Perspectives
The Most Trusted Man in America
While the Occupy movement railed against the excesses of the 1% and it has become normal to diss those who work on Wall Street, why is it that Warren Buffet is often seen as the successor to Walter Cronkite as the Most Trusted Man in America? Well for Warren, life...
Influence
Trying to start this business has been a real journey of discovery for me. I now look back in amazement at what I didn't know about leadership and wonder after spending almost two years studying the subject, what I still don't know. Case in point, influence. I'm...
Flow
Can you remeber a time when you were highly productive and gained enourmous satisfaction from work, when you had seemingly limitless amounts of energy? Well if you've ever been there, what you were experiencing is called flow. Mihàly Csìkszentmihàlyi, the psychologist...
My Two Cents Worth
If your thoughts used to be worth two cents (inflation adjusted from the days when people paid a penny for your thoughts) what are they worth now? After all, two cents in cash exchanges will now be rounded down to nothing. Obviously we need some innovation in trite...
How do you turn an ass into a donkey?
There's lots of literature on the diffusion of innovation (nerd-speak for how innovation spreads) but most of it is devoted to how to get customers to innovate. Never mind customers, how do you get your bosses or co-workers to innovate, or even your own direct...
Whatever
There's a great interview of Seth Godin on Copyblogger. Worth a read, I'm still laughing from reading it. The best line was when Seth was asked whether he writes every day. His response: "Do you talk every day?" As all of you know, I'm trying out this writing thing...
Should what Blackberry brought us this week be called Innovation?
So Blackberry finally released their new phone this week. I happen to use a Blackberry but only because I like the buttons. I have tried typing emails on touch screen based smart phones but my inaccurately big fingers seem to mess everything up so I am relegated to an...
Styles of Innovators
Yesterday, I posed the question: "A woman had two sons who were born on the same hour of the same day of the same year. But they were not twins. How could this be so?" I had a few people chime in with an answer but no one got it right the first time. The correct...
Lateral Thinking
One of my favourite stories is about slow elevators. As it is told, there was a co-op building in New York where tenants were complaining about slow elevators. Management considered all sorts of solutions including installing additional elevators or speeding up the...