Way of the Infonaut

"Khanna tells us, point blank, “pretending the world should be equal – or even can be equal – harms..."

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 22:03:04 +0000

“Khanna tells us, point blank, “pretending the world should be equal – or even can be equal – harms development.” He proposes, “rather than even talk about poverty, we should focus on need. Poverty is amorphous and sounds incurable, but needs are specific: food, water, shelter, medical care and education.””

- http://www.paragkhanna.com/?p=1269

"But although this ought to be an opportunity for financial services providers, there is something of..."

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 12:21:09 +0000

“But although this ought to be an opportunity for financial services providers, there is something of a mismatch between the brand values and service propositions which millennials look for and those which financial services providers tend to have. Millennials want to see ‘authenticity’ in brands, and they want easier access to services (for example when they’re ‘on the go’ or using dead time to catch up. There are some easier wins for financial services providers – for example, they may be able to nudge them to some good but low engagement behaviours (such as saving more for retirement) by smart service design. But there’s potentially a big win here. The provider which gets this right, at a time when many millennials are financially squeezed, could capture a cohort of customers for life.”

- http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/2011/02/07/millennials-and-money/

Immigration and wealth

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 13:28:42 +0000

The Human Development Report rankings have come out, placing the U.S. 4th, behind Norway, Australia, and New Zealand.

3 of the top 4, with Norway the odd man out, are immigrant nations.

via The Atlantic

"In a networked world, the issue is no longer relative power, but centrality in an increasingly dense..."

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 09:58:24 +0000

““In a networked world, the issue is no longer relative power, but centrality in an increasingly dense global web.””

- The Crossroads Nation - NYTimes.com

On chaordic leadership

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:24:04 +0100

Never hire or promote in your own image. It is foolish to replicate your strength. It is stupid to replicate your weakness. Employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability and judgment are radically different from your own and recognize that it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom.

Dee Hock, quoted in a comment on HBR

The six keys to achieving excellence

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 14:55:54 +0100

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.

2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.

3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.

4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.

5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.

6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly..."

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 10:12:11 +0100

““When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.””

- Arthur C. Clarke via Seth Godin

New iTunes logo - without the CD. The final death knell for the...

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:31:29 +0100

New iTunes logo - without the CD.

The final death knell for the medium?!

The Wilderness Downtown

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:25:11 +0100

The Wilderness Downtown:

Simply amazing.

via www.fitch.com

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:32:20 +0100

via www.fitch.com

I'd buy a Kindle if...

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 19:33:37 +0100

If Amazon really think that e-books are the future, why don’t they include a free download of the e-book with every hardcopy bought?

Then those of us who are (still) attached to physical books would be incentivised to buy a Kindle to try it out…and pretty soon might realise that actually we’re happy to tend to a virtual bookshelf?

A matter of perspective

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:50:00 +0100

A father on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, “Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.” The other boy runs to him and says, “Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!”

via The Atlantic

Cool Tools: The Best Magazine Articles Ever

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:13:24 +0100

Cool Tools: The Best Magazine Articles Ever:

Wow.

Reading sorted until 2012.

Photo

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 23:23:40 +0100

"“Privacy was once free. Publicity was once ridiculously expensive. “Now the opposite is true: You..."

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:57:43 +0100

“

“Privacy was once free. Publicity was once ridiculously expensive.

“Now the opposite is true: You have to pay in a mix of cash, time, social capital, etc. if you want privacy.”

”

- Sam Lessin (via Jeff Jarvis)

"Before, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into..."

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 16:50:36 +0100

““Before, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies. The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other.””

- Jeff Bezos talking to Charlie Rose

Design Thinking - the tail that wags the dog?

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:28:14 +0100

Reading is Design Thinking Killing Creativity over at the Future Lab, the following paragraph jumped out

In the 5 or so years since design thinking got big in the boardroom, I’ve experienced, over and over again, business ROI getting the better of design thinking. Awesome product propositions anchored by critical insight, technology, and business potential, gets killed or watered down because risk adverse businesses believe they can’t sell enough to justify the product’s existence.

Isn’t that what a business has to do?

It can be argued back and forth about whether the ‘risk averse businesses’ are right (and it will be almost certain that their calculations were wrong and projects with positive ROIs were rejected), but to dismiss ‘ROI thinking’ in its entirety shows a naivety that perpetuates the design-business divide.

Even Apple, the paragon of ‘design-thinking’ drove itself to the brink by ignoring the ROI constraints.

As the legendary Charles Eames said

Design depends largely on constraints…[the] key to the design problem [is] the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible (and) his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints—the constraints of price, size, strength, balance, surface, time.

"In November 2009, nine researchers from MIT’s prestigious Media Lab were among the eleven authors of..."

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:36:56 +0100

“In November 2009, nine researchers from MIT’s prestigious Media Lab were among the eleven authors of a paper that espoused the value of programming as an essential skill for all. For those who cannot program in the 21st century, they declared solemnly, “It’s as if they can ‘read’ but not ‘write.’””

- Are You Illiterate If You Don’t Know How to Program?
I understand their sentiments but I believe that this is imbalance happens with every revolutionary new technology.
Early users of the printing press had to have an intimate technical understanding of the process, rather than just being able to focus on creating content.
Cars required their owners to be mechanics as much as drivers when they first emerged.
The same will be true of computers - at first users must understand the technology, however the technical knowledge barriers to use gradually lower until they become invisible.
We can see this already with blogging and web design software - it is now possible to create content and webpages with no technical understanding of HTML and code (indeed 500m people now have complex, interactive personal webpages hosted on Facebook)
The opportunities are to enable people to ‘write’ in the digital realm without needing to know how to program

Is it just B2B businesses that have to create a clear architecture of participation?

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:35:54 +0100

Interesting article from John Sviokla over at FutureLab, however I think he simplifes the B2C world.

By and large, in B2C firms, the primary task is to automate and scale cognitive work.

He sets this against B2B business:

The core of B2B work is about coordination, collaboration and creative problem solving — not codification and scaling.

This is the core process in B2B work because one of the central distinctions of industrial marketing is that you have a complex buying group within the buying firm being serviced by a complex supplying group within the providing organization. Therefore, coordination and collaboration is baked into the very mode of value creation within the business.

In this realm of the B2B businesses, the core challenge for executives seeking to create a more productive organization is to create a shared information environment which can act as a platform for that innovation.

In addition, B2B businesses need a clear architecture of participation.

While automation for scale used to be a safe method of delivering secure profits, now it’s brands that can manage the interplay between individualism, personalisation and co-creation to create strong brand communities that are thriving.

Indeed I would argue that the quotes above are appropriate to every business, not just B2B ones.

The fragmentation of consumer demand represents the complex buying group, while a supply chain that involves consumers in a web of participation is at least as complex as any B2B network.

Is this the future for Twitter - hyperlocal AND social AND...

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:35:34 +0100

Is this the future for Twitter - hyperlocal AND social AND mobile?!

Fred Wilson’s golden triangle in action…