Boardmad…still mad for it !

Staff Surveys

Hmmph…secretly what everyone believes?!

Home from a week in Hong Kong on business…hoping I’ll get back to what passes for normality quick! Jet-lag is weird…for me I often feel like I’m on the deck of a moving ship when I’m 30 storeys up in an office somewhere! Bit nauseating??! But this trip I managed to kick my sleep patterns forward pretty fast (hitting the pool and steam-room each morning really helps – try it!)

The office has now (in it’s dubious wisdom) decided to block xkcd.com….my epitaph for a site that keeps me laughing every single day

Or “21 Ideas about leading Innovation”

1. Creativity means doing new things with old ideas.

2. Treat innovation as an import-export business.  Keep trying to bring in ideas from outside your group or organization, keep trying to show and tell others about your ideas, and blend them all together.

3. Look for and build intersections places where people with diverse ideas gather together.  And when you get there, talk to to the people you don’t know, who have ideas you know nothing about, and ideas that you find weird, don’t like, or useless.  If you are squirming a bit, it is a good sign.

4.  Treat your beliefs as  strong opinions, weakly held.

5. Learn how to listen, watch, and keep your mouth shut.

6.  Say “I don’t know” on a regular basis.

7.  Have the courage to act on what you know, and the humility to doubt your beliefs and actions.

8. Reward success and (intelligent) failure, but punish inaction.

9. Make it safe for people to take risky actions and “fail forward,” by developing a “forgive and remember culture.”

10. Encourage people to learn from others’ failures – it is faster, easier, and less painful.

11. Eliminate hiring and reward practices that reinforce cultures where “the best you can be is a perfect imitation of those who came before you.”

12. Hire people who make your squirm.

13. Create teams composed of both experts and novices.

14. Make it safe for people to fight as if they are right, and listen as if they wrong.

15. Encourage your people to be “happy worriers.”

16.  Sometimes, the best management is no management at all.  Know when and how to get out of the way.

17. Have the confidence and resolve to make tough decisions, stop your people from whining about the decisions made, and to get on with implementing them.

18. Kill a lot of ideas, including a lot of good ideas.

19.  Innovation entails creativity + implementation.  Developing or finding a great idea is useless if you can’t implement it or sell it to someone who believes they can.

20. Remember Rao’s Recipe for Innovation: Will +Ideas + Tools.

21. Innovation requires selling your ideas. The greatest innovators, from Edison to Jobs, are gifted at generating excitement and sales.  If you can’t or won’t sell, team-up with someone who can.

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Really excited for a couple of guys from my teams…they’re starting their #Fusion journey today in RMA Sandhurst. We’ve swapped a few emails about the course and spoken a little but there’s nothing like that feeling of excitement mixed with trepidation at the kick-off session with a room-full of (largely unknown) colleagues. It’s only a little over a year since I started all this myself and having only just ‘graduated’ into the Fusioneer ranks I’m keen to see what they make of the whole experience.

Good luck @cafuski and Charles!

[via jesusPhone & @blogpress]

Location:Edinburgh airport,United Kingdom

Cross post from Seth Godin’s blog

Absolutely loving this piece of work !

Then clicking on these summaries takes you to a detail view

Not particularly groundbreaking you might think but the implications are significant…data (the bard’s poems in this case) reside in the Google App Engine ‘Cloud’ and the heavylifting gets done by a little python scripting to get the content down to the iPhone client.

For extreme programming or agile delivery prototyping the opportunities are considerable and not just limited to the iPhone client (which was picked in this instance) it could as easily have been leveraged in a silverlight RIA or an Adobe Air.

I own an iPod Touch…it’s a great device and all the millions of words that have been written around the web on it, I’m not going to add further on it except to say I think it’s great…but!

iTunes sucks ! It’s the worst bloated sluggish piece of desktop software I’ve seen in the last 5 years. When it updates itself it’s patches are enormous, it loses it’s connections to Apple’s own ‘Remote’ applet on my Touch, it can’t remember where I like to navigate to in the UI as any decent portal should…ugh the list goes on and and on.

Then there’s the content and here the Register comes up trumps ! When the cheaptards continue to keep buying poorly-written, crash-prone, resource-hogging applications “…because they’re only 59p !” where’s the incentive for the gimps that knock these out to really innovate and take this platform to another new level ?

Sigh…

Two very interesting articles on teh interweb [sic!] show a serious change in the state and direction of internet…I wonder if in 20 years time we’ll look back and identify this as the tipping point  ?

Macs to get AV

Windows usage dips

Time will tell ;0)