Thomas L. Friedman wrote an excellent post over here at the NY Times pleading with the climate folks to go on offense with a simple 50 page grade six english report on the state of the world. It’s awesome. Read it. I agree with all of it and particularly getting rid of the phrase “global warming” because idiots then say “well it was warm today here in Arizona so Al Gore is OBVIOUSLY a lying idiot.”(sigh)

Key quotes are below:

What’s real? In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.

At the same time, they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding. It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense. The physicist Joseph Romm, a leading climate writer, is posting on his Web site, climateprogress.org, his own listing of the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now.

Here are the points I like to stress:

1) Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.

The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.

2) Historically, we know that the climate has warmed and cooled slowly, going from Ice Ages to warming periods, driven, in part, by changes in the earth’s orbit and hence the amount of sunlight different parts of the earth get. What the current debate is about is whether humans — by emitting so much carbon and thickening the greenhouse-gas blanket around the earth so that it traps more heat — are now rapidly exacerbating nature’s natural warming cycles to a degree that could lead to dangerous disruptions.

3) Those who favor taking action are saying: “Because the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic, let’s buy some insurance — by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit — because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.” We will import less oil, invent and export more clean-tech products, send fewer dollars overseas to buy oil and, most importantly, diminish the dollars that are sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists and the schools that nurture them.

4) Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and 2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to soar. It is obviously going to be the next great global industry.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Global Weirding Is Here – NYTimes.com.

It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals.

Congrats VS team and City of Berkeley on the launch!

]]> http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/city-of-berkeley-launches-their-climate-action-plan-using-vancouver-based-visible-strategies-see-it-wow/feed/ 0 http://www.troyangrignon.com/2009/12/17/david-liittschwagers-marine-micro-fauna-photo-series/ http://www.troyangrignon.com/2009/12/17/david-liittschwagers-marine-micro-fauna-photo-series/#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:39:26 +0000 Troy http://www.troyangrignon.com/2009/12/17/david-liittschwagers-marine-micro-fauna-photo-series/ Wow. Check out the beautiful macro photography of David Liittschwager with his Marine Micro Fauna collection.

My time at Business Objects has finally come to a close. It was an awesome two years, with a lot of learning. I met a lot of extremely talented people there and through my association with the company. I was feeling the entrepreneurial urge again so i decided to throw myself back out of the perceived safety of the corporate life and back into the chaotic startup world.  I have been out for two weeks so far and couldn’t be happier. I feel like I’m “home”.

Now that I’m out, I’m taking on a few different projects. I’m working with a group called Hinchcliffe and Company. They are a leading Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 consulting, training, advisory, and media firm headed by Dion Hinchcliffe. I am joined by a top-tier team that is seeding the company and it our goal to ramp up this company very quickly. I will predominantly work in the corporate training, enterprise consulting, and startup advisory area – helping startups with their business planning, go-to-market planning, technology strategy, and/or sustainability practices.

You can see some of our sites here:

Main site: http://www.hinchcliffeandco.com
Training: http://web20university.com
Media: http://enterprise2tvshow.com

This will also give me the time and flexibility to work on some other business, technology, and sustainability related projects that I have been wanting to work on for a while as well as to build out my speaking engagements and writing and blogging.

Some people ask me how I tie this all together? I explain it like this. I have come to the conclusion that it is my mission to use business and technology to create a better world. That includes Web 2.0 (bringing a social aspect to computing and to business) or Sustainability (bringing a social and ecological aspect to business).

In my new role(s), I will be doing all of that – sustainability, web 2.0, business building. I have the best “job” in the world! Because I get to work with entrepreneurs, BE an entrepreneur, and work with people who want to change the world for the better.

It’s going to be a crazy and fun year – I can sense it already!

My new contact information is: troy at hinchcliffeandco dot com. My cell hasn’t changed: 604-551-8275 (Vancouver). Drop me a note if we haven’t spoken in a while and we’ll catch up!

Have a great 2007 everybody!

• Day 1
• Enterprise 2.0
• SMB Session
• Launch Pad
• Keynote with Eric Schmidt
• Joi Ito on Worlds of Warcraft
• Ben Trott of Six Apart, talking about Vox
• Discussion with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (Washington Post) and Barry Diller (IAC)
• Day 2:
• A Conversation with Jeff Bezos
• A Conversation with Bruce Chizen, Adobe.com
• Net Neutrality Debate with Vint Cerf and Robert Pepper
• Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker on the State of the Internet
• Fedex’s CIO talks about logistics
• Microsoft’s Debra Chrapaty “It’s all about the infrastructure”
• Korea’s MySpace Challenger: CyWorld Revealed
• Enterprise 2.0 mashups, with Marc Benioff
• Jeff Jonas explains how to give your company a Brain
• Don Tapscott discusses Wikinomics – his new theory of the global plant floor
  
• Meet Ning
• What GoDaddy knows, with Bob Parsons
• A Conversation with Ray Ozzie
• Day 3:
• The Database in the sky, with MySQL
• Yahoo! Technology Preview
• Disruption & Opportunity: Venture Capital
• From the eBay Labs
• Alumni Report: How did 2005s Launchpad companies do?
• Harnessing Collective Intelligence
• My Summary of the Summit

What a joke. Why are Americans putting up with this? WAKE UP. Unbelievable.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. They should have been hauled off the plane if he was threatening the staff, but charge them with mischief, not under the fracking terrorism act.

Craig Ferguson had a funny episode on this story: “When the other passengers saw these goings-on, they were surprised and thought….’What, entertainment on a Southwest Airlines flight?’” Funny. But not.

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley: The State of the Internet Part 3

• Overview of State of the internet can be summarized in this sentence: “The World’s Information is Getting Organized and Monetized”
• Powerpoint can be found here
• Highlights:
• The Top 5 companies are worth 46% more now than they were worth in the Year 2000: The Top 5 Global Internet Market Leaders have gone from $2B market value (pre 2000) to $178B (peak in 2000) to $32B (trough in 2002) and all the way back up to $259B (Nov 2006), which is 46% higher than their last peak.
• It’s tough to succeed: ~2% of technology companies have created ~100% of net wealth; on average, 2 companies have 1000% gains per year
• Users / Usage — Yahoo! has base of 418MM+ unique monthly
  visitors (+19% Y/Y growth)
• Customer Acquisition — Google now has 500,000 – 1M advertisers and they’re making them more money all the time through more effective targeting and metrics.
• Commerce / Payments — PayPal has 123MM accounts, (+41% Y/Y,
  CQ3); Shopping.com has 40MM+ products in 325+ categories
• Advertising — 8% of total US advertising online in 2006E growing to
  estimated 13%+ within 5 years – Google + Yahoo! = key drivers +
  beneficiaries
• Significant targeting / conversion improvements (related
  to technology improvements + data leverage) — could bolster annual
  global revenue per unique user of $9 for Google (+42% Y/Y) and $10 for
  Yahoo! (+29% Y/Y) 2-3x in next 5 years
• Personalization — Recommendation engines improve monetization
  – examples include Amazon.com + Yahoo! Music
• Recommendations systems getting better.
• [As pointed out in The Long Tail, as you address more niches, you get more noise (stuff you don't want) and the way to sift through that noise is with filters such as recommendation systems. As the volume of potential purchases, songs, websites, etc. increase, the way to find what you want is through better filtering and recommendation systems.
• Communications/Telephony: Skype would rank #3 in the world for telecom providers (behind China Mobile and Vodafone). It may still have the title of "fastest product ramp in history". Skype carries approximately 7% of all global cross-border calls and that should double in the next year or two.
• Video: It is estimated that approximately 60% of internet traffic may be Peer to peer filesharing of "unmonetized" video (read that as it could be illegal or it could be legal but just not have an economic transaction attached to it.)
• "Local" is getting to be important: Buying your software from Russia or China might be okay, but if you want to buy bagels, you need to find the bagel shop near your house. Google and eBay local classifieds continue to expand.
• Communities are exploding: Myspace, YouTube, Flickr, CyWorld are all exploding. Blogs continue to double every 7 months (now at about 57M blogs)
• [I like Matt Mullenwegg's quote on Technorati (the blog search engine): "There are over 50 million blogs. SOME of them have to be good!"]
• [See further down for the interview with Hyun-Oh Yoo from CyWorld - they're awesome!]
• Social media is at the very beginning of the curve
• [Digg, Reddit, NowPublic, and many more sites are springing up to take advantage of people's energy and desire to be involved in reporting the news (and fact-checking on the major news sites.]
• Mobile continues to ramp up quickly. The shocking statistics from the presentation included American Idol receiving 63M votes (via mobiles + internet) in the final 4 hour round.
• [I'm not sure which is more shocking. That 63M people were watching that ridiculous show or that 63M people were able to vote using a system that didn't crash. I think they're equally unbelievable.]
• [I'm also intrigued by this voting thing on phones. We're starting to see some interesting uses of phones that fit the form factor: GPS-enabled mapping, instant messaging, voting.]
• [For another interesting company to look at in this area, a friend of mine, John Merrells, has launched Embrace Mobile, which will specialize in very focused mobile applications that can be run over SMS.
• User Generated Content based sites have moved into the top 15 global websites (based on number of unique visitors per month). Wikipedia, MySpace, and YouTube drove those numbers.
• [That means that the principle "users can (and will) generate more content at the edge than you can at the center."]
• [Some other interesting notes are that the growth rates of Wikipedia (110% y/y), Myspace (303% y/y) and YouTube (2662% y/y) mean that by next year, they will likely dominate the list.]
• [Another interesting side note is that the only other site on the list with a relatively high growth rate is Apple at 38% y/y. I would think that bodes well for their continued success selling hardware and music.]
• North America is becoming less dominant on the internet:  NA will go from 36% of users in 2000 to 20% of the internet in 2007.
• Broadband penetration has finally hit the 25-30% “sweet spot”
• [Who defined this as the sweet spot?]
• [Does this mean that this is a tipping point that enables new services to be built upon it?]
• [In case Americans feel smug about this, their broadband penetration should be compared to Korea which is at 60-70%]
• Global Mobile 2.5G/3G penetration has hit the 30-35% “sweet spot”
• [Again, what does that mean? They didn't really explain that.]
• Global Internet Thesis: We have had 10-15% user growth this year; 20-30% usage growth (time/pages/etc.); and an increase of 30%+ in monetization.
• Online text/music/video – paths to monetization:
• Text:
• Newsgroups (usenet) turned into Yahoo Directory which led to $$$
• [I don't understand that transition. I don't get how Usenet converted to Yahoo Directory...]
• Directories turned into Search (Overture, Google, etc.)
• [That transition makes sense - the indexes and directories were HUUUGE.]
• Music:
• Peer to peer (Napster and Bit Torrent) gave way to For-pay (Apple & others)
• [The slide doesn't say this but Meeker basically suggested that video would take a similar path. So that would look like:
• YouTube (no monetization) to _______?
• [I have noticed that people will both tag and transcribe the contents of videos on YouTube which means that you can quickly find what you are looking for amongst a sea of millions of videos. Transcription + tagging + search + ads = monetization. I agree that this will happen VERY quickly.]
• [There was always this assumption that moving all of the world's video to the web would probably not happen because of the incredible amount of work required to transcribe the scripts and tag the media appropriately. I see now that this is not only possible but indeed likely. Humans have a built-in need to organize and categorize and they are proving it on sites all across the web. Just give people the tools to do it and it will happen!]
• Slide 15: US Internet Advertising has mostly been driven by text. Rich media advertising has not grown at nearly the same rate. Morgan Stanley predicts that rich media will be the next avenue for US internet advertising spend growth.
• [Another interesting note on that slide is that the number of internet users in the US went from 141 to 205M  between 2001 and 2006. And the number of households went from 51M to 73M in the same time span. The maybe-not-surprising-but-still-good-to-know part is that the spending per household has also gone up at the same time. Summary: More people are getting online and they're spending more when they get there. So the pie is growing in both dimensions.]
• Slide 16: 67% of Global Internet Users use search [that seems low...]. Search is the top customer acquisition tool for online retailers. Search engine marketing was responsible for 36% of customer acquisition, and 29% from organic traffic [what was their definition of that?] Everything else was a distant second, third, fourth place.
• What’s the take-away? Search rules. Therefore, your company must have a dynamic website (not a static HTML site) and you must blog. NOW. Blogging is the single best way to increase GoogleRank. Period. Search is also the cheapest customer acquisition channel. I have referred to this before but Dr. Paul Kedrosky showed the following customer acquisition costs in his Vancouver Enterprise Forum Oct 2005 Web 2.0 presentation: Direct sales: $22,000/customer; Indirect Sales: $5,000/customer; Direct Mail: $70/customer; E-mail: $60/customer; Online banner ads: $50/customer; Yellow Pages: $20/customer; SEARCH: $8.50/customer. He did not articulate which industry or sector this was from but even if the numbers change, the ratios are the most interesting part and the lesson is the same.
• Slide 17: Internet ad spend is increasing.
  
• [I have heard numbers that say it represents 8% of all ad spend and that will increase to 13% by 2010. Source ???]
• Slide 18: eBay has outstripped classifieds 9:1 but the newspapers still make all the money – a correction is inevitable: eBay listings have gone from zero to 921M listings in 8 years while classified listings have gone from 141M listings down to 111M listings. The weird part is that the newspapers have maintained a relatively solid revenue base! eBay listings to newspaper listings have gone from 1:35 to 9:1….but the revenue at the newspaper end is still 25x higher than the eBay revenues… Is this a massive correction waiting to happen?
• [I don't get this one. I wonder about their sources. Did the newspapers increase their classifieds charges to compensate for the losses? If they dropped by nearly 25% in terms of their listings but their revenue went up 20%, then they would have had to increase their charges by something like 50%?!!?]
• [The other thing that surprises me is that there is much talk of how the eBay and Craigslists have "disrupted" and "decimated" the classified industry (Yes, even I have used those phrases), but the newspapers seem to be holding their own in terms of revenues. I wonder if this is a delayed reaction and what we will see is a radical collapse of that revenue base in the next couple of years - a sort of tipping point delayed reaction?]
• Slide 19: Rapid peer to peer (video) growth is stressing the internet and is undermonetized: Morgan Stanley included a very cool chart (that for some reason ends in 2004) showing the mix of content types: changing over time and how video has come to dominate the stream.
  

• Slides 20: Video is most of the P2P traffic – no surprises there.
• Slides 21/22: Some very dense data points on the momentum of online video – again, just evolutionary steps along the curve. Well okay, there is a minor acquisition for $1.65B!
• Slide 23: Online video is getting tagged/searchable/findable.
• [The slide talks about the fact that much of the content is now tagged/findable/searchable. This is because of the earlier comment I made about how people are doing the categorizing/tagging/transcribing on a massive scale. Kevin Kelly wrote:
  

  “No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences—and they knew a lot—confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment…. What a shock, then, to witness the near instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds….These user created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming from? The audience."

• [I would add to that a corollary. Aside from blogging, another confounding aspect of the web is who is transcribing, tagging, and categorizing these millions of pieces of music and video? Again, the audience. The media companies need to stop suing their customers and begin taking advantage of this rabid, passionate, and FREE workforce. A great question to ask yourself is: How can my company take advantage of my most passionate users in such a way that they benefit, their fellow customers benefit, and our company benefits?]
• Slide 24: The time people spend on the internet is outstripping the number of pages they are viewing – is this again evidence that video is dominating their time?
• Slide 25/26: Yahoo is doing this stuff well. (user generated content + social network + video blog + good ad placement / monetization)
• Slide 27: Rise of the pro-amateur videocaster.  In three years, what % of video will be: amateur, pro, semi-pro? We don’t have a clue.
• Slide 28: Some reference to more good examples of advertising embedded in viral video clips.
• [This slide asks the question: "do users want 30 second pre-rolls?" Let me answer that for Morgan Stanley. Of course not. Users don't want commercials, they don't want billboards, and they don't want stupid commercials in front of the movie they just paid $12 to see. I absolutely loved the quote from Jim Buckmaster, CTO and lead programmer for Craigslist) on Day 3, when commenting on how many people keep telling Craigslist that "they will make more money - maybe tens of millions of dollars" by adding text ads to their site. He headpanned: "so far, we don't have users asking for them - and since we do what users want that means we haven't added them." That was a hilarious and fantastic answer.]
• [There has been a common theme over the course of the last few days and it centers around: "how much do you optimize your business for revenue or profit generation and at what point do the users tip over from
  'this service loves me' to 'this service is trying to just make money off of me' and start to leave in droves? Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy.com commented on how analysts kept telling him he had to fire a bunch of his support staff. But that generic principle (lower your overhead costs and costs of servicing the customer) in that case were inappropriate when his entire value proposition is: "the cheapest domain names on the internet with great human tech support."]
• [I can't find it any more (maybe in Michael Gerber's e-Myth Revisited?) but there is a great tale about this little meat shop in Italy that has a thriving business. The owner wants to expand, so he brings in a manager. The first thing that the manager does is cut off the most expensive suppliers and replace them with cheaper ones. Revenue dips a bit but profits go up. Then he looks at the customer demands and stops bringing in the meat that only a few customers want. Again, revenue dips, but net profits go up. Next, he gets rid of the oldest meat-cutter in the shop who costs too much money and hires a young kid who is half the price. Revenue dips once more as people stop coming back to see their friend the old butcher. But predictably the profit goes up. Finally the new manager decides to cut back the store hours to only the most profitable hours of the day. At this point, things break and the revenue drops off a cliff. One by one, the cuts decreased revenue but increased profit. Until the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" and the customers almost all stop going to the little meat shop at the same time. "They used to have a friendly butcher, great hours, incredible variety, and good quality - but that's all gone" they lament. The owner of the shop fires the manager but it's too late and he goes bankrupt. This little tale was echoing through my head throughout this conference for some reason.]
• Of course, the predictable thing happens.
• Slide 30: Apple has sold $16B worth of iPods and music/videos in only three years.
• [I tried graphing this but without the interim quarters to fill in a curve, the graph was meaningless. Nothing in 2003 and $16B in 2006. Doing a trendline on that was also useless. It would be interesting to go back and get the interim data from their annual reports and graph it out.]
• [Interesting side note, many people don't know this but Steve Jobs has said repeatedly that they make no actual profit and in fact often lose a little bit of money on the $1.8B worth of music and videos. Their business model is based on using that to drive iPod sales (where they make 25-30% margins) and also to take advantage of the "halo effect" of having a Windows PC owner like their iPod so much that they convert to a Mac computer for their next purchase. This is good to remember the next time somebody says, "We want to be the iTunes of _______". Soooooo....you want to lose a bit on every sale....but make it up in volume? Then you better have a backup plan for that business model.]
• [Another interesting note is that having been a Mac geek since the days of the Apple II+, I have had a long history with this company and have ridden up and down their success curves many times over the years. Let nobody ever forget that in its darkest hour, when Jobs came back on board, the company was in chaos, it was something like 11 days away from bankruptcy, and Jobs stated firmly and emphatically, "We are going to innovate our way out of this recession". He (and they) stuck to their promise, poured more money into more tightly focused innovative projects and they are now finally savouring the success that they won. I think about that dark time when the world contemplated having Windows as the only OS and Apple as a footnote in computer history, and like to tell that story to people who say things like "We just need to build something as cool as the iPod." Great idea. I hope you have the stick-to-it-iveness to suffer the long cold dark winter of innovation and that your will and commitment (and spare cash) carries you through until the spring when your innovations blossom.) I'm so happy that Apple is riding high these days. They paid for the success they are now enjoying.
• Slide 31: "Inventory monetization should still have significant upside"
  
• [Seems to say in plain english: "There should still be lots of ad revenue in them thar hills." They are basing this on the fact that Google makes $12.28/unique visitor, while most sites make a lot less than that. That is a great benchmark number!!]
• Slide 32: Only 13% of Top 15 Online Retailers are Internet Pure-plays – what about the media? Meeker commented that the big-box retailers that had brick and mortar operations dominated the “online retailer” category, which seemed surprising. There is the question then…will social media turn regular media upside down and dominate it or will big media be able to hold their ground and dominate the media category in the same way as the brick and mortar retailers had been able.
• Slide 33: Google + Yahoo = ~58% of US online ad revenue.
• [WOW - I knew it was concentrated, just not THAT concentrated. What that leaves out is what are the big Google/Yahoo customers that are actually the display medium for those ads? In other words, aside from MySpace, what sites are resulting in that massive spend? I have heard that MySpace, Wikipedia, and some other sites like that that have a huge number of pages work well. Even though with a zillion pages, you begin to wonder if anybody ever sees most of them? Another thing I have heard is that apparently building public wikis with lots of pages is another way to generate large ad revenue.]
• Slide 34: Google and Yahoo share approximately 30% of their revenue with their partners
• [I have been looking at a lot of network related theory and really trying to get a handle on viral spread - what counts, what makes it real, and how fast can something spread? The simplest answer for long-term sustainable network build out seems to be: PAY PEOPLE. Let them make money. eBay now has something like 500,000 people making a living on their site!]
• Slide 35-37: Watch where the global younger generation goes. This means ringtones, net access on the mobile phone, social networks, video, web applications, in-game advertising (which is becoming a huge business), community ranking, user generated content, instant messaging, tagging/categorizing, blogs, peer to peer filesharing, social media, and personalization/recommendation engines.
• [That's a simple concept and a pretty darned good list of hot areas. It's also "where the puck is" (you Canadians will get that reference), rather than "where the puck will be" since most of their analysis is based on what is at the fast part of the curve NOW. Which means the window may be rapidly closing on all or some of those areas. Of course, my time sense is a bit out of whack and I often think something is over before it is, so I have to be careful of my built-in time drift. Still, the point is the same. Starting a video site NOW probably makes no sense. Starting a social media site might still make sense. Starting a company that lets OTHER people start social networks (because they're all late to the party) like Ning is doing....that might make sense. ]
• Additional useful links:
• State of the Internet Presentation from Web 2.0, November 2006
• US Internet Advertising Outlook, 2006-2010E , October 2006
• Global Technology / Internet Trends, April 2006
• Emerging Technology Trends, October 2005

It is the true story of a men’s brogue shoe factory in Northamptonshire, England that in order to survive, stopped making men’s brogues, the market for which had been swamped by cheap Eastern European knock-offs, and found their “niche market” – kinky boots for drag queens and transvestites.

It is: a story of commtment; advice on how to be open and flexible to changes in your business environment; a treatise on finding opportunities  in the strangest of places;  a tale about how to be true to oneself; a lesson on respecting others even if they are different than you; and finally a lesson on leadership.

The other thing that I love about this movie is that it has a strong story, a lot of heart, it used fantastic venues (a one hundred year old factory), and it employed a bunch of the shoe factory employees in the movie. The writing was great, the scenes that were awkward and tense were intentionally written that way and it was not played up for laughs. There are a lot of moments in the film that you really want to end because they’re uncomfortable. But that’s the magic. Those uncomfortable moments are there in life!

Go rent this movie.  And if you are a business school leader, show this to your class. Here are some great lessons that I found. Which ones will you find?

• A company is a collection of individuals who have committed their time and energy to the enterprise. Respect them and respect their commitment. Show them your loyalty – they deserve it.
• If disaster strikes and you have to lay people off, don’t make excuses. Do it quickly and cleanly. It will suck and that’s life.
• Before you lay them off though, ask them for their ideas. They are close to the work. They will surprise you and may even save the company.
• Look at your business environment for big changes. When they come, change your business, change your product, change your service. Adapt or die.
• Look for new opportunities every where you go. Do this by finding somebody who is in pain from an unfulfilled need. Don’t try to create a market – find one that is underserved or not at all served.
• If you and your life partner don’t want the same things, you’ll never really reconcile it. You’re better to move on and live out your lives apart.
• Also, if your life partner can’t support your 100% commitment to your business, your partnership will fail. It’s hard enough to run a business. It’s impossible to do it when your partner isn’t there to support you, or worse, is acting against your effort.
• Work with your customer to build rapid prototypes and get rapid feedback. If they tell you it’s wrong, then go back and do it again.
• Forget your old business so that you can learn your new business. The old assumptions and beliefs and goals are probably not true. (In this case, the factory went from selling “life-long comfort” to selling “Two and a half feet of tubular delicious SEX!”)
• You can push your people hard but only if they know that it’s for them and not for you.
• Sometimes the tide of attitude can shift away from you or towards you on the suggestion of just one person in your team who holds a lot of sway. Earn that person’s respect and you have earned the respect of the group.
• Aim high. Choose big hairy scary goals that are way beyond your comfort zone. (I disagree with the “S.M.A.R.T.” goals approach in life.)
• You can run from your childhood but you can’t hide. You don’t need to “deal with it” all first, unless it’s getting in the way of your life. In which case, go figure it out and then get on with things.
• Life, relationships, business, sex, gender, psychology – they’re all messy and uncomfortable. And that’s the way they’re supposed to be.
• Find something you want to do. Pursue it with all your heart. And share that adventure with people you care about.

I am very excited about our launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability. For the month of March, Vancouver will host a cornucopia of events and activities, all focused around bringing sustainability to our lives and our city.

One key component of the 30 Days of Sustainability is a dynamic, interactive website, which also launched on March 2nd, 2006. To learn more about the 30 Days, check out http://www.30daysofsustainability.com.

Mark Morford strikes again with a brilliant and very likely insanely lucrative idea. Apple definitely won’t take it on which means that somebody somewhere should.

Some choice quotes:

…James Dobson, the cute little founder of the cute little ultraconservative rabidly Christian happily neo-homophobic Focus on the Family, actually stood up and proclaimed, to the media, to the world, with a straight face, with no sense of irony or shuddering humiliation or an overpowering sense that he was, in fact, contributing quite nicely to the overall violent oatmealy ignorance of the planet, came right out and announced that the wildly popular and much-loved SpongeBob Squarepants cartoon character is, actually and truly, probably gay. And therefore, of course, SpongeBob is a dire threat to all childrenkind and must be avoided at all costs lest the wee ones watch the cartoons and become overwhelmed with a mad desire to wax their chests and buy a new Miata and drink cocktails made with lemonade. More or less.

And why? Why is the adorable yellow sea sponge suddenly considered to be contributing to the mental and spiritual and genital degradation of millions of innocent children? Because he’s a hyperactive none-too-bright short-attention-spanned spazzball of lovable non-sequiturial nonsense who induces rabid devotion among children and gay men and straight adults alike? Why, no. Not quite.

It’s because the frantically animated sea creature is now appearing, alongside noted pagan cartoon perverts Barney the Dinosaur and Winnie-the-Pooh and the Rugrats and Bob the Builder, in a nonprofit video sent to 60,000 schools and designed to promote that vile demon called, ahem, tolerance. And diversity.

…But now, the not-so-cute part: Much like that other small-minded cluster of clenched nonbrains over at the Parents Television Council, the very tiny but weirdly vocal group that single-handedly managed to hurl the FCC into fits of hysteria regarding naughty swearwords and exposed nipples in the national media, these groups are having one helluva moment right now, one influential and dangerous time in the cultural limelight.

These are the minuscule and shrill groups that, perhaps in a period not seen since the Puritans forbade dancing and kissing and the color fuchsia and all pleasure of any kind, have a shockingly powerful pull on American society and who reputedly helped tilt the election toward Bush and who increasingly have the ear of Congress — a Congress, it must be noted, that’s increasingly crammed with evangelical Christians and homophobic nutjobs and Tom DeLay.

…All of which somehow reminds me of the Spanish Catholic Archdiocese, also recently in the news after undergoing an amazing spasm of lucid awareness in how, for a brief blip in time, the church officially allowed that condoms might be OK. Did you read that story? About how Bishop Juan Antonio Martinez Camin, in Spain, announced that condoms are actually pretty good for, you know, controlling disease and inhibiting the spread of HIV? Miss that one? It’s understandable. Went by pretty fast. In fact, the astounding stance lasted exactly 24 hours, just enough time for the Vatican to get a whiff of it and for the Vatican’s Archbishop of Hateful Sexless Myopia to make a nasty phone call to Spain, promptly threatening the Spanish church with nothing short of castration and excommunication and genital warts.

Whoops, nope, we were wrong, muttered the Spanish church the following day. Condoms were evil all along. Condoms are wrong and condoms don’t actually prevent the spread of HIV and we don’t care if they save lives or prevent pregnancy or STDs because condoms promote — what is it again, cardinal? — oh, yes, “immoral sexual conduct.”

…Which in turn reminds me of Bush addressing a cluster of antichoice activists a few days back, touting the vicious and degrading “culture of life,” which translates directly as, “We aging sexless white Christian males shall hereby stop at nothing to slap women’s rights back to 1955 and chip away at female procreative choice, all while preventing stem-cell research from ever saving the life of a single cancer or Alzheimer’s patient. God bless.” Ah, progress. And then, in the next ironic breath, Bush announced that his warmongering administration is ready to request another $80 billion from Congress to further the violent and treasonous and unwinnable war on Islami– er, on non-Christia– er, women– er, gays– er, decent grammar– er, dictators who control our oil– er, “terror.”

…Note the connection. Note the blood-red thread of fear and dread and homophobia, the brutal irony throughout all these stories. Shrill extremist sects and small-minded leaders with too much control, saddled with self-righteous and outdated doctrines that refuse to allow the culture to progress, to laugh, to moan in joy and sticky happiness. Note the people who look at hilarious children’s cartoons and see only sinister mind control, who look at their fellow human souls and see only an army of debauched heathens, who look (reluctantly) at their own genitals and see only a gnarled clump of pain and confusion, who look up at the beautiful blue sky and see only a massive canopy of daggers.

How incredibly sad. And, for right now, how very, insidiously dangerous.

PLEASE help by posting this information to your various email distribution lists, newsletters, blogs, goodyear blimps, carrier pigeon networks, blog-friends, and anywhere else that you think might make sense.

To vote on my Manifesto you need to go to http://www.changethis.com/proposals/314 and hit the “Yes, Write This Manifesto” button.

Maybe if we get this published, we can finally get open music formats, open file formats, technology that works, and call centres that actually know what they are talking about.

Okay, even *I’m* not that naive. But it would be cool anyway.

Thanks!

(UPDATE: It has been accepted for the next step so it has been taken out of the voting list. THANKS! Now I just need time to re-write it….)