Boardmad…still mad for it !

Social disorders

Two of my favourite subjects borg’d into one. Social Media and Data Visualisation…and yes I appear to be firmly in the heart of this so I’m kind of a mess :0)

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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So I’m a recidivist blogger…full of good intentions and I tend to blog in fits and starts as the mood, inspiration and time to do it is available !

However in true New Year’s resolution form I’ve signed up to Project52 a site that will maintain and track content updates and make sure I’m keeping my resolution. It’s kind of like a personal trainer for bloggers…someone to yell at you…”Come on ! Call that a pithy epithet…where’s the witty and cutty rejoinder ? Now drop and give me 20…reasons a Mac is better than a PC!?”

So given that I’ve no bloody excuses for having no content to discuss (my job has exploded in my face in the last 6 months in completely unexpected directions!) I’ll be doing my level best to make sure there’s at least one article per week uploaded here to Boardmad.

Come back soon for more…

Cheers
Scotty

Yum ! This imagineering concept converges communications, data, UI and OS into one seamless and beautifully conceived platform…if only one thing comes of this pllleeeeeaaasssssse let it be the semantic, clustered file system?

Well TimeSwappers has been up and running for a couple of weeks now and we’ve had a number of posts in the East Lothian yahoogroups page for TimeSwappers and in parallel with this I’ve been getting the Organisation homepage updated and online too. Latest content is now a detailed breakdown of information required to go ahead and start a local TimeSwappers group for your own community and what some of the pre-requisites for managing it are.

Much as I despise ads on sites I visit I’ve decided to add in some very inocuous Amazon books to the TimeSwappers homepages in order to see if we can develop some click-through revenue and hopefully have the domain pay for itself sometime down the line. If you’re mortally offended by this then by all means use Firefox and the AdBlock extension – I really don’t mind !

In the meantime we’ve also had great coverage from local activity groups in the area and are already heading up our pages on Google and Yahoo. Not too shabby for a couple of weeks online activity !!

Well after little fast work with the old web tools and some graphics shenanigans TimeSwappers.org is now live and online. It’s currently pretty sparse but I’m intending to flesh out content on the barter economy, time-banking, community activism side of things…if you have any links or suggestions don’t be afraid to drop a comment on here.

In the meantime the inaugural East Lothian TimeSwappers group already has a member and I’m hoping grassroots word-of-mouth will help get the message around, after which here’s hoping it goes viral !

For some time now (2 years in July – wow !) I’ve been running and moderating the East Lothian chapter of the FreeCycle organisation. I was looking for a couple of stairgates for No. 1 daughter and managed to secure them from a very nice couple in Edinburgh. Not an issue for me as I worked in Edinburgh at the time, however given I lived fully a 40mile round trip from the collection point I thought there had to be a group in East Lothian…on checking I found there wasn’t and so I kicked it all off.

I think it’s fair to say it’s been a success and shows every sign of continuing on in a similar vein however today I’ve decided to kick off a new project .

Time Swappers will fill another void I’ve noticed is lacking in local communities. Very often I’ve had to reject posts or ask members to re-word their offers as they are offering items for the explicit benefit of others either by monetary gain or by barter, well I’ve decided there has got to be an outlet for this.

The premise is simple. You have a skill, ability or talent that you are willing to trade or barter against something you need or want doing around the home etc, eg you’re a champion cake-baker and you’re living-room needs redecorated. Post to that effect, meet a decorator in your local community with a sweet-tooth, come to an agreement on terms. Job done !!

Time on your hands…go on! Swap it !