June 2011
12 posts
1 tag
“We’re trying to do good. And we’re trying to make money. The more money we make,...”
– John Mackey, CEO, Whole Foods : The New Yorker
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'Our Media Are Treating Twitter And Facebook As If... →
John Naughton, for the Guardian:
The background is that earlier this month the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA), France’s media regulator, ruled that the country’s TV networks and radio stations will no longer be able to explicitly mention Facebook or Twitter on air, except when discussing a story in which either company is directly involved.
A spokeswoman for...
3 tags
Bill Gates Gets Personal →
Bill Gates, in an interview with Caroline Graham for Live:
I met this girl, Hoshman, a polio victim. She’s three years old and can’t walk and never will. She’s just beginning to realize how different her life will be from the other kids’. I spoke to her mom and her older sister. Because of the work we’ve done she will be one of the last 50 kids in India to be paralyzed from polio.
...
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Ed Catmull: 'Success Hides Problems' →
Not the main thrust of his speech, but a valuable point which shouldn’t be overlooked nonetheless — when your employees love what they do and you’re successful, they’re willing to put up with stuff they don’t like. This is a problem, because communication breaks down and that tends to snowball.
Honesty is key. But honesty can’t happen without open...
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Happy Father's Day
A year ago yesterday my dad passed away. Life is short. Loved ones are precious. Cherish the good, forget the bad. Hug your dad.
3 tags
Apple's Core Values →
Steve Jobs, in 1997, giving an internal speech debuting the new Think Different ad campaign and getting very real on what Apple needed to do next in order to pull the company out of the gutter (emphasis added):
To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is....
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Moviemail
In late May I built Moviemail. Moviemail allows you to “Get emailed the day a movie is released.” Here’s how it works:
Type a movie title > enter your email address > click Submit — Bam. You’ll get an email on the movie’s release date.
There is no registration. No sign-up. No beta. It’s just a simple tool.
Why I built Moviemail
I built this...
4 tags
Limbaugh, Palin And "The Left" →
Andrew Sullivan on Rush Limbaugh’s reaction to Maggie Thatcher’s disinclination to meet Sarah Palin:
What he doesn’t understand is that Palin’s nutsiness is not a partisan matter in Britain, or anywhere else in the world. It is an obvious truth marveled at by all. Palin’s emergence as a serious figure in American politics has made the country a laughing stock across the world. The idea that a...
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Iceland Is Crowdsourcing Its Next Constitution →
Interesting. My first thoughts are: I love it. True democracy, taking advance of the tools available to us today. Would this work in the U.S.? I don’t see why not. There would be ample blowback, sure, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that if the Founding Fathers were born in the 1980s they would be keen on this idea.
(Via Future Journalism Project.)
4 tags
"Happy Talk" →
Mike Long, in his 2011 Magis Lecture at Georgetown University:
And what I’ve figured out just recently is that whenever I was doing the most good for somebody else, I was doing something that I enjoyed.
So now I get up in the morning and with a fairly clear conscience about it, I just try to have fun.
This has the advantage of transforming selfishness into practicality—even...
2 tags
How Pilots Successfully Manage Thousands of... →
Atul Gawande, in The Checklist Manifesto, comparing new procedure adoption rates between doctors and pilots:
On average, the study reported, it took doctors seventeen years to adopt the new treatments for at least half of American patients.
What experts like [Boeing’s] Dan Boorman have recognized is that the reason for the delay is not usually laziness or unwillingness. The reason...