when you say “no”, you are saying “yes” to something else that deserves your time, energy and resources.

Lemonade – Great inspirational video about being laid off and how many people coped with the change.

You have friends. They are start something. They are not joking. You do not need to agree (or even like). You do need to encourage them. If you love them, support them.

My favorite part happens just before the first minute mark. That’s when guy #3 joins the group. Before him, it was just a crazy dancing guy and then maybe one other crazy guy. But it’s guy #3 who made it a movement.

Initiators are rare indeed, but it’s scary to be the leader. Guy #3 is rare too, but it’s a lot less scary and just as important. Guy #49 is irrelevant. No bravery points for being part of the mob.

We need more guy #3s.

Don’t expect others to feel the same.

“Sony and Microsoft’s quest to “control the living room” has locked them in a classic arms race; they have invested billions of dollars in an attempt to surpass each other technologically, building ever-bigger, ever-better, and ever-more-expensive machines.

Nintendo has dropped out of this race. The Wii has few bells and whistles and much less processing power than its “competitors,” and it features less impressive graphics. It’s really well suited for just one thing: playing games. But this turns out to be an asset. The Wii’s simplicity means that Nintendo can make money selling consoles, while Sony is reportedly losing more than two hundred and forty dollars on each PlayStation 3 it sells—even though they are selling for almost six hundred dollars. Similarly, because Nintendo is not trying to rule the entire industry, it’s been able to focus on its core competence, which is making entertaining, innovative games…

Nintendo’s success is not an anomaly, either. The business landscape of the past couple of decades is replete with companies that have flourished as third wheels, and with companies that have struggled to make money despite being No. 1 in their industries. (Today, would you rather be Honda or G.M.?) And while it’s true that in many industries there is a correlation between market share and profitability, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other.

A recent survey of the evidence on market share by J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C. Green found that companies that adopt what they call “competitor-oriented objectives” actually end up hurting their own profitability. In other words, the more a company focusses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do. And a study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.

Markets today are so big—the global video-game market is now close to thirty billion dollars—that companies can profit even when they’re not on top, as long as they aren’t desperately trying to get there. The key is to play to your strengths while recognizing your limitations.”

You can change their behavior for a moment, only while you intimidate them, but as soon as you turn your back:

a. They will stab you

or

b. They will devise a plan to take you down

So you have limited power. It relies on you watching and monitoring their every move. Basically, it means you have no life or joy and prey on others.

It is a sad existence.

You win the battle, but lose the war.

Leia Feray, you are an embarrassment to the law enforcement community.

I love it – using creativity and right brain concepts, you can affect powerful changes

“….It’s that whole “degree from MIT” thing that allows that school not to worry about sharing its lecture bounty, because in the education system lectures are viewed as worthless unless they lead to a degree.

Why is that?

My friend Richard Miller (he designed the Atari Jaguar video game console eons ago) is one of the smartest engineers I’ve ever met yet he doesn’t have a degree in engineering. Apple II designer Steve Wozniak got his degree from UC Berkeley only after leaving Apple in the early 1980s. In both cases their employers couldn’t have cared less….”

http://www.cringely.com/2009/09/burn-baby-burn/

Why Design is Critical and Needed?

I firmly believe that we are living in a time of radical change. Our economy is shifting at a rapid pace. Jobs are shifting to China, India and Eastern Europe where the routine can be done at a fraction of cost.

(see “The World is Flat“, “The Next 100 Years” – great books, highly recommended)

We feel the shift in our jobs and companies. We cannot expect our companies to take care of us or keep us “safe”.

Nor is it good to be scared and put our heads in the sand.

Automation and abundance (Daniel Pink – “A Whole New Mind“) has pushed us to reconnect to our right brain. It’s no longer important or needed to memorize and retain raw data, computers can do that. It’s no good to do routine work that can be outsourced or programmed. What cannot be programmed is:

• 1. Empathy
• 2. Story Telling
• 3. Aesthetics and Design
• 4. Feelings
• 5. Pattern Recognition and Synthesis
• 6. Architecture

If your job can be stripped to a list of instructions it is absolutely at risk. If you create a software product that users dislike (difficult to use, ugly, disconnected from their life), someone will create a better product for a fraction of the cost.

You have choices in this new environment:

1. Learn the automation skills that are in demand

“Teach yourself Java, HTML, Flash, PHP and SQL. Not a little, but mastery. [... I used the word mastery to distinguish it from 'familiarity' which is what you get from one of those Dummies type books...]“

- Seth Godin, “Graduate school for unemployed college students”

2. Become an amazing story teller and learn to engage customers

“How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations.”

- Dan and Chip Heath, “PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES”

3. Share empathy to grab the whole story about a customer

“What does it feel like to be old in America? At the Westminster Thurber Retirement Community here, Heather Ramirez summed it up in two words. ‘Painful,’ she said. ‘Frustrating.’”

- NY Times, “Simulating Age 85, With Lessons on Offering Care”

4. Design joyful products that customers feel an emotional connection

- Apple, Apple.com

It’s important that people gain the skills to remain competitive in this new economy. We teach the automation skills.