Author Archive
The World Cup teaches finance
1. Don’t be shocked by “shocks.” 2. You need a strong defense. 3. You have to think globally. 4. Don’t get blinded by hope. 5. Patience wins. 6. Watch your margin of safety. 7. Don’t pin all of your hopes on the referees.
In soccer and life, timing is everything.
“Too many teams try for the quick kill–kicking the ball up field and hoping for the best. Great soccer teams–especially the Brazilians–take a very different approach. They are famous for passing the ball around dozens of times, waiting for just the right moment to strike. It works.”
Can there be too much internet?
Samuel shares an example that if our social lives are humming along, we may want to reevaluate the health of our professional lives. Are we connecting meaningfully with other business associates and increasing our base of community and knowledge? When we invest our energy into one activity, there’s typically a shortfall in another area. What we want is balance, even in our internet connections. After all, the internet’s real purpose is to connect us to the information and people we care about.
Rather than jump on the band wagon of every new internet trend, we choose the tool(s) that offers satisfactory Return On Investment for the time required to Twitter, Facebook, blog, or the like.
The info highway is not just on your computer
And there’s a growing number of Millenials (people in their 20’s) who have neither land line nor cable tv. Instead, they depend on high-speed internet service for video feed.
Brockman refers to the indvidual who is well connected and mobile as a “digital gypsy.” She is that person who is working from any mobile hotspot, like the local Starbucks. With information localized to our gadgets, knowledge seems ubiquitous. It may be that Generation Z will have to grapple with navigating the information excess. For now, we’re all pretty happy just to have the access.
Reduce – Reuse – Recycle
Nelson’s original vision prompted an enthusiastic rally from Americans. “Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated.”
Fourty years later, Americans think more about our footprint on the environment as we go about our daily business, consume, and live life. The mantra – reduce, reuse, and recyle - is still a relevant goal. Many of us are decent recyclers because waste management services provide blue bins we happily fill and receive a small credit for on our statements. But we need to keep working at minimizing consumption and reusing what we already have, which has proven to be much more challenging.
Northwest University Class
16 years since graduating college, I’m back as a guest lecturer talking about business principles and making presentations! I feel kinda old right now!
Good friends for life. . .
Bamboo combo
Clichés according to Seth Godin
I love this definition from Wikipedia: In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. “Cliché” came to mean such a ready-made phrase. The French word “cliché” comes from the sound made when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a printing plate.
To save time and money, then, printers took common phrases and re-used the type.
Along the way, they trained us to understand the image, the analogy, the story. Hear it often enough and you remember it. That training has a useful purpose. Now, you can say ‘Festivus’ or ‘There is no I in team…” or “that took real courage” when describing a golf shot, and we immediately get it. Monty Python took a cliché about the Spanish Inquisition and made it funny by making it real. The comfy chair!
The effective way to use a cliché is to point to it and then do precisely the opposite. Juxtapose the cliché with the unexpected truth of what you have to offer. Apple does this all the time. They point out the cliché of a laptop or a desktop or an MP3 player and then they turn it upside down. Richard Branson takes the expected boredom of a CEO and turns it upside down by doing things you don’t expect.
I often use the Encyclopedia of Clichés to find clichés that then inspire opposites. It’s a secret weapon and it’s all yours now. Have fun.
Quality above all else
Football star Joe Montana once said, “Confidence is a very fragile thing.” The Toyota Corporation is knee-deep in crisis. After over 75 years since its founding, Toyota struggles to maintain the “Toyota Way 2001,” the management credo that stakes company values on two principles — Respect for People and Continuous Improvement.
Six million drivers in the U.S. alone have had their automobiles recalled for safety issues. Mr. Toyoda, President of Toyota, made steps to repair the broken relationship between the corporation and its customers by starting with an apology.
“At his news conference…Mr. Toyoda lamented that an overzealous pursuit of growth had led Toyota to lose sight of its commitment to quality. ‘We so aggressively pursued numbers that we were unable to keep up with training staff to oversee quality. We were also somewhat slow in collecting, analyzing and acting on complaints we received from our drivers.’” (New York Times, “Toyota Takes New Steps to Restore Confidence,” February 17, 2010)
The difficulties of the world’s biggest automaker reminds us that profit is always one goal of business but never the single driver.
Does Time Really Fly?
The perception of time seems relative to one’s age. What causes the feeling that “time flies”? It seems that life has played out in fast-forward mode, much like it has for Homer Simpson in “Every Day.”
Homer Every Day from Noah K. on Vimeo.
NPR’s “Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older?” (Robert Krulwich) puts that very question to neuroscientist David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine. He proposes that when we are young, we are establishing many “first” memories — the first day of school, the first friend, the first kiss — and these experiences seem long and rich.
“The list of encoded memories is so dense, reading them back gives you a feeling that they must have taken forever. “But that’s an illusion,’ says Eagleman. ‘It’s a construction of the brain. The more memory you have of something, you think, Wow, that really took a long time!’”
According to Eagleman’s findings, brains use more energy to imprint a memory when the experience is original. Children are not the only ones who create first memories. As adults, we may try to slow the pace of time by creating new “firsts.”
