Brilliant
I love stumbling on brilliant ideas and product innovation. Inspiring.
What Value do you Add?
I liked this description of the value marketing should add… and this critique of what marketers do:
True marketing means reframing your propositions to be relevant to your target audience, in language they understand, and to appeal to what they already believe and value.
Management Myths
Love “Johanna’s Management Myths”, namely:
- The Myth of 100% Utilization
- Only the ‘Expert’ Can Perform This Work
- We Must Treat Everyone the Same Way
- I Don’t Need One-on-ones
- We Must Have an Objective Ranking System
- I Can Save Everyone
- I Am Too Valuable to Take a Vacation
- I Can Still Do Significant Technical Work
- We Have No Time for Training
- I Can Measure the Work by the Time People Spend at Work
How to handle a press conference
Press conferences are notoriously hard things to manage. I thought this was an amusing end to the President’s first press conference and the way to handle what inevitably happens at these events:
There was one last twist: Obama patiently listened to a high-decibel question after he had closed the presser by thanking the reporters for attending. Then he said it would set a bad precedent for him to answer a shouted question. Reelected presidents can do that.
The Black Cloud
Fred Hoyle’s the Black Cloud is a stunning read. Well worth the time and accolades as one of the greatest works of science fiction ever. Loved this opening to one of the latter chapters:
It is curious in how great a degree human progress depends on the individual. Humans, numbered in thousands of millions, seem organized into an ant-like society. Yet this is not so. New ideas, the impetus of all development, come from individual people, not from corporations or states. New ideas, fragile as spring flowers, easily bruised by the tread of the multitude, may yet be cherished by the solitary wanderer.
