Category: inspiration
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Being Right Means Knowing When You’re Not Right Anymore
I've long been a fan of Jeff Bezos's approach toward being stubborn on vision whilst flexible on details, and playing the long game. Amazon are one of the few companies that seem to really live and breathe that. So it was interesting to read over on the 37Signals blog the advice he gave to them…
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Doing Things Your Own Way
I somehow missed this, but it's a wonderful story. When he was fifteen, John Gurdon's Science teacher wrote on his school report: "…he will not listen, but will insist on doing his work in his own way. I believe he has ideas about becoming a Scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous…" Last…
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Work On Stuff That Matters
"Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road — but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations" Tim O'Reilly This is a great short interview with Tim O'Reilly. Well worth eleven minutes of your time. I've long…
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Is ‘Follow Your Passion’ Bad Career Advice?
I'm a big fan of Sir Ken Robinson (particularly the TED talk he did on how schools kill creativity which is the most watched of all time). His book The Element is a powerful evocation of how finding the point where your natural talent meets your personal passion can lead to high achievement and personal fulfillment in…
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Google Firestarters 6: Digital Storytelling And Video
Gosh. I can hardly believe this is our 6th Firestarters. Our next event, held as usual at Google HQ, is loosely themed around digital storytelling and video (where I think there are some particularly interesting thinking, tools and processes developing) and is on Wednesday 26th Sept at 5.30. At a time when brands are increasingly…
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How I Write
One of the regular readers of this blog Olivier Legris was kind enough to give me some good feedback on a recent post and as part of that happened to ask me about my process for writing. I'd never really thought it through before, but doing so made me realise that I definitely have a…
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The Meaning Trap
I really liked what Jack White has to say in this short clip about how inspiration and a good work ethic "ride right next to each other" (and how on stage he likes to deliberately make things harder for himself because all those little things build a tension that forces you to create). It's an…
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Minimally Invasive Education
One of the words I have a dislike for in marketing is 'educate'. Often, it is used in the context of an objective where we merely need to 'educate' our target customers/clients/prospects/colleagues of the benefits of our brand/product/service/idea and the scales will simply fall from their eyes. The people who know, simply need to show…
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On Company Values
I'm not really a fan of mission statements. Rather than being an exercise in inspiration, looking at an aggregated list of the mission statements of the Fortune 500 companies makes you realise how vague and riddled with corporate-speak many of them are. Mission statements are all too often just that – a statement of intent that is…
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Digital Intimacy And Gestures
There's some rather lovely work here by Marco Triverio, an interaction designer at IDEO, playing around with (and disrupting) the asynchronous nature of much non-verbal communication over mobile devices. Feel Me experiments with different ways of creating a 'sweet, playful connection with the person on the other side'. I'm quite taken with some of the ideas…