I hope you will join me for a free TeleForum hosted by Marshall Goldsmith and Patricia Wheeler on June 25, 12 Noon EST entitled: "Prevent Your Career's Biggest Tragedy."
Info below:
Please join me for my Free Live Teleforum, "Prevent Your Career's Greatest Tragedy," on June 25 at 9 AM PST. Info below. Sign up at: Dr. Mark TeleForum.
Marshall Goldsmith and Patricia Wheeler invite you to a Thought Leader Teleforum on Wednesday June 25th at noon Eastern time.
Our June TeleForum features author, columnist and coach Dr. Mark Goulston on "Prevent Your Career's Greatest Tragedy," moderated by Executive Coach Patricia Wheeler.
There is no charge for this TeleForum, which will be held on Wednesday June 25th at 9 AM Pacific/ noon Eastern.
Mark quotes Warren Buffett in saying to you:
"All of you have the ability to do anything I do and much beyond. Some of you will and some of you won't. For those who won't, it will be because you Get in Your Own Way, not because the world doesn't allow you."
Mark must agree because he wrote the best seller, Get Out of Your Own Way: Overcoming Self-Defeating Behavior and its sequel, Get Out of Your Own Way at Work...and Help Others Do the Same. In this TeleForum, learn what self-defeating behavior is, why you engage in it and most importantly how you can stop and replace it with success promoting behavior.
During this 60-minute conference call we will be discussing the three points below plus fielding your specific questions:
1. Will you get to the end of your career and life with no regrets?
2. How do you craft a career with no regrets?
3. How can you replace self-defeating behavior with success-promoting behavior?
There is no charge for this TeleForum. Please click here to register. If this link does not work in your browser, you may cut and paste the following URL: www.LeadingNews.org/signupgc.htm.
If you have further questions, please contact Patricia Wheeler at 404 377-9408.
In spite of the unrelenting rain (and the fact that it was post lunch), Mediabistro Circus’s video seminar featuring Jim Louderback, CEO, Revision3; Robert Scoble, Managing Director, FastCompany.TV; and Dina Kaplan, Co-founder and COO of Blip.TV, had us all squished in like sardines -- testimony to the high level of interest online video has elicited in recent months.
Jim Louderback launched the discussion, talking about how the advent of online video has moved past TiVo, changing the landscape so that it's not just anytime, but also anywhere and on any device. “It’s all about consumers taking control… prime time is now all the time.” His view is that video is going from mass to special interest: “the mass market has splintered.” Online video that targets focused content choices can be very profitable (he cites Scoble’s fan base as an example.)
Dina Kaplan talked about how a new model is increasingly allowing artists to control the music industry. She cited Chamillionaire as a prime instance: an artist who toured on his own to raise money, and who built up his own fan base and network online, to the point that when he finally approached the music labels, “they needed him more than he needed them.”
Kaplan’s view on the future of video: “Content creators will have more and more power. Distributors will compete with one another for the best talent – and this includes distributors like YouTube and Blip.tv, not just major networks.” She ended things by quoting Walt Mossberg of the WSJ: “The Web is in the process of becoming a video medium.”
After fumbling with several wires and three cell phones (yes he always carries around three cell phones), the much anticipated Robert Scoble flashed a projection of all his current web activity on the wall behind him. Accompanied by an overwhelming display of his Twitter feeds (he follows 23,000 people on Twitter, which he modestly notes translates to about one tweet per second!) he told us about the impressive number of Web applications he uses.
According to Scoble, he was the first person in the US to break the news about the China earthquake – information that reached him via a tweet from a fellow twitterer based out of Beijing.
Scoble drew attention to the work of others like Gary Vaynerchuk, who runs the video blog Wine Library Tv and to sites like dotSUB.com (which allows users to translate video in to several languages) and Asterpix.com (which incorporates interactivity into the video – click on a person’s face for instance to get more information about them.)
While he did briefly talk about his work on FastCompany.TV, unlike the other two speakers, Scoble spent the bulk of his time on stage talking about new and innovative Web applications, and the ways in which he uses Twitter. “Its not just about video – it’s about using all the tools you have to communicate your message,” he told the audience.
Mediabistro Circus’s session about blogging featured Eric Hellweg, Editorial director for harvardbusiness.org; Noah Shachtman, Contributing editor for the Danger Room Blog (on Wired.com); Anil Dash, Vice President of Six Apart; and Elisa Camahort, cofounder of Blogher.
Hellweg kicked things off, talking about how blogging (and the web overall) has changed the way publications interact with customers. While historically, publishing has been “transactional,” it’s now a more relational process, and, in order to keep up, publications need to invert the traditional editorial roles. If you’re used to “being the voice of God,” now it’s time to “listen to the congregation.”
He went on to elaborate upon how while traditional publishing was one to man and the traditional editorial was a gatekeeper approach, things are clearly moving to an aggregation; editors need to take on more of a curatorial role. Nothing we hadn’t heard before really and all pretty standard stuff (we’re firmly on that bandwagon here at Fast Company!)
More interesting was the idea Hellweg threw out about how potential authors (or those in the process of writing or reworking a book) can test their ideas and theories, as well as build up a strong audience, by leveraging the blogosphere. “Blogs are terrific for idea generation… this can become a pretty compelling argument for an author… You can use the blogosphere to your competitive advantage.” One fundamental question that comes to mind, which I would have put to Hellweg had there been more time – what happens with intellectual property rights on such content?
Next came Elisa Camahort. Appropriately clad in fiery red, the vivacious BlogHer COO gave an impassioned speech about the transformational power of blogging: “blogs are mainstream, addictive and trusted.” She cited statistics from the BlogHer/Compass Partners 2008 Social Media Benchmark study to support these claims and talked about how blogs have changed the way people live their lives, affecting not only the first things they do when they wake up every morning, but also the type of information they have access to, and the communities they create or join.
A particularly compelling instance of this was her account of a call to action after Hurricane Katrina -- a woman (called Grace) set up a blog from within her kitchen after being contacted by (or perhaps contacted) a person in Mississippi who had a car and a cell phone. The woman with the car drove around to different regions and shelters, communicating to Grace which shipping company serviced where, what shelters really needed supplies, and what supplies were needed. Through Grace documenting all this on her blog, people could ship supplies that were needed directly to those in need, bypassing all the red tape and missing funds that inevitably come with going through a middleman.
Then Noah Shachtman talked for a bit about how he got to be a big timer at Wired from having started blogging in the spare room of his grandmas house. An interesting journey, the takeaway from which being that it really helps to have a niche (Noah’s blog Danger Room is about national security and defense.)
Finally, Anil Dash came on stage to talk about the “useful construct” of “rip, mix, burn.” With the Web, there are no definitive stories like the Iliad that are passed down because there are no definitive versions – things constantly get transformed and then passed down. “The default behavior with what we do with media is to rip, mix, burn” he explained, the prevailing attitude to music being a primary example.
Dash went on to say that the centralization of content cannot exist for much longer. Having to brand your content on platforms provided by a select host of big names like Google, Facebook, AOL, Yahoo, MySpace etc., “to give up your brand and be subservient,” will not continue in the future.
“These companies want to hold you hostage and you don’t have to put up with that,” said Dash. This centralization doesn’t work in media. It already fell apart in television,’ he explained where there aren’t just a few channels. He compared such big companies to ice cubes that must melt and go back into the water they were made of. “Platforms are made of the Web.”
His answer to controlling your own content and data – blogs. Blogs are the platform that let people mix all this content together; blogs give artists and individuals the opportunity to own their own content, on their terms.
Friending people, having profiles and sharing information are all features that are, or can be, built into blogging today. “Every blog has a network… it’s the long tail of social networks. This,” he says is the future of your media brand.”
Next week, on May 20th and 21st, Mediabistro.com will hold its first conference – Mediabistro Circus.
"Most conferences are dry and boring. That's why we're calling ours a circus," says mediabistro.com founder Laurel Touby.
A gathering for creative content producers that is aimed at senior-level professionals, the 2-day event will include sessions on mobile technology, online video, social networking, blogging, digital publishing, and user experience design.
The "circus" features an impressive roster of Web 2.0 staples: Robert Scoble, tech blogger and Managing Director for FastCompany.TV; Ben Edwards, publisher of the economist.com; Elisa Camahort, Cofounder of Blogher; Steve Rubel, senior vice president at Edelman; Eric Hellweg, Editorial Managing Director, Harvardbusiness.org; Chris Anderson, Editor-In-Chief, Wired Magazine, and more.
Events include:
Publishing: From Print to Digital -- Jim Daly and Cal Joy of Edutopia are slated to discuss the successful transition their magazine has made to an online publication; Ben Edwards will discuss upcoming online strategies for The Economist; and Paul Cloutier, head of 8020 Publishing, will talk about community-created magazines.
Blogging:
Anil Dash is slated to talk about community platforms in blogging; Elisa Camahort Page will discuss leveraging the power of social media, and how companies can empower people through blogs; Eric Hellweg will talk about Harvard Business Review's newly developed blog network; and Noah Shachtman will describe his journey from "blogging in the basement" to his current editorial beat.
Video: Jim Louderback, Robert Scoble, and Dina Kaplan will present their perspectives about the future of online video. They will discuss different types of production styles and also talk about how companies can make the most of distributing content online.
Social Media:
What does it take to build and maintain a successful social community site, and is it worth it? Kate Everett Thorp of Real Girls Media, Shwan Gold of Social Approach, Steve Rubel of Edelman PR and author Steve Johnson will discuss the diverse ways that social media is evolving, and what it means for businesses and their brands.
Keynote with Jim Roberts:
Jim Roberts will lead a discussion with the NYT digital team about bringing the newspaper online, and focus on the current coverage of the election - political journalism in the digital age.
Put some change in, thrust your face out and prepare for… a quick nicotine fix and an estimate of your wrinkles.
The Japanese have always had the world's quirkiest vending machines – actually I'd go so far as to say the world's quirkiest products in general. I did a slideshow on quirky vending machines for Fast Company last year; commonly dispensed products include toilet paper, beetles, porn and sex toys, umbrellas, fortunes, rice, and of course cigarettes and beer.
The country's latest invention? A vending machine that uses face recognition technology to prevent underage smokers from buying automatically dispensed cigarettes. The BBC reports that a Japanese company called Fujitaka has developed a technology to count wrinkles and skin sags as a means by which to check a smoker's age (the legal age to buy cigarettes in Japan is 20.)
Japan currently has a whopping 570,000 tobacco dispensing vending machines. While the system is yet to be approved, it reportedly gets the age identification right in nine out of ten cases – pretty good for a system that's based on wrinkle counts. The remaining 10% will be sent to a "grey zone for baby-faced adults" where they will be asked to insert driving licenses or identification cards, according to the BBC.
"With face recognition, so long as you've got some change and you are an adult, you can buy cigarettes like before… The problem of minors borrowing identification cards to purchase cigarettes could be avoided as well," said a company spokesman in a Reuters interview.
At the annual dinner of the Financial Women's Association held at the Grand Hyatt in New York last week, two high achieving women were honored with the titles of private and public sector women of the year.
Evelyn Lauder, Senior VP of the Estée Lauder Companies and Founder and Chairman of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation was awarded the public/non profit sector award for her work in raising funds for breast cancer research -- to date the BCRF has raised over $200 million to support international research.
The co-developer of the pink ribbon, a now ubiquitous symbol for breast health, Lauder plays a pivotal role at the Estée Lauder Companies, which she joined after her marriage to Leonard Lauder, over 47 years ago.
Christine Poon, Vice Chairman of Johnson & Johnson received the private sector award. She talked to an 800 strong, primarily female, audience about her beginnings in the health industry – how she initially tried to be a physician but gave up, deciding that there were other equally effective avenues to being a part of the industry. In addition to working at Johnson & Johnson, her career has taken her through Bristol-Myers and also landed her a spot on the "Most Powerful Women" lists in Forbes and Fortune.
The annual dinner, at which the awards were issued, raised close to $300,000 -- the proceeds from which go the Financial Women's Association's college scholarship and mentorship program.
Established in 1956, the FWA is not yet the household name it could be, considering the programs it offers and the sponsorship it attracts: HSBC recently granted the organization over $900,000, while other $50,000 + sponsors include Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Morgan Lewis, UBS, Proskauer Rose and Thomson Reuters.
The FWA offers what appears to be a strong mentorship program for girls at Murry Bergtraum High School and another at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College. During the course of the evening, two young mentees of the institutions spoke about their experiences being mentored, which included everything from the camaraderie built from a coffee date or a makeover session with a mentor, to learning about the various choices available when it comes to college.
The organization also offers financial literacy and management programs, providing high school students and young adults with practical financial knowledge, and also partnering with Bank of America and the United Way of New York City to run a financial literacy seminar for people with minimal financial education. It has a microfinance initiative and a scholarship program to aid young women attending undergraduate and graduate business schools in New York City.
Although New York based, the FWA has members from across the nation, as well as partnerships with international professional women's organizations around the world, offering its members an extensive global network of women in business.
Stan Lee, the mastermind behind Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man and many others is to be in charge of Branson bankrolled Virgin Comics’ new line of superheroes.
The LA Times broke the news this morning, revealing that the 85 year old Lee will work on a superhero team that is possibly similar to his work on the Avengers at Marvel.
Since its inception, Virgin Comics has stayed largely away from traditional superheroes -- in fact in an interview with Fast Company about a year ago, editor Ron Marz revealed that the company harbors strong reservations about the superhero genre. “Marvel and DC print lots of superhero based comic books that are consumed in mass quantities in the United States. There is very little genre material. Superheroes really don't do that well in global markets," said Marz, emphasizing Virgin's international focus. "The American comic market is dominated by superheroes... and people don't want third generation knockoffs."
Now that Stan Lee is their flag bearer, Virgin is clearly singing a different tune.
Lee, who recently receive the inaugural New York Comics Legend Award at an event at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square,.can now be added to Virgin Comics’ slew of celebrity names – the company has recruited filmmakers Guy Ritchie, Terry Gilliam and John Woo, actor Nicolas Cage and musician Dave Stewart.
"We could not be more excited about creating a whole new universe with Stan Lee," said CEO of Virgin Comics, Sharad Devarajan, in an interview with the LA Times. "His presence and the tremendous respect people have for him will be a call to action for writers and artists."
“Over and above being just a name, a celebrity is a brand. Tapping into existing brands… is one way to compete in a superhero dominated world," Devarajan told Fast Company last year. With the backing of one of the biggest brands in the comic book world, Virgin has certainly turned the competition up several notches.
On Earth Day next week, the natural and organic foods supermarket Whole Foods will stop offering plastic bags to its customers. So how are you expected to carry home your granola, fruit juice, soymilk and edamame? It's down to paper or reusable canvas bags.
In response to these laudable efforts, Jeff Stier the associate director of the American Council on Science and Health wrote a scathing article in the New York Post entitled 'Paper Bags: Roach City.' According to Stier, "like other Earth Day initiatives, this move by Whole Foods reeks of a phenomenon known as 'greenwashing.'"
Stier spends his entire piece loftily writing about how cockroaches prefer to nest in paper rather than plastic, conjuring up shudder-inducing images in his readers (the subject line in the email that I got from a coworker about his article reads "this is disgusting"), and insisting that Whole Foods should be allowing its consumers the choice of using plastic bags.
If anyone can be cajoled into taking Stier's dramatic account seriously, we face a dire future: the nation will soon be over run by cockroaches, dog poo will line our once pristine streets, and unlined trash cans will be splattered with the remnants of leftover food.
There's no denying that being green is a fad – and one that's smoking hot right now. It's cool to care and companies that don't may act like they do in order to preempt an onslaught of bad PR. In this case though, Whole Foods' move is far from greenwashing.
Plastic is just bad. Whole Foods has done a good thing. Yes we all reuse plastic bags, but equally, we all throw them away too after using them just once – something we wouldn't do if the bags weren’t such an easy commodity to come by. There are tens of thousands of other stores out there still dispensing these bags and the move is integral to Whole Foods' image as a natural foods chain. Just like it's integral to Fast Company's image to work in a green building. Cutting down on plastic –and this does not imply eliminating it completely right away – will not affect our lives negatively in the least.
In his defense, Stier does make several good points – that people are too eager to jump on the green bandwagon without thoroughly examining the cause they're rooting for, that many corporations that claim to be environmentally friendly are in fact more concerned with their image than with the cause itself, and that roaches are indeed more attracted to paper than plastic. But his points fall far short of adding up to make a case against Whole Foods' endeavor.
At a recent PSFK panel, designer Jeff Staple, who has worked on sustainable initiatives for Nike, made a compelling point about the need to encourage big firms to engage in sustainable practices. He underscores the importance of encouraging big corporations that are trying to go green and issues a caveat about the dangers of labeling their sustainable initiatives nothing more than self-indulgent publicity stunts. His co-panelist Graham Hill, the founder of Treehugger, sums it up best: "If you can turn a big ship just a little bit, it’s amazing what the ripple effect can be."
An incisive Fast Company article this month explains the often-unexploited power of getting inertia on your side, a theory that could easily be extended to apply to the plastic-paper issue. Authors Chip and Dan Heath explain the power of the default option – when consumers have to request a change in an option, more likely than not they will be too lazy to do so.
The trick is to structure the default option to suit your cause. Using this principle, stores across the nation could cut down on the consumption of plastic without the inconvenience of complete eradication (at least until a solution to dog poo collection, cockroaches and extra trash liners has been created) by giving consumers a paper bag by default and then, if they ask for a plastic bag instead, charging them five cents for it. Some stores have already adopted policies like this, and if the inertia theory proves right, more consumers will accept the paper bags rather than deal with the hassle of scrounging around for the extra five cents.
In the meantime however, organic and natural foods stores like Whole Foods, and other retailers that have embraced the ideals of adopting environmentally friendly practices are right in eradicating the plastic bag option altogether. It's high time one of the larger ships took a stand.
A parody of the Wall Street Journal hit news stands early today, creating enough of a stir to get the real WSJ snapping up copies in at attempt to get them off the streets.
Published every 26 years, this time the parody has been titled My Wall Street Journal, for Murdoch's rapidly expanding media empire, which now includes everything from MySpace to the Wall Street Journal. It satirizes Murdoch, NewsCorp, the real WSJ and the media giant's other properties like Fox News and The New York Post.
The parody is the brainchild of editor Tony Hendra, a former editor at National Lampoon, along with Richard Belzer, Andy Borowitz, Terry Jones and writers from The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live, and The Onion.
It has inspired a fake video on Gawker, of an enraged Murdoch demanding ever copy be burnt.
The paper is on sale for $3.95 this week at newsstands and bookstores, at Amazon.com, and at wsjparody.com.
Trends and innovation company PSFK held its annual conference on trends, innovation and creative ideas yesterday at the Art Director's Club in Manhattan.
Eric Ripert, Executive Chef at four star restaurant, Le Bernardin, known for its haute cuisine (and even haughtier prices,) was one of a range of speakers during the course of the day to talk to a youngish crowd of mostly media and design professionals, all crammed into one large room. Challenged by the New York Times recently to come up with a sumptuous meal using only ingredients from a dollar store (a challenge he successfully completed,) Ripert has been hailed as "America's foremost seafood chef."
On stage, in a disarmingly thick French accent that quickly grew on his audience (although near impossible to decipher at first,) he expounded on the merits of competition. "If you're not on top of your game and inspired, someone will push you away. I love that aspect of competition… Otherwise you are content with what you have, it's boring. Competition keeps you creative, young in mind. It makes you want to be better than what you are."
He avoids signature dishes because "it means your success is in the past... You're not inspiring to anyone. All the care you've put into the old dish lapses because nobody cares anymore… You're not being creative anymore."
Apart from being inspired by his travels, being a chef in New York, where "it's twenty minutes from Chinatown to the Middle East," also has its merits. Ripert explained how the rich diversity of his surroundings influences the innovativeness he brings to his food: "I'm inspired by whatever I find here in New York. I find so many things -- new flavors, ingredients, techniques – and I bring these to my kitchen. That’s what makes ours 'New York' cuisine."
The most memorable part of Ripert's forty or so minutes on stage was a particularly impassioned speech he made in response to a question about when cooking approaches an art form. "I don’t see the art form in putting carrots on the right side of the plate, or putting carrots on the left side of the plate. If cooking is an art it's much more than an egoistic vision of the chef. If cooking is an art, our way of being artists is to thank the gift of earth of what God is giving us and to pay homage to the bounty that we are living in," he told us earnestly. "When you serve lobster, you’ve taken a being's life away. Therefore if you create a recipe, you have to be very dedicated to elevate the lobster, to make it good and tasty of course, but at the end of the day it’s a matter of paying homage."
Unsurprisingly, the trends Ripert sees in food revolve around sustainability and organic foods – he foresees the increasing development of products that are organic as well as simultaneously tasty and appealing to the senses.
What did inject an element of surprise was the award winning chef's self-admission about living in a tiny New York apartment with an even smaller kitchen that he never uses – his wife (who he claims "doesn’t necessarily know how to cook well,") uses their oven as storage space. Proving that necessity is indeed the mother of invention, Ripert has conceived of a slew of quick, easy recipes all of which can be made without using a conventional oven or stove. The night before he addressed the conference, he ate tomatoes with olive oil and herbs – cooked for five minutes in a toaster oven.
