Monthly Archives: April 2010

Idea Arena Podcast – Burst Interview with Albert-László Barabási

Posted on by under Big Ideas, Books, Idea Arena Podcasts

In this interview, I talk with Albert-László Barabási, author of Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do.

Barabási has been on the forefront of research into network theory. His first book Linked was about the connections. His new book Bursts is about the dynamics of how we live. He says we need to move from a model which emphasizes averages and random behavior to one that is represented by short periods of intense activity followed by longer lulls. Applications have already been seen in the diagnosis of depression and the movement of money.

[L]et me clarify that there is a fundamental difference between what we do and how predictable we are. When it comes to things we do–like the distances we travel, the numbers of emails we send, or the number of calls we make–we encounter power laws, which means that some individuals are significantly more active than others. The send more messages; they travel farther. This also means that outliers are normal–we expect to have a few individuals…who cover hundreds or even thousands of miles on a regular basis

But when it comes to the predictability of our actions, to our surprise power laws are replaced by Gaussians. This means that whether you limit your life to a two-mile neighborhood or drive dozens of miles each day, take a fast train to work or even commute via airplane, you are just as predictable as everyone else. And once Gaussians dominates the problem, outliers are forbidden, just as bursts are never found in Poisson's dice-driven universe. Or two-mile-tall folks ambling down the street are unheard of. Despite the many differences between us, when it came to our whereabouts we are all equally predictable, and the unforgiving law of statics forbids the existence of individuals ho somehow buck this trend.

Download the Burst Interview with Albert-László Barabási

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(Classroom) Management

Posted on by under Management

Doug Lemov thinks the problem in most classrooms is not dumb students or terrible teachers. He believes the problem is disguised intent – students many times are uncertain what they are suppose to be doing.

“Stand still when you’re giving instructions” is one of Lemov’s pieces of advice for teachers. Do you want the student trying to anticipate where you are going or listening to what you want them to do? Stand still gets rid of noise. Educators call this classroom management.

“Business” management is no different. It is amazing how often our intent as leaders is muddled, how often what we thought we said wasn’t interpreted the way we meant. So, before we start the same sort of name calling of employees and managers, let’s take a moment to make sure we are communicating.

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Commitment

Posted on by under You

At some point I decided to publish 500,000 photos during my lifetime. A few months later I realized that 500,000 was not enough and chose to do 1,000,000 instead.

What this goal means most of all for me is that I will dedicate a very large portion of my life to creating art. It means that my life will be intertwined with photography in a significant and meaningful way until I die. It’s a discipline to ensure that I live my life in such a way that art will play a significant and prominent role in it.

That’s from an interview that Chris Guillebeau did with photographer Thomas Hawk.

Hawk thinks it will take 10 million clicks of the shutter to get the one million photographs he wants to publish.

What moves me about his story is the way Hawk has committed himself to the craft. During every spare moment he has, he is processing photos – on his train ride to work, at breaks during the day, at 11PM before he goes to sleep. He says the only two things in his life are his art and his family.

Most of us won’t make that commitment. I know many days I don’t think I have anything interesting enough to say to here, but I fight through that judgment to keep writing and sharing. Think how having a goal like Hawk’s doesn’t even allow for the time to filter and fear and wonder if this is what he should be doing.

Excercise: Rewriting What Has Been Written

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Last July, I attended the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. It was a choice I made to improve my writing and get exposed to something that I actively avoided for most of my life.

The university I attended, Michigan Tech, was the perfect school for the engineering/math geek I was fifteen years ago. The sales closer for consciously choosing to attend a school in a remote section of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was the fact I only needed to take three English courses to graduate. I used to wear that as some badge of honor, proof of my ability to game the system and avoid learning the skill of choosing and arranging words to convey meaning.

I treated letters as the opposite of numbers with the precision of equations trumping the messiness of prose. That duality started to fade as I entered the world of business. Over and over I saw how success was always tied to one’s ability to communicate. Communication may take many forms, but words can’t be avoid.

One of the exercises I learned last summer was to look at the words other writers use. This makes reading an essential task to becoming a better writer, but my instructor went one step further. She said to find passages from your favorite authors and retype them; put yourself in the writer’s shoes and see the way words and sentences flow as if they were being written for the first time. It’s probably no different than a painter recreating a famous work of art.

I find typing each word creates a more tangible sense for how the meanings are constructed and would recommend to others as a great writing exercise.

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I have been doing my rewrites at 750words.com, a great site for building a practice for daily writing.

Book Review – Seizing the White Space by Mark Johnson

Posted on by under Strategy

Not much gets written about business models. I don’t know if it isn’t sexy enough or it somehow gets bucketed into the sleepfest of most strategy books. The only book I can think of, in recent years, to broach the subject was the self-published Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur.

Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation For Growth and Renewal is a fine exception. Author Mark Johnson co-founded Innosight with author and HBR professor Clay Christensen, and while Christensen has been publishing niche extensions on disrupting education and health care, this book is a wonderful addition to the broader ideas of Innovator’s Dilemma and Innovator’s Solution. Both of the latter books were incredibly important in explaining how companies lose edge in the marketplace and are often blindsided by innovation, but there were some barriers to understanding exactly how to apply the concepts. Johnson does a great job of taking that next step in Seizing The White Space.

The book is squarely focused on showing companies how to build new businesses in area that are outside their current business models. This could be through replacing an existing business, building new models where there are barriers to consumption, or by filling gaps in the market. The final section delivers roadmap on how to go about the redesign and implementation of your new business model. Cases include Tata Motors and Hindustan Levr (India), Xiameter that grew out of Dow Corning, and Better Place, the Israeli start-up trying to change the automotive business model with electric cars.

Seizing The White Space is surprisingly short at 150 pages which makes the book very accessible. The language and concepts also match that accessibility. The book is worth a quick look, a reminder of the unconscious parts of strategy that you too often take for granted.

Build A Classroom

Posted on by under Marketing

The mantra of social media is “Building your Audience”. The game becomes one of numbers. Who has more followers? How can I get people to become my fans and friends on Facebook?

“Build a Classroom” seems like a better mantra. The best of whom I read each day are always teaching: exposing me to new ideas, making an argument for a needed perspective, showing better tools to getting things done.

My grandmother started her career teaching in a one room schoolhouse, everyone learning together and learning from each other.

Some of the best ideas have been around for a long time.

Links For The Week Ahead

Posted on by under Economics, Management

Here are three links that you must find time for this week:

  1. Can Ge Still Manage? by Diane Brady (Business Week, 4/15/2010)

    It is important to disclose upfront that I am a GE alum. It’s been almost ten years since my departure, but I still watch the company I grew up in professionally.

    Brady’s thesis is that earnings and stock price have been under pressure for most of CEO Jeff Immelt’s tenure. With a quick acknowledgement of the dismal economics over the last decade, Brady wonders if GE’s storied management can no longer cope with the times.

    Immelt describes the successful managers at GE as overachievers, working-class roots, resilience, the ability to be challenged and to learn, a tendency to be self-reflective, and a desire to grow. But then he adds the most important line from in the piece:

    “[T]here’s always this impediment of ‘Why do we have to change if we’re good?'”

  2. Inside Job from This American Life

    The folks from This American Life teamed up with ProPublica to dig into the subprime mortgage mess. This epsiode rivals their Peabody award winner episode The Giant Pool of Money. This is also important journalism given the suit filed on Friday by the SEC against Goldman Sachs for the same thing that these reporters found hedge fund Magnetar doing: building questionable financial instruments and then betting against them.

  3. Michael Lewis’ Big Short and Our Appetite for Apocalypse – An Interview with Christopher Lydon

    This is one of the most interesting interviews I have listened that Lewis has given on his new book. Lydon is animated and asks insightful questions, but at times, tries to turn the discussion political with using the Iraq War as a comparable metaphor for the economic collapse. The Charlie Rose interview with Michael Lewis is also good.

Publishing 3.0

Posted on by under Media

In this video, Richard Nash talks about the future of publishing. He has been working on a start-up called Cursor, since leaving the publisher post at Soft Skull, and looking to test many of the assumptions the industry is based on.

I know Richard and he makes some incredible powerful points in this talk that we have talked about in our conversations.

  • Publishing used to be about supply; the future will be about demand.
  • Publishers only operate on a small part of the demand curve for what readers will pay for culture and connection.
  • Success in the future will be about managing communities, not SKUs.

Idea Arena Podcast – The Power of Pull Interview with John Hagel

Posted on by under Books, Economics, Idea Arena Podcasts, Strategy, Technology

In this interview, I talk with John Hagel about The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, a book he co-authored with John Seely Brown and Lang Davison.

Hagel and his cohorts at Deloitte’s Center For the Edge, a research center based in Silicon Valley, have being doing research to understand what they call The Big Shift.  Their work has uncovered a variety of insights, but the most telling is the reduced profitability of today’s corporations versus their counterparts forty years ago. We talk about how information, networks, and execution are changing the way individuals and institutions compete.

Pull is a very different approach, one that works at three primary levels, each of which builds on the others. At the most basic level, pull helps us to find and access people and resources when we need them. At a second level, pull is the ability to attract people and resources to you that are relevant and valuable, even if you were not even aware before that they existed. Think here of serendipity rather than search.

Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, we need to cultivate a third level of pull—the ability to pull from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential. We can use pull to learn faster and translate that learning into rapidly improving performance, not just for ourselves, but for the people we connect with—a virtuous cycle that we can participate in.

Download Idea Arena Podcast – The Power of Pull Interview

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Where Your Center Lies

Posted on by under Leadership, Management, You

Wherever your center lies, know it , name it, stick to it, and believe in it. Everyone who works with you will know what matters to you and will respect and appreciate your unwavering values. Your inner beliefs about business will guide you through the tough times. It’s good to be open to fresh approaches to solving problems. But, when you cede your core values to someone else, it’s time to quit.

-Danny Meyer, Setting The Table.

Without A Doubt

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Leaving the company you love in pursuit of what you love during the worst economic conditions of the last seventy years can seem heroic or stupid depending on your point of view.

My friend Erika said, without a doubt, life would be better in a year.

We are at just past five months since my departure and she is right. It is certainly not perfect, but things are definitely going in the right direction.

Fixed to Flexible has done really well. I have a completed book proposal that you will be hearing about soon. And today I can talk about another piece that fits in really well with my new life.

About two months ago, the Spanish publisher Deusto approached me about scouting for them. They are one of the primary business book publishers in Spain and they wanted help determining what U.S. business books they should acquire the Spanish subsidiary rights to.

Working with Deusto is going to be fun. If you have been following me for any of the last several years, you know I really like business books. Getting another opportunity to use all of this crazy knowledge is very cool and it plays along perfectly my other new pursuits.

Things do work out; it’s just impossible to see ahead of time.

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Related:

Scouting was a part of publishing that I knew only a little about before my current venture. Publishing Perspectives ran a great three part series back in December 2009 on the ins and outs of this “strange niche.”

Part 1: How It Works

Part 2: Scouting Changes with the Times

Part 3: What The Future Might Hold For Scouting

LEADERCAST in Milwaukee

Posted on by under Leadership

Last night, I met Alonzo Kelly at the Spreenkler Meet-up. He runs Kelly Leadership Group, a leadership development practice here in Milwaukee. He spoke about an event he is bringing to Milwaukee.

The Chick-fil-A Leadercast is a simulcast that is broadcast to cities across the country. The event features an incredible list of speakers including Jim Collins, Chip Heath, Mark Sanborn, Tony Dungy, and John Maxwell.

The part that is awesome is Alonzo saw that it wasn’t being shown in Milwaukee and stepped up as the promoter and local representative for Leadercast.

I want to help make him successful. If you are in the area, take a minute and think about attending.

Leadercast takes place on Friday, May 7th and runs from 8AM to 3PM.

There are two locations in Milwaukee: Crowne Plaza Milwaukee in Wauwatosa and Concordia University on the North Side.

The cost is $75 for the day long program. You can register here.

I’ll be at the Crowne Plaza. Hope to see you there!

The Questions Haven’t Changed

Posted on by under Strategy

Any businessman who can answer certain basic questions better than his competitors has a major strategic advantage. Most of these questions are asked constantly., in one form or another, in virtually every company:

  • What are my competitor’s costs?
  • Why do I make so much money on one product but lose money on an equally good one?
  • How shall I price this new product?
  • How much is more market share worth for a given product? Alternatively, what are all the costs of losing market share?
  • Should I lower prices? When? By how much?
  • How much capacity shall I add? When?
  • What will prices be next year? Five years from now?
  • Why have my prices broken so sharply? Where will the decline stop?

All these issues are part of a single fundamental question: Why does one competitor outperform another (assuming comparable management skills and resources)? Are there basic rules for success?

From the introduction to Perspectives on Experience by The Boston Consulting Group, 1968

Writing Advice for Engineers (and Everyone Else)

Posted on by under Marketing, You

How to make engineers write concisely with sentences? By combining journalism with the technical report format. In a newspaper article, the paragraphs are ordered by importance, so that the reader can stop reading the article at whatever point they lose interest, knowing that the part they have read was more important than the part left unread.

State your message in one sentence. That is your title. Write one paragraph justifying the message. That is your abstract. Circle each phrase in the abstract that needs clarification or more context. Write a paragraph or two for each such phrase. That is the body of your report. Identify each sentence in the body that needs clarification and write a paragraph or two in the appendix. Include your contact information for readers who require further detail.

— William A. Wood, September 8, 2005 (source/via )