Bush's Farewell Address
Here is the video (part 1) of Bush’s farewell address:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbZRh1aR_TM
I would recommend most of all, however, watching Reagan’s farewell address from 1989. (For some reason, the video will not embed. But you can watch it directly from YouTube.)
Wireless Electricity is Here
Fast Company reports that Wireless Electricity is Here (Seriously). That’s … incredible.
After more than 100 years of dashed hopes, several companies are coming to market with technologies that can safely transmit power through the air — a breakthrough that portends the literal and figurative untethering of our electronic age. Until this development, after all, the phrase “mobile electronics” has been a lie: How portable is your laptop if it has to feed every four hours, like an embryo, through a cord? How mobile is your phone if it shuts down after too long away from a plug? And how flexible is your business if your production area can’t shift because you can’t move the ceiling lights?
As the article mentions, the physics of how to do this has been understood for a while. But the ability to do this in a way that works well and is useful has not existed before. There are about three different approaches coming to market. Here’s how one of them works:
A powered coil inside that pad creates a magnetic field, which as Faraday predicted, induces current to flow through a small secondary coil that’s built into any portable device, such as a flashlight, a phone, or a BlackBerry. The electrical current that then flows in that secondary coil charges the device’s onboard rechargeable battery. (That iPhone in your pocket has yet to be outfitted with this tiny coil, but, as we’ll see, a number of companies are about to introduce products that are.)
For more detail, here’s a helpful summary from an article at Popular Science:
Scientists have known for nearly two centuries how to transmit electricity without wires, and the phenomenon has been demonstrated several times before. But it wasn’t until the rise of personal electronic devices that the demand for wireless power materialized. In the past few years, at least three companies have debuted prototypes of wireless power devices, though their distance range is relatively limited [see “Power Brokers,” next page]. Then last year, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set the stage for wireless power that works from across a room.
The key to wireless power is resonance. Think of a wineglass that shatters when an opera singer hits just the right note. When the voice matches the glass’s resonant frequency—the tone you hear when you tap the glass—the glass efficiently absorbs the singer’s energy and cracks. Using magnetic induction and two identical copper coils that resonate at the same frequency, the MIT scientists successfully powered a 60-watt lightbulb from a power source seven feet away. The team called their invention WiTricity, short for “wireless electricity.” Next up: sending the juice even farther and more efficiently.
You can also read more on wireless electricity at Wikipedia.
Lifehacker Interview with David Allen
Lifehacker has a good interview with David Allen about his new book, Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life.
This was an especially interesting question:
Lifehacker: In your one-on-one training sessions, and in feedback from customers, where do you believe most folks fall off the GTD wagon? Is it a behavioral and discipline concern, or just a failure of focus over distractions?
DA: Most folks don’t take the GTD tools far enough to really get the benefits. They don’t really do a thorough and consistent mind sweep, externalizing all of their commitments into a system they trust. Then they don’t review their commitments (calendar, projects list, next actions for each project) often enough to build the trust that they’re doing what’s most important at any given time. They therefore still trust their psyche more than their system, which makes system maintenance more trouble than it pays off.
Read the whole thing.
(HT: Vitamin Z)
How to Keep Up with 24 Business Books a Year
For the last several years, I’ve been a subscriber to Audio-Tech Business Book Summaries. Each month, you get two summaries of some of the most important and latest business books. The summaries come in both audio form (either CD or, I think, MP3 download) and in written transcripts (by email).
Each summary is about 45 minutes, and they actually summarize the content very, very well. So for a time investment of about 1.5 hours per month, you can keep up with 24 business books per year.
This post is not an advertisement — nobody asked me to write this. I have simply found this to be a helpful tool which some of you might be interested in exploring. I think the cost is about $150/year.
One point to keep in mind: Don’t expect to fully absorb the content in only 1.5 hours a month. If you want to truly think over and remember the content, it will take additional review of the transcripts and just plain reflecting on the content. I view this program as a way to stay briefed on new books, and then go deeper on the few that seem most useful.
Here’s a summary from their site:
Audio-Tech Business Book Summaries are carefully written summations of the best business books published each year. They are recorded on audio CDs or cassettes, plus word-for-word e-transcripts.
Each audio summary is 45 minutes in length, much shorter than the average of 10 to 15 hours required to thoroughly read and comprehend most truly important business books. They enable subscribers to turn the “downtime” of commuting, travel or exercise, into profitable “uptime.” A subscription to Business Book Summaries is a productive alternative to the radio or cellular phone.
The 24 books summarized each year are selected by our Editorial Board from nearly 3,000 new titles examined. The Audio-Tech Editorial Board is composed of Harvard Business School Graduates, Fortune 500 senior executives and internationally known management consultants. Each is an expert in one or more of the subject areas we cover.
Our professional writers and editors carefully summarize the books under the watchful eyes of Editorial Board Members.
Last of all, here’s a business idea for anyone so inclined: This would be a good thing to do for the latest books in Christian publishing. I bet a lot of pastors and people in ministry would appreciate being able to keep up with about 2 books a month through well-done audio and written summaries. The business model for such a company would not be hard to spell out.
But the books chosen for summarizing would need to be good. None of that fluffy, boring, useless stuff that so often finds its way into Christian bookstores. Also, I would recommend not limiting the summaries to new books. It would be helpful maybe for 1 of the summaries each month to be new, and 1 of the summaries to be a solid, classic work from church history (Edwards, Luther, Owen, Augustine, etc.), as well as more recent classics such as Packer’s Knowing God.
A Simple Way to Keep Updated With This Blog (And Others)
Many people subscribe to blogs in feed readers, where they can stay up to date with everything in one place. But there are also many people who don’t do that.
For those who use a reader, you can easily subscribe by clicking on the RSS icon up in your address bar or on this link.
If you don’t use a reader, there is still a very easy way for you to keep up with this blog. You can subscribe by email. Just click that link to sign up. Then, each morning the posts from the previous day will be delivered right to your inbox.
And if you don’t use an RSS reader but want to get started with one, Abraham Piper has a very helpful post on how to do that called What is RSS? A Step-by-Step Guide to Google Reader. He writes: “If you follow these instructions, you will be subscribed to your favorite sites and already saving time by the end of this article.”
Does Your Organization Have Leaders?
On Friday I posted that the essence of what a leader does is rally people to a better future.
Understood in that way, does your organization have leaders?
If not, what should you be doing about it?
What Does a Leader Do?
So much has been written on leadership, yet the concept of leadership often remains vague and unclear. The first reason for this is probably that many books on leadership are average to bad.
But even good books on leadership often fail to provide the core clarity that goes right to the heart of what leadership is. For example, Marcus Buckingham points out that the book Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence details “nineteen traits that effective leaders are supposed to possess.”
I have that book on my to read list, but now I’m afraid to read it. How are you going to keep 19 different competencies in mind? It is hard to apply such a broad spectrum in the day-to-day.
To be sure, it is helpful to understand the characteristics of something, especially leadership. There is much value in that.
But, before that, I would argue that you need to know the single, underlying core of a matter. Knowing the 19 characteristics of this or that is not going to be sufficient guidance. It’s too much — and too little — at the same time. They need to be integrated into a bigger idea.
You need to know the core of a matter so that you have a context for understanding the broader characteristics of it (in this case, leadership). So, what is the core of leadership? What is the essence of what a leader does?
Maybe the authors of Primal Leadership do this. But successful attempts at this are rare. I have seen nothing more helpful than the definition of leadership that Marcus Buckingham gives in his book The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success.
Buckingham’s definition is not simply the best of a bunch of “good but still not exactly right” attempts; it resonates. When you read his definition, you immediately get it. Finally. You have an aha moment (at least I did), and realize “that’s it — that’s what leadership is.”
So, what does a leader do? Buckingham’s answer is:
Great leaders rally people to a better future.
A great leader does not control people, he rallies them. He rallies them to realize and bring about a vision of a better future.
Buckingham especially emphasizes the future-oriented nature of leadership:
The two key words in this definition are “better future.” What defines a leader is his preoccupation with the future. In his head he carries a vivid image of what the future could be, and this image drives him on. This image, rather than, say, goals of outperforming competitors, or being individually productive, or helping others achieve success, is what motivates the leader.
Don’t misunderstand. An effective leader might also be competitive, achievement oriented, and a good coach. But these are not the characteristics that make him a leader. He is a leader if, and only if, he is able to rally others to the better future he sees. (The One Thing You Need to Know, pp 59-60.)
One last thing: This means that a leader must have a talent for optimism. If you are not an optimistic person, nobody will want to go to the future that you see. Leaders rally to a better future. “As a leader you must believe, deeply, instincitvely, that things can get better” (p. 63).
Web-Enabled TV Sets Not Too Far Away
You can already access the web on your TV through devices like the Apple TV and so forth, but this requires hooking up devices external to your TV. Now it looks like web-enbabled televisions are on the horizon, as Yahoo, TV Makers Unveil Deals to Webify the Tube:
TV and the Web are converging, but until recently most of the movement has come at the Internet end. Broadcast channels are increasingly putting current episodes online, and U.S. audiences for Web video were up 34% in November 2008 over the previous year, according to new metrics from comScore.
Now the other side of the equation is starting to move, with the announcement by Yahoo that it has lined up manufacturing partners who will build high-definition TVs that will let viewers access Yahoo online services directly from their big home screens.
At the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday Yahoo revealed that it would work with Samsung electronics, Sony, LG Electronics and Vizio to build TV sets that can access the Yahoo Widget Channel.
The new service will use factory-installed software and the Ethernet connections used to provide cable TV to connect viewers with Yahoo TV widgets, small applications they can click while watching programming to get news, weather and finance reports from Yahoo.
Another widget will let users browse through photo’s they’ve stored on Flickr, Yahoo’s photo-sharing portal.
Among non-Yahoo content, TV audiences will also be able to click on widgets that access eBay, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, Blockbuster, music service Rhapsody and the Web sites for CBS, the New York Times, USA Today and Showtime.
Present Like Steve Jobs
BNET has a good 7-minute video on giving better presentations called Present Like Steve Jobs. “While most speakers merely convey information, Jobs inspires.”
Here are the main points:
- Unveil a single headline that sets the theme. For example, “Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.”
- Provide the outline. For example, “I’ve got four things I’d like to talk to you about today. They are …”
- Open and close each section with a transition in between. Make it easy for listeners to follow your story, letting your outline serve as guideposts along the way.
- Don’t be stiff and formal. Have fun and be excited about your company, product, service.
- If you offer numbers and statistics, make them meaningful. For example, don’t just say “we’ve sold 4 million iPhones to date.” Say, “that’s 20,000 each day since it was released.”
- Make it visual. Don’t fill your slides with mind-numbing text and charts. Paint a picture for your audience without overwhelming them. Use video clips, demonstrations, and guests.
- Identify your memorable moment and build up to it.
- Rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse some more.
- Give your audience an added bonus to walk away with. “One more thing …”