January 2012
6 posts
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MLK
I read this quote on Seth Godin’s blog today from Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s tremendous, and worth repeating, especially with the circus we are about to endure in an election year.
“The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.”
May you live...
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Would You Like Some Bland With That?
I spent the week between Christmas and New Years in Tulsa, OK visiting family. On one of the days my wife and I decided to go get some coffee (or tea in my case). There were, of course, sixteen Starbucks within a five mile radius of where we were, but I wanted something different.
We stumbled upon a cool little, locally owned, coffee shop called Agora with the help of Google Maps. What I...
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The Number Two
A man with two clocks never knows the time.
A man cannot serve two masters.
These independent thoughts have in common the distraction of having two of something. In the case of business, this might be having two competing objectives, or to be more to the point not having one clear objective.
I think there is also something to the idea that trying to be something you are not (personally or...
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Books to Read - January 2012
I usually pull most of the books I recommend each month from my current reading list. Last month, however, was a particularly bad month for reading for me. I seemed to get in a rut of books I didn’t like and had a hard time getting out of it. That is, until the last week and a half or so. I only have three books on this month’s list, but all of them are very much worth a read.
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December 2011
6 posts
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Starting With @ - A Common Twitter...
If you use Twitter, there is a well-kept secret about starting your tweets with @. If the first character in your tweet is a Twitter address (e.g. @joeblow), only the people that follow both you and @joeblow will be able to see the tweet.
Here is how it works:
Tweet: I am good friends with @joeblow Who Sees It: Anyone that follows me
Tweet: @joeblow and I are good friends Who Sees It: Only...
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Nothing is Fatal
Except, well, death.
When I am in periods like I am right now, where everything is going sideways, it’s a good reminder that there are very few things that are unrecoverable.
As a companion to this idea, Seth Godin’s post yesterday about failure and mistakes was another reminder that every decision made, while not fatal most of the time, does have consequences. Taking the time to...
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On Liberty
I rarely delve into politics on this blog. The reason for this is that I aim primarily for this blog to be informative and interesting, and politics is usually neither.
There are times, however, when the laws being considered and passed by the United States government need to be talked about. Such is the case with two pieces of legislation that have received widespread notoriety in the past...
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You Never Know Who's in the Room
A few years back I went to see a Switchfoot concert at a college nearby. At the time I knew who they were, but would not have considered myself a fan. At the urging of my brother, I went to see them.
The concert venue was lousy, and there was almost no one there. Probably less than 500 people showed up. The warm up bands were awful. I was skeptical.
Next thing I knew Switchfoot was up on...
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Books to Read - December 2011
As we wind down 2011, the following is my must-read list for December. These books are a combination of recently read and a classic that have a theme of great adversity and the triumph of the human soul. Seems fitting for the end of this year. I hope you enjoy all of them!
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
From the author of...
November 2011
10 posts
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Observations from a Rural Outpost
I am spending this week with family in upstate NY. My parents have lived in the same house for close to 45 years, and I love getting up here a couple of times a year to enjoy a change of scenery.
A few things have jumped out at me since we have been up here.
Americans watch a ton of television. I guess I don’t notice it as much where we live for whatever reason, but as we have been out...
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The Technology Adoption Debt
I am guilty many times of rushing to judgement about how widespread technology adoption is among the general population in the US. I often presume that because I know about and use great technology every day that most everyone else is doing the same.
It’s simply not true. There is a significant portion of the population that doesn’t know anything about Dropbox or GMail or dozens of...
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Backupify - A Service To Back Up Your Gmail and...
I have been a customer of Gmail since 2004. Since that time, nearly all of my email has been stored with Google. It’s something I fret about from time to time when I think about the cost of losing my mail to either an error at Google, a hack of my account, or human error.
This week I came across a great service called Backupify. It does a nightly backup of your mail, calendar, and Google...
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It's What We Have
I was listening to an interview with REM the other night on NPR. Michael Stipe and Mike Miles were in studio, talking about closing out three decades of amazing music. I must disclose I don’t care for REM at all, but can acknowledge that their contribution to music is worthy of high praise.
Toward the end of the interview, each was asked what was next for them individually. As the voices...
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The Privilege of Protest
I witnessed two events in the past week that could not have presented a more different view the world.
The first was a fundraiser last Saturday night for an organization based here in Raleigh called Jobs for Life. Jobs for Life equips people for the workforce who have had little or no experience in getting or holding a job. The curriculum teaches how to interview, how to fill out applications,...
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Building a Company
I realized this past week that I have been guilty of not trying to build a company, but rather building something that might sell someday. It’s not that selling your company is a bad thing. I wouldn’t mind if it happened.
However, the focus is not the same. I was finishing up Steve Jobs biography last week and there is a great section in the very last chapter. It is essentially...
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Worth Watching - November 2011
Recently there have been several videos that have captured (or recaptured) my interest. As I have done with books for a while,
Objectified is a really interesting documentary on industrial design. From BMW to Braun to Apple, the best in design is explored in this 1.5 hour film. Available for streaming on Netflix or Amazon, or for purchase on iTunes.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs - All Things...
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Thank You, Veterans
On this Veterans Day, thank you to all of the people who risk their lives every day in service to the USA. There is simply no way to repay the families of those who have lost their lives. Every citizen owes you a tremendous debt.
Some statistics to consider:
There have been over 6,200 men and women killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last 10 years since the wars started. The...
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Things Done In Secret - The Mess at Penn State
The happenings at Penn State are another reminder to us all that things done in secret will be shouted from the housetop (or in this case from every housetop).
Joe Paterno’s handling of the events around his assistant coach are at best disgusting and at worst criminally negligent. His graduate assistant bears the same responsibility and should be dealt the same set of cards. Both knew...
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Books to Read - November 2011
Here is the list for the month of November. I hope you enjoy each of these books as much as I have!
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Not surprisingly, the biography of Steve Jobs tops my list for this month. It’s a fantastic read and will not disappoint. I will have a separate post later this month that has more details. I can’t take the proper amount of space to write about it...
October 2011
10 posts
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Microsoft's Browser Wars, 2011 Version
I came across this comparison chart today that reminded me of the early days of the browser wars between Microsoft and everyone else. If you don’t follow such things, Microsoft has a long and sordid history of being unwilling to comply with standards that the rest of the world readily adopts.
Internet Explorer (IE) is universally accepted as the most difficult browser to work with when...
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Fixing Radio
I remember being on a plane ride back in 2002 or 2003 where a good friend of mine and I got into a lively discussion about how to save the music business with a couple of music executives. This was back when Napster was king and everyone was pirating music. It was our conclusion that people would pay for music if they could buy the way they wanted to, not the way the industry wanted them to. We...
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WatchPearl Jam performing “Last Exit”
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Why You Should Record Meeting Audio
If you are like most people, you have inevitably come out of a meeting with less than perfect notes and had to try to recall important items from the discussion. Missing important details inevitably leads to wasted time and effort, either by taking the wrong action or by having to circle back with the other attendees to recapture the information.
I started a practice a couple of years ago of...
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How to Start Simple
You woke up this morning with a great idea, one that will change both your life and the lives of everyone you know. It’s the next big thing, for sure. The next question you inevitably have is, “What do I do first?”
If you are a technologist like I am, the tendency is to start building something right away. The cooler, the better. People love cool. I have taken this path at...
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WatchAmazing TED talk on prosperity’s root causes
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Dancing While the Ice Melts
There was a local election last night here in Raleigh, NC. The big race was not the mayoral race, but rather the seats on the local school board. As I have talked about in the past, the Wake County school board has been under fire for the last few years as they have moved to change how school districts are organized.
Those that celebrated last night’s results were the champions of...
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The Story of Chapman's Ice Cream
Chapman’s Ice Cream is legendary in Canada. They are a family-owned and operated business in northern Ontario. What makes Chapman’s a great story is not the quality of their ice cream (I have never had it), but rather their response to a disaster in September 2009.
On September 4, 2009, their creamery burned to the ground, essentially stopping production for the entire company....
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The Great Equalizer
There are at least a couple of ways to think about yesterday’s passing of Steve Jobs.
One is to mourn the loss of the iconic corporate leader of our generation. Many have written about how great he was, how much of a visionary he was, etc. All of those things are true, and I admire the things that his company produced as much as I can admire something inanimate.
The other far more...
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Books to Read - October 2011
It’s been an unusually good month on the book front. I hope you enjoy October’s selections as much as I have.
The Lean Startup by Eric Reis
This book, in my opinion, is a must-read for anyone in business today. I have talked in this blog about the Lean Startup methodology and my disposition toward approaching all problems looking through the lens of the practices put forth in this...
September 2011
24 posts
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Google Finally Starts Appealing to Our Emotions
The latest ad from Google is the most compelling ad I have ever seen them create. I saw it on Sunday. If you have not watched it, check it out below. Is it me, or did you feel like you were watching something from Apple? Really well done, Google. It makes me want to use your products. Which, by the way, I already do.
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Do Corporations Bear a Societal Burden?
I was listening to a podcast by Rebecca MacKinnon last night. You can watch the video here. Rebecca is an activist campaigning to retake the internet, which by her definition means lessening the influence and power of large corporations. There were a couple of points in the talk that raised some interesting questions.
Is modern-day censorship the same as previous corporate ills such as waste...
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Everyone is an Artist?
I watched PressPausePlay this week. If you have not watched it, I highly recommend it. You can download it for free now. The movie is a documentary about the democratization of creativity.
If you follow the writing of Seth Godin at all, you will be familiar with his premise that everyone is an artist at something. Seth is in this movie as well. I am a big fan of his work, and find him to be...
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Answering the Question Prematurely
I was at a client site the other day and they were talking about some exciting new initiatives that were getting ready to kick off. While there was a good bit of excitement around it, there was also frustration with some of the thinking around how to attack these new opportunities. It seems that there were those who wanted to overload the new stuff with some of the same burdens of the way things...
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Removing My Email Fix
I am an email junkie. I check my email probably 50 times a day at least, either on my phone or while working at my desk. To paraphrase an old Chicago lyric “Email, you’re a hard habit to break.” However, this week I have set about changing my habits. I did the math on the interruptions around checking email and figured I am probably burning an hour or two each day in focused...
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Why An Occasional Outage Is A Good Thing
I had a major internet service interruption at my office yesterday. I called the service provider and found out that the whole block was offline and that it was going to be a while before service was restored. I had five minutes of panic, thinking about where I needed to go to get back on the grid. Then I stopped and thought about the work I had queued up for the day.
After looking through my...
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A Different Kind of Performance Review
I was reading an article by Premal Shah of Kiva this past week. The focus of the article was on how to do reviews for the people that work for you. I thought he had some really good ideas on how to get away from the traditional annual review.
At Kiva, the staff are required to present their latest work regularly to a group of their peers. If they are working on a particular project or...
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Lessons from the Runway
I was at FashionSpark this past weekend, which is the fashion show associated with SparkCon here in Raleigh. I was there, not because I know anything about fashion (other than that I don’t know anything about fashion), but to support a friend who was launching a new clothing company called Villette. There were about fifteen designers that participated, from what I could tell.
What I love...
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Googling Yourself
How often do you Google yourself? I try to do this at least once a month to find out what is being said about me, or what comes up in the first few results.
It’s the first thing someone else is doing when they hear your name. Is what people are seeing what you want them to see? If not, is there anything more important than fixing it?
Along similar lines, updating your profiles on...
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The Network Made Me Do It
A good friend posted an article on Facebook the other day about the network effect on extremism in modern life. The author, Bill Davidow, is a veteran of business and studying the market.
First, let me say that I agree with the premise of this article in that the network produces positive effect more rapidly than at any other time in human history. We see this in the examples provided by the...
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Being Ruthless About What You Shouldn't Do
I have been reading and studying the book End Malaria this week. It’s a compilation of 62 authors who came together to help, as you might imagine, end malaria in Africa. For every book that you purchase, $20 is donated to buying mosquito nets.
The first part of the book is about focus, a topic that ironically, I have a hard time focusing on. The first two writers, Kevin Kelly and Roger...
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Serving Two Masters - Will It Work?
I have been running Rocket Hangar for about a year now. When I started the company, I had two primary goals: 1. Do interesting and valuable work. 2. Don’t go broke
For #2, I lined up a series of consulting gigs that I still work on to this day, more or less. Smaller gigs have come and gone, but I continue to have a decent stream of work from those initial clients. This work has...
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Roger Federer Gets Small
I love tennis. It’s become a sport that I love to play and follow.
We were at a tennis tournament this past weekend and missed the epic five-set match between Roger Federer and Nole Djokovic. For those that did not see it or hear about it, Djokovic was down in sets 0-2 and came back to win in five sets.
There was one shot in particular that Djokovic hit when he was down a match point....
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The Triumph of Good - Remembering 9/11
Yesterday, September 11, was a witches brew of emotion for me. I was up early, playing tennis with my daughter as the sun came up. It’s one of my great pleasures in life, being out early and just enjoying her company. She went to play a tournament match an hour later and lost, ending a pretty good weekend for her.
I listened to the radio broadcast on NPR of the various ceremonies at the...
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Why?
Why do you live where you live?
Why do you work where you work?
Why did you marry the person you married?
Why haven’t you done that thing you have talked about doing for so long?
I get stuck in ruts just like everyone else. Every now and then I am reminded to pull my head out of (my butt) the sand and take a look around and ask the hard questions. Most of the time I don’t like...
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The Upper Crust Bakery - Fulfilling life-long...
There is a new bakery that just opened up here in Raleigh, very close to our house, called The Upper Crust Bakery. We have made it one of our new favorite places. This morning I took my daughter there for breakfast, and the food was awesome yet again.
Everything is made fresh each day, and the decor makes you feel like you are in a Parisian bakery (even though you are in suburban Raleigh).
...
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Dennis Crowley of Foursquare
The video below is Kevin Rose’s interview with Dennis Crowley of Foursquare. I have really come to enjoy Kevin Rose’s interview style while watching / listening to the Foundations series.
My number one takeaway from this interview is the simplicity of thinking and concept behind each of Dennis’ ventures. In each case he took a problem that he experienced in every day life and...