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August 29, 2003

Spare Change

I wouldn't normally turn to Nexus, "Colorado's holistic journal," for FC Now fodder, but a recent interview with Bernard Lietaer proposes some provocative ideas about "complementary currencies."

The author of nine books on money and finances, including The Future of Money and The Mystery of Money, Lietaer expands on the relationship between economic stability and political stability, monetary innovations such as frequent-flier miles and loyalty programs, and private currencies.

Posted by Heath Row at 3:04 PM | 2 Comments

Friendly Hire

OK, so being bald and beautiful doesn't always work in Seth's favor. Let's see if being friendly does.

While FC Now readers debate whether love truly is the killer app, researchers at the University of Michigan have found that friendly employees are more productive.

"An impersonal style tends to restrict the bandwidth of information a person attends to in the workplace," says psychologist Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks. "This type of miscommunication, like ships passing in the night, is further exacerbated in diverse organizations (domestically and internationally) because rarely are people with other cultural backgrounds as impersonal as mainstream Americans."

While Americans can be extremely friendly in social settings with colleagues, that behavior doesn't always translate to the office environment. Is this the case where you work?

Posted by Heath Row at 1:56 PM | 4 Comments

Components of Creativity

Creativity & Innovation CoF member Renee Hopkins recommends an online creativity self-assessment tool offered by the Belgian innovation consultancy Creax. The evaluation tool creates a radar plot of where you stand in various components of creativity, including abstraction, connection, perspective, curiosity, boldness, paradox, complexity, and persistence. And if you sign up for the paid service, Creax provides training modules in each category. The nine-page, 40-question survey doesn't take long to do, and many of the questions offer good food for thought.

Posted by Heath Row at 12:21 PM | 2 Comments

Hey, Beer Mon

The folks at Red Stripe Beer have gone in an interesting direction with their marketing: the informercial. Are they desperate? No. Their "Hooray Beer" campaign has driven 3,000 calls to their 800 number, tripled traffic to their website and increased sales 20 percent, according to Brandweek Magazine.

The key to the infauxrmercial is humor. It features the "Red Stripe Ambassador" and his sidekick Jimmy, who are selling everything from mints to telescopes to Jimmy's right shoe as the two-minute ad goes on. Each time the ad cuts from a merchandise shot to the ambassador, he and Jimmy are nearly caught sipping from the lager, a tv no-no.

Red Stripe (and their agency, BBDO) have taken something reviled and turned it on its head with often hilarious results, and in the process, they've increased sales by 20 percent.

Sure beats those putrid Coors commercials about twins and other cool guys wearing snow hats because they'e oh-so-extreme.

Posted by Kevin O'Donovan at 12:05 PM | 2 Comments

An Attack on a Bus II

In a Sound Off post in response to "Driving in the Valley of the Shadow of Death," Melbourne, Australia, Company of Friends coordinator Peter Tunjic writes:

The Melbourne, Australia, Company of Friends group held a forum last night on death and business -- and how our attitudes toward death influence our lives as business people.
Without wishing to make light of the gravity of the article, there was one paragraph which struck me as equally applicable to business: "There is no management book, no business school case study on how to lead a company that has become the target of war."

Business can be a metaphoric war, companies seek the "death" of opposition products, business units, and ultimately the company. Business schools teach how to kill in business, but, in our experience, none teach how to deal when our businesses are the victim and our companies die or are dying.

Our guests for the evening were a corporate liquidator; a former major, rescue pilot, and now business coach; and a member who had suffered near death in life and business. Each agreed that in the west, for many, death in business is as much ignored, avoided and sanitised as death in life.

We came up with our own ideas on how to lead in the face of death:

Plan for death. Morbid as it sounds, our liquidator confirmed that companies that had business plans for death coped better both finacially and personally.
Have rituals upon death. Employees often dealt better with death than management and the board. This was seen as a result of employees getting together and grieving, whereas management and the board were alone in the process.
Help people grieve when their products, services, and strategies die. They will transition to their new life quicker.
Death should not be left to the experts alone. In leaving death to the experts, we rob ourselves of an essential part of our lives -- an experience which informs a healthier approach to life and business.
People with strong network deals with life threathening situations better.
Businesses die for many reasons which have nothing to do with the founders directors and employees. Though death in business (perhaps from an Australian cultural perspective) is often seen as failure. Perhaps we need a way of recognising the contribution of a company that has died.

Please forgive what may seem insensitive, but we think there is much to learn about business from our experiences with death.

I commend Fast Company for this article and pray for an end to the violence.

Thank you for the thoughtful comments, Peter.

Posted by Heath Row at 12:01 PM | Add Comment

Manufacturing Content

The Chicago Company of Friends group has been discussing an interesting question this week. Here are some highlights from the email conversation:

Lynne Marie Parson: I'm doing design edits for a university's curriculum/course catalog, and I just noticed that a department has changed nearly every use of the word "manufacturing" to "industrial" or "business." Has this word's meaning devolved so much because our society associates it with layoffs or a less-than-glamorous job description? I see manufacturing as a necessary process. Our society, as it is now, cannot exist without it in some form or fashion. Why would it be a no-no word?

Paul Lloyd: Perhaps your university friends are changing the word to "industrial" or "business" because those words have a broader context and the university may want to reach a wider range of prospective students. "Manufacturing" is when you make stuff in a factory. "Industrial" sounds like manufacturing, warehousing, light industrial assembly, or maybe providing engineering or other services to the "industrial sector." "Business" means whatever you do to make money. The manufacturing people I've met over the years would be unlikely to concern themselves with politically correct usage of words. They just want to make stuff and ship it out the door.

Joan Novick: I agree that "manufacturing" can become a less-than-glamourous word, and not just to students paying tuition money in search of careers. For one thing, "manufacture" can evoke the image of hand labor, heavy machinery, or famously failing plants. Does that sound like something worth studying in college? More importantly, not just the manufactured products, but the labor sources themselves are procured outside the U.S. -- in places chosen for the low cost of labor and/or materials. "Industry" or "business" suggests white-collar managerial control of these resources. Which career sounds cleaner, more profitable to you? I agree that we need manufacturing -- for the products themselves, and for the economic support of our own (dwindling) labor force -- but for a lot of reasons it's just NIMBY.

Lynn Lee: The subtle twist of "manufacture" to "industrial" and "business" may well be signaling an interesting trend sweeping across the U.S. for several years: the off-shore sourcing of manufacturing jobs. Wasn't it Megatrends long ago that predicted that the U.S. would become less and less a manufacturer of hard goods and be a seller of knowledge? I think this change in academia is just finally picking up what businesses have been doing for over 15 years.

Benjamin Elrod: I personally don't mourn the loss of manufacturing jobs. As a society, there is certainly a degree of nostalgia for the factory worker, 9-5er, unionized, job-for-life type of employment. However, this type of work has become a commodity with little opportunity for self expression or creativity. The training issue is relevant in a big way, because there will only be greater numbers of people displaced. How do we employ the last generation of manufacturing employees? Where do we find employment for these displaced people? Is there a place in the American economy for the displaced manufacturer?

Posted by Heath Row at 11:28 AM | 2 Comments

August 28, 2003

Layoff Payoffs

The Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy released their 10th annual CEO compensation survey earlier this week. Among the key findings in "Executive Excess 2003: CEOs Win, Workers and Taxpayers Lose":

CEOs were rewarded in 2002 for laying off workers in 2001.
As employee pension plans falter, CEOs have secured their own personal futures with higher pay.
By blocking proposed stock options 10 years ago, Congress helped usher in an era of runaway CEO pay.
Blocking stock option reforms also helped U.S. corporations avoid paying their fair share of taxes.
As corporate offshore tax shelters proliferate, CEOs win and ordinary taxpayers lose.
The CEO-worker wage gap persists.

The report also offers a range of reforms that could be implemented:

Require that stock options be expensed.
End taxpayer subsidies for excessive compensation, whether in cash or stock.
End taxpayer subsidies for gold-plated pensions.
Protect workers by requiring more realistic pension accounting.
Ban companies from offering executive perks not broadly available to employees.
Improve plain-English disclosure standards of executive compensation.
Require stockholder approval of extraordinary executive severance and retirement packages.
Increase barriers to selling based on insider information.

This seems like an appropriate topic for discussion as Labor Day nears. What think you? Does this call to action go too far? Not far enough?

Even if we look at Hewlett-Packard alone, 25,700 layoffs were announced for 2001, and Carly Fiorina's pay increased 231% between 2001 and 2002. That's certainly not the highest pay raise -- AOL Time Warner's Gerald Levin's pay increased more than 1,500% (perhaps because of his retirement?) and Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy made a bigger bank by more than 1,000% -- but it's a distracting discrepancy.

Posted by Heath Row at 5:25 PM | 4 Comments

Keeping the Dream Alive

Today marks the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

King was a reflection of all that is possible through strong, compassionate, and dedicated leadership. Few and far between are the leaders who managed to mobilize the entire country to fight against an ongoing injustice.

King's legacy lives on to this day with the I Have a Dream Foundation, which works to help children in low-income areas reach educational and career goals through mentoring and tutoring.

Posted by Kevin O'Donovan at 2:32 PM | 2 Comments

Soft(ware) Sell

Cem Kaner has proposed a Software Customer Bill of Rights. While the paper is oriented toward software as a product -- and addresses whether people should be able to sue vendors that ship defective software -- it touches on the ideas of brand promise and customer service, as well.

When working with business partners, organizations have contracts to fall back on. But what contract do you offer your customers beyond a warranty, if that? If you developed a bill of rights for your customers and clients, what would it say?

Posted by Heath Row at 12:56 PM | 1 Comment

Throwing in the Towel

Today is also Holiday Inn's Towel Amnesty Day.

If you've ever made off with a Holiday Inn towel while traveling for business -- or pleasure -- if you share your story about the towel (why you took it, what you did with it, how you use it), the hotel chain will donate $1 to charity. And if you're one of the top 25 tales tagged, you'll win a limited-edition souvenir towel.

Now, about those dotcom company T-shirts...

Posted by Heath Row at 12:00 PM | Add Comment

Beauty Pays

Berkeley business professor Hal Varian reports today that the unthinkable is true: Good-looking people (mainly men) consistently enjoy more professional success than their less physically attractive colleagues.

As if that weren't insult enough to the less-glamorous ranks, the study Varian refers to indicates that more than garden-variety discrimination is at play here; being attractive may actually enable higher productivity.

Registration is required to access New York Times articles on the Web.

Posted by Ryan Underwood at 11:52 AM | 2 Comments

Data Mining the Amazon

From a Suggest a Topic entry from FC Now reader Gemma Teed, we find a Guardian article about the work of artist Angie Waller, who had a little fun with Amazon.com's "Customers who bought this, also bought..." function.

Waller spent many, many hours exploring what Amazon offered for particular interesting purchases and found some interesting results.

For example, those who bought Mein Kampf were offered musical choices from Prince, Eric Clapton, and the Bee Gees, while purchasers of Patrick Halley's biography of Hillary Clinton are offered The Strokes.

In my experience, this Amazon function is quite good, and has introduced me to some things I might never have bought. On a somewhat related note, a friend once cautioned me to "never turn on one-click ordering, because one night, after a few drinks, you will end up buying books about Nunchucks."

I took a spin through this function on Amazon myself this morning, and found that people who purchased our friend Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life enjoy the musical stylings of Norah Jones and Annie Lennox. I am, however, disturbed that they apparently also enjoy Celine Dion.

Also interesting is that Waller's book is not available on Amazon, but you can get a limited edition here.

Posted by Kevin O'Donovan at 11:51 AM | Add Comment

In Box Insights

Tim Sanders, Yahoo's chief solutions officer and author of Love Is the Killer App, offers the following guidelines for easing your email workload:

CLEAR. Is it C: Connected to my job? L: List what you want me to do. E: Expectations; what is success? A: Avenues for me (resources). And R: Return on my time investment.

The Globe and Mail's Christina Cavanagh looks back to the history of Western philosophy for guidance: Aristotle.

In an article written for Report on Business in mid-August, Cavanagh considers how Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric -- invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery -- can be applied to electronic communication in the workplace.

Posted by Heath Row at 11:34 AM | 5 Comments

Urbane Planning

Company of Friends member Christian Young recently emailed the Knowledge Management CoF about the work of UK-based David Gurteen. A recent entry in Gurteen's blog caught my eye.

Gurteen brings up the idea of a knowledge city -- or a city "purposefully designed to encourage the nurturing of knowledge." He cites several possible examples, reminding me of a conversation that came up in the Real Estate CoF: What's a Fast Company town?

There's already a hotel drawing on Fast Company's ideas and ideals. What makes up a knowledge city or a Fast Company town?

Posted by Heath Row at 11:12 AM | Add Comment

Brown Nosing

Today in 1907, the United Parcel Service was founded. Be sure to thank your UPS delivery person today!

Posted by Heath Row at 10:37 AM | Add Comment

August 27, 2003

Car Talk

In another excellent column about Iraq, the New York Times' Thomas Friedman quotes Harvard prez Larry Summers: "In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car."

Although neatniks might quibble with the veracity of that observation (I confess, I've cleaned out several days of Subway cups and bags in my rentals), Friedman and Summers are definitely onto something. If Iraqis feel a sense of ownership in rebuilding Iraq (or, more accurately, building it from scratch, says Freidman), they'll be more invested in the outcome than if the U.S. military simply does the job for them.

This is one of the universal truths in organizational change. If people participate in and contribute to remaking the organization themselves, the mission becomes personal. They -- rather than outside consultants or new management -- help drive (pun intended) the transformation. And their efforts improve the odds of having one clean car.

Although there are obviously no easy answers in Iraq, this isn't a bad guiding philosophy.

Registration is required to access New York Times' articles on the Web.

Posted by Chuck Salter at 5:05 PM | 1 Comment

Food Service for Thought

A recent entry in FC Now reader Earl Gray's blog Skunkworks offers an interesting corollary to Chuck Salter's recent FC Now entry Project Dysfunction.

Gray deconstructs last week's episode of The Restaurant, analyzing the organizational dynamics, leadership, and teamwork exhibited on the show.

As leaders, we are responsible for our team's success -- corporately and individually. Sometimes, like Rocco did, we have to cut someone loose for the right reasons. We just need to be careful that we don't give up on someone that has potential that we may have recognized correctly, but that we set up for failure because we put them in a faulty situation with inadequate support. If they fail, it's on us -- not them -- just like the cook that was expected to do the work of three people. We must set people up for success, not failure -- and that begins with our own execution of our own plans.

Now that the program has ended its run, we can catch reruns on Bravo starting mid-September. Until then, where can we turn for leadership lessons on television? The Office? Back to the Floor?

Posted by Heath Row at 3:24 PM | 3 Comments

No Smiling, Eh?

The late humorist Erma Bombeck once titled a book When You look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home. If this holds true, Canadians won't need to go home until they achieve a "neutral expression."

The Canadian Passport Office released new guidelines yesterday as to what constitutes an acceptable passport photo, including helpful example pictures.

Among the more interesting guidelines:

The face must be square to the camera with a neutral expression and with the mouth closed.
False hairpieces or other cosmetic devices are acceptable if they do not disguise the natural appearance of the bearer and are worn habitually.
Photos must be taken against a plain white to 18% grey background without shadows. An 18% grey background is recommended for persons having white hair and/or wearing white clothing

Apparently smiling mouth-breathers with white toupees have to stay in Canada, which might not be that bad of an idea.

Posted by Kevin O'Donovan at 2:50 PM | Add Comment

Life in the Googleplex

USA Today has an interesting, if light, article on the ubiquitous Google. Sure, the top-dog search engine gets almost as much press as Howard Dean, but the article talks a little about the perks of working in the sprawling and cleverly named Googleplex, where the 90s live on.

Employees are blessed with "free food, unlimited ice cream, pool and ping-pong tables and complimentary massages, plus the ability to spend 20% of work time on any outside activity."

Those were the days. I do find it sad that in these more sober times, employers seem to have thrown out all the things that made workers happy and productive under the guise of "cutting the fat." If Google can keep its workers happy while maintaining 75 percent of all Internet searches, why can't everyone else?

Posted by Kevin O'Donovan at 1:22 PM | 4 Comments

Howard Dean's Start-up Syndrome

Presidential candidate Howard Dean is hot right now. He's just got one problem: How can he transform a sudden burst of success into long-term momentum (Hmmm, that sounds familiar)? Anyhow, that's the question posed in a great New York Times piece today. Ahhhnold signed up Warren Buffett as an advisor, maybe Dean should pay a visit to HBS's Clayton Christensen of Innovator's Dilemma fame.

Registration is required to access New York Times articles on the Web.

Posted by Ryan Underwood at 1:11 PM | 1 Comment

Performance Anxiety

The report from the commission investigating the space shuttle Columbia accident is a classic autopsy of workplace delusion. It's not just that NASA played self-defeating budget and bureaucratic games, management at the space program consistently deluded itself about whether the shuttle was safe to fly -- and whether NASA even knew whether the shuttle was safe to fly. NASA bosses told themselves they had a safety system, therefore the system must be safe. Who hasn't been in a meeting like that?

But for a truly chilling journey into how fragile and flawed America's space ship is, read this story from the Orlando Sentinel from 10 days ago.

The Sentinel, NASA's home-town newspaper, went back and analyzed every "anomaly report" from every single one of 113 space shuttle flights. The Sentinel found:

Bolts that hold the shuttle upright on the pad before launch often don't release at "blast off." The shuttle's thrust yanks them out of the concrete launch pad.
On almost every flight, critical pods of orbital maneuvering jets have to be shut down because they don't fire correctly. Actually, they get clogged with gunk.
The space shuttle uses wiring that the military has banned because it short circuits, and that wiring has caused the shut down of engine control computers, in flight, on the space shuttle. But the wiring has not been replaced.

It's the kind of performance that makes you amazed at the complexity of space travel, amazed that the ships do routinely get up and back safely, and sad at the state of our commitment to space exploration.

Posted by Charles Fishman at 10:20 AM | 5 Comments

Open-Source Product Development

The Boston Globe's Hiawatha Bray reports today on the increasing importance of "modders" to the video game industry. Avid video gamers have been modifying their favorite games to incorporate new weapons, enable character crossover, and change settings for quite some time. At Fast Company, we've even developed a ~~mod~~ map so some staff can play Unreal Tournament in a mockup of the Boston satellite office.

But it's not all fun and games. A mod of the hit game Half-Life -- Counter-Strike -- became one of the world's most popular online games. How open is your product development process? Do you let customers modify your products and services to better meet their needs? How do you harness those improvements and redirect them to other customers? Open source isn't just for software development any more.

Posted by Heath Row at 10:08 AM | Add Comment

Idea Generation Nation II

FC Now reader Robert Moss comments:

James Webb Young wrote a great little book for his students in 1939 called A Technique for Producing Ideas. It was first distributed in 1965. While the dates are old, the ideas are not.
The gist of it is as follows:

Knowledge is only rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything.

Ideas are only new combinations of old elements. Look for the relationships.

Gather raw material. Specific and general.
Listen for meaning in relationships in the material. Don't look at them too directly. Turn them around. Try fitting the puzzle together differently. Write down the partial ideas. Burn yourself out. Keep going.
Take a break. Put it out of your head. Let your unconscious work on it. Do something else that stimulates your imagination.
Out of nowhere your ideas will appear.
Be merciless with your ideas. Do they hold up? Are other people excited by them? If not, rework them.

Thanks, Robert! That's a useful blast from the past. Just goes to show that some ideas age more slowly than others. Young's work is still applicable.

Posted by Heath Row at 9:56 AM | 4 Comments

Proposal: Disposable

I can't imagine the need for or appeal of disposable digital cameras. You can't preview or delete images, and you need to take the cameras into an authorized retailer for "development" onto a CD. Add this to the disposable DVD and relegate the idea to the dustbin of product development history. Please.

Posted by Heath Row at 9:40 AM | Add Comment

Just Add House Ads

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Wenner Media, publisher of such magazines as Rolling Stone and Men's Journal, now offers advertisers in-house ad-design services. While magazines have long provided additional services to business partners, Wenner's approach encompasses the conception, design, and execution of ad campaigns in the company's publications.

Why embrace the design of your partners' adverts? "The magazine itself understands better than anyone else what look and feel best suit its pages," writes Brian Steinberg and Suzanne Vranica. This reminds me of the early days of Fast Company, when agency creatives would design ads specifically for Fast Company, occasionally riffing off our editorial design. One of Wenner's first ad efforts ran in the July 24 edition of Rolling Stone -- a five-page spread with Coca-Cola.

A subscription is required to access the Wall Street Journal online.

Posted by Heath Row at 9:27 AM | 20 Comments

August 26, 2003

Brain CEOs

Our grade-school teachers had it right: The ability to plan, organize, and follow through on a task contributes far more to success than raw talent. At least that's the word from neuroscientists studying something called brain C.E.O.s (which here I think means cerebral executive operations, though it seems like a good CEO would need healthy C.E.O.s!) . Here's what the New York Times reports today:

"You can be truly smart and still struggle in life if you lack the ability to plan, organize time and space, initiate projects and see them through to completion, and you cannot resist immediate temptations in favor of later better rewards.

"When those capacities are damaged or underdeveloped, even people with intelligence and talent may flounder. They are often misunderstood as being willfully disorganized or lazy, possessing a bad attitude or, from a parental viewpoint, 'doing this on purpose to drive me crazy.'

"More and more, however, neuroscientists are saying such puzzling underachievers may suffer from neurological abnormalities affecting 'the brain's C.E.O.' This control center, really an array of 'executive functions,' orchestrates resources like memory, language and attention to achieve a goal, be it a fraction of a second or five years from now."

Registration is required to access New York Times articles on the Web.

Posted by Ryan Underwood at 4:20 PM | 3 Comments

Pitching Ideas

More important than having a great idea is figuring out how to sell it to the boss -- especially in a culture that's not too keen to accept your idea.

How to do it? A couple of academics from Stanford and the University of California at Davis looked at how ideas are successfully sold in, of all places, Hollywood. Selling a script or a movie may not be all that close to selling your idea for a new product or marketing campaign. But the lessons ring true, no matter what kind of idea you're peddling.

Here's what Stanford's Roderick Kramer and UC-Davis' Kimberly Elsbach discovered:

Not surprisingly, the more passionate the person pitching the idea, the more effective he or she was.
And the better the pitcher was at drawing in the person on the other side of the table, the more likely he or she would succeed.
Indeed, the most successful pitchers were those who convinced the idea catchers that they had something to do with the crafting or improving of the idea itself.

"A lot of naive pitchers we talked to assumed what was important was for them to be passionate and to get their concept across clearly," says Kramer, a former script writer and psychologist who is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford. "That's important, to be on fire about an idea. But the other thing was to what extent the catcher was engaged and also felt creative."

In fact, adds Kramer, the person hearing the idea "has to feel like (he) is drawn in and contributing." The more you can make the potential buyer of the idea believe he or she came up with or helped improve the concept the better. You need to effectively persuade the "suit" that he or she is truly creative.

My takeaway: Never underestimate the importance of ego and vanity -- not yours but the person sitting across the table -- in selling your idea.

Posted by Editor in Chief at 2:47 PM | 7 Comments

Smells Good

Brandweek reports "nearly 9 out of ten men who wear fragrances believe some form of reorganization at the fragrance counter would significantly help them when choosing and purchasing a fragrance."

Amen to that. Although it's not every day I'm in the market for a new fragrance, some sort of reorganization would be helpful.

More than 5 minutes in a Sephora shop leaves my nose stinging and eyes watering with scent-sory overload. If I don't find what I'm looking for in those 5 minutes or so, there will be no sale, and I return to my usual mall-based pastime, grumbling about how teenagers dress.

The report also notes "38% believe fragrances should be sorted by scent, similar to the way liquor stores organize goods into whiskeys, vodkas and rums."

What a fantastic idea. Like the placement of the bottle of Bushmills next my usual bottle of Jameson, a general categorization by each product's relative place in the "smell-o-spere" would likely result in me opening my wallet. Starting with a fragrance I know and like, I could move to the right in a muskier progression, or to the left for a somewhat lighter scent, until I find what I'm looking for and purchase it.

Back in 2001, we featured trendsetter Hilary Billings, who has made a career out of forging "lifestyle brands" by thinking along these lines at Pottery Barn, W Hotels, and RedEnvelope. Not coincidentally, I've been a customer of all three companies in the last year.

What are some other organizations that could benefit simply by reorganizing their products?

Posted by Kevin O'Donovan at 2:12 PM | Add Comment

Satellite Weight II

FC Now reader Martin Sweeney comments:

Ultrasound signals? In Space? Bzzzttt wrong.

Now, I'm no scientist, but the Globe piece does mention ultrasonic signals, and Space.com has reported on ultrasonic drills used in outer space.

Any further insight from FC Now readers? Add a comment below.

Posted by Heath Row at 1:02 PM | 17 Comments

Help Me Understand! III

I think Seth should enter the next mobile phone-throwing competition in Finland. According to the Financial Times, "Qualification for the event consisted not of heats but explaining why they were unhappy enough with their mobile phone to want to throw it as far as possible."

Posted by Heath Row at 12:27 PM | Add Comment

Want to Innovate? Dump Your Friends II

Today's edition of the newsletter 48 Days, which usually runs more cold than hot, includes an item that resonates strongly with John's recent entry.

The average person has 50,000 thoughts a day. Unfortunately, the average person has the same 50,000 today they had yesterday. They keep asking the same questions and doing the same activities. If your thoughts do in fact have any control in your life, then you should be able to move toward the life you want by controlling, or changing, your thoughts. What are some easy ways to look at what creates your thoughts? The books you read. The TV shows you watch. The people you talk to each day.

All good places to start if you're looking to step out of an innovation rut. Richard Kadrey suggests the following:

Technical and trade magazines are great for learning how different people and professionals view themselves and others. Virtually every profession has a trade journal; check with the general reference desk of your local library. Ask your friends. Look in the Encyclopedia of Associations. Be on your toes. Doctors offices and industrial shops are great places to steal magazines. Some of my favorites are Diagnostic Imaging, a radiological journal, and Cardio, for heart specialists. Check the ads and return the Reader Reply cards. You will be inundated with ads from companies that make the kind of hardware doctors, fabrication firms, nuclear power plants, etc., use everyday. One company sent me a sample of their new gamma ray shielding, which now adorns a wall of my office.

Sure, dump your friends. But also consider changing your media diet.

Posted by Heath Row at 12:07 PM | 1 Comment

Personal Brand Equity

Nicholas Papadopoulos, coordinator of the Fairfield County, Connecticut, Company of Friends group, revisits the concept of the Brand Called You in a recent newsletter transmitted by his coaching practice Sky's the Limit.

In the article "What's Your Brand Equity?" (to find the piece, select Resources/Events and then Readings), Papadopoulos suggests you start by addressing the following questions:

What is your vision and mission?
What is your value proposition that you offer?
What audience do you want to target?
What is your brand promise?
What are the action items that you plan to implement for your branding campaign?

He goes on to expand on each area of questioning. Regardless of whether you work for a large organization -- or for yourself -- these are good questions to return to occasionally. Sometimes it's less about branding and more about staying focused.

Posted by Heath Row at 11:58 AM | 1 Comment

On Humanity and Humility

In our Fast Talk feature in the September issue of Fast Company, we asked the B-School deans of Harvard, Kellogg, Stanford, Tuck, and Wharton to answer one of their own application questions. If you haven't read it already, its a great piece, and you can also cast your vote whether their answers would merit accecptance, a deferral, or a denial if you were calling the shots.

Reader Ludmila Matiash, from Kyiv, Ukraine, sums it up perfectly in her Sound Off on the article:

If only business CEOs were as insightful and reflective as these deans. Maybe it's a combination of humanity and humility which makes a "leader" a positive change maker.

Sounds like there's some fast thinking going on in the Ukraine.

Posted by Kevin O'Donovan at 11:55 AM | Add Comment

Expanding, Branding

Last fall during the Company of Friends Roadshow, I visited Work Advertising in Richmond, Virginia.

On Labor Day, Cabell Harris, the company's president and chief creative officer, will launch a new extension of the business: Work Labs. A product development company building on the activities of Work Brands, Work Labs currently has more than 20 products in development. Product categories include china, stationery, fashion accessories, books, toiletries, home decor, holiday novelties, and office supplies.

"This new venture is not so much a departure from advertising as it is an evolution within the industry," Harris says. "I'm in the idea business. Only now, the ideas aren't just about other people's creations. We're going to market our own creations, too, taking them from concept to production through marketing."

It's good to see some of the ideas Harris and I explored last fall coming to fruition!

Posted by Heath Row at 11:25 AM | Add Comment

Consultants on the Move

Joe Sharkey's report on a recent Consulting Magazine study of business travel bubbles up some interesting statistics:

33% of consultants surveyed log 51,000-100,000 miles a year.
33% log 101,000-500,000 miles a year.
3% edge past 500,000 miles a year.
20% spend 125-plus nights away from home a year.
35% spend 50-124 nights on the road.
40% take between eight and 20-plus plane trips a month.
84% frequent Marriott hotels.
70% stay at Hilton hotels.
53% emphasize the need for high-speed Internet access in hotel rooms.

But here's the kicker:

How Smart People Work

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