b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Recently
"If there's a bustle in your hedgerow ...
An Inconvenient Truth
Breakthroughs Happen in a Social Context
Amazing Discovery - Innovation Is Not A Strategy
MacLockPick: A Vital Tool For Our Trusted Protectors
Monday, October 29, 2007
Can We Please Just Do The Obvious?
For anyone who's managed to miss the news for the past 6 months, the southeast US is in a 100-year drought. As we are wont to do in such cases, we have ignored this for the past several years until now all our lakes and reservoirs are nearly empty. Suddenly, we have a crisis.Imagine that.
So what do our vaunted civil servants do in this precarious situation? They implement outdoor watering bans. They argue with other states. They complain to the Army Corps of Engineers. They shutdown car washes and landscape companies. They go on TV and tell us how dreadful it is, and how sorry they are that people must lose jobs, and that they just can't help this awful, awful situation.
All the while they completely ignore the blindingly obvious, brain-dead simple, straightforward, and guaranteed 100% foolproof solution to the problem. Any 3rd-grader could suggest this.
Raise the price of water!!!
Oh, I know we can't raise the price. After all, it's completely unfair to the poor.
Bullshit.
The average person can live comfortably on 1,000 gallons/month. They don't even need to be particularly conservative to do that. We could probably survive well on 750, but let's say 1,000 to be compassionate. So for a family of four you need 4,000 gallons.
Let's be really, really compassionate for the poor. Set the price for the first 5,000 gallons at $10. Set the price for the next 1,000 at $10. That's $20 for up to 6,000 gallons - enough to serve a family of 7.
Set the price for the next 1,000 at $20. The next 1,000 at $30 and so on. At 10,000 gallons you're paying $150. By the time you get to 15,000 gallons (a typical amount of water used in one month watering a yard) the cost is now $550. Nobody gets a pass. Everybody pays.
You think people won't stop using excess water once they get a $550 bill? I sure will. If they won't (or don't), raise the incremental price to $20 per thousand. I don't know anyone who would spend $1,100/mo on water. If you have that kind of money more power to you - there aren't going to be enough of you to significantly raise total usage and we can all get on with our lives without these self-serving, jackass politicians grandstanding on TV with all their new emergency regulations.
Car wash owners would have to run out and change their coin-ops from $2 to $10. Or $20. That will hurt business, but people who want to spend $10 or $20 can still wash their car now and then. And maybe the owners will figure out they need to recycle. Ditto for industrial users and the power company. Office building managers will have to figure out how to actually operate their sprinkler systems, or turn them off. And landscapers will have to stop guaranteeing their plants. But we'll get over it.
It's absurd to try and reduce the use of limited resources in every way imaginable except the one way that is best designed for managing limited resources - economics.
But this is the government. I wish I could be surprised.
Terry Frazier at 11:12 PM
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"If there's a bustle in your hedgerow ...
Don't be alarmed now.It's just a spring clean for the May Queen."
Just what the hell does that mean? I've wondered for more than 30 years.
But my real questions is, if Zep really still owns the rights to their music who sold Cadillac the rights to use it in their commercials?
From Rock Gods to Ringtones
Posted by Alan Wexelblat
As you've no doubt seen by now, the remaining members of Led Zeppelin have finally agreed to release their complete collection on iTunes, along with a special purchase item that bundles all 141 tunes. Verizon Wireless will also be offering Zep ringtones.
The band has famously refused most prior commercial uses of their music, with one amusing exception: Jack Black begged them for the rights to use "Immigrant Song".
Terry Frazier at 10:19 AM
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An Inconvenient Truth
If a truth is ugly and inconvenient, is it still a truth?If a truth is offensive to you or might hurt someone's feelings is it still a truth?
If you just don't like a truth, does pretending it's false make it untrue?
Friday, June 8, 2007
Breakthroughs Happen in a Social Context
Tuesday night I rode my bike down to Fayetteville, just south of Atlanta, to attend Lisa Haneberg's "2 Weeks 2 a Breakthrough" talk And talk about your breakthrough ideas - Lisa is riding her motorcycle across the country to promote her new book. I feel safe in saying this is the first time a business book has been promoted in such a way. And I'm certain it's the first time ever by a woman. Pretty cool.
So what did I think about the talk? Lisa’s premise for this talk (and the book) is that little things matter. She relates in terms of chaos theory and the Butterfly Effect – which is a little new-agey – but the analogies are for inspiration more than analysis. The main idea is that continual forward progress, even in tiny increments – builds velocity, and forward velocity leads to breakthroughs. To illustrate Lisa uses the consulting mainstay – the 2x2 matrix:
I think many of us spend our lives either in “Dreamer” or “Stuck” modes. Those with adult ADD tend to be in the “Victim” quadrant – confusing motion with progress and paddling furiously but getting nowhere. But where we all want to be is in the “Peak Performer” quadrant.
Lisa offered two points that stood out for me:
- Breakthroughs happen in a social context – If you aren’t out actively promoting your goal or idea – discussing it regularly with friends, colleagues, and strangers and sharing your challenges, achievements, and objectives – you aren’t going to make any breakthroughs.
- Introverts, no matter how smart, rarely make breakthroughs – Breakthroughs do not happen in front of your face. They happen in the connections and gaps and networks that emerge from constant forward action and focus. [Editor's note: Following a comment from Lisa the above bullet point should read 'Introverts, no matter how smart, rarely make breakthroughs until they breakout of introverted behavior patterns...']
I am a natural introvert. I’m more comfortable sitting alone in my office than I am in a crowd. Over the years I’ve worked hard at developing my extrovert capacity and done a lot of public speaking and presentations. But at my core I’m always more comfortable alone. That makes it easy for me to slip into the Stuck or Dreamer states.
And that’s a dangerous thing. It’s like exercise, or eating habits, or any other behavior you want to modify. What’s required is constant forward progress – even in small steps. If you stop – even for a little bit – getting started again is difficult. The inertia that builds is deadly. This is really the underlying principle behind all behavior modification, from Alcoholics Anonymous to Weight Watchers.
And so it is with Lisa’s program – simple, proven principles packaged in an easy-to-read program and supplemented with specific plans to help you move forward. More important, Lisa is building her own network and cult following. She asked each attendee to contact her by the end of the week and let her know how it was going, and if she could help, she would. Her goal for this tour is to help as many people reach a breakthrough as possible. Lisa has quite a few cities still to visit as she heads back west. Check her travel itinerary and go see her if you get the chance.
Terry Frazier at 11:04 AM
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Thursday, May 17, 2007
Amazing Discovery - Innovation Is Not A Strategy
The cover story for the May 3 issue of BusinessWeek was "World's Most Innovative Companies" The big point was that the idea of running around as a multi-millionaire CEO chanting the word innovation as if it would magically alter your organization has now been recognized as another in the long line of stupid management fads.[...] At the behest of an "ideation" consultant, he donned a blue superhero costume—cape, tights, and all—to put a little extra oomph behind the company's innovation-boosting campaign. "I guess the thinking was that if you free people from the norm, you'll unleash a torrent of creativity," says Scott Anthony, president of Innosight, a consulting firm co-founded by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Anthony refused to name the company because it was a client. "Innovation Man led to a lot of laughs," he quips, "but it didn't lead to a lot of innovation."According to the article many CEOs, having failed at turning their billion-dollar behemoths into innovation engines, are experiencing "innovation fatigue." I am shocked! Shocked, I say. Shocked to learn that innovation is not a commodity that can be ordered up like Papa John's Pizza. Shocked to learn that innovation doesn't exist on its own like, say, cotton.
The same might be said for many gimmicks that companies have tried over the past few years in their attempts to boost growth. Suddenly trendy, innovation took on the flavor of an elixir, as companies raced to hire "chief innovation officers" and build innovation centers complete with purple-painted walls and conference rooms with funny names. Ford Motor Co. (F) boasted in a press release about its new Innovation Acceleration Center in Dearborn, Mich.: "It's amazing what a room filled with radio-controlled cars, a 3-ft. Statue of Liberty made of Legos, and some comfy couches can do to stir the imagination." [...]
It turns out that innovation is actually a result - something that happens after you change every aspect of your stodgy, corrupt, inefficient, overbearing, outsourced, badly managed global corporation where everyone spends 80 percent of their time in meetings, 20 percent of their time doing reports, 10 percent of their time fixing stuff someone else did wrong, and 5 percent of their time doing something valuable that a customer will actually pay for. (I know, that's 115%. That's called increasing productivity. Guess which 15% gets dropped when your average, everyday human realizes they can only give 100% today.)
And this turns out to be very, very hard.
But there are a few innovative companies. And they're innovative because, well, because they just are. Because they actually do the hard things most companies can't, or won't, do. Because they focus on things far more tangible than "being innovative." Things like finding and hiring talented employees and then not stomping on them or burning them out. Things like actually listening to employees with good ideas. And things like not letting the accountants and lawyers decide about what does and does not get done.
Mostly, innovators just seem to understand that innovation is a fundamental result, that comes from getting the fundamentals of running a business right. What a shocker.
Terry Frazier at 4:34 PM
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MacLockPick: A Vital Tool For Our Trusted Protectors
Only $499 and available in bulk from Subrosasoft, The MacLockPick is a handy little device for computer-illiterate trusted civil servants to plug into sleeping MacBooks and collect data from all those computers left lying around at crime scenes - just like on TV. Via Digital Trends Magazine: [More...]
Terry Frazier at 1:21 PM
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