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“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

– Albert Einstein

Millions of people buy a particular medicine. The disease for which the medicine is effective is one that these people have virtually no chance of catching. What do they buy?

This is a tough one. Let me know if you need a hint.

“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

“Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”

– Abraham Lincoln

Every week a woman went into the local library. If she saw a book that looked interesting, she immediately turned to page 78 before deciding whether she should borrow the book or not. Why?

www.gasbuddy.com has Javascript you can add to do a zip lookup for gas prices. There are several options available to add links to your site. Props to Stacey for sending this on. Check out the GAS Temp page too – it rocks. After Chuck went to the site to get up to speed on it he noticed they had several scripts that would enable embedding. See below for the zip look-up example:

Search for gas prices by US Zip Code

Imagine this integrated on sites where people are doing trip routing and we know the zip they are traveling to. We could display the price of gas. Or even more simply, just show the top 10 place to get gas in their local neighborhood. Pretty cool huh. Chuck is going to look into the top 10 and let us know.

I attended the PDMA a couple weeks ago and Jim Perdiew was kind enough to pass out a couple books to the attendees. “A Technique for Producing Ideas” by James Webb Young was one of those books. It is a 40-50 page read that is very simple and insightful. It describes the steps one of the great advertising copy writing minds of our time used for producing his ideas. The book outlines 5 steps to producing ideas. They are:

1. The Gathering of Materials - both the materials of your immediate problem and the materials which come from a constant enrichment of your store of general knowledge.
2. Working Over the Materials – Simply thinking about all the materials you have gathered and how that relates to your general knowledge.
3. Incubating Stage – This is what most of the world gets wrong. This is when you stop thinking about it all together. Go do something else that consumes your conscious thought and let your subconscious work it out. The underlying wisdom buried beneath your own personal thinking will deliver the answer when you least expect it. Just don’t think about it.
4. The Birth of the Idea – The Eureka Moment!
5. Final Shaping and Development – This the cold grey dawn of the morning after. This is when you take your fledgling idea out into the world of reality and learn maybe it wasn’t so marvelous. But stick with it, be patient and see if it grows. Many an idea is lost at this moment. Let others contibute and mold it. If it is truly a good idea it will resonate and begin to grow.

I have a copy in my office if anybody would like to learn more.

I had to share this, be sure to watch it to the end for the binary solo. Toooooo funny. They have an HBO series.

What kind of a boss would I really be if I didn’t make sure to share this precious moment with the world?

“He who knows others is learned;
He who knows himself is enlightened. “

- Lao Tzu

“Better to be quiet and appear ignorant than open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

  - Mark Twain

I subscribe the MIT Journal so if anybody wants to read the full article let me know. Excerpt from the article below:

“There is a new wave of business communication tools including blogs, wikis and group messaging software — which the author has dubbed, collectively, Enterprise 2.0 — that allow for more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. These new tools, the author contends, may well supplant other communication and knowledge management systems with their superior ability to capture tacit knowledge, best practices and relevant experiences from throughout a company and make them readily available to more users. This article offers a paradigm that highlights the salient characteristics of these new technologies, which the author refers to as SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals). The resulting organizational communication patterns can lead to highly productive and highly collaborative environments by making both the practices of knowledge work and its outputs more visible. Drawing on case studies and survey data, the article offers managers a set of ground rules for implementing the new technologies. Continue reading »