A brief word from Marcus Buckingham on how to start building on your strengths right now:
The Value of Design
Well stated, from a Time article from a few years ago (but still very relevant):
Most high-tech companies don’t take design seriously. They treat it as an afterthought. Window-dressing.
But one of [Steve] Jobs’ basic insights about technology is that good design is actually as important as good technology.
All the cool features in the world won’t do you any good unless you can figure out how to use said features, and feel smart and attractive while doing it.
Irrefutable Logic
Many people are aware of how spam is my favorite food — to make fun of. It just about tops my list of things that should not exist.
Therefore, 10 points to any who can point out the flaw in this irrefutable logic:
- Nothing is better than a big juicy steak.
- Spam is better than nothing.
- Therefore, spam is better than a big juicy steak.
The Most Effective People
From Henry Cloud’s book The One-Life Solution: Reclaim Your Personal Life While Achieving Greater Professional Success:
The most effective people I know are people who have times when they give their entire focus to whatever they are working on — and there is no way they are going to stop what they are doing to see what just showed up in their in-box or on their BlackBerry. Certain blocks of time are guarded, and an e-mail or a phone call is not going to interrupt them or change the agenda.
Reverse Engineering Google's Innovation Machine
Harvard Business Review has a good article on Google’s ecosystem of innovation. For a quick overview, here is the idea in brief.
Also, here are two very dense and interesting sentences from the article:
“Every piece of the business plays a part, every part is indispensable, every failure breeds success, and every success demands improvement.”
“If the company’s expressed mission is to organize the world’s information, it has a somewhat less exalted but equally important unexpressed commercial mission: to monetize consumers’ intentions.”