Godbey Works: Big Idea Part Deux

Mack Miles is a guest blogger for godbeyworks.com. He describes his column and himself:

My column Look and Feel is just that. Stories about how things look and feel — usually with a business twist. I rant, I rave, I give advice and most importantly, I look at things and react to them. After spending thirty years in the field of the visual arts I have assumed this as my calling. It's what I get hired to do. I love it and am very passionate about it.

clipped from www.godbeyworks.com This article is going to be an update to the August 2006 article BIG IDEA. Since preparing that story I have run across several more examples of big ideas, but these have a twist. They are all very heavy on the big idea and light on the budget (although as you will see, some do spend money). They feature the product (or their talent) in a clever way - presenting the use - theatrically, stressing the advantage creatively or coupling the product with something from everyday life in such a way as to make it stand out, endear you to it and promote it. These last few are a different approach and as I found, the web offers up a multitude of examples of very creative ideas on small budgets. Just do a Google search for that! One woman used the top of her refrigerator http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com like a dry erase board to create a website promoting her book. It is very creative, has a surprise, makes you laugh and I wanted to read every page.

Race in a Bottle

Drugmakers are eager to develop medicines targeted at ethnic groups, but so far they have made poor choices based on unsound science. By Jonathan Kahn

clipped from sciam.com Two years ago, on June 23, 2005, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first “ethnic” drug. Called BiDil (pronounced “bye-dill”), it was intended to treat congestive heart failure—the progressive weakening of the heart muscle to the point where it can no longer pump blood efficiently—in African-Americans only. The approval was widely declared to be a significant step toward a new era of personalized medicine, an era in which pharmaceuticals would be specifically designed to work with an individual’s particular genetic makeup. Known as pharmacogenomics, this approach to drug development promises to reduce the cost and increase the safety and efficacy of new therapies. BiDil was also hailed as a means to improve the health of African-Americans, a community woefully underserved by the U.S. medical establishment. Organizations such as the Association of Black Cardiologists and the Congressional Black Caucus strongly supported the drug’s approval.

"Benefits & Pitfalls of Metaphors & Syntopical Readings" or "Why We Have a Library"

Books sure are pretty.

And, they make people look smart.

But the books are a vital part of our tool set for helping teams think faster, better and more creativelier [spell check did NOT like that word!].

Here are some resources giving the background of how other organizations use metaphorical reading, research outside their subject areas, and their own libraries as tools and methods for innovation in business.

Syntopical Reading… Intelligent Dialog
Mortimor Adler developed the term and method called Syntopical Reading in How To Read A Book [rbtfBook]. The idea is to read many books at the same time - on a given subject - and aggressively dialoging with the authors. First, you see things this way that otherwise would not be revealed. In addition, it is possible to read a set of books, that together, bring information and insight to a subject that none of them, singularly, cover. by Matt Taylor

The Syntopicon as an Instrument of Liberal Education
The Syntopicon serves the end of liberal education to the extent that it facilitates the reading of the great books and, beyond that, the study and teaching of them. To make the nature of this educational contribution clear, it is necessary to distinguish between the integral and the syntopical reading of great books. by Mortimer Adler. Ph.D.

The Fruitful Flaws of Strategy Metaphors
Harvard Business Review | It’s tempting to draw business lessons from other disciplines—warfare, biology, music. But most managers do it badly. Instead of being seduced by the similarities between business and another field, you need to look for places where the metaphor breaks down. by Tihamér von Ghyczy

Unearth Growth by Digging in the Dirt
Fast Company | Everything you need to know about innovation is growing (and dying) in a garden near you. So forget balanced scorecards, six sigma and SWOT analysis and read this instead. by Richard Watson

Fast Company: Unearth Growth by Digging in the Dirt

by Richard Watson

Everything you need to know about innovation is growing (and dying) in a garden near you. So forget balanced scorecards, six sigma and SWOT analysis and read this instead.

clipped from www.fastcompany.com There is an element of business, which, as far as I know, has never been written about. Business is like gardening. That’s right; growing a business is like growing a tree. I know this sounds flaky, and I’ve probably lost many of you at this point, but for those of you that remain, consider this: most metaphors about business are about sport or war. This is useful, but the fatal floor in these analogies is that both have an end point in the immediate future. Moreover, the objective of both is to defeat a clearly defined enemy. Aims and outcomes are always fairly clear. The feeling in most organizations like these is that business is a mechanical process. In this context the analogies of war and sport are very apt. It’s all about pre-planned strategies, resources and control within a fairly fixed environment or known set of rules. But real life doesn’t work quite like that does it? We cannot control everything and it is egotistical to think that we can.

GoogleHealth Screen Shots

Move over small-time EMR Guys,.. the Googlemeister is doing a cannonball in the pool.

clipped from blogoscoped.com Google Health, codename “Weaver”, is Google’s planned health information storage program. Google’s Vice President of Engineering Adam Bosworth lobbies for the program for quite a while now. Adam said the current US health care system is challenged when it comes to “supporting caregivers and communicating between different medical organizations.” Adam went on to say that people “need the medical information that is out there and available to be organized and made accessible to all ... Health information should be easier to access and organize, especially in ways that make it as simple as possible to find the information that is most relevant to a specific patient’s needs.” Adam adds that this – making information accessible – happens to be along Google’s mission. The New York Times today writes that “about 20 percent of the [US] patient population have computerized records

You Are Responsible for Your Child’s Creativity

From GodbeyWorks:

Back to School
by Diana Long, Ed.D.

The summer flies by. Already the Back-to-School ads are dominating television and newspaper advertisements. Memorial Day gives way to the 4th of July in a blink of an eye. Labor Day is the official mindset end of summer and many kids go back into the classroom well before the holiday.

GodbeyWorks is a company that is promoting and yes, screaming for the public to pay attention to development activities that promote entrepreneurship, development of creative jobs, design and value added products and services. The recent “white paper” by Vision Shared, Culture, Creativity and Innovation, West Virginia in the New Economy, recommends actions to government, education and business to encourage such development. Taking the responsibility down to a personal level, I gathered thoughts on this question, “How do parents encourage the creative development of their own children?” more >>

Ballmer Monkeyboy iPod Mashup

Sent by David "Monkey Mind" Owens:

Original source video of Steve "Raging Bull" Ballmer. \

Select mash-ups:

• Young Dr. Frankenstein's Puttin' on the Ritz
• Adolf Ballmer
  

Best comment posted on YouTube: "Why don't you shoot a .44 Magnum into a pillow, vent out some of that anger."

E-Base: Leadership on the Edge of Antarctica

2041.com was founded by explorer, adventurer, lecturer Robert Swan, OBE, the first man to walk to both the North and South poles. Swan has dedicated his life to the preservation of the Antarctic wilderness and promoting recycling, renewable energy and sustainability to combat the effects of global warming. see video

clipped from www.2041.com The E-Base is a sustainable green building operated in an environmental and resource efficient manner. The materials which were very carefully selected include recycled and renewable resources. It is believed that a cornerstone of sustainable design is to retain as many resources as possible within a community however, there are no building materials produced or indigenous supplies available in Antarctica. All of the building materials chosen are sustainable products and include, structurally insulated panels from WinterPanel, 100 percent post consumer recycled rubber interior flooring from EcoSurfaces and an energy star watertight blanket with low VOCs for the roof and siding from Metacrylics. THE E-BASE GOES LIVE In 2008, Swan and a small team will live in the E-Base for two weeks demonstrating the use of the renewable and sustainable technologies. Their daily actvities will be covered on this website and transmitted 'live' around the world throughout their stay.

Fast Company: Design meet Business: "Business, this is… Design"

by Mark Dziersk

Business people need to develop a better understanding of design, form partnerships between themselves and creativity, and apply strategy to design thinking, in order to compete effectively today.

This article shares 6 tips "to help navigate thoroughly confusing waters."

1. Design Strategy…an oxymoron?
2. The world is upside down, embrace it.
3. Invent new training, train thyself
4. Understand your DNA
5. Visualize strategy
6. No PPTs. Tell stories

clipped from www.fastcompany.com As an accomplished businessperson you probably know a lot about strategy and little about creativity. Creativity is the key to innovation. And, if innovation is (as testified almost everywhere these days) the Midas touch for business today, understanding creativity involves a lot more than orchestrating regimented processes. Most businesses are run by adding columns of numbers, and led by financially motivated business managers armed with…. strategies. If creativity is the fuel that brings innovation to life, then strategy is the mirror equivalent for business. Visual thinking, storytelling, DNA, and adaptable processes all help enormously. For designers today, a good understanding of the" business comfort zone" with ideas and concepts is a tool as powerful as any Alias rendering or beautifully executed aesthetic prototype. Creativity is the currency, but the strategic foundation is equally important.

Fast Compnay Sketch Pad: Elizabeth Arden

This series from the business innovation mag shows how the creative process works -- from brainstorming to sketches, color and font selection and webdesign.

clipped from www.fastcompany.com The spa for ladies who lunch goes for younger, more contemporary women with a new line of hair-care products. The brand-identity designers at Alexander Isley Inc. created the packaging to speak to that audience.

Xerox's inventor-in-chief

An innovation revival has lifted profits to $1.2 billion. Fortune's Geoff Colvin asks CTO Sophie Vandebroek: Can the company keep it up?

There has been much ado about Hillary's appearance on Fortune Magazine's cover in July, but what caught my eye was this interview with Xerox's chief innovator.

The company's smart document technology holds much promise for the paper-glutted medical field.

clipped from money.cnn.com One key to the turnaround: Xerox has become an innovation power again, producing new technologies that can read, understand, route, and protect documents, among other things. Leading that effort is Vandebroek, 45, the company's chief technology officer since late 2005. Her task is to keep Xerox at the leading edge of infotech progress in ways that make shareholders richer. Born and raised in Belgium, Vandebroek has a doctorate in electrical engineering from Cornell; she first joined Xerox in 1991. Before an invited audience in New York City, she talked with Fortune's Geoff Colvin about the difference between invention and innovation; why Xerox employs anthropologists; how to make girls passionate about engineering; and much else. Edited excerpts:

'Green' Tech Shops Have a Way to Go

As the use of HIT rises, so does the need to conserve it's direct and indirect costs: electricity and the unhealthy methods we produce it.

clipped from news.wired.com A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the easiest, least inexpensive changes to data center operations - involving tweaks to software, layout and air conditioning - could boost efficiency by 20 percent. But even that level of improvement would still lead to higher overall electric use in the coming years. Going further, and actually reducing information-technology's strain on the electric grid, will require a more aggressive commitment. The EPA says 45 percent improvement - enough to lower electricity usage by 2011 - can be achieved with existing technologies.) For example, almost all the energy that goes into the air conditioning systems is used to run giant chillers that make the air pumped through the rooms' raised floors a brisk 55 degrees or so, sometimes as low as the 40s. Such extremely cold air is blasted in to guarantee that no single server's temperature gets much above the optimum level, which is around 70 degrees.

eHealthRisk: The Human Factor

The eHealthRisk blog is a forum for examining privacy, security, safety, project and business risks associated with the application of information and telecommunications technologies to health care.

clipped from ehealthrisk.blogspot.com The Human Factor Without question the best book I've read about human factors engineering and the issues that arise when we put human beings and technology together is The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way We Live With Technology by Kim Vicente. Vicente has written a very readable and fascinating book drawing on real life experiences from the aviation, nuclear, health care and other high risk industries. The book is organized around the "Human-Tech Ladder" which describes a hierarchy of relationships that explains why things sometimes go wrong when humans and technology mix. The ladder looks at the following factors: Physical - Size, shape, location weight, colour, material Psychological - Information content/structure, cause/effect relations Team - Authority, communications patterns, responsibilities Organizational - Corporate culture, reward structures, staffing levels Political - Policy agenda, budget allocations, laws, regulations

Health IT Blogs All Mapped Out

This is a helpful exercise to track patterns of how bloggers piece together opinions into folksonomies.

clipped from healthtech.accordingtome.com What does the healthcare blogosphere look like? That is, how are all the healthcare IT blogs interconnected? To begin to answer this question, we’ll need some idea of the composition of health IT blogs. Fortunately we have HITSphere, a growing list of about healthcare IT blogs (now numbering about 50.)

Creativity Pure and Applied in Social Enterprise

Whether starting up a new design firm or unlocking the power of nanotechnology, creativity in business is key. But how do we move from idea to practical implementation? Join the conversation.

clipped from www.socialedge.org In a recent comment on The Edge, Prof. Ravi Arapurakal suggested there are two types of creativity, viz: creativity for generating anything new, and creativity for fulfilling a purpose. I'd like to rename those, Creativity Pure and Applied, and discuss them both here, getting into some tips and techniques. Applied creativity is creativity that is pointed in the direction of problem solving, where the problem is known in advance. Pure creativity is free-roaming, and typically introduces materials we are aware of but haven't brought into consciousness -- often in response to some deep-seated concern or issue that has been "in the back of our mind" for some time.

d.light design

From SocialEdge:

Meet Sam Goldman, the ultimate social entrepreneur. A former Peace Corps volunteer in Benin who grew up in Mauritania, Pakistan, Peru, India and Rwanda, he studied biology and environmental studies in Canada and received his MBA from Stanford.

He just launched d.light, the social venture that received best honors at the recent Global Social Venture Competition held at the University of California at Berkeley. (see video of his story)

Sam wants to provide a source of light that is safe and cheap, a decision he made when his neighbor’s son in Benin was badly burned by a kerosene lamp.

Watch Sam as he explains his goals to Global X. And read “let there d.light,” his new blog, only on Social Edge.

clipped from www.dlightdesign.com 2 Billion people in the world currently live without access to electricity. They rely on kerosene and candles for their lighting needs. These sources of light are expensive, hazardous and polluting. We believe that in an era of unprecedented technological growth, we can bring light, safety and prosperity to millions of hardworking households. We want to make kerosene lanterns a part of history, where they belong.

Morality: Your Inner Chimp

A fantastic podcast aired on April 28, 2007 and profiled on Chicago's WBEZ This American Life. Listen to more on the Science of Morality.

Turns out, when faced with moral dilemmas, there is a band of chimps in our brains, duking it out. And it requires some alpha chimp arbitration!

clipped from www.wnyc.org Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? We peer inside the brains of people contemplating moral dilemmas, watch chimps at a primate research center share blackberries, observe a playgroup of 3 year-olds fighting over toys, and tour the country's first penitentiary, Eastern State Prison. Also: the story of land grabbing, indentured servitude and slum lording in the fourth grade. Then we'll move from inner chimp to outer. Dr. Frans de Waals lets us watch a chimp fight at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. And we'll turn our navel-gazing toward the furrier navels of the chimps to learn a little more about this thing called morality: where it comes from, its evolutionary benefit, and why you can't guilt-trip an ape.

Tomsitis: Every time you see a child, you want to give them a pair of shoes

Stumbled across this on Seth Godin's blog. A great model for social enterprise.

Buy one get one free

Brice points us to TOMS Shoes.

I like several things about this approach. The simplicity of the offer, first of all. If you buy a pair of these very inexpensive shoes, he gives a pair to a kid in the developing world for free. No fine print.

Second, Tom has turned the shoe into a souvenir. A post-modern shoe, a shoe for people who don't need shoes, but are happy to wear a statement. This isn't the first pair of shoes most Americans will buy, it might not even be the tenth. But it will be one that people talk about when they're wearing it.

The founder (and chief shoe dropper) is Blake Mycoskie, who, by age 30, has done more than most suburban-bred Texas kids.

From a Jan. 26, 2007 article in Time Magazine, A Shoe That Fits So Many Souls by Nadia Mustafa:

Blake Mycoskie wanted to get away from it all. After founding and running four businesses and losing by a sliver on The Amazing Race, he escaped last January to Argentina, where he learned to sail, dance the tango and play competitive polo. He also visited impoverished villages where few, if any, children had shoes. "I was sitting on a field on a farm one day, and I had an epiphany," says Mycoskie, who had taken to wearing alpargatas--resilient, lightweight slip-on shoes with a breathable canvas top and soft leather insole traditionally worn by Argentine workers. "I said, I'm going to start a shoe company, and for every pair I sell, I'm going to give one pair to a kid in need."

Blake returned to Argentina in October of 2006 with a couple of dozen volunteers to give away 10,000 pairs of Toms shoes along 2,200 miles of countryside. "I always thought I'd spend the first half of my life making money and the second half giving it away," says Mycoskie, who calls himself not ceo but chief shoe giver. "I never thought I could do both at the same time."

See video of Tom's 2006 Agentina Shoe Drop.

They Sure Don't Make Comic Books Like They Used To : Virgin Comics

From Fast Company :

"'If you told parents ten years ago in America that their children would know characters named Yu Gi Oh! and Pokemon as well as they would Spider-Man, those parents would have thought you were crazy -- yet in America today an estimated 30% of major children's animated programming is now Japanese animation,' states Sharad Devarajan, CEO of the New York headquartered Virgin Comics and Animation.

It is the recognition of this ease with which anime transcended its initial status as merely a cult phenomenon outside Japan that formed a fundamental impetus behind the founding of Devarajan's company about two years ago.

Positioning itself to redefine the comic book industry, Virgin Comics touts its mission as the creation of global comic properties that take their basis and inspiration from the east, particularly India, in a manner that resonates with both western and larger eastern audiences alike. It is the progeny of Sharad Devarajan and Suresh Seetharaman -- co-founders of another comic book company, Gotham Entertainment Group in 1997-- along with writer Deepak Chopra and acclaimed director Shekhar Kapur."

Crowley Caught a Wild Swarm of Bees

Alphachimp graphic facilitator Steph Crowley is now the proud mamma of two families of bee colonies. We received this email from here about her adventures in bee keeping:

Hello fellow nature geeks! : )

If you're interested, I caught a wild swarm of bees not too long ago that had set up a temporary residence in our front walkway to our house. I was happy to see them, but the neighbors were not. A swarm of bees is a big cluster of bees looking for a new home, with their queen hiding out in the middle of the cluster.

They're very gentle at this point because they're homeless and have nothing to protect. So I caught them and gave them a proper home in a new hive in the backyard. Anyhow, if you want to see photos and a video I shot while hiving the swarm of bees, feel free to take a look at my bee photo webpage!

Enjoy!