Q. What ideals have you embraced from Steve Jobs?
A. The importance of doing everything you do to your very best. And that the journey is the reward. If you do things well one at a time, you end up in a really good place. Don't get ahead of yourself. Control the things you can.
Ron Johnson - power behind the Apple stores. This is so obvious, why doesn't everyone do it?
It's obviously not about access to capital (doing it right doesn't cost more). It's about caring enough to make an effort.
If we define good enough sufficiently low, we'll probably meet our standards. Caring involves raising that bar to the point where the team has to stretch.
Caring = competitive advantage = very rare
The implicit message from RIM is good news/bad news. The good news: we forced out our ineffective co-CEOs. The bad news: we’ve replaced them with an incoherent crazy person.
You have to watch the new RIM CEO - this is why you give Executives media training.
Pricing your product is actually simple, as long as you consider it from the buyer's point of view. How much it costs you to make something is irrelevant. They don't care (of course, you can't price something at a loss and hope to stay in business for long).
Great article on pricing.
my ideal setup would produce a certain feeling, a feeling that arises when the space is so familiar you no longer notice it, when the tool melts into you and becomes an extension of your mind or body. There’s this sense of harmony with the world, things crystalize in your wake, coming together almost impossibly, like throwing up a handful of toothpicks and having it land in the shape of the Eiffel Tower.
Research suggests people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.
Practising is not enough — it’s the way we practice that matters. Professional musicians, for example, tend to work through tedious exercises and focus on the difficult, whereas amateurs tend to just play a lot of music.
George Orwell’s anti-totalitarian novella, Animal Farm, almost never saw the light of day. The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book, partly for political reasons. Eventually Animal Farm came out in print in 1945 and the now-famous text became an animated film in 1954.
Produced by Halas and Batchelor (and funded by the CIA, although the animators didn’t know it), Animal Farm was the first British animated feature released worldwide. The film runs 80 minutes, and you can watch it below or here.
(Via @openculture)
Learn your message well enough that you can communicate it without reading it. We want your humanity.
If you can't do that, don't bother giving a speech. Just send everyone a memo and save time and stress for all concerned.
Please. I've had enough of you reading me your slides.
