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May 8, 2007

Window to the Soul: the Subway to New York

Apart from being just about the best place to advertise, New York's subway could be a goldmine both for sociologists and for market research professionals. Of course, I'm not suggesting that the subway is representative of all of New York but it does provide an almost compulsory window shopping experience that can be very revealing, particularly for those with commercial or academic purposes.

Living in Queens and making the commute to downtown Manhattan everyday, I've often felt that I spend half my non-working life underground. I've got all the exits figured out, I've begun to recognize people on my commute (I recently got asked to dinner by a fellow commuter,) and I even know that at 11p.m. on Thursday nights, I am likely to hear an Indian accent telling me that my next stop is Queensboro Plaza. My iPod and a Poland Spring are now my constant companions -- The Economist makes an appearance on special occasions.

And yet even without these distractions, it's rare that I find myself bored on New York's subway.

Continue reading "Window to the Soul: the Subway to New York"

Posted by Saabira Chaudhuri at 1:41 PM | 3 Comments

March 6, 2007

What's the Big Idea?

What’s the value of a good idea?

Distilled, that was the main theme of Strawberryfrog CEO Scott Goodson’s keynote speech, “Change the Model, Change the World,” at yesterday’s Future Marketing Summit in New York. So what’s new about that? For as long as they’ve been around, ad agencies have been talking about the value of a “big idea.” That notion has gotten even more currency when it’s supposed to be the framework around which an integrated marketing campaign – the Website, the branded entertainment, the product placement, the POP stuff, the TV spots, the mugs, the T-shirts, the cents off coupons, the guerrilla campaigns to terrify Boston, etc. – is supposed to be hung.

But while clients ostensibly pay agencies for coming up with grand ideas that will resonate with customers and drive them to the cash registers, in actual fact, most agencies are paid for being suppliers – for delivering the commercial, the collateral, and the event. And, in a global world, that’s a precarious place to be.

What you want to be compensated for is a function higher up the food chain – “It is idea generators who will be most valued – because ideas people create the greatest value, across every industry sector, not just our own,” Goodson says.

Truer words were never spoken. And as the US loses its manufacturing to China, and its service industries to India, the imperative to find better ways to generate great ideas has never been more urgent. That is a skill that’s harder to outsource – and the one that will ultimately pay the bills.

What is your company doing to foster what Goodson calls a “new ideas culture?”

Posted by Linda Tischler at 2:18 PM | 4 Comments

February 15, 2007

Paying For Convenience

Not many cities have capitalized on delivery services quite like Manhattan, where people have the luxury of grocery or laundry delivery, or even a delivery from their shopping spree at Bed, Bath & Beyond. Yet it seems that the delivery market has not been completely tapped, because there's now a new service that delivers your spare keys, just in case you lock yourself out or misplace your keys.

The company, NewYourKey, has a very clever and practical idea and they claim that they will save your butt in any location, at any time. Their process is simple. First you make an appointment with the company so your keys can be copied and you can create a profile of yourself for identification purposes. Your keys are then housed in a secured storage facility -- a high-tech vault -- where the company's website says there will be 24-hour personnel and electronic surveillance.

Continue reading "Paying For Convenience"

Posted by Tamara Schweitzer at 3:15 PM | 5 Comments

January 15, 2007

Does Your Team Swing?

USA Today today has an interesting interview with Wynton Marsalis. Recently named one of America's best leaders by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and US News & World Report, Marsalis shares his ideas about improvisation at work -- and what leaders can learn from jazz.

He touches on the concepts of respect, integrity, and trust -- as well as meritocracy. About 10 years ago, the Fast Company touched base with Gary Burton about similar topics and themes. The two pieces might make useful parallel reads.

Posted by Heath Row at 10:19 AM

November 3, 2006

Is Open Source Mania Already Dead?

A few weeks ago Larry Sanger, the co-mastermind behind Wikipedia, announced he's taking on the grassroots encyclopedia with his own "fork" (a term used by hackers when two groups working on open-source software move in opposing directions) called Citizendium. Sanger--who at one point was Wikipedia's only employee--left the org in 2002, not exactly on great terms with his former co-founder, Jimmy Wales. The two have been reported to have had both philosophical and personality clashes (in fact, on Wikipedia, Wales declares himself the site's sole founder).

With Citizendium, which is slated to launch by the end of the year, Sanger--who has a doctorate in philosophy--is challenging the Wikipedia philosophy head-on: instead of anonymous writing and editing of submissions by anyone, Citizendium will have a stable of expert editors (that reflect what some might say are elitist academic creds like: PhDs, masters degrees, published work, etc.) that all submissions will be filtered through. Citizendium will literally begin by taking Wikipedia's 1.4 million articles (ten times that of Britannica) and comb through those with its experts, to weed out the inaccurate and the biased. Surely the academics will be thrilled to regain their authoritative voice, but the site's sustainability is dependent on whether or not the masses will want to participate in this refereed version of the post-modern encyclopedia they know and love.

This of course raises the central debate of the entire open-source movement: does the revival of the expert mean we're already over the whole utopian idea of a democratic, user-generated world? Have we realized that it just doesn't work?

Posted by Danielle Sacks at 3:01 PM | 5 Comments

October 3, 2006

Tired of Your Real Estate Broker? Try a Physicist

French physicist, Pablo Jensen, has devised a new model for approaching business real estate based on molecular physics.

Highlighted in the most recent issue of the American Physical Society's Tip Sheet, the model comes after years of studying the locations, successes, and failures of businesses in Lyon, France.

Empirically backed, the scientific model analyzes businesses with regard to how they -- much like spinning atoms -- repel and attract one another.

If you wanted to open a hardware store, for example, you could plug it into this model, and be given an index (Q) of locations around the city. Near a grocery store, where Q is high, the business should prosper. Next to a jewler, where Q is low, the business might go bust.

Intrigued? So is the Lyon Chamber of Commerce, which has enlisted Jensen to assist aspiring business owners looking for a good place to set up shop.

Posted by Peter Hoy at 5:33 PM | 1 Comment

What Ideas Are You Fighting For?

Back in the early 1980s, when I was a student at Princeton University, one of my heroes was Pete Carril, the legendary (and now Hall of Fame) basketball coach. During his 29-year tenure, Carril’s Princeton Tigers regularly squared off against (and often humbled) powerhouse programs whose players were taller, faster, and stronger than the players on his team.

How could an Ivy League school with rigorous admission requirements and no athletic scholarships succeed against the likes of Georgetown and UCLA? By realizing that the team could never out-muscle the competition, but it could out-think the competition. “The strong take from the weak,” Carril’s mantra went, “but the smart take from the strong.”

What was true for basketball then is true for business today. We are living in the age of disruption. In an era of hyper-competition and non-stop innovation, the only sustainable form of market leadership is thought leadership. Originality has become the essence of strategy.

That’s why ideas matter so much in business today. Tme popular media remains enthralled by gizmos and gadgets -- the stuff that Clayton Christiansen so famously calls “disruptive technologies.” But when it comes to building companies, the real killer app is a distinctive and disruptive point of view -- a bold new line of sight into the future of a market or an industry.

Call it strategy as advocacy: Who can redefine the terms of competition by challenging the norms and accepted practices of their business, before disgruntled customers or reform-minded regulators do it for them? Who has the most persuasive and original blueprint for where their business can and should be going -- not just in terms of bloodless economics, but also in terms of emotion and imagination?

Who can unleash and campaign for a set of messages that shapes the future of their industry and reshapes the sense of what’s possible for customers, employees, and investors?

Winning companies don’t just sell good products or provide good-enough service. They stand for important ideas.

What ideas does your company stand for?

William C. Taylor co-founded Fast Company. His book Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, written with Polly LaBarre, was published October 2.

Posted by William C. Taylor at 12:06 PM | 1 Comment

September 8, 2006

Bluetooth? Where's my Portable Rotary Phone

I had to laugh at word of the new "Port-a-Rotary," an old-time dial telephone that's been rigged to work wirelessly. Take it anywhere! Only $400!

It's funny, but it also gets at a serious point. Most consumer electronics are just way too complex. They're small, they're sleek, they do everything--and they take a physics major to decode.

True, a rotary phone isn’t going to fit in anyone’s purse, or even a hefty briefcase, but your mom -- or even grandparents -- could certainly figure it out.

Some of you may remember the piece we did in November’s issue: “The Beauty of Simplicity.” We took a look at everything from Google’s search engine to a TiVo remote and marveled at their ease of use and application.

Although most of us are now used to ring tones that sound more like Beyonce than a Model T horn, the introduction of items like the Port-O-Rotary may be the public’s cry for a phone that doesn’t come with an instruction booklet bigger than it is.

Here’s an idea: why not hold every new techno-gadget to the “mom” standard? If your mom can’t figure it out after a couple of tries, is it worth sending to market?

Posted by Kathryn Tuggle at 10:15 AM | 3 Comments

August 15, 2006

Data: Why Google is a Genius and a Fool

Over and over, we are told that we live in an information age. Gone are the days of brutish and greasy labor amid piles of steel. Instead, we are now masters of the bit and byte, moving mountains of data every nanosecond (just the fact that you know what a nanosecond is says quite a bit about our situation). But while our top executives imagine that they are delicately operating surgeons, slicing these data piles with infinite grace to create new value as if from thin air, the reality is often that we are still laborers staggering under the weight and awkwardness of our information. There is little grace. Our industrialist yearnings for bigger, louder, smellier factories have lead us to crave and build bigger, more all encompassing data mining systems. This is folly. Like surgery, it is the quality, rather than the quantity of the cut, which makes a successful operation. For contrast, witness a subtle swede and a brute-force big G.

Continue reading "Data: Why Google is a Genius and a Fool"

Posted by Dominic Muren at 12:13 AM

May 25, 2006

Hello, Wheat. Goodbye, Chaff!

Two of the most recent ChangeThis manifestoes might make useful parallel reads. Tom Ehrenfeld, who used to work with Fast Company's sister magazine, Inc., offers The Rewritten Rules of Management, which considers the Bill Swanson leadership wisdom plagiarism through the lens of Enron: "Letting Swanson get by with a slap on the wrist is like letting the Enron folks off with a small fine and a few hours of community service."

Meanwhile, Robert Sutton, a professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford Engineering School, cites Sturgeon's Law and suggests that 90% of management advice is crap anyway. After indicating that "the way business advice is sold today makes it difficult to cull the good from the bad," Sutton goes on to offer ways to identify what's awesome -- and what's awful.

Posted by Heath Row at 7:13 PM | 1 Comment

March 29, 2006

Reputational Insurance

One of the more surprising comments I heard at SXSW Interactive this year was made by Doc Searls during a panel discussion revisiting the Cluetrain Manifesto. When asked which companies and organizations he thought were clued in, Searls didn't hesitate before saying Microsoft.

Microsoft? Searls held up their Channel 9 project and Robert Scoble as examples. And an article early this month in the Wall Street Journal explored how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation holds a halo above Microsoft, improving its reputation (subscription required).

Does charitable giving make up for an organization's failings and foibles? Can Bill Gates buy himself love?

Posted by Heath Row at 6:32 PM | 8 Comments

March 28, 2006

A Creative Read

It's not often that I'm able to read a business book on my evening commute. I don't mean just read -- I read on the subway all the time. I mean that it's not often that I'm able to read an entire book on my evening commute.

Tonight I did.

Continue reading "A Creative Read"

Posted by Heath Row at 8:23 PM | 6 Comments

October 5, 2005

Money, It's a Hit

Amerca's getting a new Nickel. A big fuss is being made that Jefferson seems optimistic, almost smiling. Will that affect the spending of the new nickel? Money is an everyday item that everyone uses and has an opinion of. Here in the U.S. we've had a bunch of changes over the last handful of years. Our dollars changed to get a huge portrait (as well as anti-counterfeiting additions), then again to rainbow colored paper (which many did not like). There were huge events around state quarters, with design contests and yearly releases.

But does the design of money actually affect our economy? If a dollar becomes simple change, maybe people will spend more? The golden dollar coin depicting Sacagawea may have been released for this reason. We will never know if it would've worked The gold dollar failed to catch on, despite numerous television and radio commercials, because the Mint did not stop circulating dollar bills. I guess people don't like change.

Then again, there is a site devoted to saving the penny from destruction. Some have said the government would save several million dollars each year if we got rid of the penny, because the cost to make them goes up every year and most remain unspent. Of course, businesses may have an increase in profit when every purchase is rounded up to the nearest increment of five cents. It seems like a big deal, for such a tiny denomination.

What do you all think about these money matters?

Posted by Kevin Ohannessian at 11:54 AM | 3 Comments

September 17, 2005

Weekend (Yawwwn) Journal (Yawwwn) Debuts, Disappoints

If you've seen or heard any media in the last couple of months, I imagine that's it's not news that the Wall Street Journal launched a Saturday edition today. Given all the hype and ballyhoo, I'm disappointed to report that my world was more rocked by my favorite neighborhood bar discontinuing its funky Irish brunch than that I won't have new reading material no matter where I eat on Saturday.

Here's why the Journal's Saturday paper is dead on arrival: There are no surprises whatsoever. At least at this point, there's no evidence of a single fresh idea, or even the deft execution of a well-worn chestnut of an idea. It's a focus-grouped, advertiser-friendly confection with nothing that I can't get in hundreds of other venues. What the Journal seems to have fallen victim to is the kind of insular thinking that kills so many entrenched enterprises: It seems to believe that there's value in the information being delivered by the Wall Street Journal, as if that were enough to carry the day. The decided lack of splash here is also another tale of the downside of hype. If you can't live up to it, the backlash isn't going to be pretty.

Here's what I was hoping for. More articles like the Journal's justifiably famous "A-hed" column (that's the one in the middle column on the front page each day, although on the reconfigured weekend front page, it's below the fold in the middle and not that good today either).

Continue reading "Weekend (Yawwwn) Journal (Yawwwn) Debuts, Disappoints"

Posted by David Lidsky at 6:41 PM | 11 Comments

September 1, 2005

Idea Generators

Martin Leith offers a list of "every idea generation method I've encountered during the past 15 years" in a new Web site. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he touches on various mapping techniques, approaches to brainstorming, and innovative card decks, along with other practices, processes, and tools. If you need to move beyond some of the myths of creativity, this might be a good place to start.

[via Strategize]

Posted by Heath Row at 10:55 AM | 3 Comments

August 9, 2005

In Harmony

At the outset let me thank Heath and the FC team for giving me the opportunity to participate in this blogjam all the way from here in India.

As my final post, I'd like to point to Todd Sattersten's post where he asks:

Continue reading "In Harmony"

Posted by Gautam Ghosh at 11:59 PM | 1 Comment

How Innovative Leadership Impacts Customer Experience: Part 2

This may sound like the beginning of a bad joke: What do you get when you combine:

• A nuclear engineer
• A rap artist
• An FBI agent
• An AOL / Time Warner executive
• A professional stand-up comedian

How about a church leadership team? As an experience architect, I've been exploring ways that innovative leadership is imprinted on customer experience. New Life Christian Church is a great case study. It's one of those unique places where the customer experience definitely reflects the drive and innovation of its leaders... and there's something to be learned for all.

Continue reading "How Innovative Leadership Impacts Customer Experience: Part 2"

Posted by Leigh from LivePath.net at 7:39 PM

Differentiation That Works?

Mark Northern asked in his previous post about differentiators that work. Here's .02 cents from someone in the trenches with folks engineering new products and messages every day.

The differentiators that work are the differentiators that matter most. The differentiators that matter most depend on the individual. Individuals in today's marketplace don't always know what they want, and are conditioned to be more fickle, discontent and less patient.

Delivering differentiation messaging effectively is unquestionably more complex today than it ever has been. This isn't just because our customers are now more educated than ever. We're also dealing with online and offline channel proliferation, a lack of data standards, systems integration, and a shortage of seasoned quantitative analytics staff who can make sense out of mounting customer information...

But that's a topic for another day... Here's the good news: In this era of tight competition and commoditization, the differentiator that matters most may have less to do with your product than you think.

Continue reading "Differentiation That Works?"

Posted by Leigh from LivePath.net at 2:46 PM

The ROI on Doing a Favor

We've all heard that favors are a social lubricant and workplace currency. You do something nice for someone, and they'll return the favor. Everybody wins.

It's a bit more complicated than that, according to Columbia University management professor Frank Flynn. His research indicates that when a recipient believes that a colleague did them a favor because they genuinely like or care about them, they're more inclined to return the favor. The favor is much less likely to be returned if the recipient believes the action was calculated one, based on roles or an expected "payback." Additionally, his team discovered that consistent, smaller favors have a proportionally greater impact on ongoing interactions than occasional flashy ones.

Continue reading "The ROI on Doing a Favor"

Posted by Jennifer Warwick at 11:10 AM | 2 Comments

August 8, 2005

How Innovative Leadership Impacts Customer Experience - Part 1

We've talked a lot about innovative leadership. As an experience architect, I'm also interested in how innovative leadership is reflected in customer experience. Let me hear from you on this one.

I'll start us off by contributing some information about a company called Honest Tea, which relates to Peter Rees' post on Social Impact and Profit.

Honest Tea's Co-Founder Seth Goldman's passion for quality, community, culture and socially responsible trade is reflected in the products he makes. As an innovative tea aficionado, Seth introduced high quality, less sweet teas, bottled with social conscience to the market in 1998. His teas and newly launched lemonades are now sold at national retailers and health food stores around the country.

Continue reading "How Innovative Leadership Impacts Customer Experience - Part 1"

Posted by Leigh from LivePath.net at 10:57 PM | 2 Comments

Why Integrated Marketing Makes Me Shudder

I've been spending a lot of time with disappointed executives who mistakenly assumed that integrating the marketing department would revolutionize marketing and dramatically improve customer acquisition and relationship management.

More than a few of these executives (especially the ones on the hook for the technology ROI) are now fighting to keep their jobs.

Were they wrong about their investment in CRM tools? No, but that may not help much.

These executives are now steeped in the knowledge that truly integrated marketing can only be driven out of a truly integrated organization. Creating such an organization spans beyond the marketer's area of influence and control and stands in the way of improved experience and customer-centricity. A lack of organizational integration also impedes effective collaboration and frustrates the sales and marketing process.

Continue reading "Why Integrated Marketing Makes Me Shudder"

Posted by Leigh from LivePath.net at 12:50 PM

July 13, 2005

Inspiration, by Way of Flackery

No offense, but it's not often someone in PR-land says something that makes me grab the nearest pencil and post a quick blog. Maybe I'm immune--and yes, a little jaded. But as I was going through the tedious process of transcribing a tape this morning, I came across this nice little inspiration fix, which my friendly flak was using to describe his CEO:

"The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines itself within ancient limits." -- Nathaniel Hawthorne, from The House of Seven Gables

Posted by Jena McGregor at 11:15 AM | 1 Comment

June 20, 2005

Beach Reading?

The July issue of Fast Company (available online soon) features an article on summer reading for smart leaders, in which we recommend six non-business books that serve up business ideas and lessons. The business section in today's St. Petersburg Times includes a similar roundup of worthy reads.

Columnist Robert Trigaux's list is decidedly more heavy on the traditional business books, but there are some interesting outliers. Here are some of the more intriguing oddities:

• Sean Naylor's Not a Good Day to Die
• Edward P. Jones' The Known World
• Peter Mansfield's A History of the Middle East
• Jared Diamond's Collapse

What's on your reading list?

Posted by Heath Row at 1:33 PM | 4 Comments

June 16, 2005

From the Reading Pile

The most recent edition of Knowledge@Wharton includes a couple of interesting articles. Good Managers Focus on Employees' Strengths, Not Weaknesses focuses on the work of Marcus Buckingham, who suggests that good leaders play chess rather than checkers.

And Florida Red or Moody Blue addresses a research study that considers how color and flavor names affect consumers' choices. To whit: "Consumers react positively to imaginative names even if they are not particularly descriptive."

What interesting articles and research reports have you gleaned ideas from lately?

Posted by Heath Row at 3:10 PM | 3 Comments

June 8, 2005

In Search of Meaning

This morning at the Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show, the opening keynote address was delivered by Jim Taylor, vice chairman of the Harrison Group. Fast Company last connected with Taylor in 1996, just before his book The 500-Year Delta -- co-written with fellow futurist Watts Wacker -- was published.

If Taylor's keynote is any indication, "what comes after what comes next" -- at least in the world of business futurism -- is in many ways more of the same. In his wide-ranging, 45-minute talk, Taylor trucked out some tried-and-true futurist tricks:

Continue reading "In Search of Meaning"

Posted by Heath Row at 6:20 PM | 2 Comments

May 19, 2005

DVD Rental Wars: Netflix 1, Wal-Mart 0

Just a year ago, many were calling Netflix as good as dead after the gazillion-dollar gorilla Wal-Mart stomped in on their turf. (Just a taste of the David and Goliath thing going on here: Netflix's 2004 revenues, at $506 million, is what Wal-Mart makes in less than a day.) But today, Netflix looks quite alive and kicking. This morning, Wal-Mart announced it would shutter its online DVD rental business and direct customers to Netflix. In return, Netflix will remind its customers that they can buy DVDs on Wal-Mart's web site.

Netflix still has a hill to climb--it expects to lose $5 million to $15 million this year. But news like this gives renewed hope that innovative upstarts with a breakthrough idea and a customer-centric model can win out over mass and price. At the very least, it's inspiration to us all. Let's hear it for the little guy.

Posted by Jena McGregor at 11:34 AM | 2 Comments

April 15, 2005

William Saroyan on Business

Last month, I posted an entry touching on some business lessons learned from Encyclopedia Brown. Readers responded strongly enough that I'll probably continue that train of thought in the weeks to come.

But last night, while reading William Saroyan's The Human Comedy, I was struck by how much business knowledge is hidden inside the pages of that 1943 novel, as well. Perhaps this book should be considered for future pieces like Summer Reading for Smart Leaders.

Here are some of the gems:

Continue reading "William Saroyan on Business"

Posted by Heath Row at 3:59 PM | 3 Comments

March 15, 2005

Pay As You Please

Okay, this is an innovative, if risky, pricing strategy. But fascinating, too. Who wants to eat in a new restaurant until it's been tested? Letting consumers pay as they wish certainly builds trust with new customers during the early experimentation phase.

Posted by Jena McGregor at 2:51 PM | 3 Comments

February 8, 2005

How to Read a Business Book

Inspired by Tim Sanders' book Love Is the Killer App, which details how Sanders reads books -- and why -- the author of the blog Slacker Manager weighs in with his own how to. While I'd also offer our Readers' Choice project as a way to identify which books are need to reads, his advice on annotating a book while you read is useful. He also mentions several useful reading tools -- I'd recommend the Pilot G-2 as a choice pen.

[via bBlog]

Posted by Heath Row at 6:13 PM | 1 Comment

January 11, 2005

Mano a Mano

Now, this is a conversation worth eavesdropping on. James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, and Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, are holding forth in Slate this week.

So far, their exchange has touched on the difference between rapid cognition and careful deliberation, distributed decision-making, the danger of expertise, and other heady topics. It's a fascinating read: Equal parts book discussion, friendly professional debate, and expansion of their core ideas. When was the last time you sat down with a colleague -- or a competitor -- and deeply discussed what you did... and why?

[via Future Now]

Posted by Heath Row at 3:47 PM

January 6, 2005

Ways to Nurture an Idea

Earlier this week, John posted an entry about ways to discourage, derail, and effectively destroy new ideas. Chuck Frey's Innovation Weblog offers a useful corollary to that post, touching on the concept of springboard thinking.

Sometimes the best ideas are ideas that have been reconsidered, revisited, and revised. How can you escalate ideas? Encourage new ideas? Here are some starting springboards:

• Redefine the task headline
• Make a wish
• Start with a new idea
• Challenge constraints
• Add random thoughts
• Draw on feelings or gut level reactions
• Consider conflicting points of view

Posted by Heath Row at 12:40 PM | 1 Comment

January 4, 2005

Ways to Murder an Idea

The Synectics Corp., yes they are consultants, has just published a neat little book entitled Imagine. You can't get it in a bookstore because it's available free from the firm. My advice: Call the firm up and ask for a copy. It is loaded with great ideas, aphorisms, and inspirational quotes.

Among the many gems of advice for would-be innovators is a list of the many ways to squash an idea.

Synectics, an expert on innovation and change, counts 17 ways. I'll name the top ten and encourage you to get the book yourself.

Continue reading "Ways to Murder an Idea"

Posted by Editor in Chief at 3:01 PM | 5 Comments

December 20, 2004

Conquer Your Fear of Public Speaking in a Few Hours. Really?

I hate speaking in public. Like most oratory-phobes my throat closes up, "Umm" suddenly becomes the single most important word in my vocabulary, and trying to imagine the crowd in its underwear, as the age-old trick has it, complicates matters by several orders of magnitude. So it was with great interest that I read a press release this morning claiming that a new method can totally eliminate the anxiety of speaking in public within a few hours. I'll have to give the guy a call to learn more. In the meantime, any good stories of people getting over their fear of public speaking? How did you do it?

Posted by Ryan Underwood at 10:18 AM | 13 Comments

October 27, 2004

Free Market Philosophy

Wikipedia's Philosophy of Business section takes a long look at the very foundation of business formation and operation, business's purpose and role in society, and its moral obligations. Making a sharp disction between the philosophy of business and business philosophy -- merely ways of doing business -- the entry addresses the history of business, some of the more notable business philosophers such as Peter Drucker, and several important philosophical questions raised by and in business.

Like anything in the Wikipedia, this is a work in progress. But it's sure nice to see writing about business using words like "epistemology" and "logic."

[via bBlog]

Posted by Heath Row at 9:07 AM

September 10, 2004

Security Projects

As the third anniversary of Sept. 11 terror attacks gets close, five projects have been picked as the finalists for the Mitretek Innovations Award in Homeland Security, the first nationwide program to mark public or private models for improving security. Here are the highlights:

Continue reading "Security Projects"

Posted by at 11:08 AM

August 13, 2004

Games Theory

If you ever get busted for playing solitaire, here's the EverQuest defence.

Clive Thompson writes in The Walrus about Edward Castronova and his paper Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier.

Why the interest? When you write about the seventy-seventh richest 'country' in the world, and it doesn't 'exist' ... my curiosity gene clicks in.

Continue reading "Games Theory"

Posted by Peter Rees at 8:31 PM

The Sleep Opportunity

I'm moblogging from my Blackberry, so I'll keep this short. I'm off to Minneapolis for the annual meeting of the American Society of Association Executives and I'm already pretty tired. So, naturally, I started to think about the business opportunity around sleep.

I know there is a place in NYC that charges customers $14.99 for a 20-minute nap during the workday. Many hotels--including mid-range chains--are upgrading their rooms to help weary travelers sleep including offering "sleep amenities" such as earplugs and eye shades. Anyway, I'm contemplating the possibilities in this area and I'm wondering if anyone is aware of other new ventures designed, quite literally, to put us to sleep?

Posted by Jeff De Cagna at 7:43 AM | 1 Comment

July 19, 2004

What Would Your Company Do With a Poet in Residence? II

Last fall, John considered the value of poetry as a creative tool in business. In this morning's Daily News, Lloyd Grove discusses the poetry of British publisher Felix Dennis. While Dennis doesn't use his poetry to help shore up Dennis Publishing per se -- he started writing while convalescing in '99 -- I'm thinking about poetry this morning.

So it was a pleasant surprise to receive a poem from a Danish friend via email. Carsten Ohm Andersen's "What a Wonderful Flow" celebrates the pioneer spirit, meaningful work, being in the "zone," and teamwork. When was the last time you waxed poetic about your work? Were you to pen a pome today, what would it say? Add a comment!

Posted by Heath Row at 10:20 AM | 2 Comments

June 30, 2004

Did You Ever Go Off-Road?

I was five minutes late to work this morning -- due to a last-minute decision to go off-road.

I usually take the S train to get to Grand Central and walk a couple of minutes to the office. This morning, running a little late, I decided to take a shortcut and followed a colleague's tip to take the 7 train. She told me the escalator would take me right to the side entrance of the building. So I stepped onto the 7, and when the train pulled into Grand Central, it was almost 9 a.m. Reassured that it would take no time to get to the ground, I found myself on a long platform that led to an escalator on either end. Which way to go?

Continue reading "Did You Ever Go Off-Road?"