If you upgraded to the iPhone 4S, Gizmodo has some good suggestions on places you can easily sell your (now) old iPhone 4.
Help 500 Children in the Developing World for $25
I saw this on Food for the Hungry’s Twitter feed the other day. What a great opportunity: For $25, you can provide medication and everything else necessary to deworm 500 children who have been infected with parasites due to poor sanitation.
Here’s the description on their site:
In the areas we go, dirty water, lack of sanitation and poor hygiene result in almost every child being infected with parasites. Malnutrition and even death can result. The good news is — on average, it costs about a nickel to deworm 1 child. Treatment keeps a child healthy for 6 months or until clean water and sanitation become available.
There is no reason not to do this. For a very small gift, you are able to make a very large impact in the lives of a large number of people. If you can, up your donation to 100 and help 2,000 people.
When to Fire a Customer
Godin gets this right:
There are a few reasons to tolerate the customer who makes unreasonable demands:
- You promised you would
- She helps you raise your game
- Her word of mouth is very powerful
- The cost of frequently figuring out which customers to fire is too high compared to the cost of putting up with everyone
It’s probably worth firing a customer if:
- He willfully corrupts your systems at a cost to other customers
- Your employees are prevented from doing their best work in the long run
- His word of mouth can’t be changed or doesn’t matter
- He distracts you from delighting customers that are reasonable
In general, organizations are afraid to fire customers, no matter how unreasonable. This is a mistake. It’s good for you.
Tweaking the Idea of "Minimal Viable Product"
A good point from Godin the other day:
One of my favorite ideas in the new wave of programming is the notion of minimal viable product. The thought is that you should spec and build the smallest kernel of your core idea, put it in the world and see how people react to it, then improve from there.
For drill bits and other tools, this makes perfect sense. Put it out there, get it used, improve it. The definition of “minimal” is obvious.
Often, for software we use in public, this definition leads to failure. Why? Two reasons:
1. Marketing plays by different rules than engineering. Many products depend on community, on adoption within a tribe, on buzz–these products aren’t viable when they first launch, precisely because they haven’t been adopted. “Being used by my peers,” is a key element of what makes something like a fax machine a viable product, and of course, your new tool isn’t.
What is an Entrepreneur?
I love this quote from Godin:
An entrepreneur is an artist of sorts, throwing herself into impossible situations and seeking out problems that require heart and guts to solve.
What Fathers Should Teach Their Sons
This is a very helpful, short, significant e-book by Glenn Brooke on what fathers should teach their sons
As a father, I feel the lack of good instruction on parenting that exists right now (with some notable exceptions) — and the difficulty in making time to read the books that are helpful. Glenn’s book helps address both of those issues because it is both short and significant. I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to read Glenn’s book while my kids are still young!
Michael Hyatt on the Kindle Fire
After about 21 days of using the Kindle Fire
Here’s his conclusion:
Overall, the Kindle Fire is no iPad killer. If you can afford the iPad, I’d buy that instead. It is just much more polished and, with so many available apps, can do so much more.
However, if your primary goal is media consumption at an outstanding price, you won’t go wrong with a Kindle Fire. With Amazon’s backing, it will only improve with time.
I agree with this: the main reason to get a Kindle Fire would be price. If that’s your goal, it’s a good device.
And I would add one more suggestion: At this point in time, price should not be a factor in choosing electronic devices. We are at a stage in history right now where the benefits of a truly exceptional device (such as the iPad) far, far outweigh the price difference between those devices and the lower priced attempts.
Additionally, the benefits of an iPad, iPhone, and so forth go far beyond the actual things you can do with the devices. The primary benefits are in how they affect your thinking, helping you see what’s possible and what’s next and how technology can be utilized to do good to the greatest possible extent. You cut yourself off from the fullness of those benefits when you go with budget models, and for a few hundred dollars savings, it’s not worth it.
Save money in other areas. Seeking to save money in technology is not worth the price.
The Myth of the Garage: Chip and Dan Heath’s Latest Book
Chip and Dan Heath’s latest book, The Myth of the Garage
In Myth, the Heath brothers tackle some of the most (and least) important issues in the modern business world:
• Why you should never buy another mutual fund (“The Horror of Mutual Funds”)
• Why your gut may be more ethical than your brain (“In Defense of Feelings”)
• How to communicate with numbers in a way that changes decisions (“The Gripping Statistic”)
• Why the “Next Big Thing” often isn’t (“The Future Fails Again”)
• Why you may someday pay $300 for a pair of socks (“The Inevitability of $300 Socks”)
• And 12 others . . . Punchy, entertaining, and full of unexpected insights, the collection is the perfect companion for a short flight (or a long meeting).
3 Tips for Improving Collaboration as a Servant Leader
My post last week at the Willow Creek Association blog.
The True Meaning of Justice in the Workplace
Biblically speaking, to be just means to use your strength on behalf of the weak.
Justice most certainly includes an overall “fairness” and truth and integrity and honesty and refusing to show partiality.
But the essence of justice goes beyond that.
The essence of justice is that those with greater authority and influence are to use their stronger position in service of those who are in a weaker situation.
Helping those in a “weaker situation” might mean helping those suffering from poverty or sickness or some other harm, but it doesn’t have to be. It means helping anyone without the influence of formal authority you have. Which means, if you are a manager or leader in an organization (or in politics or anywhere), that it includes those who work for you.
Some people think that the biblical commands to be just in this sense and their corollary, radical generosity, do not apply inside the bounds of an organization. Inside an organization, “business rules” apply, which is interpreted to mean that people must be impersonal (a distorted notion of the concept of being “impartial”) and that doing things for your own advantage primarily is correct and right.
But this is wrong. The biblical commands to be generous and to be just apply in all areas of our lives, without exception. The Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12) and commands to be merciful as God is merciful (generous to all, especially the undeserving, Matthew 5:43-48) do not cease to apply at our jobs and in our work and in our organizations. They are not simply for the personal realm.
Their manifestation may look different in each area of life. But these principles of justice and generosity still apply in every area of life and we must be diligent to apply them in all areas.
So, here’s one example. Let’s take the workplace. Being just and generous in the workplace means that, if you are in authority over people, you use that authority in the service of everyone you interact with — including those in the organization who directly work for you, those around the organization who don’t work for you but you are in a position to influence, and those outside the organization that you interact with. It means you see yourself as the servant of all, and that you see your authority and position and role as existing not as some statement of how great you are or how hard you’ve worked, but rather as existing for the sake of those around you. Your authority exists to do them good.
Now, immediately here we run into “the fallacy of doing good,” which is the tendency of people to act contrary to the purpose and role of their vocations in in their attempts to “do good,” which ends up making things worse. One example might be a chef at a restaurant who gives away dozens of free meals every night out of a spirit of generosity, when it’s not his restaurant and the owner has not given him the authority to do that. In this case, the chef’s generosity of spirit is right, but the way he carries it out is not. (If he owned the restaurant or had been given the leeway to do that sort of thing by the owner, however, go for it!)
So, what does using your authority and role to “do good” at your job look like when done right? A lot could be said, but let me just say one simple, yet core, thing.
It means being for the people who work for you. Which means believing that they can excel and do good work and make a contribution, even when few other people might be able to see it. And it means using your influence to give them opportunities and, yes, advance their career whenever you have the chance.
Note I’m not saying you shouldn’t be smart and discerning. But I am saying that you should have a default belief in people and therefore do whatever you can to give them a chance, to give them greater opportunities, and to give them a break whenever you can and whenever it seems they will be able to meet the opportunity and succeed in it.
And it means, even when you aren’t in a position at the moment to help advance someone or given them an opportunity, that you are encouraging and always seek to be the type of person that builds others up and helps them get better at what they do.
So much here is about your spirit and attitude — the disposition you have and with which you carry yourself. You need to see yourself as existing for the good of others, and charged with the responsibility from God to use any influence, authority, and resources you have in service to others.
But note that I’m not simply saying “be for other people.” That is a critical thing. But it’s not enough, because it’s so easy to say that we are “for” someone but never take action. It’s easy to say words that we don’t back up with our behavior. The true disposition of a servant is to be for people and to be diligent and forward and effective in identifying ways to promote their welfare.
This is a call to give thought to improving in both our dispositions and our concrete actions. See yourself as existing in your role for the good of others, and be proactive in finding real opportunities to use your authority and influence and resources to serve others and build them up.
That’s a how true Christian operates in his job and lives his entire life.