February 18, 2009
10:24 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Nominations for the 2009 Fast Cities of the Year are pouring in. Here's an entry on behalf of Providence, RI:
Providence has its own language, rules and characters that are embraced. A steak grinder and two wieniers 'all the way' please! (pronounced weenahs) Stop signs are suggestions and left turns from the right lane through a red light is a weekly occurrence. Rhode Island was the last to ratify the constitution and the first to fight the British (burning of the Gaspee). We have bonfires downtown with music, and surf all winter long.
There is still time to vote for your city.
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February 11, 2009
04:00 pm | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
Chicago and London topped our 2008 Cities of the Year list. This year we're asking for your help in choosing the most exuberant, diverse and growing city to top the list of Fast Cities for 2009. Click here to submit your nomination.
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April 25, 2008
08:36 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
I love flip-flopping as I look at the Presidential campaign through the lens of emotional intelligence. Maybe I should run for office.
Here goes my current iteration.
Obama is a charmer, not a fighter. Clinton is a fighter, not a charmer. Clinton is a bulldog and it’s beginning to “feel” like Obama is slinging a lot of bull.
Given how uphill a battle it seems to get anything accomplished, I can see the advantage of a bulldog over someone with charm, but possibly not much else.
Truth be told, the reason President Bush may have beaten Gore and Kerry, is that compared to both, he was the bulldog to their complainer and whiner personae. Ironically, President Bush’s bulldog personality may even be preferable to either Obama’s or Clinton’s. The problem with Bush was his flawed vision (or perhaps his gamble that didn’t pay off) and then even more flawed execution of that vision. If Bush had a better vision and was more effective in implementing it, he in fact has the better personality for the job.
Darn, this personality stuff is such a distraction.
I think what Americans need, want and ache for is something that none of the candidates have and if they had, most Americans would fight.
What we need is a candidate with a noble vision so powerful and compelling that we will put aside our more pressing personal needs to throw ourselves behind it.
Fighting for individual freedom was the vision that gave birth to this country, freedom from slavery caused the Civil War, making the world safe for democracy led to WW I, overthrowing evil led to WW II.
None of the candidates seems to have a transformational vision that can be that rising tide that lifts all Americans. Instead, they seem hopelessly locked in transactional myopia where the focus seems more about getting elected than on taking America to a place of world prominence and eminence.
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March 21, 2008
06:44 pm | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
Is Chipotle a one-trick pony? Is dependable Safeway actually more innovative than trendy Whole Foods? Should we have jettisoned AirAsia to make room for Virgin Galactic? Innovation expert Dev Patnaik thinks so.
Fast Company's Ellen Gibson spoke with Patnaik, the founder of consulting firm Jump Associates, about companies that didn’t make the cut for this year's Fast 50 ranking—and companies that shouldn’t have. His views might be controversial (BMW? They’re just “so-so.” GE? “More buzz than substance.”), but we have to agree with him when he says that banks and car dealerships don’t have to suck.
Check out the interview to see what Patnaik means and give us your take.
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February 6, 2008
08:48 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Building a business around being cool is really hard. Keeping it there is even harder. But the toughest of all is getting your cool edge back if you ever lose it. The good news for innovators is that refocusing on being credible can be just as profitable as being cool, without as much inherent risk.
Apple is a great example of a company that has been coming out with cool products ever since Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started making and selling circuit boards and computers in the late 1970s. Apple’s latest computers and iGoodies are widely perceived as must-have products with people routinely lining up to buy them as they are launched. At $1800, the MacBook Air launched last month is the latest on Apple’s hit parade.
So what will happen if Apple loses its edge? Not a problem if it takes the same approach that Kodak did years ago when its traditional business of photographic films and papers turned to ashes. Kodak is a big company with a long history of introducing cool products that date all the way back to about 1900 when it introduced the very popular “brownie” camera. Kodak saw big problems coming when digital camera sales started going through the roof. Although the company was in the digital camera game from early on, it knew it would face very tough competition from Japanese consumer electronics giants. Kodak simply wasn’t going to remain cool as the competition heated up.
Kodak was able to refocus on B2B offerings using the tremendous credibility it had established over the previous century. The company’s investor information page claims “Kodak is the world’s foremost imaging innovator. With sales of $10.7 billion in 2006, the company is committed to a digitally oriented growth strategy focused on helping people better use meaningful images and information in their life and work. Consumers use Kodak’s system of digital and traditional products and services to take, print and share their pictures anytime, anywhere; Businesses effectively communicate with customers worldwide using Kodak solutions for prepress, conventional and digital printing and document imaging; and Creative Professionals rely on Kodak technology to uniquely tell their story through moving or still images.” These are not consumer product offerings that will have people lining up in droves. Apple brags about its iPhone and having sold over 110 million iPods and over three billion songs from its iTunes online store but it has no major current B2B offerings.
A great advantage of a company that has leveraged and built up credibility to shift from leading edge consumer product offerings towards B2B offerings, is that the business becomes more predictable. This also applies to its R&D returns. Watch and see if Apple remains cool and if it shifts toward increasing its B2B offerings over the next few years. That would decrease the likelihood of the company falling flat on its face if it loses its cool.
Atomica Creative > Strategic Product Marketing • Vancouver, Canada • tnakagawa@atomicacreative.com
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February 4, 2008
10:34 am | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
The phrase "create, rip, mix and burn," popularized by Apple, summarizes how fans are personalizing and sharing their music experience. They are empowered with the ability to "create new music," "rip or copy music," "mix" this music to generate new musical creations and lastly "burn" this into a final new product to enjoy.
Richard Baraniuk is a professor at Rice University and founder of Connexions, a free, open-source, global clearinghouse of course materials. He has translated this concept of "create, rip, mix and burn" to textbooks and given people in almost 200 countries around the world the ability to create and share new textbooks on everything from engineering to ornithology to music, while adapting the content as they see fit. The potential is enormous. Catherine Schmidt-Jones, a mom in Illinois with a degree in music, creates music curriculum for children using the Connexions process which has been downloaded over 600,000 times from her site, many by traditional K-12 teachers.
Now fast forward - think about how this can be used in corporate learning. Rather than spending millions of dollars on designing expensive customized learning programs, everyone in the organization can be empowered to create new content using a Web 2.0 toolkit of blogs, wiki’s and RSS feeds. The advantages can be enormous including:
- Faster response time to changing, new knowledge
- Customizable to local needs that require a different presentation of material
- Lower cost
- Wider base of contributors and potentially richer content
- Faster translation to languages by members of the community
"Create, Rip, Mix and Burn" will continue to emerge as the new model for corporate learning in your organization.
Corporate Learning Consultant• New York City, NY • New Learning Playbook
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February 2, 2008
04:35 pm | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
Can you name four magnificent events in your life which came about because of perfect planning? Sure, there was the vacation in '99. Then the move from… oh, scratch that. Even if I count a house we built, which was well-planned but not as-planned, I can't name four. Neither can anyone else I've asked.
Yet on Groundhog Day, when more than 70% of all New Year resolutions have been deep-sixed, it's easy to view the eleven months ahead as an empty field for making plans: carefully orchestrated, meticulously organized, stressed over and un-shadowed plans.
In the glow of possibility we seem to forget the 80/20 rule, the path of least resistance, the law of attraction, synchronicity and serendipity as the more accurate patterns for how (and why) change happens in real life.
I don't propose you stop planning all together. Buckminster Fuller said, "All physical movement is a series of course corrections." After you craft plans, persistently revisit and tenderly modify them whenever they lose step with the music. Be less gentle when subsequent activities acquire a life of their own. Above all, spend your time adjusting and equilibrating rather than entrenching yourself in plans created so far.
Take for instance a mid-size company influenced by a big consulting firm to develop a strategic plan. Objectives were agreed upon, analytic staff members were selected to lead the development, customers were polled, constituents and suppliers were surveyed and the board agreed this was to be the organization's new work. Task groups were formed and emails started flying.
Within only a few months, however, many who joined the development team because of an unwavering belief in planning ("If you don't know where you're going, every path leads there" and so on) became disillusioned and their energy began to flow elsewhere. Meanwhile, the development team grew frustrated and felt abandoned, becoming increasingly controlling rather than easing up.
When I was brought in to figure out how to get the strategy back on course, I interviewed the relevant and affected parties, learning that nonstop requests to ask if everyone was on track had become distracting and destructive, creating an environment inhospitable to how passionate people innovate and create something full of life.
We replaced check-in emails and conference calls with mid-course gatherings, both in person and online, where participants across task groups joined in to talk about new discoveries as well as how new information could help everyone work toward a better future.
In parallel, senior management met to revisit any objectives that needed rejiggering, actually altering their organization's targets to take into account new market factors, unexpected plays from competitors, changes in the economy and newfound intel from their teams.
Everyone in the organization became less focused on the course itself (recognizing the course itself didn't matter) and instead examined how where they were at any time could get them to their destination. One department head said this approach reminded her of how walking through the old town of an ancient city proves far more valuable than zooming along a modern road. You get to the same destination, but from only one do you actually learn something en route.
Even the organization's efficiency experts spoke of their delight when changed happened faster than anyone expected because people were now looking up and around rather than down at their desks figuring out how to cajole their work into someone else's form.
Almost a year after the new strategic plan was adopted and now guides much of their work (and as you might expect, gets regular tweaks), I hear from employees who tell me they've adopted a similar process in their personal lives: moving off course to be on target.
Rather than make your trek into spring fretting about the path you've already meandered off of, reassess where you are. Reflect on where you have journeyed. Then ask yourself if your target needs to be moved a little or maybe even completely changed, and then reset your trajectory accordingly. The sun will come up.
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Marcia Conner > www.marciaconner.com
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February 2, 2008
12:45 am | 0 recommendations | 4 comments
A few weeks ago I ran into a Beta for a product called Xobni Insite. (Xobni is Inbox spelled backwards). Xobni is another in a long line of email taming tools (NeoPro, TrogBar, Jello.Dashboard, Orgoo, etc). The big difference is this one really works.
Unlike a lot of the “inbox tamers” this one does not try to change the way I work. Instead it augments it. That was the key for me. I ran the Xobni installed, it installs a simple sidebar and starts to catalog all my emails. I have about 6 sets of Personal Folders and Xobni found them all. Once all the emails were cataloged (it only took a few minutes) I was ready to go.
I clicked on my first email in my inbox and here’s what I got
Email analytics
Each sender was ranked by the total amount of emails I sent them and that I received from them
I got a break down of the average time when emails were received by me from that sender. I quickly realized I have too many friends sending me emails at 1:30 am.
Availability Matrix
I love this feature. I have a lot of people who do not have access to my exchange server. With the click of a button, it will send that user a list of my availability times for the next 7 days.
Instant Search
Xobni's instant search allows me to search for someone with my emails.. For example I type in Daniel, I get a Wiki search, all people with Daniel as their name or part of their name and every email with the name Daniel mentioned in the body and/or title.
Quick attachment discovery.
Every attachment, no matter what folder, exchanged with this user is now accessible from the panel.
Threaded conversations
All my conversations with that user in one place. Click a thread and I see the conversation in full without leaving my inbox. I can directly reply or forward from the Xobni bar. It brings my favorite aspect of Gmail to Outlook (finally!)
Phone Numbers
Automatically extracts a contact's phone number from their signature. And supports dialing via Skype directly.
People Connected
This area shows me every person connected via email to that user. What is nice is address I have sent “one-off’s” to are listed here as they were part of communications with that user at some point.
Access to Appointments, Tasks, To-Do’s and Follow-up
All right from the Xobni bar.
The bottom line is the constant toggling between Outlook calendar, inbox, personal folders, and the to-do list is a pain and time consuming. Xobni removes all that. It lets you look for everything from within the sidebar, and correspond with people from it — all without leaving the email you were originally working on.
See it in action for yourself via their You Tube video here or at their site at www.xobni.com. Again, Xobni is still in beta but it’s one to watch and grab when the beta is up. If you do get in, Xobni offers some free invites for your friends. I still have one or two so if you’re interested, email me and I will shoot the first respondents one. Sorry Windows users only. There is no Mac version at this time.
Stephen is Sr. Partner and Network Architect with Odyssey Consulting Group and a Microsoft MVP in Connected Systems.
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February 1, 2008
09:00 am | 0 recommendations | 2 comments
On Wednesday the website GreenBiz.com released a big report on the "State of Green Business.(pdf)" Working mainly with government agency numbers, they scored the economy as a whole to be "treading water" in 10 categories, "sinking" in two, and "swimming" in eight--but for some of those, executive editor Joel Makower admitted they were "being generous." (I agree. Take LEED-certified office space construction--it may be a "swimming" category in terms of square footage, but as I argue in an October story, LEED certification is not the be-all and end-all of environmental design.)
It's dismaying to see that despite all the talk about "climate neutral" and "zero carbon," America is making insignificant gains in carbon intensity--the greenhouse gases emitted per unit of GDP.
But where Greenbiz really did a good job was in being honest about the questions they asked but couldn't answer.
For example, water use. "We wanted to measure water efficiency," they wrote, "the amount of water used per unit of GDP. We were shocked to discover that there is no
annually updated metric for national water use."
Or an even more basic question that's certainly of interest to us here at Fast Company--the overall size of the green economy. "I must get 50 to 100 calls a year from people who have some version of the question: how big is the green business movement?" said Makower. If you restrict the question to ground-up, mission-driven green businesses, the Avedas and New Leaf Papers of the world, you'll get one answer. If you count up the people working on GE'sEcomagination, Wal-Mart's Sustainability 360 , and the US Climate Action Partnership, or the companies from Starbucks to Alcoa who have added "VPs of sustainability" to their corporate rosters, you'll get a much bigger picture.
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January 30, 2008
11:53 am | 0 recommendations | 5 comments
In the past months I’ve read several articles and blogs about the possibility that Jonathan Ive, SVP of Industrial Design at Apple, could succeed Steve Jobs as CEO. As far as I can tell this is only a rumor, but it prompts the questions: Is corporate America ready for the design revolution? Can designers be CEOs? I can only imagine how much fun that would be, not only for the people working in these companies but for the consumers, finally getting products and services that go beyond their expectations. And imagine what that would do to the stock price.
Although to many, designers as CEOs, may sound like a crazy idea. I believe designers could do very well as top executives. Designers have a unique set of skills that combined with traditional management knowledge could create a new kind of leader, more in tune with today’s needs. Why? Because they know how to explore possibilities, connect the dots, simplify complex information down to a relevant summary and remind of us of context and humanity. They know how to work closely with engineers, marketers and outside manufacturing contractors. Rather than being simple stylists, they're leading innovators in the use of new materials and production processes.
With this I am not advocating that any designer can be a good CEO, but a few have a unique set of skills that are more relevant to today’s and tomorrow’s competitive markets. Where almost everything is commoditized and differentiation can only come from thoughtful products and services, companies must go farther than just talking about design and begin using it.
Design is a powerful tool that is just being discovered and mildly used by most companies and strategically implemented by a few. I wonder how long it will take for most board of directors to understand the value of design and make bold moves to utilizing it?
manuel
manuel@manuelsaez.com
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