Monthly Archive for November, 2008

My life as a goldfish…

Published on 28 November, 2008 in Personal Growth. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

For me, clocks sometimes stop. Particularly on Sundays, time used to have no meaning at all – if I’ve arranged to meet with you (especially on a Sunday!), you might have noticed just how loose can be my concept of time!

Having been playing with NLP for more than a decade now, I found it really refreshing to give myself a quick review of some of the concepts that I hadn’t explored for a while: Timelines.

As I was listening to part of the NLP Practitioner CDs, I noticed that I had become intensely focused on the present moment… almost to the point that the past and future were irrelevant. This makes for intense and wonderful experiences, though it has its risks!

And as I elicited my timeline, I realised that my timeline went almost straight up at the front for the future, and straight down at the back for the past, so that I had very little concept of the future and very little care about the past! One of the cool things is that you can put your timeline wherever you might like it to be… so I’m going to play with it some more!

When I’ve been in time – living in the moment – I’ve often been late without a care in the world… heck, it’s a wonderfully intense experience of life! The challenge is ensuring that you have the flexibility to adopt the appropriate attitude towards time that the situation demands.

When we’re setting goals, we need to be able to be aware of the timelines that are involved rather than being immersed in the experience. Under the MBTI system, Perceivers tend to be “in time” whereas Judgers tend to be “through time”; planning demands that you are a judger; being a focused, goal-directed achiever demands that you be a judger.

In a sense, being totally in the moment – a total perceiver – provides an amazing subjective experience of life! Maybe we need to choose the appropriate frame of reference for the circumstances…

What if you had a trigger to switch into a more useful way of looking at time?

Daniel Smith

Trends or tragedies?

Published on 26 November, 2008 in Personal Growth. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Some things really fascinate me. How we can meet cool people in the weirdest of places. Cool ideas that spring from unlikely places (Post-it Notes). And some amazing trends…

I’ve just discovered some interesting ‘trends’ that may or may not come to pass that really challenge me to think while simultaneously shaking my head:

  • Gravanity - Beyond YouTube, from personalised stamps (that Australia Post actually offers) to average people paying to have their names on the seats in a cinema, there are opportunities for ordinary folk to have their 15 minutes of fame. Or how about Troika’s efforts in letting people project their SMS messages onto objects?
  • I wonder whether every house really is for sale… every house is for sale
  • While they didn’t let me in there last month, I’m pretty impressed with WC1’s £1m job of outfitting a bathroom opposite Selfridges
  • Transumers: consumers who are driven by experiences rather than wanting to own things… preferring to live a more transient lifestyle. And if you take what luxury consumers are doing as an indicator of what the rest of us will be doing in the future, consider this: Spending on luxury experiences and home services nearly doubled between 2004 and 2005!
  • Inspiriences: When we want to make our home environments extraordinary… from the home cinema to the home resort. Not being satisfied with a great place and metaphorical castle, people are wanting to make their homes into a ‘real castle!’ While we have home coffee makers, I don’t understand why we can’t get XXXX on tap in our own home bar – they can get Heineken thanks to Krups…
  • Along similar lines are garden offices. While perhaps out of the reach of our friends in Shanghai and London, it could be interesting for many people… especially the increasing number of teleworkers in the ‘burbs.
  • What about buying great glasses online? A friend in Shanghai just paid RMB3000 (AU$500 – they’re nice!) for her latest glasses, but maybe there should be cheaper ways. The same kinda thing is available for contact lenses too.
  • Renting gardens??? I don’t know if Ross came up with the idea or borrowed it from the Dutch version, but it’s a really cool idea!
  • Create vinyl decals for the side of your car? Not just to make the car use a tax deduction, but to personalise the little beast…
  • Vending machines in the ladies’ rooms… but for a straightening iron! They’re only in the UK so far, but are set to spread…
  • Maybe cone-shaped pizza is your thing. Looks more appealing than most of the stuff available in 7-11’s and takeaway stores… actually, it could be a real alternative to Subway even. Maybe it might teach the Chinese that Pizza Hut has a great business system for making mediocre pizza – even after taking a friend to the Nanjing Road store, I still can’t believe that people queue for overpriced poorly made ‘pizza’ in Shanghai… so much for being culturally sophisticated! But, best of all, this stuff is actually from Italy!
  • How about going to sea to discover the world – and getting academic credit! Thanks to “The Scholar Ship” now you can.
  • Ticketmaster handled tickets for my brother’s graduation ceremony, but what about running your own events? What if you could have a professional ticketing service for your next event? Sounds cool to me, thanks to brownpapertickets.com
  • With China’s newfound wealth, will we see something like Floridasation for Australia? Maybe they’ll stick with Chongming, though somehow I doubt it…
  • It’s not enough to have stuff and do things: Now we want to show off how great we are… and maybe we want to be really good at showing off how wonderful we are by taking advantage of status skills. From making your own wine or coffee, to tying your tie properly or maybe just being more ‘elegant’… combined with the massclusivity and uber premium trends, I’m guessing we’ll be seeing a lot more etiquette and connoisseurship classes for those who want to be seen as “It” rather than getting caught wearing a Nouveau Riche t-shirt!

For me, I’m looking forward to seeing the movement away from consumerism towards experiences combine with the status skills movement, yielding great rewards for those of us who can teach people to be brilliant… the time when ’status’ will go to those who can actually do cool things are are actually cool people to hang around, rather than those who buy expensive stuff (mostly unused garbage?) that destroys our environment through its wastefulness. What about deriving status (and heaven forbid satisfaction!) from your creativity like artistic, academic and indeed most truly high performing communities? Of course, that would be a opportunity for genius training…

Daniel Smith

Thoughts on Innovation Articles

Published on 24 November, 2008 in Innovation. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

As a child, I was very much mathematical, logical and disciplined. My natural tendencies towards impulsiveness and passionate outbursts were channeled into socially acceptable (even desirable) vehicles, methods and mechanisms. As time has passed, I have grown more expressive, more biased (hell, today design is everything ) and more intuitive, and has probably hindered my studies of psychology, law and business, yet impelled me towards the pursuit of personal genius, innovation and entrepreneurship.

They’re fun!!!

I came across a few articles that I decided to take notes from, and wondered if your notes would match up…

  • Connecting the Dots between Innovation and Leadership
    • Leadership + Innovation = Cool stuff… but how do we create it?
      • An insurer said it was about aligning the whole organisation (especially the oft-forgotten support staff like lawyers and financial officers) behind matching customer needs with the organisation’s systems, processes and activities… ie marketing . Being a leader denies you the opportunity to be a “Fast Follower” and try to copy the innovations of others; you have to be leading consumer behaviour.
      • Big is not necessarily better. Throwing more resources at a dead end doesn’t help… small teams will often do the best work.
      • Cultivate an innovative culture by rewarding and expecting innovation. Challenge people to reinvent themselves.
      • Passion is good, and often is the result of feeling a sense of ownership over the work that you do.
      • Capitalise on opportunities by being ready to act – fast .
    • Should you buy or build innovation?
      • If you build it, there’s a better chance of it matching the existing culture, and will help keep the organisation flat… though sometimes a highly targeted ‘rifle shot’ acquisition can work.
      • Select targets that have complimentary skills; where they’re great at something that fit with what you’re generally good at, but haven’t developed as highly in that arena.
    • India and China?
      • According to the panel, they’re great copiers, but haven’t really started innovating yet. Eg Chinese developers use international architectural firms to design the skins of buildings, though aren’t really innovating much beyond this.
      • In biotech, Indian innovation is suffering from poor intellectual property protection leading to decreased rewards for innovation and a consequential lack of investment. That’s changing though…
      • China and India are very different: We can’t just apply what works here! Take the time to get to know them.
      • There are huge opportunities for using India for clinical trials of new drugs. Their massive patient population is yet to be meaningfully tapped…
    • Managers need to remain fixated on customers (and social issues: cultural, generational) to keep in tune with customers and open to gain insights for innovation… (though disruptive innovation relies upon giving people things that they don’t yet realise that they’ll want)
    • Great innovators bring together technical skills with people skills.
    • Turn failures into success…
    • Execution is critical. Great ideas are cheap…
    • Business leaders change the world. Beyond dividends, business provides jobs and advancement to would-be terrorists… to give people a sense of hope makes the world better for everybody. This necessitates companies to act responsibly in building companies of integrity.
    • Part of innovation is being open to doing stuff when you have no idea what you’re doing.
      Peter Linnemann, Wharton finance professor.
    • Everyone wants the golden path. How you get there… is by doing a great job at what you’re doing. Stay in the moment instead of worrying about that next job.
      Seth Waugh, CEO of Deutsche Bank America
    • You cannot really work hard at something that you don’t love, and you’re not going to succeed if you don’t work hard.
      Jeffrey Katz, CEO of Sherwood Equities
  • The Biggest Mind-Flip in Business Today
    • There is nothing more powerful than a truly original idea… something that redefines an industry or transforms a product category. Thought leadership through generating better ideas and making smarter improvements gives sustained advantage.
    • Entrepreneurial folklore gives the credit to the inspired visionary CEO, but the modern world is too complex: We need to develop teams of people who can work in parallel to be more creative than any single individual could be. This is expensive through the transactional costs of dealing with teams, but it’s potentially infinitely more powerful.
    • We need to create an architecture of participation – where contributing your ideas for problem solving and product development is fun (or at least interesting), easy and rewarding.
    • We’re talking about collective intelligence here… that comes from a different leadership style, one where the leader seeks to exude charisma, strength and intellectual humility, to be the sort of person with whom smart people will share their ideas, want to work with and contribute ideas, and to be as open and transparent as the other participants in their work.
  • Learning to Innovate

    • Business schools tend to teach how to teach ‘business-as-usual’. This is important in running successful businesses, though innovation requires people who are Masters of Business-by-Design . Stanford’s d.school has already started it… I wonder how long until the rest of us figure out that we need to design the way forward, rather than just measure what we’re doing.
    • Analysing a business situation is very different from how to create and execute a business innovation. A bunch of Stanford kids were asked to design a way forward for the web browser Mozilla. While the b-school kids would likely have used market size driven financial analyses to generate, develop and complete a new product idea. Instead, the design school was approached: They started with an ethnographic study of consumers and worked towards creating prototypes with potential features, iteratively returning with a succession of potential winners.
    • Without execution, great ideas are worth nothing… yet without ideas, brilliant execution gets outsourced.

While I continue to lament his repetitive writing style, de Bono still ‘owns’ the concept of lateral thinking and even ‘creativity’ for a lot of people. But, in my view, his book on Value Medals is worth checking out if you want to think a little beyond the ‘bottom line’…

Daniel Smith

Social networks breed creativity

Published on 21 November, 2008 in High Performance and Personal Growth. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Not surprising anyone who has been involved in collaborative work before, NewScientist has reported a Cornell University study that has looked at social connections and found that larger cities have a greater amount of connections than towns, etc., and that larger cities produce more patents and more innovation than smaller places.

Why?  In larger cities, brilliant people are more likely to be socially connected with someone who may be able to help them on their project, whatever it is – maybe through complementary personalities, maybe through complementary backgrounds, maybe through something as simple as being able to bounce ideas off someone else.  The production of innovation rarely comes purely through one’s own personal effort, but through the involvement of others.

In short – those who want high performance need to do some social networking with people who are likely to help: perhaps with like-minded people in different fields; perhaps with colleagues who think differently, even though they are in the same field.

In African philosophy, there is a concept that, loosely translated, means that people are people through other people .  We definitely find this in expert performance – we perform at our best through the involvement of others.

Personal Genius from YouTube’s Third Founder

Published on 19 November, 2008 in High Performance, Innovation, Personal Growth and Science and Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Jawed Karim is the third founder of YouTube, the not-yet-profitable company that Google just bought for $1.65b. After making a few million from being involved with PayPal before it was bought by eBay (also for a billion and a half dollars), Jawed just went back to school. Indeed, this New York Times story reports that he’s gone back to finish a masters degree at Stanford.

The kid (he’s a year younger than me!) seems to be pretty amazingly brilliant, and I started to wonder why. Maybe his father being a researcher for 3M could help, as could his mother being a research A/Prof Biochemist. When explaining Jawed’s interest in science and technology, I really got some insight into the mindset of this family: ‘To develop new things and be aware of new things, this is our life.’

He even chose his first college because it was the college that Netscape’s founder attended!

Creative genius is an amazing thing…

Daniel Smith