Month: March 2011

So did SXSW jump the shark this year? I don’t think so. Was it noisier? Sure… but I just paid attention to the awesome people who continue to show up year in and year out. The rest is easily ignored with the right app.

sometimes when you bulldoze an ecosystem, what you wind up with is a lot of weeds and a corporate mono-culture in which growth no longer flourishes, and in some cases that growth subsequently moves elsewhere. That’s a risk Twitter seems willing to take

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

How can we, citizens of what is supposed to be a democratic republic, fight to ensure that we get a government that is more open, participatory, and innovative than the one we now have?

Reid Hoffman’s Ten Rules for Entrepreneurs

Seek To Create Disruptive Change. Is this massive and different? Example: Skype
Aim Big. It’s the same amount of blood, sweat and tears to build a small company to flip as a big one to change the world.
Build A Network to Amplify Your Company. Your network is a store of distributed intelligence that can enable you. It’s important at the board and investor level and the rank and file.
Plan for Both Good and Bad Luck. Opportunity will cross your path and you’ll have to pivot to reach it. Plan Bs are intuitively easier to plan for.
Maintain Flexible Persistence. Know when to be persistent, when to be flexible and when to be a combination of both.
Launch Early Enough To Be Embarrassed By Your Creation. You’ll probably be wrong about most of of your thesis, and you might as well get the feedback. Perfection is a myth. Get it into the mix. Don’t undervalue the importance of time.
Aim High But Don’t Drink Your Own Kool-Aid. Find friends who will tell you when your baby is ugly.
A Great Idea for a Product is Important. But a great idea for product distribution is more important.
Pay Attention to Your Culture. Worry about getting hiring right from the very beginning.
These Rules are Not Laws of Nature. You can break them.
Read More: Most Innovative Companies: LinkedIn

There’s a long historical pattern of new media being seen as irrelevant or decadent, then finally getting legitimacy and being integrated into society.” Who knows? Two hundred years from now, Super Mario Bros. could be treated with as much respect as The Brothers Karamazov.

military power in today’s world is incompatible with freedom, incapable of providing security, and ineffective in dealing with evil.

Most companies are better at exhorting you to be a great manager, rather than telling you how to be a great manager,? Safferstone says. Project oxygen started with some basic assumptions. People typically leave a company for one of three reasons, or a combination of them. The first is that they don?t feel a connection to the mission of the company, or sense that their work matters. The second is that they don?t really like or respect their co-workers. The third is they have a terrible boss – and this was the biggest variable. Google, where performance reviews are done quarterly, rather than annually, saw huge swings in the ratings that employees gave to their bosses. Managers also had a much greater impact on employees? performance and how they felt about their job than any other factor, Google found. ?The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier – they do everything better,? Bock says. ?So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen.