It’s very cool to be living in a long tail world like we do today.

Yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to get an email from Thomas Friedman’s publisher informing me that they are having a promotion where they are giving away audio copies of “The World Is Flat” to generate some buzz around his new book out in September on environmental issues called Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America.   As you might recall, I enjoyed “The World is Flat” quite a bit, hence I’m passing word of this promotion onto you.  The promotion ends August 4, so get it while you can.

For a publisher to find a guy with a small blog, who enjoyed an author’s previous work, to help in promoting awareness of a subsequent title is pretty cool.  Even if I am a bit starstruck, that’s a 21st centry approach that not all businesses grok quite yet.

UPDATE 8/4:

The promotion has been extended to August 11.

Technorati Tags: hot flat and crowded, the world is flat

“Always tell the truth.  That way, you don’t have to remember what you said.” —Mark Twain

Within a 24 hour period the other day, I received over 100 emails and attended 5 hours of meetings.  During that time, I got asked a lot of questions that required answering and I had more than one opportunity to stretch the truth or flat out lie about something to make myself look better.  This would have been a really bad idea because people remember when you don’t tell the truth.

For example, I never ask my Dad what time it is for this very reason.
(more…)

Technorati Tags: honesty, networking, perspective

If you’ve got a free hour and 15 minutes, it’s hard to beat spending your time watching The Last Lecture video, which went viral a little less than a  year ago.  The book by the same title (The Last Lecture) introduces some new material, but is mostly the same as the video.  I found, though, that by absorbing it in smaller pieces in book format I liked it a lot better.

Be forewarned, though, especially if you have small kids.  This is only the second book to ever make me cry.  So much so, in fact, that I couldn’t finish the last 5 pages.

In case you have been living under a rock for the last 11 months, Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon who was diagnosed with terminal cancer and delivered a stirring last lecture that became an online phenomenon.  And for good reason.  Both the book and the video serve as a list of things he wanted his 3 kids to know about him and serve as the advice he wouldn’t be around to deliver to them.  Of the book, he has said in interviews that he only cares about the first 3 copies.

I found the end to be quite heartwrenching since his oldest son is about the same age as my daughter.  I can’t possibly fathom what it would be like to know I was leaving her, but Pausch takes it on with an optimistic enthusiasm that is infectious.  Instead of trying to paraphrase his insights, here are my favorite quotes throughout the text.

“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand”

“It’s not helpful if we spend every day dreading tomorrow”  –his wife Jai

Tips for improved group collaboration (paraphrased):

Meet people properly

Find things you have in common

Try for optimal meeting conditions

Let everyone talk

Check egos at the door

Praise each other

Phrase alternatives as questions (’What if we did A instead of B’)

“Go out and do for others what somebody did for you.”

“When giving an apology, any performance lower than an A really doesn’t cut it.  Halfhearted or insincere apologies are often worse than not apologizing at all because recipients find them insulting.”

“But remember, the brick walls are there for a reason.  The brick walls are not there to keep us out.  The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.  Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.  They’re there to stop the other people. “

“Brick walls are there for a reason.  And once you get over them — even if someone has practically had to throw you over — it can be helpful to others to tell them how you did it.”

Technorati Tags: inspiration, motivation, the last lecture

At first, this book scared the crap out of me.

Then, it validated what I write about on my blog.

Finally, it made me think. It made me think a whole lot.
(more…)

Technorati Tags: book report, economics, globalization, the world is flat

Think about the last time you were in a contentious meeting. You are in a room with a bunch of smart people representing various constituents and not everybody agrees on how to proceed. Arguments ensue, some of them are civil while others are heated. Now, imagine that meeting was nationally televised, live.

Oh yeah, and the outcome directly effects an election for the leader of the free world.

This is what happened to Donna Brazile on Saturday. (more…)

Technorati Tags: 2008 democratic primary, arguments, contentious, donna brazile, meeting

In September of 1982, I started my first day at Ramona Junior High School in Chino, CA. First period PE was pretty uneventful, since we didn’t have to dress out for that initial meeting. My best friend Aaron and I stood around and talked about Intellivision Baseball, if I remember correctly. World History during second period was close to the PE lockers and went pretty much as expected too.

But right after that second hour, Aaron and I looked on the map we’d been given and noticed that third period English was completely on the other side of campus. Not wanting to be late on the first day, we did what came to what seemed like a really natural conclusion at the time: we ran.

What we failed to take into account was the scale of the map and that it really wasn’t that great a distance to cover in 5 minutes. This wasn’t lost on Tim, who would prove himself to be the coolest kid in 7th grade over the coming months. He casually strolled into class as the tardy bell rang with a smug look on his face and the collar on his Polo shirt flipped, a wake of girls swooning by his mere presence. The previous year, Aaron and I had been smart kids in a 6th grade class where we spent the whole day in one room and everybody seemed to get along with everybody else just fine. As we would soon discover, though, we would be redefined as nerds at Ramona and be the target of stereotypical teasing.

This social phenomenon that hits most American kids at this same age, and the damage it has done manifesting itself as a shrinking workforce of U.S.-reared workers with strong math and science backgrounds, is covered in great detail in David Anderegg’s Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them.
(more…)

Technorati Tags: book report, education, nerds

I’ve seen it many times. Too many, sadly. You get pretty good at your job, you start to get more responsibility, and before you know it you start acting like a jerk.

You start popping off at your team mates who aren’t as good at completing their deliverables on time as you are. Maybe you roll your eyes at the security guard who stops you from taking home a piece of equipment you forgot to fill out the paperwork for. Perhaps the catering people get an earful from you when they accidentally burn the bottoms of the cookies you had sent up as snacks for your meeting with that vendor.

We’ve all done it. At least, everybody I know has, including me. You start to feel entitled and begin to treat others badly. For that, or for putting up with someone who does it to you, Stanford Professor Robert Sutton is here to help.

The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t contains a pretty awesome quote, the kind that is reminiscent of good advice you might get from one of your parents:

“The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know.”

Pretty cool, huh? And that’s just page 25.
(more…)

In the late 1970s, Steve Martin was the biggest thing stand up comedy ever saw. Routinely playing before audiences of over 20,000 people, a regular on The Tonight Show, and the originator of catch phrases that were cemented in American popular culture at the time, he was a huge success.

Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life is mostly a story about how huge a failure he was that enabled that success and a worthy study for career advancement. By far my favorite quote in the book explains one of the two overriding themes of his story:

“Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.”
(more…)

What’s the secret to running a great company?To find out, former Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty member Jim Collins turned his impressive researchers loose on mountains of public data. They examined the 1,435 companies that appeared in the Fortune 500 from 1965 to 1995 looking for a pattern: more than 15 years of sustained growth.

While that sounds simple, that 15 year period was selected on purpose so that the growth was related to the management excellence at a particular company as opposed to their specific industry getting hot or the market in general. From that huge list of companies, only 11 made the cut. Collins’ team then studied those top companies closely, interviewing as many of their top executives as would talk to them and did the same for one of their competitors to find out what it was that made one company good, but the other great. That’s the premise of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t.
(more…)

As a co-founding editor of Wired, John Battelle qualifies in my book for a nerd crush article. His book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture is a look at the past, present (circa 2005), and potential future of the search industry. Although he got unprecedented access to Google insiders when researching the book, it does a great job of recording the achievements of early search pioneers as well.

It starts by explaining what Battelle calls The Database of Intentions, which is a conceptual model for everything people have collectively looked for in the past when used to predict what we’d like to do next. He explains how close he thought Google was to having just that in 2001:

“Given the millions upon millions of queries streaming into its servers each hour, it seemed to me that the company was sitting on a gold mine of information. entire publishing businesses could be created from the traces of intent in such a database; in fact, Google already started its first: a beta project called Google News. Could it not also start a research and marketing company capable of telling clients exactly what people were buying, looking to buy, or avoiding?”
(more…)