"I suddenly understood with great clarity that nothing in life—except
death itself—was ever going to kill me. No meeting could ever go that
badly. No client would ever be that angry. No business error would ever
bring me as close to the brink as I had already been."
– David E. Davis, Jr., on the liberating effects of the automobile accident which almost claimed his life
Sure, blogging is an integral part of what transparent leadership looks like cira 2008, and bloggers do great things, but blogging has its downside.
Hear Yossi Vardi speak eloquently about some downside of having a G5 humming away in one’s lap. If nothing else, this is a great example of how to use PowerPoint. It’s not the crate, but the person who pilots it, as was once said.
And check out this great profile of Vardi in The Economist.
John Lilly, a long-time member of the metacool blog roll, was named CEO of Mozilla today. I’ve been lucky enough to work with John at the Stanford d.school, spend many hours together swapping war stories about business and the nature of product development, and even toil for a few days as fellow Lobbyists.
Not only am I happy for John, I’m really psyched for Mozilla, too. Firefox is one of my favorite products. It is incredibly reliable, very easy to use, and is the most personalized product in my possession. I use it for play and for work; in any given day I spend four hours staring in to the Web as mediated by Firefox. It’s safe to say that Mozilla is one of my favorite brands, right up there with Apple, BMW, The Economist, Honda, The Cortiina, Subaru, McGuckin Hardware, and McMenamins Kennedy School. I can’t wait to see where the Mozilla goes with John, and vice versa.
That last vice versa is crucial. As I wrote about in MIT’s Innovation journal last year, John and the Mozilla community represent a new way of getting things done, one which requires a new paradigm of leadership and participation. They live in a world that thrives on transparency and openness, a place where web thinking is freedom thinking. We can all learn a lot about innovation and the art of getting stuff done from Mozilla. One thing for sure: this is a story with many chapters left to go.
w00t!
(you didn’t think I was going to write this without saying that, did you?)
My favorite talk from TED2007. As one might expect, this is a meta level talk, a Director’s Commentary about being a director dreaming big things. A meditation on designing life.
Here’s a transcript of Starck’s talk. Let’s just say that this is a very provocative and intriguing twenty minutes.
"Most new ideas are bad; and the good ones are mostly not new."
Tomorrow I’ll be part of a panel discussion at Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations of the Future, a conference presented by Harvard Business School.
Professor Jim Heskett will be moderating our panel. He’s written a provocative post on the HBS Working Knowledge website about tomorrow’s discussion. There’s on open invitation there to leave your comments, ideas, and thoughts on the subject. Please do so, as we’ll be tackling at least some of them in the time we have tomorrow together, and the discussion will continue online through December 18.
The agenda of speakers at the conference is simply mind-blowing. I expect to walk away with more than a few new ideas and insights, all of which will no doubt make their way in to metacool. The entire conference is being held in honor of Professor Thomas K. McCraw, author of my favorite book of the year, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.
My time at Harvard Business School changed my view of the world in many ways, and as a result fundamentally changed my life. It is very meaningful to me to be back on campus exploring design, innovation, technology, business, and life.
I wrote the other week about Alex Zanardi’s amazing achievement at the New York Marathon.
I’m not a good enough writer to capture the charm of a live interview with Zanardi. So to show yet again why he’s my hero, here’s a five minute segment from WindTunnel. Enjoy.
"There are those who do the real work of the world, and those who hound them."
Today Alex Zanardi placed 4th out of 53 competitors in the hand cycle class of today’s New York Marathon. Not bad for a guy who not only didn’t train for the marathon, but who died several times on the way to the hospital after losing his legs six years ago.
I love and respect Zanardi because he’s such a racer. Run a marathon? No problem, let’s do it. Get back in the saddle and race the bejeezus out of touring cars (in a BMW, natch!)? No problem, let’s do it. Write some inspiring books about your life and times? No problem, let’s do it.
In a world where negative whining often poses as concrete action, it’s great to see someone who just gets on with it. I have the distinct pleasure of hanging out with some people who make a living carving amazing things out of aluminum, wood, steel, and plastic. Their job is really hard, because there is no bullshit factor due to the inherent tangibility of their medium; unlike a glossy PowerPoint deck, a milled piece of aluminum is either it, or is not. They have a saying they roll out when someone is paralyzed by the prospect of something new, something that might lead to failure, loss of status, or pain: Just F****** Do It. JFDI.
Zanardi is a JFDI kind of guy. In other words, a racer. Racers are innovators.
The current issue of Fast Company has a great article about the way HP’s corporate design group influences the rest of the organization. I found the article fascinating — it’s a great example of designing for business.
It’s also a good example of why there’s no silver bullet when it comes to getting an organization to integrate the design process in to the way it goes to market. I love most of Apple’s products, but I also realize that the way it goes about innovating — a centralized, low-variance, top-down approach — isn’t the answer for every organization. With HP, for example, you have a decentralized company where the leaders of individual business units are very powerful. A centralized innovation model based on power wouldn’t work well there. As the article shows, what does seem to be working at HP is an approach based on influence, as well as on showing the distributed decision makers what could happen. It’s all about looking hard at the constituent parts that make up a culture — people, resources, processes and values — and then structuring a congruent approach. Good stuff.