Just Think

Amazing. With Strings Attached

I am lucky to have met and become a friend of Miha and experienced this directly on our first meeting in London but I cannot ever do justice to it.

This guy walked into my life many years ago carrying a violin case and said to me can you pull your entire company together for 20 minutes? It was lunchtime - I said what the heck and called everyone into the studio area. 20 or so bemused folk (who believe I am mad anyway) stood and stared at this guy who proceeded to attack us with rapid fire violin excellence - breaking in an instant breathlessly to scribble magically intelligible scrawls of explanation on a flip chart. In 20 minutes everyone was in a mess of tears - emotional jubilation. He had explained life through music in 20 minutes.

Read Miha's own incredible summary of a recent event below. Incredible.

Dear Minister Podobnik,

It was great pleasure to lecture and perform for you and your colleagues, EU Ministers of Environment and their staff, last Friday in our National Gallery. For the sake of a vivid memory, please have a look at the attached photos and here is the short summary of my workshop as you requested:

Wonderland. Text based. Wow.

I couldn¹t believe this when I found it yesterday.

This picture is the entire Alice in Wonderland. Beware you will need a fancy machine to see it but basically what he has done is to create a visual representation of a text, the entire text (twice!) on a single page. A funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary; it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning.

So you will need a 600 Mhz Pentium III or faster, or a recent Mac. 1024 x 768 pixel screen or higher resolution, 16 bit color. Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP operating systems, or Mac OS X. 256 Mb of RAM. A fast internet connection. No other memory-intensive programs running. Microsoft Internet Explorer (5 or later). Netscape (6.2 or later)

And for the real geeks amongst you how about this - TextArc will often stop working the second time it is run in the same browser session. This is caused by the browser remembering parts of the program after it should have exited. The simplest way to run it multiple times is to STOP all browser windows, then come back and run it again. If you are running Netscape, you can clear the browser's memory manually by opening the Java Console (under the Tasks:Tools menu, available in the menu bar at the top of the program) and pressing "x" on the keyboard, so that it "clears the classloader cache." If you do this after each session with TextArc, you should not have to stop all browser windows. (If some brilliant Java/browser hack knows how to get Netscape and MSIE to clear the classloader cache under program control. Note: TextArc will open a window that covers your primary monitor's desktop. Pressing the Esc key or clicking the mouse button will stop the program, but on some slow machines (don't try it on a 300 Mhz machine or slower) or old browsers this may take some time.

Enjoy!

Visual Gymnastics

What Future?

Came across this just now.

It's probably the best expression I have seen around the perpetual argument on Advertising. To be fair its simple common sense but this is neatly done and states the case we make constantly for deeper thought, better understanding and integration in the enterprise and so on.

Check out the excellent Paul Isakson Blog too

The Iceberg Exposed

Ever wondered what was below that amazing glass structure opposite the Plaza, housing Apple's flagship store?

An equally amazing but rammed glass staircase! Akin to the prism outside the Louvre but with way more folk milling around it. In fact it proved impossible to shop there.

Getting Stuff Done

The Mystic Power of Executable Frameworks Definition: Executable Framework -  A  structure that provides the rationale, governance and direction for the implementation of a strategy

"82% of Fortune 500 CEO's feel their organization did an effective job of strategic planning. Only 14% of the same CEO's indicated that their organization did an effective job of implementing the strategy." - Forbes Magazine

There are many (too many perhaps?) methods, philosophies, mantra's and formulae for achieving so called business success. The cry from our clients though is always - please explain in simple terms - what needs to be done, by whom, how and when. The rest is either fun, boring or plain overhead. (Well you know what we mean)

Often the current reality is that teams are busy working hard, but on different priorities.  Plans get iterated with heady regularity. The water cooler conversation is one of rudderless panic and increasing scepticism. Managers spend way too much putting out fires and in fact they don¹t actually have the time to manage. Leaders spend time with lofty aspirations and spend too little time actually leading. Programs are often overdue and over budget.

"From a process perspective, we often note a collective sigh of relief when, through collaboration, debate and challenge, role players understand and agree on 'what' needs to be done.  Allocating the 'who' and 'when' is the fun part, and unpacking the 'how' is the 'now we are talking business' part." Michelle Booysen

In strategy creation the gap between expressing the problem (or opportunity of course) is often an indeterminate period of research, assessment, analysis and choosing between options. Depending on your choice of weapon fun, boring or an overhead.

A 61 Corvette. Any day.

What is there not to love?

This guy in Dallas Texas has spent most of his life and money being a dedicated lover of things. Especially this car. I actually didn¹t make an offer, even though I look like I am, but it was very tempting. You could literally have licked it.

A very beautiful thing and a wonderful man who anybody could speak to for literally hours whether they liked cars or no. A special moment. And yes it was taken by a Leica but not mine. This is a mini one. I got the Digilux 3 in the end.

Another thing of beauty but sadly the M8 will have to wait.

Best in Glass

OK I admit it. I'm a sucker for gadgets, but also a sucker for (and want to own one day) a Leica.

Each time they release a new piece of kit I think right, now's the time. I have put off buying a new camera for so long, just waiting to be in the right town with right store and as I will be in New York soon I know where to head but at $4795 without even a lens it is going to make it a massive intake of breath. Will I? Can I? Should I? Damn.

Charlie White over at Gizmodo says this.

Leica goes a long way toward recapturing its glory days with the M8, which harkens to the time when the company's famed rangefinder, mirrored reflex system and fine lenses ruled the camera world. In fact, the M8 is the first digital iteration of Leica's M-series, and naturally, its combination of old-school metal body and digital technology takes advantage of every lens ever made by Leica since 1954.

A beautiful mind...

Sometimes we come across powerful language written in a book, heard on the radio and admire it for itself in context. We do the same when we meet truly inspirational people.

It interests me though that in spite of all our prejudices and preconceptions we can perceive the same quality humanity, people's spirit and personality in an e-mail or on the internet. We don't meet them in person but we get a sense about them. I have posted work from Benoit before but here is another example.  For the full context go here -
 
"The nature of collectivist says: "It takes the village to raise a child". The nature of individualist says:  "Who am I?  I need to know!"  The nature of knowledge says:  "The culture of interdependence in serenity is the health of mutuality between the village and who we each are!"

"Currently, we are at a junction of history when the incompatibilities of the past collectivist ruling units, such as the various war machines and their specific contexts, are resisting the individualism that has taken on a corporate shape, and goes on acting as individuals, competing for survival in an unsustainable village. For both, the individual and the village, the genuine paradigm shift comes from discovering the passage from competing to completing, just like the village needs to do with great dedication when the child becomes a teen, in making room for the teen's deployment in the community."

"Failing to do so keeps the teen from getting to know who she/he is, therefore keeping her/him to take her/his place in the smooth running of the village.  Our Western modern society is made of several generations in which the villages have been built to satisfy corporate individualism, supporting competition and forgetting about completion.  As a result, the corporate agenda finds itself having to re-invent the wheel of life with artificial intelligence, leaving behind the cultivation needed for the village and the individual's continuity into maturing."

Business on the Back of a Napkin

It's amazing that this topic isn't already the subject of some degree course or other.

Today Business Week has an excellent article exploring what is almost now such a true genesis of pure creativity. Its mythical status as the emergence of ideas is commonplace. Featuring Dan Roam and the excellent Dan Roam book out soon The Back of The Napkin: Solving Problems And Selling Ideas With Pictures - And see the "slideshow" here.

Business Week extract by Douglas MacMillan

"Who says doodling is a waste of time? Here are four ways to solve serious business problems with a simple drawing

No e-mail, no spreadsheets, no PowerPoint‹no problem. All you really need is a pen and a cocktail napkin, says Dan Roam, a visual thinking consultant.

Take the story of Southwest Airlines (LUV): During a dinner meeting with his lawyer in 1967, Texas entrepreneur Rollin King jotted down the names of three cities on a napkin‹San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas‹and connected them to form a triangle. A small airline that offered non-stop flights between these hotspots, he explained, would have an edge over big airlines like American and Continental, which forced travellers in the region to fly through expensive and time-consuming hubs."