish works of art that are so far beyond any measure of excellence that they become the standard by which critics measure inferior effects. Plus, I like feeling smart reading 1OO-year-old philosophy texts. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Jedi Masters of the sift Saturday, June 11th, 2005 ln the end I hope my clients don’t need me. Well, hope is a strong word — maybe it would be more honest to say that “should” be the case. I believe that my business will be more whole if this is true. “I am training you to take my place.” That’s far more reassuring (and healthy) than, “When we’re done this project, you can pay me to do it again next week.” But teaching my clients to never need me is still a bit frightening. Yet, despite this benignly altruistic ambition — training others in the way of knowledge management, innovation, and creativity is no mean task. Jim McGee asks, “Where are all the Jedi Masters of knowledge work?” How does one apprentice creativity? Where is the 4-year one-on-one mastery of crafting innovation? Over at Idea Flow, Renee echoes Jim and writes, “You can teach someone creative skills, but you can’t teach them explicitly how to think more creatively. Or to be more innovative.” Both writers stop at the same spot: being expert in these meta-human skills requires a lifetime. Passing them on to another person takes exactly the same amount of time. So, to put it bluntly, if you can’t do it yourself — you’re screwed. Jim points out that we stand at the foot of problems so large and looming that we are all novices in the shadow of the challenge. There are no solutions, no perfect joints, no master form — these are wicked problems and our best will be the people that hold the the rudder as we paddle through. But I think we would be short-sighted if we didn’t acknowledge the characteristics of the masters. The masters pause to think. They collaborate. They understand the difference between complicated and complex. These are practises I can pass to my clients — along with bright blue light sabres. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Free up time, use your brain Friday, June 10th, 2005 A friend just handed me a chapter from Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline. In it Peter writes: “At one of our recent programs, I talked to a manger who has worked in both U.S. and Japanese firms. She said that when a person in a Japanese firm sits quietly, no one will come and interrupt. It is assumed that person is thinking. In America, we assume that when a person is sitting quietly they aren’t doing anything very important.” One of the greatest problems I see among entrepreneurs, business leaders and any sort of executive is the lack of time to think. And, as a result, the lack of an ability to be strategic and tactical. This understanding is what has driven my career choices in my daily work and the sift experiment. I consciously chose a career path where I can train myself to think. I chose sift because I’m interested in thinking on behalf of entrepreneurs. Peter continues the chapter: “Even when there is ample time for reflection and facility for retrieving all manner of relevant information, most managers do not reflect carefully on their actions. Typically, managers adopt a strategy, then as soon as the strategy starts to run into problems, they switch to another strategy, then to another and another. Managers may run through three to six different strategies, without once examining why a strategy seems to be failing or articulating specifically what they hope to accomplish through a change in strategy.” Peter writes “manager” but he could have easily written “entrepreneur”. Because an entrepreneur has the intuition to sense and grab a previously hidden opportunity doesn’t mean the same entrepreneur has the ability to be tactical or strategic in the way he pursues it. The challenge then is two-fold: building the ability to be strategic and finding the time to exercise that ability. Too few entrepreneurs have both. Those that have the ability, tend to lack the latter while those with the time tend to lack the former. I’ve had it in mind to find a Getting Things Done guru to compliment the things I think sift delivers. Free up time, use your brain. Anyone know who I should talk to? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Comments - the saga continues Friday, June 10th, 2005 I’m such a novice. I fixed the comments in the most inefficient of ways. The door is open for comments but also an unabating torrent of spam. Not only that but every comment must await my almighty moderation. Moderation involves trudging through a field of Texas -holdem, poker chips and giant, ever-enlarging penises. The glories of bogging….blogging. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Innovation by replication Thursday, June 9th, 2005 I know I’ve been giving Dave Pollard props; but the guy does good work. Today he has another piece I like. Today he’s describing four types of innovation and overlays it with the methodology from Blue Ocean Strategy. Of particular value are the ten paths to innovation: Product attributes or performance: How you design your core offerings Product system: How you link and/or provide a platform for multiple products (e.g. the Microsoft integrated productivity suite) Core processes: How you create and add value to your offerings (e.g. Wal-Mart’s reinvention of retailing as shelf-space leasing) Enabling process: How you support the company’s core processes and workers Service: How you provide value to customers and consumers beyond and around your products Delivery Channel: How you get your offerings to market Brand: How you communicate your offerings Customer experience: How your customers feel when they interact with your company and its offerings (e.g. the Harley Davidson owners’ community) Networks and alliances: How you join forces with other companies for mutual benefit (e.g. Sara Lee sticking strictly to branding and outsourcing all manufacturing) Business model: How you make money (e.g. Dell’s pay-in-advance for a custom-made PC model). But I think it can be even more subtle. The examples Dave gives are all of funky innovations, which are great if you can get them - but I think the real value is in the opportunities that may exist in these areas of your company. For example: instead of seeking to innovate one of your core processes, consider how one of your core processes might lend itself to new business models. Maybe you have a unique way of handling the flow of supplies - think about replicating that system to handle customers. Maybe you’ve got this tight system for interfacing with a printing agency in another part of the country - consider using that system to interface with remote clients. Innovation can be brand new or it can be replication; as I’ve written before: replicating systems is good. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Writing business plans Wednesday, June 8th, 2005 Lately I’ve been asked about writing business plans. Rather than bomb through all I’ve said, go here instead. He’s done a good job, my contacts are gritty, and at 8:59 my bed is looking really fine. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) More on complexity Wednesday, June 8th, 2005 True to his style, Dave Pollard has a giant post with lots of implications for business. To toot my own horn, I’ve written on complexity too, here the most topical piece of the bunch. Favourite insights: In a complex world, assume unorder. In a complicated world, objective reality is possible but in a complex world, perception is our greatest hope. Instead of focus, a complex world demands experimentation. Innovation today is driven by networkers, not by scientists or marketers. Management science is finally getting more like real science, through the use of complex adaptive systems theory, cognitive science, and anthropology etc. The adoption of complex adaptive systems theory seems to be currently strongest in the pharma, telecom, defence and banking industries. The last seems very important to me. Each of these industries is very organic. Except, at least from my completely ignorant perspective, pharma. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Sorry for griping Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 Turns out no one could comment for who knows how long. Sheesh. Still not sure what the problem was but at least you can now comment. Though you may have to wait until I approve (again for reasons I don’t quite understand). Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Sprawled on my couch Monday, June 6th, 2005 Every few years there comes a moment where technology reaches into my life and shakes my brain. Today is one of those days. I am sprawled out on my coach with a Tablet PC perched on my lap. Hugh Mcleod is bantering about something through the speakers - streaming in on some one else’s internet connect. I’ve been surfing for an hour in a fashion remarkably human - surprisingly real. Unlike almost everything technological, this feels good. Pen in hand, I’m scrawling out my ideas in the living room instead of crammed into the incredibly hot computer room upstairs. All this to say - these tablets are wonderful. Now all I need is a button to mute the insanely annoying dog downstairs. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Strategy for small fish Sunday, June 5th, 2005 Just found an article at HBS that compliments the things I said earlier today. Part of the strategy for small niche businesses: leverage the capabilities of other players in your niche. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Entrepreneurs are like scientists Sunday, June 5th, 2005 Last Fall I bought a copy of Seed magazine to read their piece on Revolutionary Minds: 18 icons and iconoclasts who are redefining science. The story on mathematician, Erik Demaine, tattooed itself on my mind and I’ve thought of it constantly since. When Erik turned 12 he enrolled in Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, at 20 he was teaching at MIT, and now he’s 23 and co-author of more than 100 papers including the 50 he wrote in 2004. One of his colleagues describes him as “promiscuous”. Erik is interested in everything and can make a contribution to anything. In the past year he’s worked with biologists, chemists, physicists, engineers, designers, and architects on some giant, difficult interdisciplinary challenges. His story is inspiring to me and an example for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs and scientists share at least one thing in common: a vicious sense of intellectual territory. Erik’s story is exactly the opposite. He’s built a wildly successful academic career on reaching out researchers in other fields. Entrepreneurs could too. Like a mathematician or physicist, entrepreneurs are often masters of a small slice of intellectual property. And like most scientists, entrepreneurs are pretty aggressive about keeping everyone but themselves off the field. But looking at open-source and the collaborative success of guys like Erik, is that model becoming obsolete? When you read an article like the one I posted earlier you recognize how complicated the opportunities available today really are. Is the one-man-show still the best strategy for addressing these issues? I have a dream of starting a collaborative-solutions-tank. I’d like to build a team of guys like Erik — scientists, artists, CEOs, musicians, and architects — and give them the facilities they need to do their work. But put those facilities in the mountains of B.C. or on the coasts of Nova Scotia, somewhere so beautiful it makes you cry. And invite people with the world’s biggest problems to come solve them with me and my group. I think this model can be replicated by entrepreneurs. Whether you realize it or not, you are part of a collaborative-solutions-tank. The suppliers you use, the customers you have, and everyone else that inputs or outputs from your company is in the tank. You need to recognize the latent potential in the tank and exercise it. The brightest guy in the room won’t be the one violently waving his own flag. It will be the guy that points all the tank members in the right direction so he can achieve something far greater than he would alone. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (5) Just to be undecided Friday, June 3rd, 2005 I’ve got a rule. If I read and highlight more than 40% of an article, I don’t summarize it. I just send the whole thing. In today’s mad rush for productivity, a paper worthy of being nearly half covered in highlights deserves some recognition. It’s a small way to put on a pedestal something sorely missed. Here’s a piece by E. Jeffrey Conklin & William Weil from the TouchStone consulting group. Both Johnnie Moore and Chris Corrigan had good things to say about it. The quote they placed right at the front is a perfect summary: “Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.” Laurence J. Peter If you want my highlighted version, send me a note. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (3) Love and meekness Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 There are two aspects of business that are immeasurably important but poorly understood. These are meekness and love. Two of the companies I work with pay me to “think on their behalf – about the company’s strategic direction.” Know what they really pay me for? To remind them to be meek and to love. Almost everybody in business understands how to “love” their customer. At least they can get by. But many stumble when they have to care for the people inside their companies – especially entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs stumble because they are driven. I’m driven too and I know how hard it is to stop for others when I’m trying to get things done. It’s so much easier (at least in the short-term) to ignore everyone and just plough through. I need reminders every so often to pay attention to the people I work with. Another reason these guys need reminders: they don’t know what these words mean at work. Now I haven’t wiki’d this nor googled it nor looked at a recent dictionary – my friend, a fiend for words, told me about it. Plus the story is beautiful. My friend says meekness is a term used first by horse trainers. In particular it was used by those that trained battle horses. The inexperienced trainer (and novice wordsmith) would assume that the ideal horse to ride into the fray is the biggest, baddest stallion in the pasture. And there’s no damn way you want to ride a sloop-backed nag. Everyone would naturally ignore the quiet, proud one standing alone in the field - but that’s the one you’d want. You don’t want the stallion. He’s too unpredictable. And you don’t want the nag - her spirit is broken. You want the meek one. The horse you want in battle will get you to the fight and carry you both through it. You can’t have it going rodeo on the way and you don’t want it running scared when the fighting begins. Meekness is strength under control. When horses were first used in battle they were the most powerful weapon in the field. But off the field, all you wanted was a horse. At work, the temptation is to act either like a stallion or a sloop-backed nag. For the entrepreneurs I know - it’s stallion all the way and all the time. But any wise trainer would see that as a monumental waste of energy and usually it’s inappropriate. Your strength is best used in battle and as an entrepreneur you need to realize: you aren’t always in battle. In fact, you’re hardly ever in one — especially when you’re in the company of people you’ve hired. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Toilet paper syndrome Sunday, May 29th, 2005 So, I’ve got a baby right? And like nearly every other adult on the planet I’m always putting my face about one inch from his cute little nose. When I’m with him, I’m always right up close and when my wife picks him up to carry him off somewhere I’m always amazed at how small he actually is. All that time spent so close to him — I think of him as far bigger. And it seems to me that this is one of the key difficulties in the life of an entrepreneur too. One friend calls it “toilet paper syndrome” — the idea is that entrepreneurs spend so much time fixing stupid problems like getting more TP for the can that they forget what business they are in. You’re so close to every-day-issues you mistakenly think they are huge. At the same time you forget the real mission at hand: building a fledgling business/raising a tiny baby. This is where an outside perspective is handy. Or a wife buff enough to carry you away from your business so you can see it with the right perspective. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Brita-filter for business Monday, May 23rd, 2005 I’ve been poking at sift for the last month or two. I’ve been wondering what this blog’s for. Not because I doubt the value of what all this is about. Nor do I question my interest in this work. I’m all in. No, what I question is “why blog?” I think I’m off track. This blog has become a straining attempt at popularity; it’s a stumbling struggle to copy someone else’s success. Screw it. The first phase of the experiment is over. The literature review is done. Now it’s time to set up tests and get busy. So, what now? What is sift to be about? What is the next phase of the experiment? The second phase is about big ideas, new perspectives, better fits, making a whole out of pieces. Less about convincing people to care and more about caring. It’s about forming a set of criteria, principles, philosophies, and perspectives for thinking. It’s about creating a brita-filter for business. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Sifting without translation Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 Tom Peters is sifting. Not sure what I think. I still think the problem is too much information + translation needed. Tom’s sorting out the info but not translating. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Abundance, Asia, and Automation Monday, May 16th, 2005 Provocative post at Worthwhile. Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind sees three forces that are shaping work roles: Abundance, Asia, and Automation. “Abundance leads us to move from valuing “utility” to “significance” in the things we own. Significance comes from design, creativity, and inspiration … note the “arms race” in designer toilet brushes if you doubt him.” The future of work is in the delivery of the first A. The skills needed: creativity, design savvy, empathy, etc. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Perspective is everything Thursday, April 28th, 2005 Went for a run this morning and spent the entire time disgusted by all the garbage in the ditches. Am sitting in my office now and just realized the leaves are out. Bright, shiny and green. I chose the wrong thing to focus on. Perspective is everything. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Teen’s social computing Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 David Weinberger posts his notes from presentations given by six teenagers from a sci/tech high school. They are talking about how they’re using their computers socially in the course of a day. I’ve often thought of doing something similar to learn how kids sift info. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) When sharks visit your blue ocean Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 Below is a review of a new book by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne: Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant I’ve got a question, when sharks come to your blue ocean, what then? Do you find another ocean? Or start building a Blue Ocean castle? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Blue Ocean Strategy Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 Just finished reading Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. I enjoyed the book. One of the entrepreneurs I work with, the career coach, is already well ensconced in an largely uncontested blue ocean. And another, the graphic designer, is toe-to-toe with a million other designers in a highly contested red ocean. It’s fun to compare the strategies of each. Overview In one sentence: Get out of highly contested markets and unlock untapped potential. By the author’s definition, Blue Oceans are uncontested markets. Red Oceans are the bloody waters on fully exploited, highly competitive markets. The authors give a pretty good arguement for getting out of competition. Their process is simple and new insights come quick. The book is a great roadmap for finding alternative markets and building strategies to grab dreamy opportunities. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) The best sort of blue Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 The good part of Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. The best part of the book is their Strategy Canvas. That paradigm alone is worth the price (which is high and shows they haven’t even innovated on pricing). I’ll leave it to you to grab the book, I don’t want to steal their thunder, but it’s excellent. Amongst the “metrics” there’s a great framework for identifying alternative markets. The authors provide choose-your-own-adventure quests: - Look across alternative industries,- Look across strategic groups within industries,- Look across buyer groups,- Look across complementary product and service offerings,- Look across functional-emotional orientation, and- Look across time. They also stamp out a template for building a strategy once a chimeric opp has been spotted. Visual awakening, visual exploration, visual market fairs and visual communication are good methods for filling in the details of the plan (despite the bs names). At a deeper level their six stages of buyer experiences and road blocks to purchase are super. And the grid they built to illustrate it is one of the few good tables they constructed. Overall the book is great for spotting dream niches and finding ways to quickly take advantage of them. But a few questions were left unanswered. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) When blue oceans turn purple Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 Reviewing Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. Here’s the bad: The authors forget (or ignore) something fundamental to business — all great innovations are copied. A blue ocean today is quickly a red ocean tomorrow. And in thier blissful forgetfulness they feel justified and safe enough to toss off the precepts of hard-won, timeless principles of strategy. Just because the book is about moving into uncontested space doesn’t mean that the principles of competition and contest don’t apply. In the Art of War, Sun Tzu lauded the good general who wins a battle before it is fought. But he puts on a pedestal the general who achieves military objectives without the enemy ever knowing a contest had begun. What Sun Tzu calls the “Sheathed Sword Strategy” is the old name for Blue Ocean Strategy. Speaking of new names for old things — the authors do alot of renaming. Funky new words, tables and figures add little value when the principles aren’t clean. For some reason they think a few tables and innovative words are the same thing as adding metrics. They aren’t. Finally, for a book about blue oceans and uncontested markets — is there another market more heavily contested than that of business books? What’s innovative about their strategy? A quick trip to their website shows there’s been very little innovation at all. So much for the bad. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Opportunity science Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 Great thought by Rob at Business Pundit. Opportunity Science: in an age of increasing competitiveness, falling barriers to entry and ever increasing business opportunities, the advantage will lie with the companies that pick the best opportunities to pursue — and use science to do it. “The advantage will lie with the companies that pick the best opportunities to pursue … and put more and more science behind this task … take the next step and [this could] become a discipline unto itself, complete with college majors and whole departments at major corporations. “Think about how primitive our models for this kind of thing are today. We do a SWOT analysis and figure out ROI and then debate a little while. That’s it. Yet with increasing computer power, models borrowed from economics, biology, neuroscience, physics and sociology, opportunity scientists could potentially give structure, formalization, and predictive power to a field that now requires lots of “hunches.” Think about being able to estimate the “tipping point” of a new venture with a high degree of probability.” “Initially, opportunity scientists will have to fight the same battle that psychologists have fought, that their field isn’t grounded enough in hard data. But as we begin to better understand and model the human mind and the way we interact in groups, the day may come when our business strategy for attacking new markets is heavily determined by an opportunity science computer program.” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) What do you want to read? Monday, April 25th, 2005 Ok, I’m back. During the break — in between changing diapers, burping babies and battling a wicked cold, I’ve been thinking about this blog. What’s it for? Who cares? What now? I asked a few months ago who was reading this and why. That post is actually my sixth most popular of all time but it generated minimal response. I hope this one gets a bit more action. I’ve badgered the entrepreneurs I work with to seek the advice of their clients more explicitly. I’d like to follow my own advice and ask those that read this blog what they value most about what they read. I’ve been delivering a fairly broad smorgasbord of topics here and I wonder if some focus is needed. I write regularly on: - innovation,- insight,- education,- business book tid-bits,- synthesis across disciplines,- strategy,- science, and- economics. Is the mix good? Too wide? Any gaps? Does this fill a need or is it sufficiently covered by other writers? Of course I’m going to consider this some more on my own, but I’d love the advice of anyone willing to toss in a comment. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Masters of Business Imagination Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 Slowly getting through the mind-numbing, sleepless days with a new baby. So I’m starting to sniff around the net again finally. Today I found a manifesto calling for a Masters in Business Imagination. The rhetoric’s not too hot but it does shout out the core reasons why me pursuing a relationship with Heliotrope is a good idea. I’ll get back to regular broadcasting in a few days. Promise. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Doula for start-ups Friday, April 8th, 2005 I got to stay with my wife through the entire sweaty 24-hour delivery of our boy (still no name). One of my favourite parts was the rhythm of her labour. Near the beginning of the marathon her contractions were shallow and irregular. But she quickly got used to the feel of things and was able to go to sleep for a few hours. By noon her contractions were serious – giant waves of pressure and pain. They pounded in with barely a minute between the end of one and the start of another. But she was amazing and beautiful and strong. We even went for a walk to help distract her. At 6:00 we ripped off to the hospital. Her contractions were at the same pace but strong and more painful. She was getting a bit panicked and wanted to know if she was progressing. Meanwhile I’m rubbing her back, fiddling in her hair, stumbling around — trying to figure out how to help her. From six until the end her labour changed very little. Crazy strong, incessant and sometimes even doubling or tripling up before a break. I loved the entire process. It was so … real. So whole. And I thought that the long, ever-changing journey to his birth was a brilliant metaphor for all new things in life. Now this might sound cheesy, but this morning I thought of three things things entrepreneurs can learn from labour. First, remember the end result and focus on the next contraction. As in labour it’s easy to forget why you are doing what you do. It gets hard and painful and too fast. Distracted by the chaos of the moment you can panic. And the only way to live through the chaos is to remember this will end and stay focused on the next contraction. In the case of labour, living through three-minute increments makes it possible to win the psychological game of body raking contractions. In the same way, as an entrepreneur, living through the chaotic days of a start-up, the next three weeks or three months need to be the breadth of your foresight. Otherwise the game is too big and overwhelms you. Second, what worked one-hour ago doesn’t work now. And what works now, won’t in another three hours. Even though the end result is unchanging, the process is dynamic. Dealing with the pain is almost a strategic game. Find something that works, use it until the marginal pain gets too high, wait for a lapse, flip to another position and immediately find a new groove. So too in the birthing of businesses. Many entrepreneurs plough along using the strategy that worked when they got started. They forget that the game is dynamic. Be vigilant. Watch the pieces that work and beware of those that begin to fail. Quickly jump to change those areas that start to lag behind. Finally, while you focus on the short game you need someone to see the bigger picture. Labour is nearly inhumane. It’s overwhelming, mind numbing, and nearly endless. While awash in the monumental pain of the moment it’s devastating to look at the immensity of what lies ahead. And core to making it through is having someone that watches both the moment and the long-game: She has six more hours and needs to rest now. She hasn’t dilated; she can’t push yet. The baby’s heart rate has been falling for two hours – we need to move quickly. As an entrepreneur you must live in the moment. But you’ll do best if you can play strategically based on the bigger picture. And because most entrepreneurs can’t play both short and long games – you gain from the perspective of someone outside the moment. Besides my new son I also work closely with three young companies. And now that I’ve been through the delivery of my baby I can see that, for these entrepreneurs, I’m basically a labour coach. A doula for start-ups. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Another sift start-up Wednesday, April 6th, 2005 Decided life wasn’t full enough and tacked another start-up on the portfolio. A baby boy. Huge initial investment but the pay-back is immediate. Fortunately it’s a growth industry with lots of potential. And it’s something my wife and I can do together. We’re still struggling with the name. Gavin or Otto? So, while I adjust to the newness, the blogs will thin out a bit and the response to email will trickle slower than ever. You know — priorities. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Step-by-step guide to pitching Monday, April 4th, 2005 For the step-by-step guide to pitching, use these links: 1+7 Steps to pitching an idea 13+ questions for pitchers Put the pitch together 60-second pitch: The 10 point outline 60-second pitch: The first 10 seconds 60-second pitch: The three biggest mistakes Presenting the bigger small picture The overview Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Speaking of design … Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 … I just recently did a self-constructed readings course on design and creativity. For help on reading suggestions I talked to Galen Cranz at Berkley and Sara Beckman, same place. If you’re interested I could send you the reading list and links. Once you’re set up we could discuss it as you chug along. Send me an email or post a comment. If there’s enough interest, maybe I could throw up a wiki (need to learn how anyway). Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Abductive thinking — not about kidnapping Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 I love design, even if my vanilla background and black text don’t prove it. In grade five I discovered that Ms. Faulkner gave A’s for illustrated stories and B’s for the plain text version. By 13 I knew that ladies preferred a poem to shouted declarations of undying ardour. My early conviction that design was distinctive kept me following design even when I wandered off into the “real” things of life (like regression equations, Brownian motion, and sodding elasticities of substitution). This month’s issue of Fast Company does a bang-up job of laying out the intersection of design and business. In the article they chat with Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business. Martin’s short on the future of commoditity goods and services. China and India are going to pound to dust any company that tries competing on price and cost. He asserts that future prosperity depends on the ability of entrepreneurs to create “elegant, refined products and services.” Martin says, bottom line: “Businesspeople don’t just need to understand designers better — they need to become designers.” Presently the core differentiator between business person and designer is imagination. Imagination is a juggernaut meta-human skill. You can get a computer running business simulations, cross-referrencing case studies but there are two key areas that remain the sole domain of humanity: cognitive synthesis and imagination. Imagination lets designers see problems and opportunities in the abstract where commodity builders see things in the linear progression of basic mathematics. I’ve written before about Robert McKee, a screenwriting lecturer, who distills stories to their essence. Every great story maintains a sense of mystery and an element of imminent loss – a challenge. Martin agrees and believes innovators need to take hold of the mystery — the abstract challenge — and create a solution. The trick is breaking up the problem so your imagination can engage. When you see a challenge you’ve faced before you immediately defer to old tactics. To be innovative you need to break up the line of numbers and analysis and bring back the mystery. Martin says the key is a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning — abductive thinking. Abductive thinking is “suggesting that something may be and reaching out to explore it.” It’s like the hypothesis of the scientist or the suspicion of the detective — instead of acting on what’s certain, bet on what’s probable. In the article Martin charges business schools to take a position in the design-based economy. He criticizes MBA’s for only producing linear thinkers when “the real challenge lies in getting better and better at a different thing: devising clever solutions to wickedly difficult problems.” Martin, the Rotman School, the the Ontario College of Art & Design, the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, and Stanford University are building programs to combine analytical thinking with horizontal thinking — thinking based on intuition, experimentation, and empathy. This is a great move but maybe MBA’s are the last places to do it. I’ve raved before about A.H. Maslow’s view on education and the need for a new kind of human. This is a move in the right direction but why try to teach adults to be creative after we’ve pounded it out of them in high-school? If we’d affirm the natural desire to innovate and create early we wouldn’t need to build new business schools. Well, I do see the point. Who’s going to lead us while we try to fix the elementary school system? So, I’ve started working with two entrepreneurs in this area. First is Heliotrope which is dedicated to magination’s tremendous importance in our lives. And then a design and communication strategy group here in Ottawa (note their newsletter “SIFT” is not me or mine … but you can’t blame them really — it’s plainly a terrific name). Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) The overview Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 Having caught their attention with the 60-second pitch, you immediately followed with the 5-minute version and now you’re invited to do a full-blast presentation. How to? Again, Bill Joss and Fast Company nail down next steps. Before you get to “yes,” you have to give the “overview presentation.” This little show gives enough information to help listeners make the enlightened decision to engage your company without overloading them. If they’re interested, they’ll ask for more. Pitching is an art but there is science to it too. And science tells us that one week after your pitch, your listener will remember only 10% of what you told them. This is pitch decay, and it’s a grim obstacle to any sale. You can highlight the 10% that matters most, or you can let them figure it out for themselves. You choose. The reality of pitch decay underscores the need for brevity. So condense your message into a dozen slides — boil it down. Divide your presentation into chapters: summary, market, solution, team, and recap. Summary Start by saying, “If you only remember three things about our business, you should remember these …” Adapt your 60-second pitch, including your mission statement, business idea, and call to action. Don’t make it a secret. Tell them up front what you’re looking for. Market Lead with the problem and follow with the opportunity. Describe the need your business will meet. Back up your case with market research. The more granular and consumer-focused — the better it will be. Business Plan This is the solution part of the presentation. - The Idea: Sketch out your idea. Remember this is an overview. You may have to delve into details briefly, but don’t get caught up in them. - The Technology: Give a basic grasp of what you’re doing. - The Competition: Don’t dwell on the competition, but don’t leave out any major competitors out either. - The Marketing Strategy: Explain your leverage points. You can’t move the world alone. Where is the fulcrum? - The Path to Profitability: Explain how what you do helps those you serve make money. And know that everyone will care about your assumptions and your metrics, the pedals that make your business move faster. Tell them. Your assumptions and your metrics help them gauge your logic. And your logic is more important at this stage than the results of your mathematical equations. Team Tell them about your team’s relevant experience. If you don’t have a complete team, say so. Recap Here’s where you tell them what you told them. Remember pitch decay: pull out the main points of your presentation, and restate them with a renewed call to action. You must cut it down to just a few key points — three is ideal. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Presenting the bigger small picture: A racetrack analogy Saturday, April 2nd, 2005 Having slogged through the metaphysical and skidded through the practical we now need a middle-manager class pitch - the 5 minute version. Again, Bill Joss and an article in Fast Company provide the details. The 5-minute pitch is all about laying out the nuances of your plan. Give the detail that is lacking in the 60-second version. Here Bill’s talking executive summary but it’s nearly the same thing as a 5-minute pitch. Experienced horse-race bettors want to know three things about every race: the quality of the track, of the horse, and of the rider. The Track The marketplace is the racetrack. Bettors don’t want to view the racetrack from a blimp. They want to know whether the track is wet or dry, sandy or firm, slick or sticky. The same goes for investors interested in your marketplace. Don’t show them the view from Jupiter. The more grassroots market knowledge you can demonstrate, the better. The Horse A new business idea must act like a racehorse. It must be fast, fluid, and flexible enough to lead the field even in times of change. Investors want to see the reasoning behind your assumptions. The thinking that goes into a business plan is extremely valuable. Get the plan on paper — 60 pages, 80 pages, whatever it takes — then boil it down to 2. The Jockey The jockey is the team that steers a business idea to market. Smart bettors bet on jockeys. Human capital is simply harder to acquire than financial capital. The team is the most important part of you pitch — devote a significant amount of space to your jockey. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) 60-second pitch: The three biggest mistakes Friday, April 1st, 2005 This is the last of three street-level bits of advice on pitch giving. Previously covered are 10 points for outlining your pitch and the first 10 seconds of the 60 second pitch. The three mistakes discussed today are just a part of a broader discussion in Entrepreneur. In 60 seconds time, you must: - say who you are;- describe the salient features of your business plan;- and get your listener excited about what you do, so that they want to hear more details. “The three biggest mistakes people make in their pitches are: 1) describing skills rather than purpose; (2) failing to tell an interesting story; and (3) forgetting to rehearse and prepare.” Instead of focusing on your skills, focus on why your pitch matters to the person listening. This is where the homework on the 13+ questions is handy. Describe your favorite client and how you’ve changed their life. Describe what you have done and will do instead of the skills that help you do it. What is your specialty — the stuff you do best? Tell your story, we’re wired to hear them. Robert McKee, a screenwriting lecturer, says all great stories show a protagonist wrestling with antagonizing forces, maintain a sense of mystery and even an element of loss — so share the challenge you face, the amazing solution you’ve discovered and the uncaptured promise that lies in front of you. Hook your listener — get them interested in who you are. Finally, practice. Practice for two reasons. First, you’ll be surprised how often you get to use your pitch and most often it’s in unexpected places. Second, you don’t want to stumble when you get the chance. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) 60-second pitch: The first 10 seconds Thursday, March 31st, 2005 Yesterday was the first of three pieces on creating a tangible 60-second pitch. Today is the second. For this I’ve used two points made by Mel Perchesky (don’t know who this guy is but his advice is good). Mel says: 60-second pitches “have two components: the first ten seconds and the remaining fifty. The objective of the first ten seconds is to have [whoever’s getting pitched] want to listen to the next fifty seconds more intently than they would have otherwise.” It’s like the first 5-pages rule for books or the first 5-minutes rule for stores — catching attention immediately is critical. “The first ten seconds of the [60-second] statement also has two components. It should contain what you do or what your niche is. Secondly, it should also contain a reference that independently validates your value-proposition.” And it should include your tag-line. In 10 seconds you should intrique, introduce, and inform. Don’t try to cram too many details into your first 10 seconds. Your goal is to catch some attention and once captured you want to have them wanting to know more. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) 60-second pitch: The 10 point outline Wednesday, March 30th, 2005 Forsaking the metaphysical (1,2,3), today we get into the tangibles of a 60-second pitch. For this I leaned heavily on the advice of Bill Joss and an article in Fast Company called Perfecting Your Pitch. Here are 10 tips for outlining your pitch: 1. Be Concise: Brevity requires effort — think hard about the essentials of your message and ruthlessly cut away the unnecessary details. An pitch is a clear, concise and well-practiced description of your company — about 150-225 words. 2. Put a tag on it: Start with a tag line — a wordplay to pique interest in your pitch. A tag line must encapsulate your business’s core purpose or product, but, more important, it must grab your audience’s attention. 3. Solve a Problem: Right after your tag line, launch into an explanation of the need you plan to meet. 4. Turn adversity into opportunity: Every problem offers the opportunity for a solution. Once you’ve presented your prognosis, lay out your prescription. Boil down the unique elements of your approach into one or two sentences. 5. Tell Them What They Want to Hear: Describe your product or service and its benefits succinctly. Depending on your audience, you may also have to: - define and size the market- explain how you’re going to make money- tell who is behind the company and- frame the competitive landscape and your advantage in it. 6. Speak in Plain English: Talk in tangibles, not abstractions, throughout your pitch. Frame the problem, your unique solution, and the benefits your company will bring to the man on the street. 7. Tailor Your Pitch to Your Audience 8. Show your passion. You have to act like a new parent showing off pictures of your newborn. If you can’t get excited about your plan, you’re done. 9. Conclude With a Call to Action: Always end your pitch with a call to action, but recognize that different audiences prompt different requests. 10. Tell a Consistent Story: Nothing sounds worse than fumbling, inaccurate or contradictory company descriptions. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Put the pitch together Tuesday, March 29th, 2005 Yesterday I laid out Brad Feld’s/Chris Wand’s 13 questions for entrepreneurs and said they would lay the groundwork for a ripping good pitch. Trouble is, once you do that work, all you really get is a ripping big pile of paper. How do you put all that crap together? For help I turned to the most unlikely of places: Web Design. Over at 37 Signals Ryan Singer has a paper called An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design and using a mix of Betty Edwards and Christopher Alexander he’s put built a framework for imposing order on that great stack of stuff. Like web design, you have a huge number of alternative ways to pitch yourself or your company. And like many web designers, its easy to fall on old habits. The risk is you end up with a pitch that looks like everyone else’s (just like those blogs everyone’s building off of templates). To break the problem (and here’s where Betty Edwards meets Christopher Alexander) you need to fracture the problem into pieces so unfamiliar your old habits can’t take over. And to be cool like Christopher Alexander you need to build each chunk so perfectly that they flow together (as all natural patterns do). So much for trendy architecture, what about that pile of crap? Start by making a list of all the specific bits that eventually must fit together. Some bits to include: company info, current info, other users info, current business plan, date you started, potential clients - mine that pile for useful bits. Once the bits are listed, put them into chunks based on whether they impact each other or not. Group up the pieces that are related and then prioritize them by functional importance - what matters most to the people you will be pitching. Now design each chunk independently. Careful attention here will ensure (according to Christopher Alexandre) that the whole will fuse together. That’s all fine and good, but in the end it’s rather metaphysical. So far we’ve seen an overview of the selling ideas, a set of questions that need answers and fairly cerebral construction of what order the piece might take - but what I need is something a lot more tangible. I still need a 60-second pitch. I’ll do it tomorrow. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Intentional conversations Monday, March 28th, 2005 While I’m busy fooling around with book lists, Dave Pollard’s dropping gems. He’s not only framed-up my initial idea but already started putting on the drywall. I guess that’s what you get for sharing ideas with bright guys. I wasn’t going to write about it here, you know — manage the brand, rah-rah. But since it’s out there, might as well get busy. Like Dave said, I was thinking about how to make blogging sustainable and how to leverage it’s potential. I mean attempting to focus all the brilliance of the blogging elite and their audiences on some really interesting questions. There’s a huge potential that’s largely untouched. I know these words (sustainable, leveraging, productivity) scream capitalistic subversion. That’s not the intention. These sinister sounding words help describe what seems to be a very interesting opportunity to do great things. We (humanity) face some fairly majestic problems and most bloggers (while being very funny or caustically critical) aren’t broaching solutions. They’re busy (and I’m right there too) ladling out great dollops of individual wisdom but these ideas are short-lived and lots of the value gets forgotten. I think we could do better. So, now that Dave’s thrown it out there: What do you think? Between him and these guys the ball’s already in play. Might as well get the game started. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Non-business business book list: a list for business thinkers Monday, March 28th, 2005 While counting my books I was surprised at how many of the ones I read were stories instead of business texts. I shouldn’t have been. Stories have taught me more about business than I ever learned in school. Here’s a few that impacted the most and a tiny description of what they teach: Enders Game by Orson Scott Card — Teaches the power and responsibility of rhetoric. The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White — Teaches perspective and the importance of creativity in learning. The Foundation Series by Issac Asimov — Reveals the subtle seduction of mystery. Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane — Teaches the importance of translating across mediums. Crane took a few new principles of art and applied them deliberately to his writing. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain — Be frank. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahme — Sophisticated doesn’t mean better and simplicity is charming. The Fountain Head by Ayn Rand — Teaches the value individuality. Who Has Seen the Wind by W.O. Mitchel — Captures the senses by story — a great goal. A few others are non-fiction but also non-business: The Complete Book of Etiquette by Amy Vanderbilt (1967) — Manners are important. So is the timeless value of creative wit. The Mavericks by Paul Grescoe — Learn to tell business stories. Walden Pond by Henry David Thoreau — Highlights the rare capacity to look inside for understanding of what’s in front of us and to look outside to understand what is inside of us. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Business book list for entrepreneurs Monday, March 28th, 2005 I love books. I just counted and I have 476 on my shelf (of which I’ve read about 200). Having so many and so little time, I’ve begun to get choosey when considering new purchasess. I’ve started the prize-winners rule for all “non-business” type books (i.e. Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Hugo) but for business books it’s hard to narrow the field. For this I rely on the opinions of others and below I’ve posted the running list I’ve got on my blackberry. It’s the compilation of several lists I’ve seen around and some I’ve found myself. I’ve marked with a star the books I already have and two stars the books I’ve read. Please suggest others you think should be on the list. If you don’t like this list, click the picture below. Each book is related in some way to the word entrepreneur. Click on any book to get its description. Order any book in the picture from Amazon. Book list: A New Brand World by Scott Bedbury and Stephen Fenichell A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson Crucial Confrontations by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, Switzler Die Broke by Stephen Pollan, Mark Levine - Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt Eloquence in an Electronic Age by Kathleen Hall Jamieson Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte Essentials of Accounting by by Robert Newton Anthony and Leslie K. Pearlman First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman Flawless Consulting by Peter Block - Getting Things Done by David Allen - Getting To Yes by Fisher, Ury, and Patton Good to Great by Jim Collins - How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations by Thomas Stewart. Management Strategy by Alfred Marcus Mass Affluence by Paul Nunes and Brian Johnson Mastery by George Leonard Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham, Donald O. Clifton On Competition by Michael Porter On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins On Writing Well by William Zinsser Product Development for the Lean Enterprise by Michael N. Kennedy Seeing What’s Next by Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth, Scott D. Anthony Smart Mobs by Howard Goldstein. Statistics by David Freedman, Robert Pisani, Roger Purves - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch - The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki - The Bootstrapper’s Bible by Seth Godin - The Cluetrain Manifesto by Christopher Locke, et al The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber The Essays of Warren Buffett by Warren E. Buffett, Lawrence A. Cunningham - The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker - The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox - The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson The New, New Thing by Michael Lewis. The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking by Barbara Minto The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker The Seven Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler The Story Factor by Annette Simmons The Substance of Style by Virginia Postrel The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surioweicki Trading Up by Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske Will & Vision: How Latecomers Grow to Dominate Markets by Gerard J. Tellis, Peter N. Golder, Clayton Christensen Wisdom Tales From Around the World by Heather Forest - Working With Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) 13+ questions for pitchers Monday, March 28th, 2005 I’m on the hunt for guidance on the all important, little exercised art of 60-second pitching. Yesterday’s initial landscape got me started but I still need to put the pitch together. In June of last year Brad Feld scooped from Chris Wand a list of questions each entrepreneur should answer before making a pitch. The pitch they had in mind was one to VC’s but the questions are fairly generic and eminently suitable for all pitch drafters. It seems to me that an answer each question would be valuable for many things other than pitching too. The answers will not only inform your presentation but having ready answers will help you imbue with confidence anybody that let’s you get past the opening play. Questions to address in your pitch: 1) What is your vision? - What problem are you solving and for whom?- Where do you want to be in the future? 2) What and how big is your market opportunity? - How big is the market opportunity you are pursuing and how fast is it growing?- How established (or nascent) is the market?- Do you have a credible claim on being one of the top two or three players in the market? 3) Describe your product or service - What is your product/service?- How does it solve your customer’s problem?- What is unique about your product/service? 4) Who is your customer? - Who are your existing customers?- Who is your target customer?- What defines an “ideal” customer prospect?- Who actually writes you the check?- Use specific customer examples where possible. 5) What is your value proposition? - What is your value proposition to the customer?- What kind of ROI can your customer expect by using buying your product/service?- What pain are you eliminating?- Are you selling vitamins, aspirin or antibiotics? (I.e. a luxury, a nice-to-have, or a need-to-have) 6) How are you selling? - What does the sales process look like and how long is the sales cycle?- How will you reach the target customer? What does it cost to “acquire” a customer?- What is your sales, marketing and distribution strategy?- What is the current sales pipeline? 7) How will you acquire customers? - What is your cost to acquire a customer?- How will this acquisition cost change over time and why?- What is the lifetime value of a customer? 8) Who is your management team? - Who is the management team?- What is their experience?- What pieces are missing and what is the plan for filling them? 9) What is your revenue model? - How do you make money?- What is your revenue model?- What is required to become profitable? 10) What stage of development are you at? - What is your stage of development? Technology/product? Team? Financial metrics/revenue?- What has been the progress to date (make reality and future clear)?- What are your future milestones? 11) Who is your competition? - Who is your existing & likely competition?- Who is adjacent to you (in the market) that could enter your market (and compete) or could be a co-opted partner?- What are their strengths/weaknesses?- Why are you different? 12) What partnerships do you have? - Who are your key distribution and technology partners (current & future)?- How dependent are you on these partners? 13) Other - What assumptions are key to the success of the business?- What “gotchas” could change the business overnight? New technologies, new market entrants, change in standards or regulations?- What are your company’s weak links? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) The quest for a 60-second pitch Sunday, March 27th, 2005 One of my friends is a teacher. He’s told me many times that the best way to learn something is to explain it to someone else. Well I want to learn to do a 60-second pitch, so here goes. Over the next seven days I intend to write (or liberally copy other people) on the following topics: 1+7 Steps to pitching an idea 13+ questions for pitchers Put the pitch together 60-second pitch: The 10 point outline 60-second pitch: The first 10 seconds 60-second pitch: The three biggest mistakes Presenting the bigger small picture The overview Today: 1+7 steps to pitching an idea. This is a summary of Scott Berkum’s essay “How to Pitch an Idea”. So you’ve got a great idea, what are you up against when you want to make it happen? Start with the principles of physics and work from there. Any real change must first address the force of inertia, the resistance an object has to a change in its state of motion. Objects (and people) at rest tend to stay at rest and getting them moving requires an astonishing amount energy. Here’s Scott’s advice (and a bit of my own): Step 0: Create and refine the idea “The classic mistake of would be idea pitchers is to pitch the idea well before it’s ready. When most people find an interesting idea, they’re quickly seduced by their egos into doing silly and non productive things, like annoying the pants off of everyone they come into contact with by telling them how amazing their new idea is. The thrill of being clever is so strong that they forget the fact that there are 100 interesting ideas bouncing around for every single truly good idea. ” To move from plebeian to highbrow requires some work. Especially important is sorting through how and when the work is done. You need to define how this idea can move from the abstract to the tangible. Scott says to “Always remember that moving from an interesting but vague idea, to specific and actionable is the difficult part of creation and invention.” Step 1: What is the scope of the idea? “Big ideas require more change to take place on someone’s part, and all things being equal, this means the pitch must be more thorough (or your approach more bold & risky). The stakes are higher.” Step 2: Who has the power to green light the idea? “Make a list of the people that are potential recipients of your pitch. Base this list on two criteria: who has the power needed to implement the idea, and who you might have access to.” One thing that never grows old is the miracle of networks. Jump onto some networking app like LinkedIn to see how easy it can be to reach people you’d have previously thought of as untouchable. It’s amazing to realize how easy it can be to leverage your network and reach people with the power you need. Step 3: Start with their perspective “Put your pitch aside. How do they think about the world? What kinds of things are they probably interested in? What is their typical day like? How many unsolicited pitches do they receive a day? Consider how the person you’re trying to pitch views the world, and keep it in mind while developing your pitch.” Step 4: The structure of the pitch Always formulate 3 levels of depth to pitching your idea: 5 seconds, 60 seconds, 5 minutes. “The 5 second version is the most concise single sentence formulation of whatever your idea is. Refine your thinking until you can say something intelligent and interesting in a short sentence.” If you can’t get this done, you’re not trying hard enough. It’s easy to be lazy here, but not near as easy as it is to summarize in one word the response you’ll get otherwise: No. The 60 second and 5 minute versions are just extensions of the 5 second version. Add more detail and explain how you deliver on your 5 second pitch. Step 5: Test the pitch “Get out of your office / cubicle / apartment, and go find smart people you know to give you feedback. From your pitch tests, develop a list of questions you expect to be asked during the pitch, and be prepared to answer them.” This is another spot where laziness is a huge temptation. It’s easy to mull it over in your head or to just stop with asking the person closest to you. But what you really need is the feedback of many people including some that don’t have a clue about your business. Step 6: Deliver “The best delivery advice I can offer is to make sure you spend some time preparing for a positive response. What happens if they say ‘That’s an interesting idea. What do you want from me?’ Do you want money? Other resources? A change in the project plan? A feature added to the feature list? Know what the sequence of steps are after they agree you have a good idea and be ready to ask for them.” Step 7: What to do when the pitch fails “When things don’t go well [you need to] harvest as much value from the attempt as possible. Always leave failed pitches with an understanding of what went wrong. Which points didn’t they agree with? Which of your assumptions did they refute? In many cases, you might learn there are criteria for green lighting ideas in your organization that you didn’t know about.” I think this list is a great start. It’s an overview of all the pieces between brainwave and getting down to steel tacks. But it leaves unanswered the difficult question: How do I make the pitch I need to make? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Copy cat Sunday, March 27th, 2005 Update: Dr. Ronald S. Burt from the University of Chicago backs up everything written here and adds his idea about “structural holes” — the notion that people can find opportunities for creative thinking where there is no social structure. My favorite line: Don’t worry about people preempting your ideas because “people are like sheep eating grass. They’re so focused on what’s right in front of them, they don’t look for the whole.” In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond takes a look at the diffusion of language writing systems. He notes that in our past we have surprisingly few root languages. He suggests two major reasons for this. First, devising a writing system is an immensely challenging undertaking when done from scratch. Diamond found that the most effective way to get a writing system is to copy one. The second reason is that the greatest competitive advantages of writing systems come from having one where none existed, not from incremental improvements. Basically, just having one is good enough, there’s insufficient incentive thereafter to make your own. Nothing mind shattering here but I do think Diamond’s thesis has implications for the way we view innovation today. When we need solutions we should look out first, then in. And when we don’t have one, any one will do, and you can fix it up later if you need to. But, there’s some more lessons related to language we can learn from – in our search for solutions we seem to have this ingrained bias that causes us to ignore the innovations of other cultures. Diamond points out that there are clear competitive advantages to having a writing system: “Knowledge is power, hence writing brought power to modern societies by making it possible to transmit knowledge with far greater accuracy and far greater quantity of detail from a great distance.” Of communication from monarchs to merchants, usability of maps, and commands during war: “these types of information were transmitted by other means in pre-literate societies, but writing made it easier, more accurate, and more persuasive.” Illiterate societies were living right beside literate ones. And when wars started, the literate societies won. How come one culture could read and write while their neighbours didn’t have a clue? It seems innovation is somewhat of a cultural phenomenon. Diamond shows that attitudes to innovation vary enormously within societies, on the same continent. He compares tribes within New Guinea, North America, and Australia to show that side-by-side tribes often have opposite attitudes to innovation. And in nearly every case, the innovating tribe enjoys great advantage. Innovation also varies within societies over time. For example, Islamic societies today tend to lag technologically, but they were, at one time, leading the world in innovation. Islamic societies had the highest literacy rates and adopted technologies prodigiously: trigonometry, metallurgy, mechanical engineering, paper, and gunpowder. Only after 1500 AD did the flow of innovation flip to European nations. So here’s what to do if your culture lacks innovation. First, find a sales guru. Second, copy someone else’s invention. Diamond thinks one of the conditions of innovation is having sales-savvy entrepreneurs. He suggests the old saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention”, may not be sufficient. He would have us add: Innovation is often in search of a salesman. Using examples like gasoline as a waste product, sand turned to glass in fireplaces, and even discarded tins cans put to use by New Guinea tribes – Diamond suggests that in many societies “an inventor he has to persuade society to adopt innovations. Merely having bigger, faster, more powerful devices is no guarantee of ready acceptance.” To be accepted the invention needs to be economically advantageous compared to existing technologies, offer social value and prestige, and these advantages must be easily observed. Basically, if it doesn’t bang you on the head with obvious, immediate advantages – it’s not going to sell itself. Having sales people isn’t enough. There’s got to be some inventions to sell. But where to get them? Somewhere else. Diamond observes that by setting innovation as a random variable, over a large enough area, at a particular time, a portion of every society is very innovative. If half the challenge of innovation is communicating its value and someone else is always innovating, then building creative teams may not be nearly as efficient as building widely cast, open-minded sifting technologies to scour the universe for innovation hotspots and blueprinting those technologies for use at home. As Diamond says, complex innovations are best borrowed, not built. Because technology begets technology, the value of diffusion often exceeds the value of original invention. This is good. It’s exactly what I think sift is for – sifting for things that work and cross-walking those lessons into areas that aren’t. So there you have it – sift is efficient, helps make sales easier, and is more likely to result in success than any R&D investment. Sounds good to me. (graphic leached from www.ocean-park.org) Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (4) Conditions of success Monday, March 21st, 2005 On the heels of my heartfelt yop - Frickin’ amazing vs. the long tail - as if guided by benevolent deities, I found “What really works.” With bemused resignation I note the publication date of July 2003 - if I am late, at least I’m earnest. “What really works” by Nitin Nohria, Willian Joyce and Bruce Roberson (published by Harvard Business Review) lays out a “winning combination for business success”. This, of course, is exactly what we’re after. The key is the 4+2 formula and its built on five years of research, the work of 50 academics and the stories of 160 companies. These are the basics (not the frickin’ amazings) that make for winners. Every successful company must be all of the following: strategic, able to execute, frothing with culture, and simply structured. This company must also be any two of these four: plugged unto bursting with talent, innovative, lead as though by divinity (which is clearly one thing sift has going for it), and/or savvy in mergers and partnerships. The successful company is clear on its strategy and clearly communicates that strategy to its customers, employees and shareholders. “It begins with a simple, focused value proposition that is rooted in deep, certain knowledge about your company’s target customers and a realistic appraisal of your own capacities.” A clear strategy will help screen decisions. It will help determine which opportunities to pursue. It will line up action with the core business and prevent drift. A steady winner is about twice as productive as the industry average and pays focused attention to execution. The successful company figures out where it really shines and focuses on making those processes as efficient and effective as possible. The study made it clear that culture was important, but probably not in the way you imagine. I anticipated a riff on casual dress, open-concept networks and lots of hippy love but their work shows that promoting fun isn’t near as important as promoting champions. Every highly successful company glorifies high performance and ethical behaviour. 90% of winning companies linked the pay check to the score board. No bonuses, no stock options, and no rewards unless targets are met. Every winning company ruthlessly purges every last vestige of vigour-sapping, innovation-cramping bureaucracy. Extra layers of management, unnecessary rules and silly processes where hacked out with the same veracity usually reserved for mosquitoes and other blood-sucking transgressors. So there’s the four prerequisites to success. Where’s frickin’ amazing or for that matter innovation, first movers, and niche domination? We’re getting to that - well, one of them. Sequestered in the “+2? are four options. Pick two, any two. A successful company either: hires and holds top talent; focuses on finding brand new products, ideas or technologies; is lead by a CEO focused on relationships and able to spot opportunities/problems early; or regularly (on a small scale) makes deals to leverage existing customer relationships or complement company strengths. Interesting aspects to note include: top talent most often comes from inside the company, innovation barely ranked as one of the top four characteristics, and only 22% of winners used mergers and acquisitions successfully. This suggests top talent and great leadership were the key two of the last four. So, what does this mean for the sift experiment - after all I focus almost exclusively on innovation (and insight). Well, first, they use innovation to mean brand new products or ideas. I don’t. I think innovation includes new ways to do old things. It also includes new clients for old products. Second, I focus on innovation as an end result of better sifted information - clearer strategy, better execution, and bureaucracy killing insights are also positive results. So much for sift, what about you as entrepreneur? Laser-like focus is required and this is where many entrepreneurs fall down. You might need to bring in some help - hire an adviser on retainer. A good adviser can help you stick handle through the many distractions, propositions, and opportunities the lead either to strategic drift, crap execution, and the need for bureaucracy. Another place many entrepreneurs fail is the breeding and rewarding of talent. Many bootstrappers hire cheap people and demand top performance - bad idea. Others hire great people but keep the performance based rewards to themselves - again, short-sighted decision. Two principles of economics play here. First, if it’s cheap that’s because nobody wants it - this includes people. Second, performance requires incentives - an extra dollar is hard to beat. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Play Monday, March 21st, 2005 Philip Pullman, Common sense has much to learn from moonshine in the Guardian: “It’s when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won’t make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It’s when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading.” He’s writing about grammar and proofreading and their best place in the education of children learning to write. He is criticising educators for putting the two first instead of second in the creative process. And using an extensive research project as his foundation he suggests that writing is best taught “in a meaningful context: writing as a practical hands-on craft activity.” I think the same applies to work. This is why the experiment is a brilliant context for learning business. Pullman concludes: “True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility. If you love something, you want to look after it. Common sense has much to learn from moonshine.” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Sift Technology: Similar Feeds Monday, March 21st, 2005 I keep a ongoing list of sift technologies: Little apps that are miraculous, instantaneous information sorters. Andrew Grumet has made several that enjoy eminence in this category. The one with the most quiescent potential is “Similar Feeds.” Type in your favourite blog and this app sorts 55,000 of the most fashionable feeds by similarity to the one you chose. But that’s not all, you can reduce the popularity by a mysterious but nifty popularity gradient. That way you get only those that are in vogue or those few that remain outliers. This is latent power at your fingertips. Want to expand your feed list? This is a wonderful first stop. Grumet’s app is a niche identifier too. Got a favourite blog and there’s only one or two similar? You just found a niche. Niches, in a nanoeconomics world, are (can be) goldmines. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Frickin’ amazing vs. the long tail Sunday, March 20th, 2005 Maybe this is an old idea. Maybe I’m the last kid on the block to get it, but it seems to me that “frickin’ amazing” is the new normal and it’s not getting us much. Read the marketing gurus. They talk endlessly about being amazing. And I’ve been giving myself headaches trying to figure out how both my clients can jolt themselves into that elite level of prestige. Plagued by that never-attainable-goal I read Evelyn’s quiz about amazing vs. meaningful. Here’s one line: Name five Nobel prize winners. K, now name five people teachers who changed your life. Frickin’ amazing gets beat by meaningful everytime. As Evelyn said, “Accolades and awards are buried with their owners.” When it gets right down to it, what is every entrepreneur trying to do? Make an independent living. There’s other drivers in the mix, but without this one all the rest will starve along with the entrepreneur. But when I look at where my disposable income gets spent hardly any of it goes to frickin’ amazing things. I don’t own an i-pod; I have a walkman I bought used in 1996. I don’t have a bespoke tailor; I bought my last suit at Mexx. My shoes are from Globo but they’re indistinguishable from my friend’s outrageously expensive, Parisian soles. I buy my coffee at Starbucks, but they’re a commodity now, right? I’ve purchased every Pulitzer Prize winner and every Nobel Prize winning author’s book I own in a used book store down the street. So, if it’s not frickin’ amazing, what am I buying? Simplicity, elegance, practicality, affordability, and classic endurance. Where are these ingredients found? Most often in the long tail. It’s easy to confuse innovation and insight with virility. But virility, audacity and surprise quickly become normal. Insights can produce brilliance or simplicity. Innovation can mean previously unseen or suddenly useful. The economics say there’s longevity in the latter rather than the former. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (3) Info by the ship-load Saturday, March 19th, 2005 Oh hey, this looks pretty good! Aggregation a la PEI. Robert Paterson and Jevon MacDonald have started Marketing Filter and it has the promise of being an helpful sift technology. Some interesting points are raised in the comments. In particular Alan’s questions are sharp. He asks: “Is there not an issue of when a marketing blog is not actually blogging about marketing? If the aggregator does not vet posts you are subject to the focus of the bloggers from whom you draw content. “I do not think the model is adaptable to all topics, it is?” I’ve got a couple questions too: How does this not get too big too? Robert and company are trying to solve the challenge of information overload. But they’ve chosen “marketing” as their experimental field and while that is probably a good marketing move in itself the field is gigantic, ill-defined and ever-evolving. I understand that they will use a core group of bloggers to sift marketing ideas but they also plan on grabbing emerging writers too. Won’t it get big fast? And Alan hints at another concern: What about vetting? How do you vet without understanding your client? I’m loving the idea of Marketing Filter but I think it really has legs if the filter can be tailored to specific clients. It’d be like a choose-your-own-adventure but for feeds. It’s really a two part challenge. What information is new and needed? Why is that information usefil. sift is about doing this second part. I provide three basic services around information: I understand your information needs. I find information you need. I translate information to help you understand why you need it. What I’d really like is to partner up with some savvy aggregator dudes and just help with the translation: Robert and co? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) What question lies at the heart of your work? Saturday, March 19th, 2005 In Presence: Human purpose and the field of the future, Peter Senge and others asked leading scientists and business and social entrepreneurs, “What question lies at the heart of your work?” Jumps out out at you eh? Makes you sort of coil up inside and groan a bit. If I was standing in front of you asking the question you’d scuff your feet, roll your eyes, stare at the ceiling and say, “Geez, that’s a good question.” It is a good question. But that’s the point: What’s your good question? Earlier this week I summarised Paul Lawrence’s and Nitin Nohria’s four drivers of human nature. The drivers are acquisition, bonding, learning and defending. Inside each driver is a question: How to get? How to stick? How to know? How to keep? If you’re going to be strategic you need to know what question lies at the heart of your work. If you want to be successful you need to know how your answer puts wheels under the four drivers of human nature. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Information overload Friday, March 18th, 2005 When I started sift I was working with two entrepreneurs that seemed to be working about 12 hours daily. Being so busy, these guys weren’t able to keep up with the massive amount of information available to them. My idea was to stand between them and that deluge, be keeper of the gate, and help them keep on top of what they needed to know. Mary Hodder wrote a personal post about this challenge early in January. I’ve paraphrased it and some of the comments and reposted here. Mary’s personal anxiety about information overload describes the personal challenge in front of entrepreneurs. But consider how magnified this pressure becomes when the livelihood of your business depends on sifting that information. “With information, ideas, expressions online, networks of activity and the desire to watch the behaviour, events, second order information tools, and my desire to write myself, in this and other blogs and in papers, I have felt pressure, to keep running ahead of the production of information, to keep apprehending it and then processing it, thinking about the deeper meaning, and yet there is so much, I cannot. “Young people seem to take in smaller, more granular bits of information, as though they are rocks skimming across a lake, touching down briefly for a bit of information before the next lift off to the next dip for something. “And the difference, I wonder, might be because those older were educated by parents and schools situated in the analog metaphor, where a classic book, Lord Jim by Conrad (one of my favourites), is read over and over, in a search for multiple layers of meaning and experience. Because of this training, my instinct initially was to read the flood of digital information as closely and deeply, looking for and ascribing meaning, even if not at quite the same level as when reading a classic novel. “But those who are younger, and have grown up with the flood of the digital, may be less educated toward that kind of apprehension and desire to ascribe the same kind of meaning and depth to everything, maybe because while their parents and teachers reside in analog frameworks of their own, those younger are balancing that kind of apprehension with their experience online of granular, digital bits that are skimmed.” Comments: “The best way to respond is to be more selective in what gets there in the first place. “Not completely closed filters, because we need serendipity to discover new concepts and ideas, but a judicious selection of sources.” – “I’ve been thinking about it as an information food pyramid. At the base level of the pyramid is a huge amount of raw data that is somewhat overwhelming. There are scholars and journalists who sift through that mass and extract interesting stories and useful information. Then there are second and third-order information consumers who take the results of those first-order consumers and process it themselves. I’ve been calling them ‘information carnivores’. “In most cases, it’s an advantage to live higher up the pyramid. It’s more efficient and takes less time to keep up with the information flood. And, as you note, you can always drill back down to the primary data when you want to reflect more deeply. The disadvantage of looking only at processed information is that you have to worry about the biases and inaccuracies that may have accumulated in the processing stage.” – “I am in the ‘younger generation’ group you were referring to. In high school we are given, for the most part, busy work. You skim through the pages to find the paraphrasing or term you’re looking for then, boom! You have your answer and go on to the next question. Usually there was no need to read in context to get an answer. That, in part, trained us to just skim until we found what we wanted.” After reading these comments I tried to weigh the advantages of teaching our children to skim versus teaching them to dig deeply. Of course there needs to be balance but we seem to be focusing on the former at the cost of the latter. I’d be interested in links to any studies that consider the skills the net savvy, younger generations employ to find and use the information they need. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Why are you reading this? Thursday, March 17th, 2005 About 100 people (give or take 50) read this blog everyday. And I don’t have a clue what you’re coming here to see. Outside of John Husband, Kevin, Alan, Evelyn Rodriguez, John Jantsch (only because I poked fun of him), and about five guys enamoured with their penises, new pharmaceuticals, and poker - I haven’t even heard a murmur from the bleachers. I do this for two reasons. First, because I wanted to see if these ideas sang with anyone - it sings with 100 silent people per day. Second, because it’s a perfect incentive for me to actually do something with all the stuff I read. But why do you come? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (4) Core Competency: Negotiation Thursday, March 17th, 2005 Negotiation is the art of making someone offer as a gift that which is your chief design to secure and for many bootstrapping entrepreneurs it’s a core competency. James K. Sebenius in “Six Habits of Merely Effective Negotiators” (HBR, April 2001) lays out four keys to negotiation: 1. Focus on the full set of interests of all parties. 2. Look beyond common ground to unearth value-creating differences. 3. Assess and shape best alternatives to negotiated agreements. 4. Avoid role biases and partisan perceptions. Use these guidelines to nail down your problem: understanding and influencing the other side’s decision in a way that it chooses what you want. Negotiation is all about trying to get the the other side to say yes for its reasons, not yours. This requires understanding and addressing the other side’s problems as a means of solving your own. By building an understanding of the other side’s concerns you can flesh out a shared vision for the issue at hand, investigate the key concerns of each side (including price) and craft trade-offs among the full set of issues to meet their interests. You want to start by sharing the view of the other side and conclude with them sharing your own. Books recommended on negotiating: Art and Science of Negotiation by Howard Raiffa The Manager as Negotiator by David Lax and James Sebenius Negotiating Rationally by Max Bazerman and Margaret Neale 3-D Negotiation: Creating and Claiming Value for the Long Term by David Lax and James K. Sebenius Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Innovation Weblog Thursday, March 17th, 2005 I’m a bit late putting this up but Chuck Frey at the Innovation Weblog posted a helpful review of, you guessed it, innovation in 2004. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Acquire, bond, learn and defend Wednesday, March 16th, 2005 From the book, Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, by Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria: Lawrence and Nohria spin together lessons from biology and social sciences to describe a theory of human nature. The lessons they highlight apply to every relationship we navigate and so, there’s good lessons here for the entrepreneur. Our choices are driven by a desire to acquire, bond, learn, and defend. Acquiring: builds on competition for scarce resources. Bonding: includes sharing tasks, joint performance and being part of a group. Balancing acquisition and bonding is key. Inherent in this balance is a tension between cut-throat competition and respectful relationships. Think dodge-ball: Try to tell nine-year-old boys that everyone wins - no game. Try to play without rules - utter chaos. Combine winners and losers with clear boundaries: favourite-sport-of-all-time. In the second half of the equation lives learning and defending. Learning scratches the itch of curiosity - the drive to resolve the gap between the known and the unknown. And defending means fending off attacks both internal and external - this is mine, screw off. Defending is different than competition. Defending involves a legitimate claim of ownership. Competition spins on strongest player wins. Their nature overlaps but each are distinct. Together these four drives define how we make choices. We need to be engaged and engage others in all four drives. For the entrepreneur quality, resonance, novelty, and reliability must justify the price. Similarly, the relation between entrepreneurs and their suppliers, to remain sustainable, need to engage both buyers and sellers in all four drives. But the lesson really hits home when you catch an entrepreneur boot-strapping. The clueless don’t understand these drives but the artful play these drivers without dropping a single dime. Acquire, bond, learn and defend - criteria for the successful entrepreneur. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Proportion Wednesday, March 16th, 2005 Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain “The wonderful thing about France is how all her perfections harmonize so fully together. She has possessed all the skills, from cooking to logic and theology, from bridge-building to contemplation, from vine-growing to sculpture, from cattle-breeding to prayer: and possessed them more perfectly, separately and together, than any other nation.” Whether or not you agree with Merton’s loving description of his homeland - More perfectly, separately and together is a beautiful way to describe proportion. When I read this I immediately thought of business. Not business the enterprise but business the art. As in any other art, proportion matters to business and it is little recognized. Often the entrepreneur is not a master of insights or innovations but a master of proportions. This much finesse, a touch of brazen marketing, 3/4 of quality and some blasphemous ambition: success. I constantly marvel at the things my entrepreneurial friends can sell. As an academic/theorist/tactician I’ve trained myself to fight to the heights of perfection. Perfection doesn’t sell but proportion does. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Be insightful Saturday, March 12th, 2005 Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution “Today you can buy knowledge by the pound — from consultants hawking best practice, from the staff you’ve just hired from your competitor, and from all those companies that hope you will outsource everything. Yet in the age of revolution it is not knowledge that produces new wealth, but insight — insight into opportunities for dis-continuous innovation. Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination. You must become your own seer.” I don’t want to sell you insights. I want to help you be insightful. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) sift happens Saturday, March 12th, 2005 Here’s a quick and dirty summary some work I’ve been doing with a company. I use some simple analysis to illustrate the impact of sift. By the start of 2004 the company was two years old and employed five people. Around this time my company, sift, started to help develop and execute strategies. Over the past year sift provided: 17 e-zine articles, 43 national newspaper articles, 4,800 words of web text and 18,000 words of print, and More than 200 updates on emerging trends. It’s tough to separate the influence of sift from the natural growth this young company would enjoy without any help at all. The company was already on a rapid growth curve before sift delivered a single product. But, like any good marketer, I use this analysis to liberally hog the credit for almost every whiff of success. I’ve tried to be plainly honest and avoid any suave economic juggling. In the end it’s plain that a two-year sample from the life of this small is insufficient to do much more than muse about possible impacts. What happened in 2004? In the figures, revenue is on an index using the month closest to the annual average (September in this case). In 2004, the company averaged about $9,000 more per month relative to 2003. In 2004, annual revenue increased 33%. What about plain old growth? To avoid being mysterious, I ran the index from January 2003 to December to 2004 and used October 2003 as the base year. This helps show the year-by-year growth. On the right the linear trendline is gradually increasing. Though it falters a bit, growth really begins in earnest around May – June 2004. So what drove these results? sift – at least in part. Starting in March sift began providing strategic advice to this company. Preceding the June peak, sift rewrote the company website. Consultations rose 38%. Web traffic jumped 41%. Starting in September, sift wrote 17 articles which the company submitted to a national newspaper. Consultations rose 29%. Web traffic jumped 16%. In October sift also began editing the company’s weekly e-zine. When articles were picked up by the Globe & Mail, msn.ca, and other magazines – web traffic sky-rocketed by as much as 300%. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Business by numbers Wednesday, March 9th, 2005 Brad, at Feld Thoughts, writes about the importance of business measures. I’m glad he did because it confirms some recent suspicions I’ve been having. Let’s compare three of my favourite entrepreneurs. The first is a lawyer who loves his numbers. The second is a graphic artist who’s company making some neat transitions. And the last is one of the most insightful and creative entrepreneurs I know. Two questions for each of them. What’s your favourite innovation last year? How much do you worry about money? Lawyer: Favourite innovation - “A fax/copy/printer machine that saves me six cents per page.” Money worries - “Uhm, how to use it all wisely. I started with none 4 years ago, now I haven’t enough time to manage it wisely.” Graphic designer: Favourite innovation - “Recognizing how badly companies need help with their public image.” Money worries - “Not bad today, but for the last 10 years it’s been brutal.” Creative phenom: Favourite innovation - “These six cool, new services we cranked out last month.” Money worries - “This is my third start-up in eight years and I’m always wonder where’s all the money going, why am I working so hard, and I need more cash!” It’s tough to make a direct comparison across these guys, but their attitudes to business numbers are nearly polar. The lawyer is obsessed by numbers and the creative juggernaut doesn’t think much beyond his target income this month. Interestingly, their concerns about cash flow are just as polar but flipped. The lawyer is not too concerned and the creative company is burning lots of bandwidth trying to deal with the pinch. And right in the middle is the creative, transitioning graphic designer. He recently completed an accounting course so he could “get a better handle on what his accountant is saying.” He hired a writer to fill in other gaps in his business. He’s ready for movement. Brad writes, “While it’s easy to get lost in ‘data’ rather than synthesizing and understanding ‘information’, I find way too many early stage companies measuring very little - thinking this is something that ‘only big companies do’.” It’s easy to get lost in data and it’s easy to be run by numbers. The beauty of early stage companies is the ability to move rapidly in new directions. And the love of movement sometimes distracts entrepreneurs from measuring if that movement is profitable. Good news: Creative juggernaut asked for some help with an experiment. We’re going to firm up his books, nail down a strategy and put updates on the impacts here. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Leeches and bullion Wednesday, March 9th, 2005 1) Don’t work with bad clients. 2) Don’t work with bad people. The great temptation for every entrepreneur is to take every dollar you can get and hire any cheap brain you can find. Seth Godin covers this in his Bootstrapper’s Bible. The tension between the leech and the bullion is unmistakable. And while Seth makes these points – he does advise the bootstrapper to grab every early dollar to be found. It’d be fun to analyse the trade off between a dollar now and two years with a leech client. The results would be even sharper if we compared a cheap candidate (and all the management required) with a sharp, expensive but capable candidate (low management required). Included as leech characteristics: cost of rerouting effort, time spent coaching, productivity gradients, and contacts per time unit. The benchmark would bullion clients and candidates. The analysis would describe a threshold – a no-go-zone. Each client and candidate would have a conceptual circle around them. Of course you’d work hard to keep them within the circle, but once they’re out – you’re done. Separate the leeches from the bullion often and regularly. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Checklist for entrepreneurs Monday, March 7th, 2005 Nice checklist for entrepreneurs by Guy Kawasaki. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Pure entrepreneurship Monday, March 7th, 2005 Scott Kisner, a contributing editor at Fast Company, has an interesting piece on what he calls “pure entrepreneurship.” He says pure entrepreneurship “is often driven by a belief that a major shift is coming — and thus it’s hard to find customers who already understand that they need the product a pure entrepreneur is developing.” For this reason most pure entrepreneurs forsake market analysis and head straight into production. He quotes Dan Brinklin, developer of VisiCalc, who says “Something just clicks, and you say, ‘This is worth doing, and I think other people will be interested’. It hits you that there’s a need, and that pursuing it is worth the risk.” But what I found most interesting is a line nearly lost in the middle of the text: “In February, [Brinklin] left Atlanta-based Interland, which had acquired his last company, to return to pure entrepreneurship.” It’s a rare, wise entrepreneur that understands herself well enough to walk away. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Why are you choosing this? Sunday, March 6th, 2005 “Why are you choosing this?” That’s such a gorgeous question. It’s complete answer either reveals: - all the information included in decision making,- the criteria by which choices are being made,- the rank of alternative paths to action,- the final goal in mind, and- the strategy for achieving that goal or … … it provides a simple indicator of the gaps. Either way the question gathers more important information than any other I’ve discovered. Anyone got a better one? Or at least one just as good? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Stages of entrepreneurial growth Sunday, March 6th, 2005 A few days ago I shared supper with the CEO and one of the executives of a small company here in town. The executive asked me to join them and discuss their company’s strategy — they’re navigating through a growth phase and he believed my insights would help. Turns out the CEO was fairly sceptical about anything I might suggest, so I spent a lot of the 2.5 hour meeting just listening. There’s something tremendously freeing about entering an important conversation and sitting back to let it roll on around me. To sit silent through those situations where I feel pressure to speak up, make a mark, or prove my value. For one thing, I learn a lot more. I learned about three stages of entrepreneurial growth. No one laid it out so distinctly but they seemed to spring out of the conversation on their own. Stage 1: - worried about cash flow- single, dynamic leader- driven by personal ambition and instinct- cut corners, bootstrap like madmen- work on spec regularly- everything’s an experiment Stage 2: - cash flow a minor issue- core of reasonably talented, self-motivated people is developing- entrepreneur has become manager, accountant, supervisor, and leader- instinct slowly replaced by rationality- vision threatens to be overwhelmed by managing daily challenges- experimentation replaced by reapplication of core competencies- brand awareness starts to self-generate business- main focus on quality rather than innovation Stage 3: - rationality prevails- decisions threatened by rules-based automation- hardly anything is experimental; experiments are threatening- vision replaced by mission- brand threatens to become irrelevant, commoditized, or diluted- begin considering rebranding or augmenting core competencies- entrepreneur is seeking new ventures and uses company as a stable- competing completely on cost, quality and positioning instead of innovation None of these stages are bad or good. All are necessary for a growing company. The important thing to note is that most entrepreneurs don’t have all the skills to weather each of the stages. At one point or another, each entrepreneur will have to let someone else’s skills and insights weight their decisions.I love doing this stuff! Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Like a billboard Thursday, March 3rd, 2005 In the comments for Optimists die, I wrote something about hiring “sift bandwidth”. That got me thinking of advertising and in particular billboards. There’s a billboard not far from my place that seems to be one of the most highly contested pieces of real estate in the city. Almost every second day there’s a different add on that sign. But no matter how many times that sign’s face changes - its work doesn’t change. But everytime that sign changes faces its annual salary goes up. People are competing for its time - its not. Here’s the Billboard principle: Get your clients to bid for your bandwidth. It’s related to the Sing-Like-You-Don’t-Need-the-Money principle: Get more clients than you can handle. The convergence of these two means a higher premium for the same amount of work. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Sing like you don’t need the money Thursday, March 3rd, 2005 Sharp post by John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing (by the way don’t go to his main page with Firefox, that pop-up he has is super annoying - bad marketing John! Update: John fixed his pop-up!). In a post he’s named “Sing like you don’t need the money” John writes: “Generate more leads, more opportunities, more clients than you can possibly serve, and then raise your prices. Here’s the theory – If I have more demands on my time than I can meet. I can look someone squarely in the eye and name my price, because I don’t “have” to get the order. It also allows you to work only with clients you enjoy. Too many business owners find themselves enslaved by maniac clients that rob them of their value. Just say no can apply to marketing too. … nothing is more appealing than security. If a potential client sniffs even a whiff of desperation, your selling effort will move away from your terms and you won’t have the guts to name your price. So, the moral of the story? No matter how much business you think you have, no matter how many times the phone rings in a day, keep generating new leads and opportunities. The only way to demand more for the same effort is to create more demand for more or you. And then, sell like you don’t need the money”. More options than you can handle. Good advice. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (3) I hate this = $$$ Friday, February 25th, 2005 When I was in graduate school I read an article describing the innovation methods of a successful entrepreneur. He keeps a hate list. It’s a list of everything he and his friends hate with all the violence of a bang-your-knuckles-when-your-wrench-slips cursing spree. Every Saturday he sits down and solves at least one of the problems. His entire fortune is built on Saturday solutions. I was reminded of this today when I had lunch with the CEO of one of Canada’s most successful biotechnology companies. We talked innovation and I asked how he got the ideas for his research projects. Leaning back in his chair, arms casually placed behind his head, he says, “I start by asking people their problems. Then I follow up with something that solves the problem.” Irish accent trawling, “Then I give it to the guy with the problem.” Big grin, leans forward, eyes on me. “That’s working right nice for us.” He goes on to tell me that his competitors use the “find it, find a market” model. Most biotech companies do mass genetic research, struggle to find potentially useful genes, then spin the research into ventures that struggle. There’s a ready market for things we hate (or at least problems we vigourously dislike) So there’s a giant difference in the marketability of solutions and things we’d like to have. That’s an important difference for entrepreneurs and for me. The sift experiment is often an answer in search of a problem. And worse, its often an answer in search of a question. That’s just not sustainable. I’ll keep doing it anyway because it’s nearly costless and its good fun. But I’ve begun leveraging this work to answer problems instead of desribing them. Todays conversation nailed home the conviction that it’s time to get moving. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Big little steps Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005 Two days ago I sat down for lunch with a new friend. He recently gave up a secure job for a chance to do something new and more challenging. He’s has a lot more experience than me in almost every area of life but both of us have similar life situations: young families, employed, aching for something exceptional to invest in. His new job is also a new position in his company and both he and his boss are still sorting out its potential. So in the meantime, he’s left thinking about the potential he sees but can’t grasp and the security he had but left. So being boisterous, aggressive, and probably naïve I said he should look down the road, decide where the finishline is, and start a million little steps that get him there. Now he’s going to say I misinterpreted this next part, and if I did - fine. It’s a pervasive way of seeing the road ahead so, if it doesn’t apply to him, it applies to lots of other people. He said: “That might be fine for you, but I don’t have time to wait, I need to take big steps now.” But he doesn’t. And entrepreneurs don’t either. Three proofs that little steps are big: Proof one: On a recent episode of the CBC’s Venture series six successful Canadian entrepreneurs were interviewed. Brian Scudamore (1-800 Got Junk?) and Jimmy Pattison (Pattison Group) were two of them. All six said one of the common denominator of their success was the decision to take risks. But here’s the important part: many small, calculated risks. Proof two: The reason we haven’t cured cancer yet isn’t that we aren’t taking big enough steps. Science (and most other things) doesn’t work that way. The scientific method involves experimentation (tiny steps) because it’s the best way known to humanity for solving big problems. This is the power of the “B-side experiment“. Even though you have one job, you can fracture it into many facets and thereby increase your security (and likelihood of success). While each facet is vulnerable to failure, failure doesn’t need to threaten everything. Proof three: Singing Like You Don’t Need the Money frees you from pressure to perform by finding opportunities in many places. And moving forward sideways lets you use talents and intuition that a single, dominant path might overwhelm by approaching end goals obliquely. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Be amazing and make up for it Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005 In high-school I got two things: good grades and a growth spurt. So when I made the basketball team in my Freshman year, I was stuck in the power-forward position. Which was fine - for two years. By the time I landed in my junior year all my friends were as tall or taller than me. Suddenly I was getting pushed out of the key but lacked the skills to play well out there. One of my good friends was a monster 6'6 guy. I helped him in school and he helped me clear the area under the hoop. When lumberjacks on the other team pushed me around, he gave them a hard time. So he and I are riding in the bus one day and I’m moaning about being small and not good. He’s all mellow and listening to me whine. Finally he rolls his eyes and says, “Look Jeremy, I’m big, right? So that’s what I’m using. You’re smart - use that.”- In my last post I encouraged entrepreneurs to leverage their irrational exuberance more heavily. I also wrote about the amazing, rare skill set that makes entrepreneurs exceptional. Po Peabody offers similar advice here and in his book (from which the article is taken). Not included in the article, but included in the book, is Po’s surprising statement that entrepreneur’s are B-grade students and managers are A-grade students. Entrepreneurs lack the attention span to climb that last 15% of the mountain. As a strategy (note it’s not a solution), Po advises entrepreneurs to hire managers that compliment their strengths. And to do this early. Two points are important: First, be amazing and make up for it. A giant strength is usually accompanied by a giant weakness. This isn’t a problem though - it’s a reality. Second, acknowledge your gaps and move to round out the skill set you need by hiring good people early. Waiting too long means using brute force where finesse would suffice. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Optimists die Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005 Found on Bnoopy: a discussion of the Scotsdale Paradox. Scotsdale was a high ranking US officer captured and imprisoned during the Vietnam War. He said the first to die in the prison were the optimists. They died of a broken heart. They put all their energy into hoping for a future that never materialised in time. He says: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” Of this Bnoopy says: “Entrepreneurs are wired for optimism. But, in Stockdale’s story, it was the optimists who died. Don’t forget to balance optimism with fact and belief with reality.” I think Bnoopy’s wrong. A rational entrepreneur is already a long way to failure. Irrational exuberance is the single greatest advantage of the entrepreneur. Yet irrational exuberance is the single greatest threat to the start-up that just hit puberty. So how is this reconciled? Changing yourself isn’t the answer. You aren’t a failure. You are a success that needs help being more successful. That’s different and merits pride. Stay irrational; but get some strategic help. Bring in a rationalist to help you transition, but keep them out of your dreams. We need you just as you are. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (3) Intellectual entrepreneurship Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005 At Seb’s Open Research, Sébastien writes a beautiful, aching post about intellectual entrepreneurship. I commented that intellectual entrepreneurship was a cool way to approach the challenge of sharing innovation and insight with people. But I agreed that few would be ready to listen. One thing I’ve learned here is that people like the idea of innovation but they’re not too keen on its disciplines. And even less enthusiastic about its action. The key is hiding hiding intellectual entrepreneurship inside practical entrepreneurship. Instead of telling entrepreneurs about the philosophy or brilliance of a proposition, just talk about what it’s going to get them in the end. The intrinsic value of innovation shines through. I asked Sébastien, and I’ll leave the same question here: What have you learned about articulating innovation? What angles are working? What aspects are significant to the people you talk with? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Reading children’s books Monday, February 21st, 2005 In the comments Evelyn Rodriguez writes of her decision “to write more stories and read more stories and put most biz books on the back-burner.” She’s been writing about this theme often lately, see here, here, and here. She reminded me of a decision I made about two years ago to only read children’s books. I’d just got a job that required lots of writing. In particular I was translating economic analysis into its simple, clear implications. I thought children’s books would help. For one and a half years I read only the classics of children literature, here’s what I learned: Mystery and failure keep your attention better than endless wins. Characters with handicaps are more endearing than flawless heros. While plots tend to be generic, the details make the difference. Write the plot for children and nuance for adults. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) When “Yes” is eventually followed by “Damn!” Monday, February 21st, 2005 Poor writing is traditionally the plague of academia. So glory is due Gal Zauberman (University of North Carolina) and John Lynch Jr. (Duke University) for a great problem statement: When “Yes” is eventually followed by “Damn!” Zauberman and Lynch are experimental psychologists who examined why we imagine that the future will be less hectic than today. They also asked if the same delusion applied to investments of money. Old and recent research suggests that multiple goals competing for limited resources are a problem not soon to disappear. Zauberman and Lynch proposed that in these situations people prefer greater future investments to smaller immediate ones. Note: Us economists figured this out a long time ago. We put these ideas together and called it the time value of money. But as a group we’re pleased that others are getting the message. Zauberman and Lynch suggest immediate gains win over future gains under the following two conditions: (a) Immediate investment blocks other, proximate activated goals that require the same resource, and (b) in the future, more slack is anticipated and thus less is sacrificed. Surprising, at least to some, is the conclusion that while the principle applies to both time and money, time is discounted more heavily than cash. So, why do people doggedly adhere to the illusion that they will have more time in the future than today? And why is the perception of money immune to this mirage? The answer seems to pivot on fungibility. Time is less fungible than money. If you’re short on cash (and you have a good credit rating) you can borrow. There’s no such thing as borrowed time. You can save money; you can’t bank time. But it is possible to rearrange time in the future. One can work in advance or use holiday time so “it is so easy to persuade us to give talks at other schools, write tenure letters, serve on committees, comment on each others’ papers, and so forth when requests are made far in advance. But in the immediate future, time is much less fungible”. In part the reluctance to endure immediate pain is due to reluctance to give up on active goals (and the fulfilling satisfaction of their completion) in the near term. It’s a strategic choice in the short-term that has dire consequences in the future. While saying yes to a long-term commitment may have a momentary reward, it is often the case that those tasks have no long-term payoff. Update: If it’s true that you’re busy today because you’re successful, tomorrow will be worse. Your success today will bring new opportunities tomorrow. Therefore, the best time to do something important is right now. Found via businesspundit. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Stories Monday, February 21st, 2005 Cluetrain Manifesto, David Weinburger: “We don’t need more information. We don’t need better information. We don’t need automatically filtered and summarized information. We need understanding. We desperately want to understand what’s going on in our business, in our markets. And understanding is not more or higher information. If you want understanding, you have to reenter the human world of stories. If you don’t have a story, you don’t have understanding.” Update: Rich Karlgaard of Forbes writes: “Personally, I won’t read a business book. I spent too many years reading such piffle, underlining and highlighting “salient” points, taking notes and promptly forgetting everything I’d read within a week. Lessons from business books never stick. Much better learning tools are novels, history books and biographies. For me, at least, these can really teach. Why? I suppose it’s because when your imagination is engaged, when you dig the lessons out yourself and connect them to your own life, the learning goes much deeper.” Understanding and imagination go together. But I’m not sure that you need to dig the lessons out yourself. In the novels, history books and biographies Rich reads the authors did the digging. They’re making money by doing the sharing. Found via Evelyn. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (3) Info triple play Sunday, February 20th, 2005 I watched this video clip a few minutes ago and immediately decided it is important. It just isn’t clear why. Here’s where I’m at so far: This guy, James Jones, has made a triple play on valuable of information. Nailing it at first he lays out why the information he holds is valuable. Catching me rounding second he repackages someone else’s information and puts it in my hands. Stomping onto third he closes the door and makes the transition from zero knowledge to niche exploitation. The why of information, the form of information, and the use of information – three keys to successful information play. So, why’s this important? Well, many entrepreneurs hold valuable information (including me). And all of us struggle to clearly nail why someone else ought to car. Even when we have good buy-in on the information we hold, we fail to leverage the information around us. Repackaging knowledge we use and giving it to our clients is good for everybody. Finally, telling the newly endowed knowledge holder what to do with the information they now holder is where almost every entrepreneur (including me) falls flat. Any other ideas or lessons I missed? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Forward sideways Saturday, February 19th, 2005 Great find by Johnnie Moore, John Kay’s article on Obliquity is excellent. Kay writes that goals are often best achieved when pursued indirectly - this is the idea of obliquity. Like Johnnie it reminds me of a sports metaphor. Late last year CBC ran a show “Making the Cut.” The show followed a heap of people, mostly guys, through a torturous trial to see which six would get to try out for NHL teams. People came from all over Canada to give it a shot. Cops, firefighters, labour guys, students, ex-pre-pro players, and even one guy that played pro. This last guy got my attention. He was fat and cocky and I loved hearing him rave about his skills. During one of the first scrimmages the producers had the camera follow him around and they interviewed him after while watching the footage. His perspective has stuck with me (despite his self-proclaimed magnificence): The camera is angled wide, he’s coasting around mid-ice and he says, “Right here I’m really uptight and anxious to show these guys the difference between me as a pro and these other guys. I’m feeling like I’m out of shape and can’t keep up. I feel like I need to make a great play.” He fumbles a pass. Gets smoked on the boards. Suddenly it’s clear something changed. His face moves from strain to intensity. His clumsy gait evolves into a sure, smooth action. His next pass is crisp. He dodges a vicious younger player. “Right there I remembered why I love hockey. I just love to play. I just decided to have fun with these guys and enjoy myself.” He stopped striving; he started playing. Entrepreneurs are often brilliant in a few key areas. This brilliance carries them through the first stages of their company. But it’s not long before their gaps begin to glare. The natural reaction is to plow forward. Head down, determination burning they try to make it through with brute force. An early consequence though is they push themselves off their game. Their brilliance starts to fade. Like Johnnie says in his post, profit might look like the purpose of this bull-headed rush, but it rarely is. Most entrepreneurs start things because they love the idea and start new stuff. They start off to have fun. When then fun stops it’s time to find an oblique alternative. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Catastrophic failure? Restart. Friday, February 18th, 2005 Mistakes teach more than success. Counterintuitive? Experimentation means being willing to make mistakes. When I am willing to be wrong, I am free to explore unlikely alternatives. Alternatives are key to solving difficult problems. Imagine a scientist afraid to make mistakes. The beakers stay on the shelf (don’t want to break one). Equations are typed up, taped to walls and left unchanged. Articles remain blank pages because every nuance has yet to be considered. Imagine a pro hockey player (this is hard, we haven’t seen one in so long). Winning requires risk. Safe passes make for crap play. Fearing sneaky, unexpected attacks means never attacking. Never missing the net means never taking shots. Psychologists know that insight is a product of trial and error. When given a problem to solve, those that find solutions do so at the expense of repeated failure. Psychologists found that highly intelligent seekers of insight remain unsure of the solution until the few moments before the problem is solved. They asked test participants to give “warmth ratings” periodically while solving problems and the successful few followed this pattern: cold, cold, cold, cold, WHITE HOT!!!! Insight is not a gradual, safe process. It is a high stakes game with a steady stream of failure and restarts until a sudden solution is discovered. Mistakes lead you to insight. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Experimental sift Friday, February 18th, 2005 Andrew Phelps has a great idea. B-Side games. The idea is to package experimental games in the same boxes as the already popular. It’s an effort to drive innovation and fringe seeking. While I like that idea, I’m really interested in the application in other areas and services. Particularly excited because now I have a hip, new descriptor for sift. “What? Oh, sift is a b-side experiment.” sift is packaged beside my real job. It’s my attempt to package something innovative and experimental within something unthreatened by failure. As I go along I realize how powerful it is to assure people that I just love the gig. I don’t mind if my idea or experiment stinks. That’s the point - the not minding (not the stinking). Being experimental frees me up - I’ll try anything. It gives me the space to play my game. When all the boundaries come down, everything is an option and any idea is worth a peek. Suddenly I’m able to make connections where none existed. I don’t have to be right, so I use intuition, and then I’m right more often. What’s the application for business? First, have a flagship and don’t threaten it with any craziness on the side. Second, differentiate your products (this one’s hot, this one’s nuts). Third, seek the fringe when it doesn’t count. If you don’t then your business won’t count for long. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Produce or reproduce? Thursday, February 17th, 2005 A man of science doesn’t discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.- Alfred North Whitehead I spend a large part of each day getting information for other people. The requests come in a panic induced, chaotic deluge. And my response has become so regularised its often delivered in monotone: What do you want to know? Where did you hear about it? How do you know you want this information? What do you want to do with it? Most people know what the want to know. But it’s astounding to realise how few know what they want to do with it. The Gestalt conception of thinking includes productive thinking and reproductive thinking. Reproductive thinking involves the application of some previously acquired knowledge to a problem. These are copy-cats. Productive thinking is the ability to go beyond past experience and produce something new in response to a problem. Most people think they’re being productive when they’re being reproductive. Here’s the clincher: What you want to do with information determines whether you’re being reproductive or productive. If you want to be reproductive - the answer to my line of questions is: I read this before, I want it again. I want to use it as a template for what I’m doing now. When you’re being productive, the answer is: I have this idea, I was told this information might help me see it more clearly. It has nothing to do with what I have to deliver but it might help me do this new thing. Neither mode of thinking is better than the other. But if you want to know in order to discover and you’re only being reproductive, you’re on the wrong track. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) TED sells like Leia Thursday, February 17th, 2005 So, this sells. It sells not just because TED is cool but getting to see that guy and see TED and see the people raving is way more persuasive than reading about it. How expensive could it be to do this as a small company? I’d love to know the cost. Call me nerdy but it reminded me of the R2D2 holographic image of Princess Leia. You know, the part where she begs Obi-Wan to come save her planet. Imagine how compelling Leia would have been if Obi-Wan had read that in an email. Even IM might not have lit his saber. If she rattled her plea into his Bell Mobile Messaging Service - she’d have been stardust. Rescuing a planet is hard work; you don’t do that for just anybody. Her message sold because he could see her angst and hear her pleading voice. Plus she had those crazy buns in her hair and they obviously merit a heroic gesture. Text leaves room for spinning so I’m always tempted to discount the rhetoric - I can’t easily sense its sincerity. But when you’re standing there in front of me doing your schpiel, I can make the call right quick. Young companies: leverage this opportunity. I know a few entrepreneur’s that are amazing in person but fall flat on their text. Use this format to grab the edge that’s made you successful everywhere else. It might take a chomp out of my revenues too, but hey, I’m my own best predator. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Barborous writing Thursday, February 10th, 2005 I’ve worked with several entrepreneurs. It surprised me to realize how few of them write well. Writing well would come in handy on a blog – of course. But writing emails, presentations, proposals, and business plans each require a steady hand. Four tips for good writing: ? Write simply. Never use a long word where a short one will do. Cut words when you can. Use the active instead of the passive. ? Organize your thoughts. Put your main point early – in your sentence, paragraph, and document. ? Design it to be read. Add white space. Keep sentences to 14 words or less. Use bullets where you can. Add bold headings. ? Be the reader first. This is supposed to be read – remember that. Understand your audience. Connect your ideas. Tell a story. In the end you will save your reader time, help them understand what you intend to convey, and your company will look better for the effort. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Be instead of do. Thursday, February 10th, 2005 I followed the crowd of slavering Hugh fans to Creating Passionate Users cause, you know, I want to be cool too. Blind enthusiasm is being replaced by a healthy criticism of Hugh’s, and now Kathy’s, arguments. Headlines like “The Ignorance Premium is Dead!” and “The Future is Not Learning!” now draw heavy-lidded scrutiny instead of bubbling glee. Kathy’s right: What rocked yesterday can land with a dull thud today. But is the real lesson: We need to unlearn? She talks about a Go player, Bert. Bert’s sold on the concept that to progress, his tactics and strategies need to evolve. But is Bert unlearning or is he reapplying successful principles in a more sophisticated environment? As in Go, entrepreneurs do best if they base their actions on principles of human nature. What you do with a principle will change; the principles remain constant. Kathy’s Parelli horsemanship program is based on the nature of horses. Use a saddle or ride bareback, sit or stand on their backs, eating grass or attacking the Huns – horses are horses. Understand a horse; ride better. Understand people; be a better entrepreneur. We don’t need to unlearn anything. We need to drive from principles instead of actions we’ve learned by rote. We need to be instead of do. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Creative execution Wednesday, February 9th, 2005 There are at least two ways to effect change. One is to complain liberally and bitterly until the rest of us can’t stand it and the move is made. Many bloggers live here. Another is to criticize by creating (Michelangelo). Wrapped up within the entrepreneurial tool kit is an explosive creativity. Leverage this. Healthy expressions of critical creativity are more productive than a sharp eye (and sharper tongue) for things that suck. The next play – the razor that separates the changer from the yapper – is movement. The greatest destroyer of mediocrity is execution. Do what you know needs to be done. Get off the bandwagon; get on the workhorse: Creative execution. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) More on the blog gravy train Tuesday, February 8th, 2005 Excellent post by Dave Pollard answering parts of my question to Hugh. Dave writes that business will embrace blogs when they 1) get buy-in from the top and 2) have no choice. Buy-in will happen when a) blogs are advocated by someone in authority that’s passionate about blogging or b) blogs hurdle some of the impediments to work effectiveness. Business will have no choice when blogs trump all other sources of current, specialised information. But, until these thresholds are crossed blogs will remain nice-to-have. The key to Dave’s arguement is his play on Stephen Covey’s four-quadrant matrix. Right now business blogs are not urgent/important. Blogs aren’t yet a survival bid; blogs are a longevity/growth bid. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Dopeler effect Monday, February 7th, 2005 The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. One of this year’s winners: Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly. An apt addition: … and in many blogs at once. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Wheelbarrow: Intelligently architected blogs Sunday, February 6th, 2005 An interesting comment by Jon about architecture. He was writing about how to use blogs in a corporation and after explaining how he’d introduce them he said, “I’d then consider using blogs in an intelligently architected way …” Intelligently architected. Reminds me of Christopher Alexander; not that I’ve read any of his books. But Robert Paterson has and he says that Alexander points out 15 keys for architecting things to have life: 1. Levels of scale, 2. Strong centers, 3. Boundaries, 4. Alternating repetition, 5. Positive space, 6. Good shape, 7. Local symmetries, 8. Deep interlock and ambiguity, 9. Contrast, 10. Gradients, 11. Roughness, 12. Echoes, 13. The void, 14. Simplicity and calm, 15. Non-seperateness. Alexander says that these are critical for design and living structure. These are the patterns of living things. Patterns are included in Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn’s definition of culture. Their analysis of world cultures concluded that culture is “a product; is historical; includes ideas, patterns and values; is selective; is learned; is based upon symbols; and is an abstraction from behaviour and the products of behaviour.” Living structures. We want more of this in our buildings, our businesses: our culture. It seems then that if one wants a living corporate blog, incorporated in an intelligently architected way – then it must be created within the ideas, patterns, values and abstractions of behaviour within that corporation. That’s a tall, tall order and it certainly won’t help if all future progress is left to the ravages of natural selection. … now what’s my point? Not sure yet. Just that these ideas are connected. Guess I’ll wheelbarrow it. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Ignorance is bliss Friday, February 4th, 2005 Hugh has a good post on the “ignorance premium.” He’s arguing that the fat bank of ignorance marketing is shrinking as other economies come online. I’d say he’s bang-on. This ticket is losing value – but I doubt it will be worthless. Here’s what I wrote: First, you assume that the market (and jobs) won’t adjust to a smarter market. They will. They do. But not without pain – look at Argentina. Second, you assume that the majority of market participants want to be smarter. They don’t. The US Department of Education says there’s been hardly any change since 1972 in the number of people taking a post-secondary education. Now, a college degree doesn’t make you brighter but it is a general expression of a desire to be smarter. The point is: There isn’t evidence of a growing hunger for smart information. Just growing access. Ignorance is bliss and you know it. Finally, you assume that those that want to be smarter have the capacity to handle the vast quantity of micro-information that is emerging. For that we need curated consumption or possibly something less trendy and more honest. Regardless, the pool of information is vast, and many people don’t mind paying to be ignorant – even when they know that’s exactly what they’re doing. Is the ignorance premium dying or being offset? It’s important to be sharp on the distinction. Smarter conversations depend on it. The bright entrepreneur will see these trends and spot the niche. There are several. Anyone that sifts information well will have a good ride. Someone that leverages ignorance to drive targeted information will enjoy this trend. The company that nails cultural evolution in emerging economies will be happy happy. I agree that the dynamics are shifting. But they always are. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Easy to love Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005 Christopher Alexander just finished publishing a galloping 2,000 plus page treatise on design and living structures. There’s a small interview with him here. Take away message: Uniqueness balances repetition. Alexander talks about a tree full of leaves that is inspiring. And a building full of windows that is dispiriting. What’s the difference? Uniqueness of position. The leaves are dynamic, driven by environment, and perfectly positioned. The windows are static, driven mechanically, and set without consideration of their position or their many functions. You know who gets this in business: Starbucks. Their new (relatively new) menu delivers most of what Alexander described. It free the customer to choose amongst various options to create a drink tailored for that moment’s purpose. This is part of making things easy to love. Easy to love – today’s principle. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Scratch this niche Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005 Today’s National Post reports that half of Canada’s 2.5 million entrepreneurs are hoping to retire in the next 15 years. A whopping 500,000 plan to retire in the next five years. That’s nearly half of Canada’s small business owners and $1.2-trillion in assets is about to change hands. This suggests three opportunities: 1) There’s room for new players. 2) There’s a staggering opportunity to leverage exiting knowledge. 3) Transition, acquisition, merger, and takeover at the small business level will be hot. Small business is usually forgotten in a world of roiling corporate paramountcy. But the niche of the gods is the playground of the mortals. $1.2 trillion is quite the niche. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (3) Principles for innovation Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 In the vein of “eat right, eat less, and exercise more” here are three unpackaged principles for innovative ideas. Robert Tucker wrote “Driving Growth through Innovation” and an article in The Futurist back in March/April 2003. Tucker gave us seven strategies. There are three principles: Make the pool bigger. To increase new ideas seek input from employees, customers and suppliers. Look out, not in. Look across fields and industries for ideas that can cross-pollinate. Be a copy-cat. Look in the dark, not in the light. What’s hard to find is hard to see. Expect that. Look at customer’s customers, competitor’s customers, past customers, and customers in other fields. The entrepreneurs I work with struggle to let the outside inside. They think they’ve got to have it all figured out first. But I’m a customer and you’ve got two ways to treat me: Ignore me or ask for my help. I’m already paying, I want it to be better – I am going to help you. Just don’t be a hoser and ask me to fill in a bloody survey. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Eat right, eat less, and exercise more. Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 Several months ago I met David Ulrich (I wrote about it in December). He talked a lot about disciplines and a bit about healthy living. While marvelling at the blinding popularity of fad diets he summarised the three disciplines that guarantee every success offered by these plans: eat right, eat less, and exercise more. It illustrates for me three lessons: 1) For blinding success, repackage core principles. 2) To engage in change, employ core principles. 3) People buy the package, not the principles. Proof? Peek out the window – how many fat people do you see? Yet many people are dieting most of the time. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) John Moore and JumboShrimp Monday, January 31st, 2005 Another great story from Brand Autopsy on the The Container Store. John Moore calls this a JumboShrimp story: companies that get bigger by being smaller. He says The Container Store gains their edge over larger competitors through persistent effort to deliver great customer service. Everything else about them is replicable by other huge companies. The best advantage that comes from being small is the attention they can give their employees so that their employees can give their attention to the customers. As a result, FORTUNE magazine has ranked The Container Store as one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” They’ve been in the top five in five of the last six years. Moral of the story for small entrepreneurs: Every stage has its advantages - learn to leverage them. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Lure of the land Sunday, January 30th, 2005 Tribal business is short-form for a movement away from mammoth corporate type jobs toward minute, niche-oriented lifestyle changes. A great example of this is described in a November 2004 MSN article. The author paints the picture of Bill Wilson, a 35-year-old financial planner who moved out instead of up. Bill and his family bought a winery and there are others who see opportunities in agriculture too. The article says that Membership in the American Cheese Society has doubled since 2001. Small wineries sell more than 66 of wines that cost more the $15 per bottle. In 2003 alone, shipments of wine quadrupled. And none of these niches compete with or work for large agriculture corporations. By doing this from start to finish on a small scale they achieve exceptionally high premiums. They are leveraging limited acreage and their lifestyle to their advantage. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Hugh’s post: Death of the premium Sunday, January 30th, 2005 Hugh MacLeod writes often about marketing and what he’s called smart conversations. I posted the following comment to Hugh’s riff on the market’s willingness to pay premiums: “The smarter the market, the harder it is to charge a premium.” Right. One step further, the smarter the market, the harder to charge – anything. The premise we work from as advisers or consultants is that our markets don’t know as much as we do. They are catching up; every day we work is a day closer to our end. We’re educating our predators. We’re educating our predators if we aren’t adapting. And I keep thinking about evolution. One of my favourite evolution stories is the one about mono-cellular organisms that want a world they can’t have without cooperation with other, different mono-cellular organisms. So two or three get together and cooperate. Soon they agree to join up permanently. Multiply by a few million – tada – people. Next: business. Right now it seems we’re at the “hey, let’s join up and be better together” stage. Business has moved from mono-corporate business models, to outsourcing, to today. As the markets get smarter, maybe it’s time to go inside. Start up some symbiosis. The challenge then is how to get inside: diffusion, osmosis or active transport? We’ve got millions of bloggers milling around saying they should be recognized; that they need to be inside. Chances are some already slipped through and the business model’s already evolved. What does it look like? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (10) Little global giants Friday, January 28th, 2005 Related to tribal business: In the 21 September 2004 edition of Reveries, Tim Manners describes little global giants. He quotes Barnaby Feder from the New York Times, “Big companies are good at identifying the intellectual property that is needed in a niche, but smaller players are often better equipped to get there.” When economists like Ronald Coase describe companies, two of the conditions they write about are access to information and the costs of doing business. When information was scarce and the costs of interacting with many different business inputs were high, companies got big. Today, with almost costless access to nearly limitless information some companies are scaling back but still delivering in a big way. That explains the size of the two companies Tim mentions. But, an aspect of information that continues to trouble current economists is it’s value. As I wrote earlier, valuable knowledge is useful knowledge and ironically, in an ever-growing sea of information, capturing useful knowledge seems to be increasingly difficult. This is a challenge recently described by Mark Kingwell and Clive Thompson: MARK KINGWELL: … Information ‘is’ now too plentiful to be considered valuable in itself, or in general. But of course particular bits of information are as valuable as ever. The trick lies entirely in finding them, and finding out what purposes we are trying to serve with them. CLIVE THOMPSON: It’s interesting, in that context, the current rage for ‘intelligent agents’ to filter out the info-glut. The idea seems to be that only a new technology can help keep in check the forces that technology has released. MARK KINGWELL: I think that the metaphor of the filter is significant. It implies that, if we can just calibrate the filter properly (i.e., educate the writers or critics in the appropriate way), we can make the glut of information serve our chosen ends. There really isn’t any better technology for sifting than people. This is a meta-human skill. Establishing cognitive links between discrete sources of information is, so far, humanity’s one great hope for employment in an increasingly information based economy. This explains part of the results observed so far in the sift experiment. The entrepreneurs I’m working with are reaping significant gains from the cognitive links I share with them. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) evolution = adaptation = innovation Thursday, January 27th, 2005 Too much order - no ability to adapt. Too much chaos - no ability to learn. Tribal business (1, 2). Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Dragonfly eye Thursday, January 27th, 2005 Edward O. Wilson says that the greatest challenge today is the description of complex systems. Scientists break down systems but reassembling systems is far more difficult. Wilson says the power of prediction will be the true measure of success. The ability to predict emergent phenomena will require linking together all we’ve learned through reduction. This is holism or, as Wilson puts it, consilience by synthesis. Consilience by synthesis is as important in business as it is in science. This is true, because it is true in everything. We’re all talk the reductionist part of the scientific method. Only a few of us have built the skills needed by synthesist. We live in a world of specialists and are in desperate need of generalists and cross-walkers. Our world’s too fractured - like a dragonfly eye. We need the whole picture. We need to climb back up. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Entrepreneurial perspective on change Tuesday, January 25th, 2005 I’m re-reading Edward O. Wilson’s book, Consilience. He describes the biological conception of scale that I tried to illustrate below. He breaks up the magnitude of action by space and time. So, for example, brain synapses are minute, ultra-fast, and biochemical. But planetary change is huge, majestically slow, and evolutionary. He explains that this conception of action is key to perceiving the unity of knowledge and is the first step toward consilience. I tried to think of how this concept might apply to business where holistic thinking is increasingly important. The bottom scale is what I came up with. To understand the complete picture when anticipating a trend, developing a strategy, taking a phone call, or ringing another customer through the till – understand where in time and space this action is occurring. This helps clarify what ought and what ought not be included in the thought process. Most entrepreneurs are so busy making the moment-by-moment decisions of the day, they lose touch with where they’re at in the big picture. This concept is key to nailing down what counts and what doesn’t in the strategic conversations they need to have if they want to transition from start-up to young company. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Has the train already left the station? Sunday, January 23rd, 2005 Hugh McLeod writes a hopeful piece about the future of corporate blogging: We want the corporate tipping point to arrive for two main reasons: 1. It validates those of us who got in there early … in the belief that this new medium was the future.2. When the corporate-mainstream world finally “gets it”, we expect a floodgate of demand from businesses to open for people like us – people who can blog properly, who have a reputation in this sphere, who can steer these wealthy companies down the strange path of this brave new world. Hello, Gravy Train. Hello, being able to make a living doing what you love, for a change. The tipping point will arrive when two things happen: 1. When the bosses are assured that it actually works, that the return on investment is solid and measurable.2. When the bosses are assured that blogging won’t open a whole can of worms, that companies won’t lose their grip on being able to make a buck for their shareholders. GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE POWER BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS, THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED. The idea that blogs have no ROI is ridiculous. The real issue is about whose territory do blogs encroach on. There’s two things about which I’ll happily admit utter ignorance: the business model of advertising and how to measure ROI on blogs. Despite my ignorance and despite my deep appreciation of Hugh’s ideas – I think there is one important point Hugh didn’t include. Of course he didn’t have to include it. He wasn’t writing a thesis on this stuff - but I think its key to understanding the nature of the corporate blogging opportunity: While Hugh did recognize that blogs were first run by folks that saw the potential for blogs early – the mavericks – he didn’t say how long the Gravy Train would run. A quick look at the history of mavericks suggests this train’s going to be about two box-cars long. The cycle between innovation and common practice is becoming ever shorter. As a result, the skills required to exploit rapidly emerging and rapidly exploited niches are ever more important. Seeing a niche early – as in blogging first – is one skill. Exploiting the niche is different. And while Hugh might be on the right track, many bloggers haven’t a clue how to exploit blogging when it reaches the corporate tipping point. Hugh, two questions: What skills are needed to exploit the gravy train when it rolls? Not the “how-to-be-creative” skills you so eloquently describe – the exploitation skills and the power brokering skills you have just begun to discuss. How long is the train? How big is the window? With more than 6 million blogs out there, could the train have already slipped by? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (11) Keys for young company success Saturday, January 22nd, 2005 Robert Patterson highlighted a young company in PEI: silverorange . Amongst other things these guys are part of Mozilla/Firefox’s image team. Their CEO Dan James published a letter to his team that expresses a rare understanding of humanity – his company’s humanity in particular. Keys for successful young companies that Dan underlined include: · Trust· Commitment· Understanding fear· Play· Rest· Pride· Charity His line on bureaucracy rings loud: “The moment we start to have programs and systems to manage people we lose trust. The day we start tracking vacation and sick days we lose our souls and freedom. The day we punch in and punch out is the day the doors might as well be locked for good.” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Ingredients for soup Thursday, January 20th, 2005 John Moore at Brand Autopsy (love that photo) has a great post today: Peddling the Soup Peddler. This is the type of post I’d like to emulate in the future. Ingredients for the soup post: · Short story· Concise statement of the challenge faced· A few principles that point the way forward These ideas/challenges are also discussed here, here, and here. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Blinking at the crowd Tuesday, January 18th, 2005 I’ve been pondering the relationship between entrepreneurs/young companies and the ideas presented in James Surowiecki’s, The Wisdom of Crowds, and Malcolm Gladwell’s, Blink. Without further synthesis, I’d argue there isn’t one. Sir Francis Bacon said that “the mind, hastily and without choice, imbibes and treasures up the first notices of things.” It is on this hastily imbibed treasure that Surowiecki and Gladwell have built their arguments. Both argue that people know more than we think they do. This hasty imbibing is “smarter and more sophisticated and certainly more influential than we generally give it credit for (Gladwell).” Surowiecki argues that a crowd of hasty imbibers is likely to produce judgments “virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of an [expert] with years of experience.” But he also recognizes a paradox – “rapid cognition often works best when there are well-defined rules or structures to guide the people using it.” Trouble is the world of entrepreneurism isn’t often one of structure and well-defined rules. Entrepreneurs operate on the fringe of the unknown. The prime ingredient in the recipe for chaos is a dash of unknown. Well, this gets us to the point I made in the first paragraph. We need to know more about those “well-defined rules or structures” before we can predict the value of these ideas for entrepreneurs and young companies. A set of well-defined rules needs to answers questions like: How do we know to trust the answer? How far can we leverage the answers of rapid cognition or crowds? How do we ask the questions we want to ask crowds? Surowiecki recognizes the problem of needing “to know a lot just to understand the question you’re trying to answer. In [some] cases, relying on a group of laypeople may be futile.” How do we know when we’ve got one of those questions? What we need is a taxonomy of questions: the set conducive to thin-slicing, the set suitable for crowds, and the set requiring expertise. Reading “Can you make my logo bigger?” by McKee Wallwork Henderson there seems to be some indication of where the lines might lie. Number 11 in their list of 13 rules for effective advertising reads: “Have the courage to overrule the research. Research said that the Sony Walkman wouldn’t work. Research said that New Coke would. Nike and Volkswagen don’t pre-test their ads. General Motors does. Enough said.” Maybe Nike and Volkswagen can skip pre-testing because blinking is sufficient. Perhaps Sony ignored research on the Walkman because the crowd said they were right. Maybe Coke missed with New Coke because they didn’t know what question to ask the crowd. Along with a taxonomy of questions, perhaps we also need a criteria for determining if we understand the question we are trying to answer. The criteria might include: clarity of timeline (i.e. short-term vs long-term), clarity and focus of deliverables (i.e. portable music player vs replacement for stereo), magnitude of risk is answer is wrong (i.e. one ad = minimal vs. new line of vehicle = staggering), the pool of needed knowledge is narrow (i.e. new recruit’s resume is in hand and decision is hire or not vs. set of photographs is in hand and decision is to reclaim exhausted oil derrick). Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) sift deliverables Wednesday, January 12th, 2005 sift leverages knowledge and thinks on behalf of entrepreneurs. Knowledge is only valuable when it’s useful. And most entrepreneurs soon discover the paradox of newly emerging opportunities: you know more about your industry than anyone else and you don’t know enough. You use all the knowledge you’ve got, but you desperately need more. sift brings together knowledge discovered in the world’s of business, science, culture, art, and sports – and helps make it useful. Because using knowledge is often more about perspective than expertise, sift relies on fetching philosophy and a broad understanding of economics and environmental dynamics to give entrepreneurs a new view on the daily grind. sift can help you be more tactical and strategic, more thoughtful, and more aware of emerging trends. This will help you leverage your knowledge, develop new products or services, and identify new opportunities. Just what you need right? Click here. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Open letter to entrepreneurs Wednesday, January 12th, 2005 Dear entrepreneur, If you’re someone I want to work with, you don’t have time to read this. I’ll keep it short: If you want to keep innovating, you need my help. My guess is around three years ago you had a bright idea and lots of ambition – it worked out and now you’re enormously busy. Whatever you had was good enough at the beginning when it was just you and your challenges, but today you’re a manager, a coach, a judge, a financier, a borrower, a lender – and have no time to do any of those things well. While you struggle to keep your head above water, first to go is broad reading, then focused researching, and then, worst of all, strategic thinking. You’re fighting just to keep up. Most start-ups fail right where you are now. Your business is entering a growth cycle you haven’t seen before and most entrepreneurs don’t have the skills or time needed to see their business through this stage. One of the biggest reasons for failure is the inability to pay attention to the keys that made you successful in the beginning: insight and innovation. sift can help. sift is about fetching philosophy, mining knowledge, and a return to thinking — on your behalf. I think, you stay innovative and strategic. Sound good? Click here. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Disciplines of innovation Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 At least two things are true of me. One, I love coffee. Two, I’m a fiddler. Not the musical kind, the annoying kind. Always jigging around, tapping, rattling, bouncing, swaying – annoying. Being a big fan of experiments, I started one on myself. I hypothesized that my fiddling is positively related to my coffee consumption. If I stopped drinking coffee, would the fiddling stop? Nearly one month later – no. Foot is impatiently tapping a staccato rhythm on the floor as I type. What did stop is blogging. Each morning around 5:30 I wake up, just for a few minutes. In those minutes there is an opportunity – get up or keep sleeping. When I was drinking coffee, the idea of a tall cup of French-pressed, Starbucks bold-roast Vienna coffee was enough to lug myself out of bed. When I get up at 5:30, there’s not a lot to do, so I read. When I read, I learn. When I learn, I innovate. When I innovate, I blog. Us economists call these positive externalities. By doing one thing, there is other unintended results that effect more than the owner of the action. Included in this group is second-hand smoke, loud music, and nuclear bombs. So, no coffee leads to a negative externality: no blogging. I just keep sleeping. Noting this relationship, I started thinking of the disciplines of innovation. To get started I search for this phrase on Google. Did you know the phrase “disciplines of innovation” has only 37 hits? But “discipline of innovation” has 1,900. One “s” and a difference of 1,873 results. Why? What’s the difference? Well, maybe its purely semantics (or semantic), but I think it depends on whether you see innovation as a destination or a journey. If innovation is a destination, then you want to know where it is. If innovation is journey, you want to know how to get started. If a discipline helps you get to a destination, disciplines help you undertake a journey. Peter Drucker thinks innovation is a destination. He says three ingredients that make up the discipline of innovation. First, focusing on the mission, he believes that one must have a definitive goal or purpose. Second, defining significant results, or otherwise expressing what is believed to be the anticipated end result. Third, performing rigorous assessments based on the tasks that are being performed while trying to adhere to the mission. I don’t think Drucker’s wrong. I do think there is value to looking at innovation as a journey though. Earlier this year I met David Ulrich. He was talking about his new work on capitalizing on capabilities. To do that, he prescribed some disciplines. By committing to a set of disciplines organisations can capture some of the intangible aspects of knowledge, experience, and social networks to help capitalize on their capabilities. Ulrich believes capitalizing on capabilities is a journey. Why not look at innovation the same way? So, what might be the disciplines of innovation? Here, I’ll get the list started: 1. Drink coffee Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Recycling knowledge Thursday, December 16th, 2004 Update: The author I had quoted asked that I not refer to his work. To accomodate his request, I have rewritten this post. January 6th, 2005 I recently read a piece where the author claimed that knowledge is perishable and as a result it is important to act on intelligence before the value of that knowledge expires. Think of the relationship between knowledge and intelligence in the following way: Holding a can of soda in your hand consider the relationship between the bauxite that went into the aluminium, and the aluminium that went into the can. Now if bauxite is data, aluminium is information, and the can is knowledge: What is the process that made the can? Intelligence. Before information turns into knowledge, for a time, it is intelligence. And while it’s intelligence it is terrifically valuable. So, it seems that gaining intelligence ought to be a major priority. If this is true, then an important question would be - Where does one get intelligence? Of course some comes from understanding the implications of emerging information, but, I’ve been wondering about another source. Continuing with our metaphor: If knowledge is perishable, it eventually becomes garbage. Think recycling. Can knowledge be turned back into intelligence? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Initial public offering: knowledge Monday, December 13th, 2004 A billion-dollar IPO for Johns Hopkins!?! William R. Brody, President of the Johns Hopkins University, is looking for money – or at least for some value. I think he’s found it. Mr. Brody makes an interesting comparison: Google’s $1.67 billion initial public offering and librarians. Librarians? Citing Moore’s Law which states computing power increases exponentially over time and relating that growth to the challenge of managing petabytes of information, Mr. Brody captures a point he says is missing from Google mania: “Massive information overload is placing librarians in an ever more important role as human search engines. They are trained and gifted at ferreting out and vetting the key resource material when you need it. Today’s technology is spectacular — but it can’t always trump a skilled human.” This is sort of a hum-drum, old-hat sort of rave except for the interesting comparison he started with: $1.67 billion vs. librarians. $1.67 billion in unused information. $1.67 billion in ill-directed proposals. $1.67 billion in gap finding exercises without $1.67 billion in information using exercises. Information is valuable, precious, and the best, priceless - but only when well used, applied, and supplemented with understanding. How well are you using your information and intellectual property? Better yet, how well are you leveraging the knowledge around you? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Blog pulse: flatline Wednesday, December 8th, 2004 I was just playing around at BlogPulse. They’ve got a nifty tool for querying the frequency of blogging topics. Now I’m not sure how many sites they scan, but still, the idea is cool even if it’s not statistically valid. I’ve been reading/blogging a lot lately on the relationship between major societal challenges (education, terrorism, global warming, etc.) and the potential for innovation, insight, and creativity to address them. I thought it would be interesting to query BlogPulse for key societal issues, some of the potential solutions we’ve already identified (biotechnology, alternative fuels, recycling, etc.), and then my favorite three words - innovation, insight, and creativity. The results were unexpected. Again, I’m not sure how many sites are searched by BlogPulse, but it looks like bloggers aren’t too worried about these issues, at least not the representative ones I chose. About one percent wrote on education recently. One percent! Around half a percent discussed terrorism. And basically no one is talking global warming. The big surprise for me was the dearth of thinking on innovation, insight and creativity. I expected high numbers here, what with all the raves about the promise of blogs. Given the absence of discussion of mechanisms to solve these issues, it wasn’t too surprising to see close to zero conversation on the previously identified solutions. Want to know what the top phrase was? “Today is December 1st.” Good grief. Even a day late! The first big issue, health care, slouches in at 27th place. Well I might talk more about this later. For now though I’m sort of excited; there’s no one on the field I want to play in. Maybe I’ll get to make up the rules. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Blogs and economists Wednesday, December 1st, 2004 Jean Piaget is one of history’s most influential developmental psychologists. This morning I was reading his book, Judgement and Reasoning in the Child (1928). In it he writes: A child hardly ever asks himself whether he has been understood. For him, that goes without saying, for he does not think about others when he talks. He utters a “collective monologue”. His language only beings to resemble that of adults when he is directly interested in making himself understood; when he gives orders or asks questions. To put it quite simply, we may say that the adult thinks socially, even when he is alone, and that the child under seven thinks ego-centrically, even in the society of others. First – collective monologue – good name for a blog. Second, speaking of blogs, I wonder what Jean would think of them. Blogging is often done without asking if the author has been understood. Regularly it’s an ego-centric endeavour. And I was wondering about the Cluetrain Manifesto (the book, not the manifesto itself) – which trumpets the blogger’s voice as a grand advancement. Do we enjoy it so much because we yearn to have a voice? Or because we long to be children? On to a tangentially related item: There are usually two responses when I tell someone I’m an economist. One of them is, “Oh, like an MBA!” The other is, “What’s an economist?” While leafing through Talcott Parsons’ Theories of Society (where I discovered Jean Piaget), I browsed the list of authors. Handiest thing, Parsons lists the authors by academic discipline. He writes that between 1890-1935 society and culture hit a major turning point. The authors included as theorists played key roles in the convergence of thought which led to the expansion of the disciplines involved. Several of those included were economists. So, as proof of the diverse applications of economics training, I built the figure below. It’s a list of all the different disciplines ordered by the frequency of that discipline’s contribution to the Theories of Society. As you can see, we economists are in good company. We’re more than just bankers, Greenspans, and bureaucrats. We’re world changers too. Hooray! Well, that might be a bit premature. I had to look up a few other disciplines listed above. Like sinologist, a person engaged in study Chinese language, literature, or civilization. And philologist, a humanist specializing in classical scholarship. Anyway, overall, I’d have been happy with any of those disciplines – except maybe an anatomist. (graphic leached from www.oldbaileyonline.org) Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Machine guns are to Google as - are to profit Tuesday, November 30th, 2004 I live in Ottawa. Today President Bush came to visit. H-O-L-Y C-O-W! Cops: everywhere. Helicopters and airplanes all over the place. Super cool snipers sneaking around rooftops. Dogs, barricades, security checks, blinders, tents to get in and out of cars, they even shut down this main street running through the heart of the city. Like putting a clamp on your carotid artery. If there’s a guy that understands dynamic systems and organic organizations it’s the person running security around here. Man I’d love to meet whomever it is. Think of all that complexity, all those dynamic relationships, all that roiling real-time information. Whatever system the President’s security team uses has to have some pretty neat applications. Think close: political campaigns or major band tours. Think far out: traffic solutions or managing bandwidth on suddenly viral sites. Sound naïve? I recently had the opportunity to ask an older, highly successful entrepreneur for his best advice. Here it is: find a problem, fix it. Can’t say I was impressed. But I smiled politely and we kept on chatting. Further into the conversation he tells me about a problem he’d solved, the intricate system he built to keep it solved, and his staggering profit upon the system’s sale. Suddenly I saw his point. Fix it – permanently. The unstated corollary: make the solution into a system, sell the system. Think Google, Froogle, Google Scholar, Adwords – replicated systems. Profit juggernauts. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Entrepreneurial “how to” Saturday, November 27th, 2004 One of my clients is Alan Kearns, Head Coach and founder of CareerJoy. He helps people make big career decisions and he’s great at it. He’s also a great entrepreneur. A few years ago he was a top 40 under 40 entrepreneur. CareerJoy is his second start-up since then. Two nights ago we were draining glasses in a moderately swank fusion restaurant, discussing the unique challenges faced by entrepreneurs. Alan was telling me all the tricks of entrepreneurial success. Boiled down, here they are: Identify a market niche you’d like to own. Build something that solves a problem in that niche, even if it only sortof works. Put it out there and use the momentum to improve it. Experiment on pricing as you go. Leverage that success to solve another problem. Replicate the above. The hard part, he says, is continuing to see the big picture while struggling with the daily grind, constant push for products, and mind-numbing concentration required to consistently deliver a consistent outcome. I thought this was great stuff, got all excited, and started evangelising some of the ideas I’ve written about here. Paradigms. Tribal business. Potent principles. These ideas always get Alan going and we ended up pounding out two new products for CareerJoy before we were done. We were just wrapping up, quietly staring about the place, pondering our chat when Alan sighs out this blast of pent-up energy and says, “You know I’m flying at around 10,000 feet. When we talk, you take me up to 300,000 feet. It makes a huge difference, thanks.” Heh. Always nice to hear that. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Look! Friday, November 26th, 2004 A few days ago I met one of life’s undeclared mentors. One of those people that have seen so much, done so much, and achieved so much that nearly every idea is weighted with a multitude of applications. One thing he said: Everything I see, I try to understand what it does instead of what it’s for. I’m convinced that one of our most powerful capacities is to shift paradigms. Those that can reframe, re-jig, reverse – they will ultimately succeed. Those that only see what is in front of them will be fed by the first group. Below is a poem by US Poet Laureate, Billy Collins from Sailing Alone Around the Room. If we recognize the power of paradigms for solving the complex problems of our day - are we teaching our children to see? First Reader I can see them standing politely on the wide pagesthat I was still learning to turn,Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon-brown hair,playing with a ball or exploring the cosmosof the backyard, unaware they are the first characters,the boy and girl who begin fiction. Beyond the simple illustration of the their neighbourhoodthe other protagonists were waiting in a huddle:frightening Heathcliff, frightened Pip, Nick Adamscarrying a fishing rod, Emma Bovary riding into Rouen. But I would read about the perfect boy and his sistereven before I would read about Adam and Eve, gardenand gate,and before I heard the name Gutenberg, the typeof their simple talk was moving into my focusing eyes. It was always Saturday and he and shewere always pointing as something and shouting “Look!”pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their fatheras he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,waving at aproned Mother framed in the kitchen doorway,pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other. They wanted us to look but we had looked alreadyand seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.We has seen the dog, walked, watered, and fed the animal,and now it was time to discover the infinite, clickingpermutations of the alphabet’s small and capital letters.Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (5) Who’s an ox? Tuesday, November 16th, 2004 I think I missed my own point last night. The sift experiment isn’t about finding bright answers. It’s about finding the right pieces. In Davidson’s analysis, the subjects were given more than enough pieces to complete a puzzling problem. The task was to see which pieces were relevant to the solution. In my analysis, entrepreneurs often don’t even have all the pieces (let alone extra useless ones). The sift experiment brings more (hopefully helpful) pieces into the game. Davidson’s research suggests this will help in a significant way. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Not Einstein? Use sift. Monday, November 15th, 2004 An interesting note from the Nature of Insight and an article by Janet Davidson. Davidson was studying the relationship between insight and intelligence. From the table below, it’s clearly nice to be bright. The results show that highly intelligent people are more insightful (these problems require insight of one sort or another). Well, that’s to be expected. Also expected is the benefits of being cued, or guided, when working through a problem – especially if you aren’t the brightest bulb in the pack. But here’s the clincher – if cued, the average subject increased her score by 47 – 58 percent on questions requiring insight. Being cued when you’re bright doesn’t get you much, but being cued when you need some help gets a whole lotta benefit. Insight performance by intellectual level and problem type High ability Average ability Problem Type Uncued Cued Uncued Cued Restructuring for relevance 4.2 4.3 2.3 3.4 Recombining relevant info 3.8 4.1 1.9 3.0 Solutions via past experience 4.0 4.2 2.1 3.3 See, besides being witty, pithy and plump with candour (as advised by Seth Godin) – sift is on the hunt for evidence that entrepreneurs can benefit from some guidance. Note, the intelligence of the researcher isn’t in question. That frees me up to be as dumb as an ox – I only have to find the bright answers. Do you answer questions requiring recombination of information, less than obvious information, or a set of past experiences you haven’t built yet? If you aren’t Einstein, maybe sift can help. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Complexity challenge Sunday, November 14th, 2004 I’ve written before on the cross-over from science into business and cited with gushing enthusiasm the insights of Edward O. Wilson. I’ve just finished reading Veran Allee’s book the Future of Knowledge. Her book is a pretty good overview of where we’re at and the challenges we face when managing this new organic world of information. Because Verna’s book is an overview, she relies on many other thinkers to do the heavy lifting. One of those people is John Hagel who’s called for (what he calls) the molecular organisation. The problem with molecular organisations is that we don’t know how to work one – or even build them intentionally. Verna says we’re in trouble because we while we think in terms of processes (instead of functional units), we need to think about webs and networks which don’t work well with our current resource management systems. And while we’re busy trying to stretch our processes to meet the challenge – the challenge keeps getting bigger. The problem is bigger than we think. Or perhaps more Mutant X than we imagine. Knowledge theorist Max Boisot says we don’t have the software systems or even the language to handle the task. But we do have the brains – or some of us do. And he posits that the information-based economy is driving a species-level evolution. There’s a few that can handle the shift. And many that can’t. While some of us are busy mutating, Verna points out that the rest of us face a most complex and difficult challenge: the temptation to simply incorporate networks into existing frameworks and tools – and then convince ourselves we are introducing something dramatically new and different. We use new language but not new concepts. And we get this strange mix of new words and old concepts. But bad analogies and inappropriate tools threaten to mislead or subvert the very principles that are being introduced by the mutating few. Verna points out that we need a shift in consciousness; we are experiencing a meta-level dilemma. On one hand, old logic is insufficient to reason our way through current challenges. On the other hand, our only tools are the linear business principles, processes and systems we currently work with. So, for the time being, we must be very clear on the worldview we are operating from. And we need to approach learning with a much higher level of self-reflection than has ever before been required. The problem then is that we are faced with complex issues and we don’t have the mutants we need to get the job done. In the meantime, we can’t solve complex issues with the same tools we use to solve complicated ones. David Snowden (Institute of Knowledge Management) makes a clear distinction between complicated and complex. He says an airplane is complicated, but all its parts may be known, understood, engineered, and managed. The truly complex includes too many variables to ever be known, fully understood, or managed. Humans are complex. Organisations are complex. Life is complex. As a result, Complexity Theory concepts are increasingly used, both metaphorically and literally, in a business context. Complexity theory is an umbrella of interdisciplinary exploration of a set of theories from physics, biology, chemistry, sociology, cybernetics, nonlinear dynamics, nonlinear mathematics, and chaos theory. Also included are psychology, anthropology, and organisational behaviour. Once Complexity Theory is embraced we can move from the mirage of a predictable world to the reality of a world of probabilities. We leave behind the deterministic economy of physical goods, production lines and dive into a knowledge-based economy. The human skills of pattern recognition, heuristic approaches, and experimental inquiry are suddenly valued. We get to explore. We get to taste, touch and experience. Our talents for metaphor, poetry, and music are suddenly business propositions instead of past-times. Now can you see why Maslow’s challenge was so important to recognize? Is it suddenly clear why education is such a critical enterprise? Does it jump out at you that innovation, insight, and vision share a measure of magnitude that renders skills like time management and memo writing laughably overrated and utterly irrelevant? We aren’t facing a world air-travel vs. space travel or dvd’s vs. hard-disk storage. There’s money in those things but the solutions are out there. We are facing melting ice caps, extinguished biodiversity, mounting municipal waste, decaying social systems and an alarming absence of movement toward anything that promises solutions. I’m not all in on the species-level shift stuff but geez, it’s a million miles closer to where we need to be than most of us are. We aren’t overhauling education. We aren’t tearing down hierarchies. We aren’t abandoning home pages. Why? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (9) Feel the biorhythms Saturday, November 13th, 2004 I’ve been pondering the goofiness of biorhythms. Not because I think they work – but because I think they should work. I just think that what’s out there right now is simplistic and running everything off my birthday is absurd. The point is that humans cycle. I know I do. Everyday for the last nine years I wrote in a journal. Each morning I characterize the weather (overcast, chilly, calm), I note my mood (creative or philosophical or apathetic – etc.), and then I write. By now I can almost predict my mental and physical cycles. And assuming I’m not a statistical outlier – given the right data, I could track someone else’s. I’ve also been chatting over email with Evelyn Rodriguez about innovation, insight and the incubation thereof. I’d read about her Nevada trip and pinged on her incubation trips. Given the deep need for innovation that I briefly mentioned earlier – anything that enhances innovation is worth some attention. So there’s natural human cycles, incubation periods, and innovation. Shouldn’t we know more about this? The economic significance of a better understanding is difficult to overestimate. Consider the challenges we face and the dearth of solutions we’re playing with. Imagine: we’re in the desert dying of thirst. Incredibly, we’re standing bucket in hand, with a well at our feet. Problem is – we don’t know how to use the bucket and aren’t plumbing the well. The desert’s our challenge, the well is our brain, the bucket’s our knowledge – what’s missing? A process of innovation. Lucky for me – lucky for us – I meet Ed Bernacki today. Who’s Ed? Look here. We’re crammed full of potential solutions and Ed’s off in the right direction. I’m looking forward to learning something from him real soon. By the way, it looks like five days from now I’m going to peak physcially, emotionally, and passionately AND, at the same time, become incredibly stupid - yikes! Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) How to be insightful Tuesday, November 9th, 2004 Another book I’m currently reading (I’m reading 16) is “The Nature of Insight” edited by Robert Sternberg and Janet Davidson. It’s 16 articles, mostly by psychologists, on the current state of understanding on insight. I was super keen on this book until I discovered it was written in1995. Now I’m just keen. Davidson, one of the editors, wrote chapter 4, “The Suddenness of Insight”. She starts with this: Many of the world’s greatest contributions have derived from insightful problem solving [in the technical sense of this phrase]. If major discoveries do stem from sudden realizations, then it is important to understand the conditions under which these realizations occur. Unfortunately, little is known about the mental mechanisms underlying insightful discoveries, and even less is known about individual differences in the ability to make these discoveries. This underlines the hilarity, the awful truth, and the vast opportunity of our time. In a day when iPods are our most innovative examples we still have authors like Thomas Homer-Dixon writing books titled “The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable World”. Mr. Homer-Dixon lays out a myriad of examples that illustrate the almost insurmountable challenge of complexity in most of our current societal issues. His conclusion: We are on the verge of a melt-down and there’s no solution in sight (check the slick pun!). We’ve got scientists saying we don’t have a handle on insight. We’ve got endless, catastrophic problems to solve. And we’re raving about iPods… Fortunately Davidson has some early insights on insight: High-IQ individuals are slower, not faster, than lower-IQ individuals in analysing problems and applying insights. Insight can be trained. Well point one is encouraging for slow-pokes like me. But point two: trained! Now we’re gettin’ somewhere. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Thunk thoughts Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004 I’ve been reading Human Action by Ludwig von Mises for nearly two years. It’s a bloody dense book. This morning I got to his chapter on “The Role of Ideas”. He makes two important points early. Action is preceded by thinking - thinking and acting are inseparable. And, individuals think - there’s joint action, but no joint thinking. These points seem blasé until one realizes (with startling apprehension) that economics is nearly entirely focused on action, with no comprehension of thinking. We economists don’t consider how thoughts are thunk. This is part of my bubbling enthusiasm for Nova Spivack’s new manifesto - The Physics of Ideas. Nova’s out to track ideas. He’s after a science of moving from individual thought to broader, societal response. He’s on the doorstep to an important gap in economic understanding. I’m excited about the possibilities. I hope Nova keeps me in the loop. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (3) What’s a blog for? Friday, October 29th, 2004 Seth Godin posted his criteria for blog success. He says blogs work when they’re based on: CandorUrgencyTimelinessPithiness andControversy Right now, that tastes bad. Mostly because this blog is nearly none of those. But I also think Seth’s treating blogs a bit narrowly. It’s sortof like saying aluminum cans only deliver pop - when they really deliver anything you can stuff inside them. Aren’t blogs vehicles for information? Aren’t the ingredients for successful delivery of information: usefulness, clarity, relevance, value, exclusiveness, etc.? If Seth’s right, blogs don’t have a business app. So a question - Seth, why are you writing a blog then? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (11) Pointers Sunday, October 24th, 2004 In the Cluetrain Manifesto, David Weinberger writes: Our understanding of the nature of knowledge, education and expertise is bound up with things that contain knowledge, not things that point you out of themselves to find value elsewhere. … With today’s huge increase in the amount of information, you can be an expert only in something sliced so thin that often it’s trivial. Increasingly, a useful expert is not someone with (containing) all the answers but someone who knows where to find answers. The new experts have value not by centralizing information and content but by being great “pointers” to other people and to useful, current information. Welcome to sift, is there something I can help you find? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Paris vs. Ottawa Sunday, October 24th, 2004 I got home from Paris last night. One result of the time difference is that this morning, I am up at 4:30. I did nearly the same thing when I got to Paris. So I have this neat comparison to make: Paris vs. Ottawa at 4:30 a.m. Immediately noticeable: no throbbing sound of humanity. No honking horns. No scuttling scooters. No clipping high heels. At 4:30 in Ottawa, we are silent. In Ottawa, when I look out the window I see black sky, scattered stars, low amber lights. In Paris – Another wall, a slice of orange clothed clouds. In Paris, even at this time, there is a sense of shoulder-to-shoulder, cheek-to-jowl crowdedness. In Ottawa – space. We’re trying to ramp up Canada’s image abroad. Pristine environment, democratic expression, libertarian social values … In my books, “We’re quiet and there’s room” would be enough to rake in the multitudes. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Building on what we know Tuesday, October 19th, 2004 I wrote earlier about Maslow’s challenge for a new kind of human. In “A Holistic Approach to Creativity” he describes our progress toward that goal: It has been interesting for me to compare the present-day situation in the field of creativeness with the situation about twenty or twenty-five years ago (1945-1950). First of all I want to say that the amount of data that has been accumulated – the sheer amount of research work – is far beyond what anybody could reasonably have expected then. My second impression is that, in comparison with the great accumulation of methods, of ingenious testing techniques, and of sheer quantity of information, theory in this realm has not advanced very much. Reading further, Maslow calls for revolution in the ways we edify our children. He seeks alternatives to redeem the many ways in which creativity is daily pounded from us. And of all he suggests, I can see none that we’ve adopted. That means one of two things. Maslow was wrong. Or, the inertia of education systems and business process was impervious to his advice. Because I don’t know of any solutions, I believe we chose door number two. Shame on us. What are you learning that puts your business in a position to take advantage of all that underused research? Nothing? Shame on you. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) A new kind of human Monday, October 18th, 2004 In 1963 Maslow wrote in “The Creative Attitude”: It seems to me that we are at a point in history unlike anything that has ever been before. Life moves far more rapidly now than it ever did before. Think, for instance, of the huge acceleration in the rate of growth of facts, of knowledge, of techniques, of inventions, of advances in technology. It seems very obvious to me that this requires a change in our attitude toward the human being, and toward his relationships to the world. To put it bluntly, we need a different kind of human being. We need a different kind of human being to be able to live in a world which changes perpetually, which doesn’t stand still. [We need to] create a new kind of human being who is comfortable with change, who enjoys change, who is able to improvise, who is able to face with confidence, strength, and courage a situation of which he has absolutely no forewarning … The society which can turn out such people will survive; the societies that cannot turn out such people will die. Mr. Maslow hadn’t seen the internet. He didn’t know about the X-Prize. And he never drove a Honda Sprocket. If Maslow wasn’t right in 1963 he was prescient of today. How has your business answered this challenge? If it hasn’t you might already be dead. Need some help? Use sift, get some. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Ontogogy = sift Monday, October 18th, 2004 In “The Further Reaches of Human Nature” Maslow starts the trend of naming, knighting, trademarking words. He toys with new names for metacounseling: helping people reach their full human potential. For size he tries “ontogogy” which means trying to help people grow to their fullest height. Or “phsychogogy” which means the education of the psyche. In this tradition, I’d like to describe the sift process: Ontogogy for entrepreneurs through metalinking. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Potent principles Sunday, October 17th, 2004 I recently grabbed a book by A.H. Maslow, a series of essays ranging across creativity, education, and society. I don’t know enough about Maslow to decide if I should be embarrassed or excited, but I really enjoy some of what he wrote. In an essay called, “Self-Actualizing and Beyond”, he discusses eight prerequisites for self-actualization. Self-actualization is Maslow’s characterization of a person able to experience life fully, vividly and with complete selflessness. Yeah, loaded words but getting past them, Maslow captures a cool thought: We must teach people to listen to their own tastes. Most people don’t do it. When standing in a gallery before a puzzling painting, one rarely hears, ‘That is a puzzling painting’ … Making an honest statement involves daring to be different, unpopular, nonconformist. Maslow wrote this in 1967. It was republished under a new title and with new authors and in a much longer version in 2001. It’s now called “Cluetrain Manifesto”. I’m not trying to play down Cluetrain, or play up Maslow. I’m just highlighting two interesting points. One, a single powerful statement can contain sufficient principles to revolutionise business. Two, a principle from psychotherapy has potent implications for modern business. A single principle can be the foundation for significant change. One Maslowian principle might be: True value comes from honesty. Consider the implications: The whole Cluetrain story is built on the idea that companies need to be honest, people long for an honest voice, and authenticity unlocks priceless communication between companies and clients. Arguably, every revolution in art is the product of exploring honest expression. The entire success of AAA meetings is based on the freedom and responsibility conferred by brazen honesty. The idea behind sift works because principles are trans-discipline in their implications. An economic principle has implications for scientists. A psychotherapeutic principle has implications for economics. And all these principles have implications for entrepreneurs and business. Conclusion: teaming the meta-skill of cognitive linking with a wide range of learning gives businesses a competitive edge – the sift hypothesis. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Cost of worry Saturday, October 16th, 2004 I’ve always been intrigued by efficiency, especially in my personal life. I regularly stroll sites kept up by efficiency fanatics (43 folders) and thoroughly enjoy the idea of “life hacks”. Over and over again, I see tactics on how to choose between urgent, important, and negligible. Renamed in funky way, but generally the same. But, absent from the field is a discussion of the never urgent, rarely important but energy sucking worries of everyday life. Like: need to get that damn door to stop squeaking, need to call about renewing car insurance – in six months, should really invest that $10k in our chequing account. Sure, these issues eventually become urgent or important but until then, they really eat up my subconscious bandwidth. I’m thinking about how this applies to business. I understand the organisation doesn’t have the same worry function, but it does have loads of people wandering around thinking about all the low-level, eventually important chores of work. It would be interesting to measure the efficiency gains from developing a mechanism to handle these issues. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Another note on boutiqu-ing Thursday, October 14th, 2004 I am in Paris – land of boutiques. It’s amazing to see hyper-stylish Parisians zipping in and out of tiny stores, purchasing one or two goods from each shop they enter. By the time they’re done, their arms are full, and they’ve been in and out of 10 to 15 stores. But even more amazing – they know the vendors personally, ask about their children, ask for something they requested two days ago … This is the social market of Paris at work. This is distinctly different than the North American experience; at first glance it seems surprisingly inefficient. This is interesting because on many issues, simply as a result of deeper history, Europe is ahead of western countries. On the issue of consumerism they seem to be behind. But, compare this to the modern, one-stop-shops like Walmart or Loblaws. Three things are immediately remarkable: long lines, gargantuan and poorly dressed people, and universally grumpy patrons. In an earlier post I noted what may be an evolutionary regression from massive social orgs (like Walmart) to tribal orgs (like Sum). Maybe the clue is that the value of the transactions between people overwhelms the efficiencies of scale. I’ll be looking into this further. Will keep it posted here. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (4) Party like a rockstar Wednesday, October 13th, 2004 When I was in university I used to love swinging by this guy’s site: Analog Cereal. He was on this quest to “party like a rock star”. I’ve never wanted to be a rock star - but the party part sounded fun. Why want to be a rockstar? There’s the obvious stuff. Rich. Venerated. Ladies/men all hot. But that can’t be all. There’s lots of rich, venerated jerks out there that I don’t want to be like. I think it’s the party. NewYorkMetro.com has an effervescent article about Donny Deutsch, CEO of Deutsch. Certified by AdAge.com as the rock star of advertising. If you read the article, beneath all the veneer of a rich and decadent lifestyle, Donny seems like an average kind of guy. Likes fights, swearing and scratching. So where’s his edge, what’s the lesson? Again, I think it’s the party. So, what’s the party? I think right deep at the core the party is a celebration of being. It’s the intentional freeing of ourselves. Throw off the restraining belts, toss away the unnatural brands we’ve built for ourselves, and rock. Sounds simplistic and it’s not clearly a business principle right? Gimme a sec. We’re sidling toward change. Check out what Steve Heyer, Chief Operating Officer, Coca-Cola Company, said in his Keynote Speech at Advertising Age: Coca-Cola is headed to ideas … intellectual property … use a diverse array of entertainment assets to break into people’s hearts and minds … moving to ideas that elicit emotion and create connections … no longer just intellectual property, [we’re moving toward] emotional capital. In a networked economy, ideas, concepts, and images are the items of real value. But Heyer is never clear on how to grab that emotional capital. He doesn’t suggest the path to something that really resonates. For that we should look to Hugh McLeod at gapingvoid.com. He’s suddenly caught an edge. He’s written a long and philosophical look at creativity. And the blog community has gone wild for it. In it he writes that people respond to “the humanity, not the form. The voice, not the form. Put your whole self into it, and you will find your true voice. Hold back and you won’t. It’s that simple.” Rock out. An interesting note, look at Analog Cereal’s new site. I won’t be back. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Faxes, memos and apathy Monday, October 11th, 2004 Am still reading Jared Diamond’s, “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” Am still intrigued by the idea of tribal business. Diamond runs through an ambitious description of social evolution. He works up from roving bands of nomads all the way to sophisticated democratic social structures. This is where Diamond’s work fits into my thinking on tribal business. The more interesting note is that his argument is built on the role of guns, germs and steel in driving this evolution. He points out the by cooperating societies got to guns faster. By bunching up into high populations, societies bred and became immune to potentially potent diseases (inadvertently shared with enemies, with devastating effects). And so, I began thinking about what that means for organisation size. What are the guns, germs and steel of modern economies? Well the guns have got to be technology. But we see the tinies outrunning the biggies in this area – everyday. So much for a single desk. Germs? Those are memos, paperwork, and emails. But, while devastating, these aren’t shared anymore, they just kill their hosts. And steel – there is none. Not, at least, in the higher stages of corporate evolution. Consider Enron and Hollinger Inc. But there’s tonnes of steel in the all-night, seven-days-a-week startups. So what does this say for tribal business? Evolution has switched flows. We now value movement, dexterity, and niches – the forte of hunters. If you can’t hunt with speed and precision, you are being hunted. Got any plans? I do. Use sift, get some. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Boutiqu-ing Saturday, October 9th, 2004 A few weeks ago I wrote about the tension between firm size and firm mobility. As the story narrowed in to the conclusion, I mentioned my concern that the sift experiment might become a bit busy. sift might turn into a chore instead of a joy. But I left the solution until now. In the article I mentioned Tim Manner’s Reveries and his note on little global companies. His story was one of the small guy playing in the big boy’s leagues but he inadvertently mentioned what I think is the answer I was seeking. Read to the end to find the trigger. Reveries Another such opportunity — in the rapid-prototyping business — has been developed by S. Scott Crump, co-founder (with his wife, Lisa) of an outfit called Stratasys, www.stratasys.com. Although the Eden Prairie, Minn., company has just 200 employees and drives only $50 million in revenues, Stratasys is the global leader in its category … and is publicly traded. Hidden in the rah-rah big league story is a small company, with (relatively) small revenues, reaching a small market. What’s the story? Keep it small. On purpose. A few days ago I was looking to buy a diamond ring for my wife. I popped into a boutique that looked interesting and chatted up the owner. “Any other stores?” I asked. “No way, I don’t want that lifestyle. Keep it small, I say.” There’s more and more of this. It looks like some companies are recognizing the value of keeping it small. That’s what I plan to do with sift too. But I wonder … we gave up tribes for chiefdoms, chiefdoms for kingdoms, kingdoms for agrarian societies … Will tribal business work? Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (3) McManifesto Monday, October 4th, 2004 I’m in a strange pinch. I’ve got two opposing writing opportunities. On one hand a regular newspaper article in the National Post that is supposed to be “punchy, witty and 100 words”. One the other hand, an offer to write a manifesto for Change This. When describing their format, Change This write, “Television demands a sound bite. A one hundred word letter to the editor is a long one … The short form that works so well attracts more readers than the long form … The bet? We’re betting that a significant portion of the population wants to hear thoughtful, rational, communicative arguments about important issues.” The National Post has all the right incentives to answer the question, “What do people want to read?” I would expect them to have answered this long ago. For Change This to win the bet, the National Post’s editor must be receiving short notes asking for long articles. But I bet they’re not. Lost in the Change This description of sound bites, brief letters, and short forms is the link to thoughtful, rational, and communicative arguments. They left it sounding like long is best. George Bernard Shaw wrote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Hidden in the short and long comparison is the key – time! We’ve got arguments for quality, thoughtfulness, Love Marks and Mark Loves. What about a Time Bank? Instead of making time savers, be time investors. Why not? In a world of insanely busy schedules and ludicrous salaries, a minute is arguably more precious that many, many dollars. Percent who feel rushed everyday.We hire people to handle our cash investments. There should be a market for handling time. For an estimate of the magnitude of the market size, consider the amount spent annually on leisure. Koreans alone spent a total of $91 million on leisure activities in 2001, accounting for 15 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). Viewed from the Time Bank perspective, it’s also a measure of value for time spent enjoyably. What about setting time limits instead of word limits? This is a 20-minute piece, I was in a hurry and grabbed some easy stats. You should see the nine-hour piece! Incidentally, both are around 350 words long. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) abbr. resume Tuesday, September 21st, 2004 My name is Jeremy Heigh. I am a husband, father, son, brother, friend, reader, thinker, economist, investor, gamer, artist, writer, and young man. I liked school and have three degrees. The last is an M.Sc. in environmental economics. I enjoy thinking and got paid to think on behalf of the Government of Canada, BASF, CareerJoy, several commodity groups, and tonnes of small companies. My last post was a senior policy advisor in the federal government on the environment, in international policy, and at the OECD. I’m good at analyzing and refining innovation - I can translate those insights in a way almost anyone can understand. I make new ideas work better. I can see where new things will end up and fiddle around with how to get there. I think, write, and speak very well. I understand the brilliance in people and get a bang from inviting them to be great. I helped craft national policy for three years. I helped Canada tackle BSE. I helped soybean growers revolutionize their industry. I helped create the brand for CareerJoy. I’ve written for the Globe and Mail, National Post, and economic journals. I started three successful companies. I was an awesome tree planter. And I make wicked good coffee. I like philosophy, stuff about how people learn and understand, animal behaviour, graffiti, scotch, science fiction, movies, modern architecture, and probably surfing. At the moment I work for a private investment company. We invest in technologies for renewable resource ventures that are either too risky or not yet viable enough to attract equity. It’s a sweet mix of hardcore business mechanics vs. soft social benefits, short-term payback vs. future-oriented visioning, and minute-by-minute tactics vs. strategic long-range decision making. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Lunacy for hire Thursday, September 16th, 2004 Nicholas Negroponte is founder of MediaLab and one of the founders of Wired. In a recent interview he described the evolving direction of MediaLab: “The biggest criticism I hear is, ‘Nicholas, you’re not crazy enough — the lab should be nuttier’,” he told a corporate audience on a visit to Dublin-based Media Lab Europe, or MLE. The MIT labs are facing funding problems. But their backers don’t want another set of traditional research labs, Negroponte insists. “They don’t need us to do those things,” he said. “They need us to be on the lunatic fringe — a very interesting place to be, but you can go over the edge very quickly. It’s a very delicate line.” Negroponte goes on to describe the consequences of the recent recession and the resulting shift toward industries with market dominance and government. One can’t blame him, he’s got to follow the money if he wants to keep working - but where’s he going to find the “lunatic fringe” when he’s buried the bureaucratic lunatics? There’s two ways to get emergent information. One is to be a lunatic - which is costly (as Negroponte discovered). The other is to watch them. The hitch is that option two is time consuming and most entrepreneurs can’t spare a minute. sift is an experiment to see if young companies benefit, in a measurable way, when given access to emergent lunacy. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Symphonies & physics Monday, September 13th, 2004 In the 2 September 2004 issue of Nature , Sarah Tomlin describes her recent cross-walk between physics and music. The opportunity came when she was invited to hear the product of Piers Coleman, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University and Jeremy Coleman, a composer-in-residence with the Prague Symphony Orchestra. The two brothers, self-described as Renaissance men, had cooperated to produce a three part composition called Music of the Quantum. Each of the movements tries to embody different physical concepts: emergence and broken symmetry, phase transformation and criticality, and the duality of the quantum world. Successful or not - the brainchild of these two brothers is a perfect example of something sift is deliberate about pursuing: innovation by recombination. Successful examples of recombination are legion. Jazz (mixture of blues and classical). Alternative rock (musical equivalent of Impressionist painting). Yahoo messenger (solitude of the letter, immediacy of the phone). Part of the research I do for sift involves combing learning from science, music, art, business, technology … whatever I can find to bring young companies new combinations of knowledge that might keep them innovating. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Google, googleguy & sift Saturday, September 11th, 2004 I’ve used Google for a long time but never really looked behind the interface. Now that I have, I see a whole world back there that I need to understand. My first clue came when I read their mission statement which comes with an invitation to Gmail: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible. Google certainly makes information accessible - Gmail is a spectacular move toward fulfilling that aspect of their mission. With Gmail they offer a massive storage capacity so users don’t need to delete emails. At first glance that seems like a recipe for chaos. Never delete? But Google shines with a solution, use their engine to sort your ever-growing volume of personal information. Gorgeous. I still haven’t discovered how they’ve made information more useful. They can help me find a pin in a haystack, but they can’t identify what the pin should be used for. I think this is part of the explanation for a new Google phenomenon - the Googleguy. In describing himself, Googleguy writes: I’m a Google engineer. About three years ago … I was reading what people online were saying about Google. I remember seeing a question from a site owner … and thinking it would be great if a Googler could just pop by to answer technical questions like that. And then I thought, I’m a Google engineer. I can answer technical questions like that. So I did. This is the useful part of the Google mission statement. But you’ll notice - Google isn’t doing it. sift is a response to this part of the equation. While there’s lots of information, the trick is to make it useful. Even better, it’s to make it valuable. In the future, I’ll use this blog to add usefulness and value to information I find in the books, arts, sports, science and everything else around us. The plan is to make young companies better by giving them access to the valuable information they need but don’t have the time to find themselves. As this blog builds I’ll start using the information to write quarterly reports to point readers to the always accessible but now valuable information they need. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (3) Of Mice by Men Thursday, September 9th, 2004 Karen Rader just published Making Mice (Princeton University Press, 2004). In the book Karen chronicles three themes - mice, genetic engineer and mice breeder Clarence Cook Little, and Little’s laboratory. Little repeatedly characterised his work as research but his greatest contribution was the purity of the mice stock he bred. What’s interesting is that while Little is credited with the development and protection of one of modern science’s most foundational assets he was focussed on something entirely different. Part of excelling at innovation involves identifying core competencies. For Little it was breeding ultra-pure strains of mice. Another part of innovation involves driving change within those competencies with new learning. sift is my business science experiment. I want to measure how much young companies benefit if they can clearly identify the core value of what they provide. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Valuable knowledge is useful Wednesday, September 8th, 2004 The current state of Russia’s scientific community is a brilliant study of the power of purpose driven (or lack of) enterprise. In the 2 September 2004 issue of Nature they’ve included a brief glimpse into the Russian Academy of Science. Once the pinnacle of any Russian scientists career, membership in the academy is followed the same path of degradation as the rest of the Russian public sector. In the thirteen years since the fall of communism, the Academy has yet to address the pressing issues of health and industrial innovation. Once respected, the Academy is directionless, un-competitive, and not taken seriously. Russia’s scientific experience illustrates three important points for those of us striving within a knowledge economy. First, knowledge without purpose is valueless. That’s not to say research and innovation must be directed at a product before proceeding. It means that knowledge without application is worth as much as a wrench in a world without bolts. Second, to maintain relevance and respect knowledge must inform the issues of the moment. Russia still has great scientists. However, most are focussed on mathematics and a few branches of physics. The real issues facing Russians are resolving an escalating health crisis and injecting innovation and technological advancing into their struggling industries. Until that’s achieved, the Academy won’t get respect. Third, knowledge provides a great return on investment if managed successfully. The prestige once enjoyed by the Academy members was the product of purpose-ful, relevant and actionable research. Whether it was pointed at innovative weapon systems, getting people into space, or providing medical insights - the Academy enjoyed success by consistently providing a high ROI. sift is a quest to provide specialised knowledge to meet the specific needs of entrepreneurs. The test is if the knowledge can bring actionable insights that drive innovation. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (1) Madness & curiosity Wednesday, September 8th, 2004 In another article in the 2 September 2004 issue of Nature Gautam Desiraju describes the process through which he discovered the birth of crystal engineering which today is one of the principle challenges of modern chemistry. His story is one of irreverence, curiosity, and discomfort - prime ingredients for innovation. In 1983 Gautam was studying crystal structure determination but a strong inclination for unconventionalism led him to team up with two other researchers poking around in the then unrecognized field of crystal packing. Tucked away in a warehouse full of art projects, this team of three discovered the first principles for designing organic solids with specific physical and chemical properties. Gautam credits his discovery to a heady mixture of midsummer madness and willingness to question existing concepts and paradigms. Through sift I can ask irreverent questions. I often suggest audacious solutions. All of which is supported by unfettered curiosity. I want to see if it’s measurably valuable to entrepreneurs when I bring together the ingredients for innovation. Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Home > sifted Search © 2007 Jeremy Simplr theme by Scott Powered by WordPress Valid XHTML & CSS RSS: Posts & Comments Sifted Home Archives dream job sift everything innovate by knowing “do only what you only can do” Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 It was hot. Having Chernobyl just a few hours away didn’t help. I was lying on my back, slung between two seats in the bottom of the row boat. My self-appointed advisor sat sweating in the bow. His fat white stomach glistened in the heat of the Ukrainian afternoon. While we drifted along the river, the missionary earnestly jabbered about his work in the country. It was getting uncomfortable. Eventually, for lack of distraction, I started making internal wagers betting on which two beads of sweat would first jump together on the man’s expansive, sweaty chest. His words droned along, joining the monotonic voice of the city. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Passion metric Thursday, March 1st, 2007 I battle an internal suspicion that I’m too naive for business. Maybe I think too big, measure obstacles as too small, and expect too much? But maybe we live too small, ask too few important questions, focus on the middle insteand of the edges of possibility, and because we don’t expect achievement of any significant magnitude we never get to see it. Obviously, I usually settle on the second side, naivety be damned. One particularly naive thing I expect is that if something is worthwhile, you should first do it for free. If it really sings, then sing. Do it on your own when no one is looking and no one is paying. Of course it’s plain silly to do everything for kicks. So, the other naive expectation I harbor is that I should be paid exhorbitantly well for things I’m willing to do for free. As a friend said, “I don’t expect much, just $350,000 per year to work three days a week at something I’d do for free. Oh, and a yacht. A big one - really, really big.” Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Blue ocean revival Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 Within my small circle of aquaintences, Blue Ocean Strategy is popular again. Reading it through for the third time (the last time was more than a year ago), the book is so smooth and so rich compared to the business books I’ve read lately. Most books are limited to pure analysis that is easy to back up with numbers. Afraid of being soft, most set aside our capacities for insight and intuition. Blue Ocean embracing those abilities and provides a system for their use. It’s immensely refreshing. The book is also an arterial injection of confidence for companies facing an uncertain future. In such circumstance, many turn to consultants. With a consultant in the room it’s easy to convince ourselves that they hold all the marbles. A flashy, heavily educated, showman is mesmerizing - especially if they’ve written “strategist” somewhere on their business card. Books like Blue Ocean Strategy show that a process and some discipline can push a company further than any outside expert. For those interested, here are comments made previously on this site: Blue Ocean StrategyThe best sort of blueWhen blue oceans turn purpleWhen sharks visit your blue ocean Image posted by noisehead.Technorati Tags: Blue+Ocean+strategy, strategy, insight, intuition, business+opportunity, W+Chan+Kim, Renée+MauborgneSite Search Tags: Blue+Ocean+strategy, strategy, insight, intuition Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (4) Fiction society: moving beyond crowds Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 Before moving on to a review of John Ruskin’s book, On Art and Life, there’s one more bit to synthesize from the first two (here and here). Trouble is, I’m not sure how to say this best. I even dreamt about this last night. But it’s still a bit muddled. If these authors are right, we need to diligently set up the information that drives decisions. Concept packages are critical and usually ignored. Poul’s comment about the sinister consequences of capitalism made me realize that markets drive off insufficient information too. The information used to inform capitalistic decisions is both too narrow and too broad. It is too narrow in its focus on efficiency, cost effectiveness, and rate of return. It is too broad in its focus on “society” rather than individuals. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) De-patterning: refining the first stage of thought Friday, February 16th, 2007 After finishing New World, New Mind I was convinced of two things. First, more attention is needed around staging our thinking processes. Second, the authors didn’t had no idea how to do it. So, while Cuban waves tickled the beach, I grabbed Edward De Bono’s book, Po: Beyond Yes and No. I discovered that this book is everything New World, New Mind should have been. To be fair, De Bono’s work is light. The book doesn’t dig deeply into the supporting facts. He takes his authority as granted and plunges into the concepts. The Ornstein and Ehrlich book set up all the points that De Bono makes in his. De Bono’s book is about the process of informing the process of thinking. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Set up your mind for better decisions Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 My wife and I just got back from a week’s vacation in Cuba. Long days on the beach, hiding in the shade of a thatched roof hut gave plenty of opportunity for reading. I rolled through three books and intend to write reviews of each. The first book was New World, New Mind: Moving Toward Conscious Evolution by Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich, 1989. Next was Edward De Bono’s book Po: Beyond Yes and No, 1972. Finally, On Art and Life by John Ruskin, 1853. What follows is a review of New World, New Mind. The other reviews will come out in the next few posts. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Experiencing insight: which comes first, age or beauty? Sunday, January 28th, 2007 The whole idea we’re talking about here is based on a group of eclectic and divergent innovators tackling focused opportunities together to create experimental companies … really, really quickly. A few days ago, another friend wrote in to suggest that insight is too much a function of experience to expect anything remarkable from this kind of crowd. Ultimately their experience is too shallow to drive out anything tight enough to commercialize. From his note: “Sometimes I wonder if being insightful is not more a function of experience at this stage. Oh, I always hope there are moments of brilliance of course, but how does one distinguish between what questions should be parroted as each opportunity presents itself versus ‘thought gems’? Even race horses know that all that needs to be done is to run around the tack one more time … though the prep consists of all sorts of training/experience.” In the reply back I suggest that the ability to generate insight is independent of experience. Some are insightful right from the start. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Forget tailor-made, just get it second-hand. Saturday, January 27th, 2007 In an offline note a good friend challenges the concept of new, tailor-made companies. Instead he asks, “What about companies that need tailors … companies that need a new dress, ugly companies, those ones that need new shoes … couldn’t this group help them?” Absolutely. And, as he suggests, perhaps it is a better place to start. The riddle behind this idea is how to find cash flow early. Dropping into and refining an existing company is a good way to take care of that problem. He also debates the suggestion that this is possible without a champion … it may need a benevolent totalitarian. It might. But I haven’t met the person to do it yet. This is small enough (just four right now) that an alpha dog isn’t even an idea worth entertaining. But will we ever need such a change? Why do we need leadership of this kind? Does defaulting to the “single great leader” system do anything to position us for the ways of the future? If we could somehow cast off the preconceptions we’ve built or mindlessly accepted, is such a thing even an option? Image posted by stickerHelsinkiTechnorati Tags: you&company, collective+intelligence, work, careers, tailored+companiesSite Search Tags: you&company, collective+intelligence, work, careers, tailored+companies Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (4) Creating tailor-made companies Thursday, January 18th, 2007 I think it’s possible to tailor-make successful companies. What I’d like to try isn’t new. I bet someone else is doing it. And I bet tons of people have tried and it tanked. I think predecessors have tried and failed because they thought money mattered - it doesn’t. I think previous attempts hit the ditch because they thought ideas were the key - patents, trade secrets and the like - they’re wrong. People matter. That’s it. Take $2M, a great concept, and a group of three people who are technically, socially, and financially savvy - the trick will still be finding those three people. But, funny thing, I keep running into people who are absolutely amazing. Each one is stuck in some job that uses just a tiny part of the stuff they’re great at. And they feel lousy because most of the time they work on stuff they readily admit they have never been good at doing. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) A master at play Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 Henry David Thoreau’s taste for life is, for me, unmatched in its perception, power, and vitality. From earnest to silly, most of it sings. His journal … it’s like watching Michelangelo whittle. The rippling strength of a master at play. January 14, 1854 “I just had a coat come home from the tailor’s. Ah me! Who am I that should wear this coat? It was fitted upon one of the devil’s angels about my size. Of what use that measuring of me if he did not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang it on. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Synchronizing greatness Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 Here’s an unsolved riddle: How do we get the minds of widely dispersed, brilliant people to focus on critical problems/opportunities? How do we synchronize greatness? Dave Pollard brought this up a few days ago. He writes: “… we don’t need more leaders, more gurus, more one-size-fits-all prescriptions. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Invoking innovation: moving beyond serendipity Sunday, January 14th, 2007 Inspiring brilliance A large part of brilliance is inspiration triggered by a convergence of information, creativity, and insight. But here’s the hitch: innovative brilliance is still fortuitous, it’s basically an accident. The challenge is moving innovation beyond serendipity and into an intentional process. Part of enabling a consistent process of innovation is creating many rich sources of inspiration. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) Invite and inspire brilliance Saturday, January 13th, 2007 If I gave you everything you need to completely and absolutely celebrate your brilliance, would you come to the table? If there was a way to see your genius come to life within a handful of small companies of which you might see a small share in each - would you come to play? Here’s an invitation: Let’s create a hand-picked group of individuals. Choose inventors, entrepreneurs, and VC’s who are insightful, wise, and influential among their peers. Let this group meet regularly, at their own cost, and give them just one thing: a tangible opportunity to be brilliant. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) Up on a soapbox Friday, December 22nd, 2006 When do we get to play? I mean play for real - like NHL-hockey-player playing. Where it’s for real money in a real game against real opposition. Where we’re invited - or better yet, commanded - to completely unload. To grab our brimming grail of rich potential, look for the whitest, untouched canvas we can find, and with absolute abandon splash its red brilliance on everything in our lives. When does that happen? There’s this scene in the last X-Men movie where Juggernaut, this massive brute who’s mutant power is giant strength, is chasing Kitty Pryde (another mutant) through a building. Instead of racing through hallways and doors, Juggernaut just puts his head down and smashes through the brick walls. Bursting through one impossibly thick wall after another, he’s unstoppable. Meanwhile, Kitty, who’s power is phase shifting, zips along in front of him, flashing in phases through the matter in front of her. The intoxicating thing about all the super-hero stuff we’ve seen is that deep down we believe a tiny, microscopic fraction of it is actually true. Some have a seemingly inhuman or unfathomable strength that isn’t a direct result of experience, or schooling, or career path. That, without even trying, a few can touch things that most people take a lifetime to achieve. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (5) Never provoked Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 From the Thoreau blog: “Some men make their due impression upon their generation, because a petty occasion is enough to call forth all their energies; but are there not others who would rise to much higher levels, whom the world has never provoked to make the effort? I believe there are men now living who have never opened their mouths in a public assembly, in whom nevertheless there is such a well of eloquence that the appetite of any age could never exhaust it; who pine for an occasion worthy of them, and will pine till they are dead … The age may well go pine itself that it cannot put to use this gift of the gods. He lives on, still unconcerned, not needing to be used. The greatest occasion will be the slowest to come.” Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (0) A distinct view of the naked whole Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: “When an object presents itself to your perception, make a mental definition or at least an outline of it, so as to discern its essential character, to pierce beyond its separate attributes to a distinct view of the naked whole, and to identify for yourself both the object itself and the elements of which it is composed, and into which it will again be resolved. Nothing so enlarges the mind as this ability to examine methodically and accurately every one of life’s experiences, with an eye to determining its classification, the ends it serves, its worth to the universe, and its worth to men … What is it? Whereof is it composed? How long is it designed to last? What moral response does it ask of me; gentleness, fortitude, candor, good faith, sincerity, self-reliance, or some other quality?” A distinct view of the naked whole … love that. Continue Reading » Filed in sifted - Permalink - Comments (2) That one fleeting instant Monday, November 27th, 2006 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, Roman Emperor from 161-180: “… the passing minute is every man’s equal possession, but what has once gone by is not ours. Our loss, therefore, is limited to that one fleeting instant, since no one can lose what is already past, nor yet what is still to come - for how can he be deprived of what he does not possess? [T]he sole thing of which any man can be deprived is th