Just Think

Amazing George - feel the same?

So he just died and I was alerted again to his passing and his genius by Steve Brant. Everyone should read this and remember him and his ability state the art.

I was in my mother's belly as she sat in the waiting room of the abortionist's office. Dr. Sunshine was his code name. I was fifty feet from the drainpipe, and she saw a painting on the wall that reminded her of her mother, who had recently died. She took that as a sign to have the baby. That's what I call luck.

My father drank and was a bully. For the first five years of my brother's life, my father beat him with a leather-heeled slipper. Had I been subjected to that kind of treatment, all bets are off. His absence saved my life.

My mother had great executive-secretarial jobs in the advertising business and raised two boys during the Second World War. She used to say, "I make a man's salary." That's heroism.

I'm sure Hitler was great with his family.

I used to collect the most colorful curses I heard and write them down. I actually carried in my wallet things like "kraut cunt" and "burly loudmouth cocksucker" and "longhair fucking music prick," which was a thing Mikey Flynn yelled at a Juilliard student that he was kicking in the head.

I don't like authority and regulation, and I do my best to disrespect it, but I do that for myself. It's self-expression only.

Sex without love has its place, and it's pretty cool, but when you have it hand in hand with deep commitment and respect and caring, it's nine thousand times better.

If it's morally wrong to kill anyone, then it's morally wrong to kill anyone. Period.

Next media...

This is Paul Neave's personal interactive playground; a place where he explores his ideas. I spend a fair amount of time, when I can checking out interesting designers and innovators and this one is worthy of extra mention here. Go and check it out, especially this one - he is very talented and the ideas are very relevant to today. Love it...

The Concept of Concept..

Been made aware of these guys just recently and its a fascinating topic, highly related to our world.

"A concept has no particular attribute values. A concept is a universal idea that only obtains meaning through its association with others concepts that are specialized as subjects that are sourced within a specific community of practice. This architecture eliminates infinite regress. Subjects are declared within a community taxonomy along with other topic map elements of associations, roles, aspect, and occurrences.

A subject is "reified" into a topic within a topic map. A topic may reference particular occurrences of content "attributes" and services. A subject may be "shared" in other topic maps controlled by different entities in other "contexts." A topic is not identified by a specific symbolic string, but by a global identifier that is a concatenated integer. Sort of like that performer formally know as "Prince." The concept may be known by different people by different natural language and dialect terms, but machine processing remains deterministic." Sandy Klausner

A Magic Speech Indeed...

I actually read this before watching the video version and it is truly insightful, wonderfully written and so valuable. I hope you find it as emotionally resonant as I did. Part two here.

Harvard Commencement Speech by JK Rowling.

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates, The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention. Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation.

The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard. You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this. I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination. These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me. Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor. I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day.

The Brand Equation..

Well there are some I just don't understand here but they are very clever if you spend enough time looking and thinking about them. Neat idea and worth checking back every now and then. Check them out...

The things you can do eh?...

Nice little insight into the world of graphics, imagination and creativity. Oh and a ton of Apple muscle!... It always amazes me though that when you watch the actual movie, even though you know this is how they did it, you always give them the benefit of the doubt. Lovely things our human brains.

Well can we?

I’ve been noodling about this whenever I get the chance.

I ask people in our sessions, “when was the last time you ever changed your behaviour?’ - silence – some thinking and then the obvious truth. Laughter and embarrassed smiles abound. It’s a tough one no question. I was sent this article from the New York Times and share it here as a very interesting angle on this.

Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? By JANET RAE-DUPREE

HABITS are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the ever- changing 21st century, even the word “habit” carries a negative connotation.

So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become,  both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

But don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.

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:

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

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.