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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]