The Bottom Line by Rip Empson

11:46 am | 3 recommendations | Be the first to comment

How to Look Good in a Recession

We're all a little shorter on that liquid capital than last holiday season, and our calls to the bank for a credit limit increase aren't being returned. Here at FastCompany.com we've devised a solution for holiday shoppers who still want to look like a millionaire without having to go broke. Yep, here are 8 great things that you can rent.

Supercomputing

Depending on your recent circumstances you might have a lot of time to kill over the holidays -- maybe you want to catch up on all those Chess games you missed or that plot to overthrow the government. Well, now you can. For $2.77 per- hour, Interactive Supercomputing, Inc. will outfit you with your own supercomputer. (Of course, if you're looking to rent the whole supercomputer, with all of its cores, it'll cost a bit more: $465 per-hour.) Can't figure out if your brother-in-law is a terrorist? Can't afford anyone to do your taxes this year? Enter the figures and let the supercomputer do the rest.

Rent-a-Roadster

Ready to do your share for the environment by driving a green machine, but didn't get that big bonus this year to make it a reality? The Tesla Roadster and the Gibbs Aquada, the fastest and most street-and-water-legal boatcar, should both be available to rent the beginning of 2009. eQocar.com, which rents hybrid vehicles, promises to have them in stock. That'll save you from figuring out new energy tax credits or purchase incentives. And just in case green isn't your thing, Gotham Dream Cars can put you in the seat of, well, your dream car. Try a Lamborghini Murciélago for $6,900 a week in New York and a Bentley Continental GTC for the same rate in Miami.

Your Very Own Circus

Forget Britney Spears and T-Pain's brands of circus, why can't you open your own big top? If the theory that people with pets live longer is actually true, then going all-out by renting exotic animals ought to get you over those recession blues. Hollywood Animals will gladly bring Madagascar to your corporate event, party, or even offer a private animal encounter with a lion or a bear-- and that's nicely priced at $495 per person.

Rent-a-Conscience

With our addiction to oil crippling the economy, why not go solar and show those nosy neighbors that you're really part of change. The Citizenre Corporation's REnU Project offers a cheap, solar panel rental plan. The company will pay for, install, operate, and maintain your solar equipment. And all you have to do is pay flat monthly rent of $100.

Big Screen TV

Buying a 61" plasma screen TV will cost you around $5000, but renting one? You can rent one for only a day at $1K or a week at $3K from Meeting Tomorrow -- or just enough time to get you through the Super Bowl. And if you've got a Brady-Bunch-sized family, how about a Jumbotron mobile LED screen? Only $9000-a-day! What a bargain!

Wall Candy

Hey boss, offer your employees something to look at other than their diminishing 401(k)s. Art Rent & Lease is just one of many sites that offers flexible, tax- deductible, no-interest leases on fine art for offices and professionals. Or go the cheaper route: become a member of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and rent in three month-cycles for as little as $17 a month. Pretty cool, huh? Now you can pretend that you're a serious art collector, when all you really need is a bailout.

Ice, Ice Baby

Michele Krause, founder of Bling Yourself, Inc. -- a site that rents blinged-out jewelry and other accessories -- says that the economic slowdown has "no impact" on the company's customer acquisition rate or even the number of rentals. Don't be bashful, rent a little jewelry over the holidays to impress your in-laws or better yet, to convince your kids they'll be going to private school next year.

Phone For The Holidays

Since the company took back its BlackBerry, you've been fiending for around-the-clock contact. Besides, you'll probably need one for your new job quest anyway. Here's how you can get a fix. RentCell, rents BlackBerry Curves for $84 a week with unlimited calls and email, while InTouch USA offers iPhones at a weekly rate of $89 plus $0.79 per minute for each call.

11:35 am | 4 recommendations | 3 comments

The Curious Case of Manny Ramirez

I think that many would argue that the role of a professional athlete in an organization, especially a famous one, is a bit of an anomaly compared to the daily reality of most other inhabitants of Planet Earth -- even if these athletes are part of a “business.” And therefore anything that might be said about parallels between their profession and any of ours must be valuated with this in mind.

Of course, a professional sports team is a business -- first and foremost -- and is managed accordingly. Sports teams are referred to as “franchises,” and as such, they are truly multinational, capitalistic entities whose modus operandi is to market their brand and to make a buck. Like any business, a sports team will survive based on how well its employees work together to achieve their goals and how proficient each member is at their individual role within this framework. The more skilled the employees, the better the team does and the more profit it turns.

For this reason, some athletes -- because of who they are and how they contribute to their organizations -- raise interesting questions about how businesses manage their employees. Specifically, at what point does the cost of a valuable employee outweigh the potential profit they represent? If a high-performing employee becomes disruptive because of their attitude, dress, or behavior, at what point do you draw the line?

Before you offer an answer, consider the case of Mr. Manny Ramirez:

Manny is a professional baseball player and a future Hall of Famer. His preternatural talent for hitting the ball to every part of the field (including 527 hits that have landed in the bleachers) and his comfort at the plate with two strikes against him, make Manny a valuable contributor to his organization. (In fact, the Red Sox thought that Manny was such a singular asset that they were willing to pay him nearly $20 million a year for his services.)

As a part of the organization’s brand and image, Manny is essential. As a laid-back and unusual guy, he helped to cement (or at least perpetuate) the Red Sox’s reputation as the less “corporate” alternative to the clean-cut and always out-spending New York Yankees. As a team member, Manny kept the attitude in the locker room relaxed (think salsa music) and when he was in the lineup, he provided valuable protection for his teammate and fellow All-Star slugger, David Ortiz. He also helped bring fans to the park and sell jerseys around the world.

Not to mention that in terms of an organization’s goals (which is obviously to get to the World Series and hopefully win it), Manny was a big contributor. He’d led the Red Sox to two World Series in 2004 and 2007 (and won the World Series MVP in 2004).

But on the flip-side of the coin, there is Manny The Distraction. Take his dreadlocks, for instance -- or his propensity for taking bathroom breaks and making phone calls in the middle of a game. Sure, Manny is laid-back -- he marches to his own beat -- and certainly some organizations go out of their way to hire this type of character. In fact, Businessweek.com went so far as to call Manny an Innovator.

But then there are others that found Manny’s quirky conduct to be “unprofessional,” and over the years he’s received many unflattering characterizations, like “flake”, “agitator”, “Prima donna”, and “clueless ****head.” Some also claimed that Manny failed to hustle consistently -- that he didn’t give his “full effort” every time he took the field.

During his eight-year stay in Boston, management and fans went out of their way to accommodate Manny because of his outstanding performance on the field. But this season, as reports of his “unhappiness in Boston” intensified and were combined with his reported assault of a member of the clubhouse and a near-fistfight with a fellow teammate, the Red Sox Organization decided they’d had their fill of his “laissez faire” attitude. In the middle of the 2008 season, Manny was traded to Los Angeles.

The Red Sox made the only choice they felt they had, but was it the right one?

Many argue that the reports of Manny’s violent conduct were incidental, that they may have been provoked and were not in fact his fault. Just as many argue that with his active contribution in the 2008 postseason would have likely propelled them into the World Series. (They lost in the second round.) Not to mention Manny’s postseason statistics, which are nearly unprecedented. In fact, David Ortiz was recently quoted as saying that with Manny still on the team for the 2008 playoffs, the Red Sox would have made it to the World Series and won. And there are the observations that paint Manny as a surprisingly studious ballplayer--few players have been known to watch more tape or practice their craft more dilligently…

Perhaps these elements complicate matters, perhaps they don’t. Either way, they seem to make Manny into a bit of a Jekyll & Hyde-type character. For the Red Sox organization, Manny’s cost outweighed his benefit, and the short-term benefit did not exceed the long-term price for his behavior. Like any other business, the Red Sox had their breaking point; they felt that Manny’s conduct was impeding the team’s ability to function as a cohesive unit and that they could be successful without him.

Sometimes taking a loss is better than accepting a dishonest gain—to lose Manny to a Western team was easier than winning with his disruptive conduct. Perhaps Mark Cuban could take a lesson from that?

But, even so, questions remain: what do you do with your superstars? Do you put up with them simply to prevent them from going to one of your competitors? Or do you quickly draw the line and if they step over it, fire them and concentrate on building other pieces of the organization?

 

What's a business to do?

READ MORE:

The Six Best Sports Insider Blogs

Dr. James Andrews' All-Star Baseball Team

 

02:11 pm | 1 recommendation | Be the first to comment

Innovation and the Obama Presidency

During his presidential campaign, President-elect Obama was quoted as saying, “America risks being left behind in the global economy: Revolutionary advances in information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and other fields are reshaping the global economy. Without renewed efforts, the United States risks losing leadership in science, technology, and innovation.” Unfortunately, the numbers corroborate words; American Federal investment in Science and engineering research has been cut in half since 1970.

Clearly President-elect Obama is aware of the dwindling level of federal money that is ending up in venues that are likely to help fuel innovation. His record in the Senate shows his awareness of technology and science-related issues, and the type of reform he is likely to enact governmentally and technologically will hopefully be a platform for innovation.

To this effect, President-elect Obama seems to be set on encouraging a degree of openness and transparency which he seems to feel the Bush Administration has lacked: “The Bush Administration has been one of the most secretive, closed administrations in American history. Our nation’s progress has been stifled by a system corrupted by millions of lobbying dollars contributed to political campaigns, the revolving door between government and industry, and privileged access to inside information -- all of which have led to policies that favor the few against the public interest.”  Obama claims that he will be able to use technology to reverse this destructive trend, improving the exchange of information between government and citizen.

President-elect Obama and Senator Tom Coburn paired up in 2006 to make a stand for openness and equality in Washington’s technology policy (they also worked closely with McCain). The law they attempted to pass (the heralded S. 2590) hoped to “lift the veil of secrecy in Washington,” by creating a Google-like SE that would allow “ordinary Americans” to track “federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and loans.”

Obama has also said that he will create America’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO), as well as hatching schemes to invest tons of money in renewable energy research, stem cell research, and others. He hopes – by investing in tech, energy, and biomedical research – to create the grounds for innovation in these fields and eventually the ability to save money on healthcare, green technology, and the other sectors that will play important roles in our nation’s future.

The President-elect is bent on reforming the Bush Administration’s reputation as being one that has aggressively avoided investment in science and technology qua innovation, “Changing the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.”

With the struggling economy and two foreign wars, it will be difficult for Obama to live up to his claims –at first. But I think we can be confident that behind the Obama Administration’s policy will be a philosophy that promotes (and relative to administrations past, evangelizes) research and innovation in the fields of science and technology, which we all know is integral to international competition and national welfare and progress.

10:22 pm | 1 recommendation | Be the first to comment

Google Brings Voice to the iPhone

The New York Times reported Friday that Google will be launching a new application for Apple’s iPhone that will allow the phone to understand the human voice. Finally catching up with the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft (who already offer voice services for cellphones), Google has taken another step toward becoming a serious player in the smartphone and advertising industries.

The Google voice-recognition software is reportedly very accurate – much more so than that of its competitors – part of the reason for this being the vast collection of data Google is able to draw upon. (It is speculated that Google employs up to 450,000 servers, which of course are home to an enormous diversity of information.)

Users of the application will be able to ask the iPhone a wide variety of questions, from “where’s the closest Thai restaurant?” to “What’s the 7th planet from the sun?” In an interesting move, Google has brought this technology to the iPhone before its own phone, the G1. But don’t worry, users can probably expect that to change before too long.

How does the voice application work?

Apparently, the sound of your voice is converted into a digital file by the voice-recognition application, which then sends the recorded file to Google’s servers. These magical servers then decode your question before passing it along to the Google Search Engine. Presto, the SE gives you the results.

Apple is expected to add the application to its iTunes store early this week.

Is there anything Google can’t do?

03:10 pm | 4 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Real Change in Washington: Obama Announces Plan to Update Fireside Chats

Reports that Obama plans to bring the President’s weekly “fireside chat” into the new century surfaced this weekend. The president elect plans to not just offer the chats on the radio, but on YouTube as well.

Every week, Obama will address the public in a four-minute-long video that will be posted on his transition site, Change.gov. Expected to accompany these videos are online Q&As and video interviews with White House staff. And in the coming weeks, members of the transition team, policy experts, and his selections for the Cabinet will record videos that will be uploaded to the site. The administration also expects to launch a White House YouTube channel once it takes office.

I imagine that this news will make a lot of people in younger generations thoroughly “amped”. Imagine if the administration uses sites like TubeMogul (as ReadWriteWeb suggests) to cross-post videos across the Internet, uses Hulu and YouTube more consistently, and creates live broadcasts, podcasts, and RSS Feeds. Obama could surpass the technological efforts of the Bush Administration in a matter of months.

First of all, the simple fact that our President shows an interest in, and knowledge of, something that younger Americans spend a lot of their time employing (even if they don’t think about it that way), means a lot. And secondly, what’s even better is that this holds great potential for participatory democracy and representative government. People will be encouraged to actually watch Obama’s weekly State of the Unions, especially given the opportunity to post video responses to what they see and hear.

Sure, posting videos to YouTube is easy and yes, for those paying attention, Obama’s account on Twitter has been silent since the election. But even if this effort at transparency is superficial, it’s a step in the right direction.

Ellen Miller, who works for a D.C. based nonprofit that advocates for government transparency said it best: "We're living, after all, in the Internet era. This is an individualized version of the 'fireside chats.' It's not delivered between 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. but whenever anyone wants to see it. I don't know if it necessarily creates transparency -- it's still a controlled, one-way message. But it creates the aura of a much more accessible presidency."

In addition, the announcement that Obama will create the first Chief Technology Officer in United States history goes a long way towards convincing Silicon Valley and the giants of the Technology Industry that it is serious about progressive tech policy. When the transition team made this announcement, the blogosphere practically shook with geeky enthusiasm. And considering the hot new topic in Silicon Valley is green investing, the Obama Administration stands to win from any effort to make the Tech Industry feel that it has a stake in the administration’s decisions.

11:32 am | 2 recommendations | Be the first to comment

How Do We Boost Those Much Needed R&D Dollars?

I just read a blog on WashingtonPost.com that essentially says that a business is doomed to failure if it cannot be on the cutting edge of innovation. And there is no bigger source of innovation than the ideas, products, and designs that come out of those valuable R&D dollars. But R&D will experience a squeeze on a widespread scale in the coming year. Why? Well, for one, offshore outsourcing has become an ingrained practice for the U.S. Another reason is that when it comes to R&D macro-investment, our colossal federal deficit makes any investment that does actually take place likely to occur outside the R&D sector. For the foreseeable future, the Fed has other priorities, like steering us out of this financial quagmire.

So, what can businesses that are experiencing their own R&D budgetary constraints do to stay on the progressive edge? One simple solution might be to invest in cheap, under-the-radar experiments. I don’t mean basement cloning, but business might benefit from testing certain products or practices without a lot of publicity or advertising. Think about the NASA scientists who were forced to find innovative solutions to bring Apollo 13 back to Planet Earth safely – using only what resources were available inside the powered-down module. Hey, if Ed Harris and Tom Hanks can do it, I think we can find a way to innovate using the bear minimum, with scaled-down budgetary restrictions.

Any suggestions?

01:32 pm | 1 recommendation | 1 comment

Reflections on a Depression: I’ve Got All This Blame, Where do I Put it?

Wherever he is, Chicken Little is probably grinning. For many Americans these days, it feels like the sky is falling, and financially speaking, the evidence supports Mr. Little’s claim. The consensus around here is that we are experiencing the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. The Dow succeeded in halving itself last week, banks are taking more dives than Italian soccer players, and the bailout bill hasn’t yet found its legs. In times like these, when few are exempt from feeling the squeeze, people demand answers. And the most sought-after answer seems to chase this question: “So who’s to blame?”

Unfortunately for those looking for a place to direct their angry mob, the answer to this question is not as sound-bite-ready as you might hope. Nor is it accessible to groupthink. Who is to blame, like the problem itself, is deep and diverse.

I walked along Wall Street just after closing on Friday and, at first glance, I thought I’d discovered the culprit (or at least who the world wants the culprit to be) without much effort. No shortage of rubber-necking to be found, the steps and sidewalks of the buildings adjacent to the NYSE were filled with spectators. There were frequent flashes as tourists captured the scene for their travel blogs and Flickr albums. On Friday, the schadenfreude on Wall Street was thick.

But how excessive is this delight in Wall Street’s misery? Some of it is summarily warranted, absolutely. Over the last few years especially, in the long-term bull market, Wall Street became accustomed to making very, very risky investments -- greedy investments that never should have been sanctioned. And of course, as investors saw their portfolios rising due to these risky investments, few asked questions and few bought insurance to protect against the inevitable bubble-burst and subsequent market collapse.

What’s more, many players on Wall Street embraced the misguided view that U.S. housing prices would remain high and that cheap short-term money (i.e. loans and credit) would always be available. They created, bought, and sold securities for huge profits that no one (not even they) really understood. Not to mention the biggest flaw in Wall Street’s business plan: its massive leverage. To finance their risky investments and bets on securities, firms were borrowing extensively against little capital. And when portfolios are highly leveraged, a firm’s capital can vanish overnight when the debt market becomes unstable, which it inexorably did. Wall Street showed a horrendous lack of foresight and a penchant for greed that played an integral role in the economic downturn, so yes, Wall Street certainly shares some of the blame.

Unhappily, however, this situation was not created solely by speculators or miscreants on Wall Street; this is the result of a deep, multifold, complex problem -- and maybe system. The fact of the matter is that it's easy to pile on Wall Street NOW, but where have these finger pointers been for the past five years -- the past ten?

Once upon a time, Adam Smith told us that, in a free-market economy, there is an Invisible Hand that provides the potential for private vices to become public benefits. Individuals pursuing their own self-interest can sometimes benefit the system and the community at large. The key word here being “sometimes.” In a de-regulated, free market, laissez faire economy, greed plays an important role in the functionality of the system. So, to me, it seems perhaps a bit ridiculous for those who benefit from American free-market capitalism -- even if they did not adopt it rote or necessarily ascribe to it themselves -- to pretend they didn't know that greed plays a role AND that this can have serious potential to backfire and wreak even more serious havoc on the system at large.

When the U.S. government helped to create Fannie Mae during the Great Depression, there was a consensus that low-income Americans should be able to buy houses, to afford mortgages. Fannie Mae was established to ensure liquidity in the mortgage markets by ensuring banks and the various institutions that lent (and lend) money to homebuyers. Along the way, Fannie Mae began to buy riskier “subprime” mortgages. Here, one might be able to blame the ratings agencies that labeled these mortgages salable and provided Fannie Mae with the incentive to buy. Or perhaps the blame could also be put on Fannie Mae for the securitization of these mortgages, the chopping of them into little pieces to be sold to investors. Or the proliferation of credit default swaps -- a practice that became a staple of business practice around the globe.

There is some truth to the claim that this problem began on Wall Street, but we are all now responsible for letting it get so out of hand.

Which is why, at this point, I also offer a lack of governmental oversight as a prime cause of this economic calamity. It is absolutely the government’s responsibility to keep up with the markets it has the duty to regulate, and clearly, it has failed to do so. The U.S. is badly in need of oversight and governance, and it is negligent of a government to undertake the responsibility of oversight--to represent that it is fulfilling that function--and then to fail to fulfill this.

The market requires individual actors to move in their own self-interest. Should they have ethics, and think about the greater good? Absolutely--but they are required by law to act in the best economic interest of their shareholders, and that mandates greed. So can we blame financiers who made highly leveraged bets that housing prices would continue to go up, without the cash to pay those debts off were they to lose? Sure--but it seems that the executive branch of the Federal Government should hold some responsibility for this crisis as well as -- for being in a sense, in collusion with the markets.

There are a lot of places to direct blame, so allocate as you see fit. This is a complicated problem, as are the solutions. So before we decide to nail one group, institution, or idea to the cross, let’s make sure we have a full understanding of the problem and the consequences. Only then can we have a good idea of where to send the angry mob, and how to clean up this mess.

But this just one man’s opinion. What do you think?

03:23 pm | 1 recommendation | Be the first to comment

Thinking Creatively: Making Coal into Diamonds

In the October edition of Fast Company Magazine, Gregory Berns wrote an article entitled “Neuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity”, which I think is fascinating. Read it here.

The article essentially explains that our brains, beautiful and complex as they may be, are fundamentally lazy. Or rather, they are efficient streamliners. When our brains process new information for the first time, it may take an entire section of the brain to process all of the incoming stimuli, but by the 5th or 6th time the brain reacts to that same set of stimuli, only a small set of neurons are needed to process the incoming information. The more we experience the same information, the more facile the connection becomes in our brain, the less the brain works, and the harder it becomes for us to experience spontaneity or creativity.

Berns tells us that creativity and innovation happen when the brain has a hard time predicting what is going to happen next; new experience and new stimuli require new ways of thinking, literally, and as such call for neural adaptation and improvisation in order to sort out and understand. This “sorting out” is, by nature, the biological and procedural root of that ineffable thing called creativity: “Novel experiences are so effective at unleashing the imagination because they force the perceptual system out of categorization, the tendency of the brain to take shortcuts,” Berns says.

So what do we do to encourage creative and innovative thinking? Change our surroundings, talk to new people, do things we might normally do in a different place or different environment. Besides being mind-meltingly interesting, Berns’s suggestion is a fairly simple yet genius prescription for fostering innovative thought. “Innovation” itself is nothing more than the process of inventing or introducing something new, right? So it makes perfect sense that in order to innovate, we must encourage innovative patterns in our behavior and in our thought-processes…and doing this is no more complicated than taking your team for a brainstorming session at Dunkin Donuts, or in the park, or if you’re feeling charitable, to laser tag.

We are now living in a time when some of the greats of innovation (like Bill Gates) are talking about an innovation gap between America and the rest of the world, and we’ve been told that the U.S. seems to be losing the motivation necessary to foster the next innovative workforce of the future. To have a culture of innovation, one needs leadership, policy, funding, and a culture that embraces creativity and novel thinking. Many argue that the forecast, at present, is grim. Perhaps we’ve gotten lazy. Perhaps we don’t care enough.

Governmental funding for scientific research is paltry, corporate research is dwindling, and students are opting out of engineering or programming degrees for other avenues.  Clearly, innovation is not aided at all by the current financial crisis and credit squeeze. Innovative organizations rely on financial institutions for funding, and clearly in this economic climate, it’s hard to borrow a buck, let alone stir up the kind of funding that will lead to an innovative revolution.

We know that the current economic decline is precipitous and may last well into the future, so we need to take novel ideas like those proposed by Berns and turn them into innovative capital. Green building, renewable energy, and sustainable solutions could be areas with potential for a whole mess of innovating even in the midst of this financial hullabaloo. We need to combat the problem with creative solutions. And I think that economic depression can provide the stimulus for creative thought. Credit is tight, budgets are tight, so your business is going to have to find creative solutions to actualize that next project. So take the team to laser tag, get out of a psychology of humbuggery, of anxiety, and get that brain to cough up the creativity that you know is in there. But I’m still working on finding a new way to put on my pants, so I’m looking to you for help. Any suggestions?

01:26 pm | 2 recommendations | 3 comments

Creative Thinking: Making Diamonds from Coal

In the October edition of Fast Company Magazine, Gregory Berns wrote an article entitled “Neuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity”, which I think is fascinating.  Read it here.

The article essentially explains that our brains, beautiful and complex as they may be, are fundamentally lazy. Or rather, they are efficient streamliners. When our brains process new information for the first time, it may take an entire section of the brain to process all of the incoming stimuli, but by the 5th or 6th time the brain reacts to that same set of stimuli, only a small set of neurons are needed to process the incoming information. The more we experience the same information, the more facile the connection becomes in our brain, the less the brain works, and the harder it becomes for us to experience spontaneity or creativity.

Berns tells us that creativity and innovation happen when the brain has a hard time predicting what is going to happen next; new experience and new stimuli require new ways of thinking, literally, and as such call for neural adaptation and improvisation in order to sort out and understand. This “sorting out” is, by nature, the biological and procedural root of that ineffable thing called creativity: “Novel experiences are so effective at unleashing the imagination because they force the perceptual system out of categorization, the tendency of the brain to take shortcuts,” Berns says.

So what do we do to encourage creative and innovative thinking? Change our surroundings, talk to new people, do things we might normally do in a different place or different environment. Besides being mind-meltingly interesting, Berns’s suggestion is a fairly simple yet genius prescription for fostering innovative thought. “Innovation” itself is nothing more than the process of inventing or introducing something new, right? So it makes perfect sense that in order to innovate, we must encourage innovative patterns in our behavior and in our thought-processes…and doing this is no more complicated than taking your team for a brainstorming session at Dunkin Donuts, or in the park, or if you’re feeling charitable, to laser tag.

We are now living in a time when some of the greats of innovation (like Bill Gates) are talking about an innovation gap between America and the rest of the world, and we’ve been told that the U.S. seems to be losing the motivation necessary to foster the next innovative workforce of the future. To have a culture of innovation, one needs leadership, policy, funding, and a culture that embraces creativity and novel thinking. Many argue that the forecast, at present, is grim. Perhaps we’ve gotten lazy. Perhaps we don’t care enough.

Governmental funding for scientific research is paltry, corporate research is dwindling, and students are opting out of engineering or programming degrees for other avenues.  Clearly, innovation is not aided at all by the current financial crisis and credit squeeze. Innovative organizations rely on financial institutions for funding, and clearly in this economic climate, it’s hard to borrow a buck, let alone stir up the kind of funding that will lead to an innovative revolution.

We know that the current economic decline is precipitous and may last well into the future, so we need to take novel ideas like those proposed by Berns and turn them into innovative capital. Green building, renewable energy, and sustainable solutions could be areas with potential for a whole mess of innovating even in the midst of this financial hullabaloo. We need to combat the problem with creative solutions. And I think that economic depression can provide the stimulus for creative thought. Credit is tight, budgets are tight, so your business is going to have to find creative solutions to actualize that next project. So take the team to laser tag, get out of a psychology of humbuggery, of anxiety, and get that brain to cough up the creativity that you know is in there. But I’m still working on finding a new way to put on my pants, so I’m looking to you for help. Any suggestions -- pants or otherwise?

10:12 pm | 3 recommendations | 11 comments

Who The Blogosphere Says Is The Most Sustainable

According to J.D. Power and Associates’ 2008 Environmental Sustainability Report, four brands—Toyota, General Motors, Honda, and Whole Foods—have received the most positive attention in the blogosphere regarding eco-sustainability.

The report analyzed 40 million blog posts in the past six months in six major industries—automotive, retail, oil and gas, food and beverage, household products, and utilities. It is one of the first reports to consider consumer conversations in the blogosphere about sustainability, global warming, and purchase trends, and to categorize brands within these fields according to the amount of positive press they get from bloggers.

The best news to come from this study is that consumers appear to be displaying an unprecedented concern about environmental sustainability and are increasingly holding companies responsible for not offering eco-friendly products. And importantly, for the major brands, when consumers are uncomfortable with how to react on a personal level to sustainability, they look to the major brands to offer information, direction, and leadership.

According to Janet Eden-Harris, VP of the Web Intelligence Division at J.D. Power, “As more companies launch ‘green’ initiatives, consumers are becoming more skeptical and confused as to what’s real, what’s not, and where they should focus their energy.”

Consumers have cited habit, convenience, price, and perceived loss of functionality as hindrances to living and consuming more sustainably, but with the guidance of major brands, consumers are now more willing to pay the price than ever before.

According to the study, 62% of bloggers are now discussing action pertaining to environmental problems, a discernible shift from 18 months ago, “when many were debating whether or not some of these environmental issues even existed,” according to the study.

Clearly, brands that provide comprehensible demonstrations of how their products or services are “green-friendly”  and how their customers can differentiate between “green” and “not-so-green” will both benefit their bottom line and help consumer culture take a sustainable leap forward.