Born to Learn is the first animation in a fascinating series aimed to provide easy-access to the exciting new discoveries constantly being made about how humans learn!

What if working to help others also helped you?  Simon Sinek, leadership expert and author believes just that.

In the video embedded above Sinek says:

• People are looking for a community or culture.  Community is defined as a group of people with a common set of values and beliefs.
• When you are surrounded by people who believe what you believe, something interesting happens: trust.  Our very survival depends on trust doesn’t it?
• You find and create communities of like minded individuals by going out and meeting people.
• Every decision you make is a piece of communication.  This is why you have to say and do things you believe.
• The things you say and do are symbols of who you are. People look for symbols similar to what they are looking for.
• Whatever you say and do will attract people with similar behavior, whether intended or not. Say and do what you actually believe.
• People want to work for companies and work for clients who believe what they believe.  They want to show up and contribute, or feel a part of something bigger than themselves.
• People use symbols and graphics to say who they are, or what they represent.  We put company logos on us to show we believe in, or we are part of something.  We wear logos and colors to represent who we are.  When people respect your company they will show it in various ways.  When was the last time you saw a dirty Mac?
• In order to feel truly fulfilled you need to do something good for someone else. Generosity is doing something for someone else and expecting nothing in return.

This is also similar to the idea of the movie Pay it Forward where a teacher challenges his class to change the world and put it into action.

Now let’s discuss what it means to be communicators.  We communicate to express an idea, or a thought.  We communicate to ask a question, or to get a better understanding of the world around us.  As communicators it is our job to help inform, as well as to ask questions.  If our communications are one sided, meaning we are simply doing all the talking and no listening, how engaged are you in the conversation?  If you are asking those who you are communicating with to do something and ask nothing in return, I wonder how likely it is for others to do anything for you.

In the new world of digital media, everyone is a communicator and everyone needs, or wants to be heard. Whether you are communicating via print, web, video, email, voicemail, 1:1 meetings, 1:many meetings, or via phone, we are all communicating to seek knowledge, to ask questions.  We are likely also communicating to seek community so make sure what you are communicating is generating the desired result.  The world is about relationships, connecting with others, and helping others.

So now let me ask you this: How are you going to put this idea into action in your personal and professional lives?

“You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.” – Winston Churchill

My Notes:

• Learned to speak English through Scooby Doo and Price is Right
• Learned why Gary became a Jets Fan
• When you are 12 and you have 10k under your bed and you are not selling weed, you are doing a good job.
• Set up a lemonade stand, collected/sold baseball cards, and then it clicked that collecting wine and being an expert in it was his next ticket.
• ’98-’05 Grew from a 4 to a 45 million dollar business
• The Thank You Economy is about listening.  Start listening and don’t do so much talking.
• People used to spend millions of dollars doing focus groups.  Now people are doing it for free and it isn’t biased (not in a focus group room etc).
• You don’t go back to what hurt you (Charlie Sheen > more cocaine).
• We just lived through the big box era, we are going to an era where people go to where there is a relationship.

What did I miss?  What do you think?

My notes/quotes from the video…

• There is a revolution in software going on now.  Simulated learning environments: You can’t give students expensive lab environments for their tests but you can simulate them on the PC.
• More important than building a product, we are in the process of architecting a company that will hopefully be much more incredible than the sum of its parts.
• One of the things that made Apple great was in its early days it was built from the heart.That is like a bomb run, you don’t change your target when you are on a bomb run.
• There needs to be someone who is the “keeper or reiterator” of the vision because there is just a ton of work and a lot of times when you have to walk a thousand miles, when you take the first step, it looks like a long ways.  It helps when there is someone there saying “we are one step closer”.  The goal definitely exists, it isn’t just a mirage out there.  So in a thousand and one little ways, the vision needs to be reiterated.  I do that a lot.

Source: http://awesome.good.is/transparency/web/1107/overworked/flat.html

John Lasseter: Chief Creative Officer, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation StudiosPrincipal Creative Advisor, Walt Disney Imagineering

John Lasseter is a two-time Academy Award®-winning director and oversees all films and associated projects from Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. He directed the groundbreaking and award-winning films Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2 and Cars.  Additionally, his executive producing credits include Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL•E, Bolt, and last year’s critically acclaimed Up, which enjoyed the distinct honor of opening the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and was awarded two Academy Awards® for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score. Lasseter also served as executive producer for Disney’s Oscar®-nominated The Princess and the Frog, a musical comedy set in the great city of New Orleans, as well as Disney•Pixar’s most recent critical and box office hit, Toy Story 3, which is based on a story by Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich.

I read this June Inc. Magazine article last weekend and wanted to share it with all of you.  I love sharing so this article obviously resonated with me and I hope it does with you as well.  The article is quite long so I tried to reduce it to just the “meaty parts” but as you can see it was difficult.  The link to the full article is below if you want to read through it in its entirety.

Is your life going sideways? Former Yahoo executive Tim Sanders shares his personal advice on escaping the rut and how confidence can fast-track your career.

By Dave Smith | Jun 15, 2011

How to Fast Forward Your Goals

• Sanders’ latest book, Today We Are Rich, describes how to break out of the doldrums and power your career forward. Feeling stuck in neutral is a common sentiment among entrepreneurs, but Sanders believes to have found the perfect recipe for lasting achievement and happiness. To Sanders, the key to everlasting business success all boils down to one word: confidence.
• There are two kinds: there’s circumstantial confidence—or, as Mark Cuban used to always say, “Everyone’s a genius during a bull market”—and there’s cultivated confidence, a lifestyle design principle that has to do with the information you put in your head, the conversation that comes out of your mouth, and your thoughts and deeds.
• Why do people have sideways years?
  Success isn’t really a destination, because you’ll never get there. Talk to anyone with millions or billions, they’re always thinking of the next thing. Success is a direction, and that direction is forward. And in our careers, we have those forward leap years. These are years where we either grow internally, in terms of our capability, or externally, in terms of our influence and ability to extract value. So when you’re moving forward, you’re usually capturing a lot of financial value, you’re gaining a lot of assets along the way—many of them intangible, such as intellectual or your network of relationships—and you have a feeling inside yourself that you have big momentum. And it feeds on itself: The more you realize it, the more you feel it, the more it improves your performance, the more you get it, the more you leverage, and that’s how people really make leaps in life.
• Then there are those times that something has just gone haywire in your head, and you have self-destructive thoughts, and you go backwards in your career. And that’s rare, really; most people that think they’re going backwards are kind of in between, and those are what we call those “sideways years.”
• Sideways years is where you have voices in your head sometimes, and they’re triggered by voices in the real world, or what I call the “scare merchants”—on cable TV, the authors of “USA Yesterday”—these people that give you reason to be fearful as a way of drawing attention from you. What it does is it triggers the scarcity mindset inside of you. You believe there’s not enough to go around, so you go from that I’m-trying-to-move-forward feeling into survival mode. Or, you just lose your fire and you don’t have the ambition to move forward, as Napoleon Hill would say.

• You created a set of seven principles to give your life a new trajectory, to get out of those sideways years. Of those principles, which one had the greatest impact on your life?
  [The principle] “Give to be rich” has had the most impact on me, because nothing sets you in a forward motion more than generosity. What generosity does is it focuses the mind on what you have, and not what you lack. Generosity forces that kind of thinking, because you’ll typically never give to someone who’s got more than you. So when you’re being a mentor to somebody who’s struggling at work or in a transition period and you see that you helped to move the needle, it helps you realize how insignificant your problems are.
• The other thing generosity does at a more physical level is it triggers the reward center in your brain, which releases a variety of chemicals. When you help and you realize you’re helping, it creates a chemical reaction which would unload things like dopamine and endorphins and serotonins. The most important thing that happens is your body will release a hormone called oxytosin. Oxytosin is known as the bonding hormone: It changes your point of view about people a little bit, and it makes you much more sympathetic and emphatic.
• For entrepreneurs, this is important. Your ability to bond with your customers, bond with your start-up employees, and trust them is the key to everything, because you can’t scale, if you can’t trust. You can’t scale a consumer business if you don’t trust consumers to give back more than you give them—ask Tony Hsieh at Zappos, incredible level of trust he has. You can’t create a great place to work like Herb Kelleher and Colleen Barrett did at Southwest [Airlines] if you don’t trust your people enough to say, “The customer is not always right.” Trust is difficult to create, but I have seen in the best entrepreneur circles that the most trusting are always the most giving. There’s just something about helping other people that causes you to realize that all people are good.
• I want an entrepreneur to think that every time you have an opportunity to either educate, mentor, or network someone who’s got less than you but the same desire, you should consider yourself mastering your mind. Henry Ford once said that was really the secret to his success, is that he conquered his mind. One of the greatest ways you conquer your mind is by giving, because you release things that don’t own you anymore—[André] Gide, the French philosopher, always said, “That which you can’t release, it possesses you.” I always encourage people to stockpile stuff just so you can give it away, and that you should spend prospecting time every week trying to find good opportunities and be aggressive about it. It’s not a social responsibility; it’s a social opportunity.
• If you looked at every recession since 1901, you always see entrepreneurs or organizations make great leaps during this down cycle before the recovery hits. In that tepid period, like we are right now and have been for the last two years, they always say that you’re three times more likely to make it during that period than a market top.
• In 1932, Kellogg’s makes the move and jumps over Post after being the Yahoo! of search engines, and they do it because they release Rice Krispies in 1932 against all recommendations. They understood that the technicals were strong for a promotion of a new cereal, there was still market demand, that one slice of CPG wasn’t dead in the water, and they knew Post was going to sit around and ask themselves, “Is the Depression over?”
• In 2001, the worst idea ever is to release the iPod when the dot-com crash was clearly on and Apple was taking a beating in the market. [Steve] Jobs noticed, though, that Sony, as a big slow company would be freaked out as much as he was, and they wouldn’t respond for a year or two. He really had to make that bet at that time because everybody had a Sony Walkman; if you told me that Apple would own the personal music device space in less than 24 months, I would’ve told you it had to be perfect timing. He had to do this when no one was watching, and that’s exactly what he did, and he did it again with the iPad.
• Yes. Stan Woodward was my boss at AudioNet/Broadcast.com, and I remember the first day Stan came on the job taking over business services for [Mark] Cuban. He gets us up in the crow’s nest and he says, “Listen, there’s no such thing as the self-made man. It’s just not true, it’s arrogance. You can neither do this by yourself nor enjoy this by yourself. The other thing you have to remember is your dream is bigger than you, so don’t go down alone. Swallow your pride, and go get help.” I’ll never forget that, and that’s the true entrepreneurial spirit.
• If there’s only one thing you hope readers take away from your book, what would it be?
  There’s enough to go around. There’s enough to share. The only way you’re going to believe this is through confidence, but when you believe there’s enough to go around and you share in that moment, you’re worth something. This point of view, “enough to share,” is the secret to success in personal life and in business life.

Source: http://www.inc.com/articles/201106/how-to-fast-forward-your-goals_Printer_Friendly.html

White Water Ahead!
Navigating the Speed of Change

Q: What white water do you see ahead for you and your team? And how will you navigate through it?

A: I was watching Deadliest Catch last night, yes I like that show, and one of the captains was encountering 20-30 foot waves due to a massive storm.  He said the only way to get through rough waters is to push the engine as hard as it can go (full throttle) into the wave, otherwise the wave controls you.  Whether it is communications or any other profession, you have to be prepared for the rough waters ahead of you; and when those rough times come you have to be ready to give it your all.  The best way to do that in my mind is to watch communication, business, and technology trends. In the nautical world looking for trends is keeping your eyes and ears open to changing conditions.  Things like reading maps, learning about tides, wind speed, and listening to weather reports are just some of the ways you can prepare yourself for changing conditions.  If you aren’t looking and listening to the trends around you, your vessel may not be able to weather the storm.  I’d also say whenever possible make sure you have a clear strategy for where you are looking to go and have a good team on board with you.  If your craft leaves port without a plan for where you are headed there is a very good chance you and your crewmates will be lost at sea.

Jeremy

Some fantastic quotes from the video…

“I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.” — Henry Ford

“The act of creation is surrounded by a fog of myths. Myths that creativity comes via inspiration. That original creations break the mold. That they’re the products of geniuses. And appear as quickly as electricity can heat a filament. But creativity isn’t magic. It happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials. And the soil from which we grow our creations is something we scorn and misunderstand even though it gives us so much. And that’s copying. Put simply copying is how we learn. We can’t introduce anything new until we’re fluent in the language of our domain and we do that through emulation. For instance all artists spend their formative producing derivative work.”

I’m not a huge fan of the quality of McDonald’s food but sometimes the golden arches have a tractor beam that pulls me in with a force that is very difficult to resist. Part of why I think I think I still like McDonald’s is because of my memories as a child. Back then I wouldn’t have ever stepped foot into a Burger King, Jack in the Box, or Wendy’s if it had been up to me. I now prefer burgers from Fudruckers or Five Guys but noticed about a year ago Tyler started recognizing company brands wherever we went. I’m obviously loyal to Safeway and shop there frequently so Tyler learned to recognize Safeway and its trucks on the roads quickly. I have always loved Starbucks since I was introduced to coffee in college and Tyler knows that brand because I frequent their establishment and his mom and I have exchanged custody in their parking lot quite a bit.

What is interesting to me now raising a child is what companies are, and are not doing with regard to marketing to children.  I have taken particular interest in McDonald’s marketing strategy because they are masters of catering to youth and thus older demographics. I’m a big fan of ice cream so on a nice hot day a McDonald’s shake is awesome.  Not to mention the Shamrock Shakes around St. Patrick’s Day, but I digress.  How is your company’s marketing to younger demographics?  McDonald’s is a master of marketing to children, their happy meals and “Play Places” are brilliant.  Whether you are a retailer, technology company, church, or politician you can’t forget about youth if you want to compete and stay relevant long term.

• A few ways you can market to children
  • Children’s menus
  • Seating area for children
  • Play area for children
  • Carts for children to push around your store, or ride in
  • Those gumball machines at the “choke points” in every store, the entrance/exit
  • Free cookies or goodies.  Give away a cookie but mom and dad have to go into the department to get it which usually leads to them looking for other goodies for themselves which aren’t free.  It is the drug dealer tactic, I’ll give you this one for free and I know you will want more
  • Internships
  • Commercials
  • DVDs that come with toys which has taught Tyler all about “Imaginex”
  • Candy and toys in the checkstands
  • Don’t forget about your employees either.  Daycare at your facility while mom or dad are working is one of the best ways to retain talent.  Lunch with the kid(s) increases work/life balance, even if it is just for an hour.

What are some other strategies you’ve seen?  Any other ideas or thoughts?

@Om was nice enough to reply to my question on Quora.com.  In case you never saw the show, you can check out the archives over at http://revision3.com/gigaom.  I liked the show because I’d like to think I’m a geeky business guy and the show always gave some great insight into a lot of great companies.

Get your ideas off the ground with Idea Flight. Idea Flight is the only tool you need to share presentations, documents and designs, and drive the experience for your audience easily from your iPad. More engagement. More control. One great idea. Yours. Learn more…

Apple overtook Google this year as the most powerful brand in the world.  One of my favorite brands, Starbucks had a strong year with a 40% change vs. 2010 but nothing like Facebook who entered the list with a 246% change.

Homepage
http://www.millwardbrown.com/BrandZ/Default.aspx

I commented on a LinkedIn discussion board comment/question today and wanted to share it.

Q:

The alpha version of qwiki (search engine that builds interactive videos on the fly) is pretty exciting. What do you think a corporate version could do to juice up employee or investor communications?

A:

Engaging content is definitely the future. You want to know the interesting thing in my mind though? Everyone says content is king and I agree. Corporations can have great tools, but only if they have great content. If you are interested try and remind me to talk with you in about a month. I’ll need to get clearance to show it to you but we are working on a knowledge sharing tool within the company and it has some really interesting social gaming aspects to it.

My hope is in the coming years we can use these types of tools as a basis for merit increases and performance reviews. That type of thinking is counter culture to many organizations but social tools can help break down information silos and encourage collaboration like never before. They “can” also show you who your team players are in the organization meaning those who are helping others and not just themselves. If we reward and recognize via virtual currency and in the future provide monetary incentives, it will be very interesting to see what happens as a result. Whether you have a LinkedIn discussion board, a blog, or a survey people are busy and often hesitant to share.

Want to see a dramatic increase in our discussion board usage? Send out a message to membership telling them if they post at least one comment or post on the discussion board they will get 25% (50%, 75%, 100%…whatever) off their next conference fee. My point is some people will share but many will do so only when rewarded or recognized.

The other interesting thing I like about Qwiki is they are using it as a platform. I was fascinated by what they are looking at as a future alarm clock (see video link below). I’d imagine it won’t be too many more years before our bathroom mirrors are huge rear projection touch sensitive screens which let us see news, weather, or any other gadget/widget we want to subscribe to. Same thing with the business world. I’d imagine it won’t be long before E-ink type screens will allow us to have constantly updated information presented to us to interact with throughout the day. But we can only have these tools if we have the content which means employees will need to write and contribute that content.

Watch the whole video or forward to 4 mins in:

I’m probably overstating things aren’t I? Resumes aren’t dead just yet but I see video and online porfolios/blogs as a much more engaging way for people to market themselves in the professional world. As powerful as these new tools are, why aren’t more people using blogs, portfolios, and video to market themselves to prospective employers? Similarly, why are so few employers satisfied with receiving a sheet or two of paper, or a PDF/.Doc file, that doesn’t contain links to digital content in the 21st century?

Rob Pitingolo for instance created the video below which helps him more creatively highlight his work experience, but it also gives employers insight into his passion and creative abilities.  Rob wrote an interesting post a while ago on “where smart people live“.  I liked it so much I started following him via his RSS feed. If you don’t have a presence online you are quickly falling behind. On Rob’s blog (http://robpitingolo.org/) you can view his resume, a video resume, his LinkedIn profile, as well as blog posts to show writing samples. Compare what Rob has done below with the resume above. What is going to rule in the future? It can’t be a boring resume right?

With everything going electronic will we find static resumes replacing engaging and dynamic ones? Jump ahead 10 years from now and I’m sure we all will agree “dead trees” (aka books) will mostly be a thing of the past and dynamic and engaging media will dominate. The trend has started in the books/eBooks space, but why not resumes?

Wolframalpha is a public data search engine which allows for lots of complex data analysis.  The data below is how much revenue each publicly traded company generates when it is divided by the total number of employees it has (per year).  I work in the retail sector so I first looked at how much revenue each company makes if it were divided by their number of employees.  As you can see below I for instance was able to determine that Kroger is making $36,841.74 more revenue per employee than Safeway.  The numbers are correct and publicly available via calculation but they don’t make sense to me.

I’ve posted similar things in the past and have had some really smart followers of this blog add to the conversation so I hope this post continues that trend.  Why would a Safeway employee create more revenue per year than a Walmart employee?  Why would a Kroger employee make $36,841,74 more revenue per year than a Safeway employee?  The interesting thing about doing the calculation this way is it takes out unions, employee compensation, and other factors.  What are the contributing factors?  Is sales per square foot the real reason the numbers are so unexpected?  Is the number of retail stores a major factor?  Did these numbers surprise you?  Is looking at annual company revenue by employee even important?  Then when you think each retail revenue by employee is high look at Google and Apple!

Annual Company Revenue/Employee
Kroger =    $244,659.51
Safeway = $207,817.77
Walmart = $198,398.10
Target =    $189,692.31

Google =   $1.81 million
Apple =     $1.32 million

Source: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Disclosure: I am in no way representing any company in this post or site.  I’m surfacing public data and merely asking what we can derive (if anything) from it.  Thanks for taking the time to read this and thanks for adding to the conversation.

“The exchange between Ferrari and Lamborghini is often cited as the latter’s inspiration for founding a carmaker in the first place, but it is as much the stuff of legend and myth as it is a factual occurrence. In the 1991 Thoroughbred & Classic Cars interview, Lamborghini said that after the clutch problems endured, “I decided to talk to Enzo Ferrari. I had to wait for him a very long time. ‘Ferrari, your cars are rubbish!’ I complained. Il Commendatore was furious. “Lamborghini, you may be able to drive a tractor but you will never be able to handle a Ferrari Properly.’ This was the point when I finally decided to make a perfect car.” Later re-tellings of the story center around several basic points: Lamborghini visited Ferrari; proceeded to challenge, demand improvements, or deride Ferrari; and finally was dismissed as a mere tractor manufacturer. Whether the industrialist’s spite was enough of a reason to enter the carmaker business, or if the exchange inspired further business interests or merely served as an anecdote, is unknown. Sackey writes that the economic motives for entering the high-profit-margin sports car business far outweighed Lamborghini’s personal sentiments. In the T&CC interview, Lamborghini notes that “Ferrari never spoke to me again. He was a great man, I admit, but it was so very easy to upset him.”

Long live the Lamborghini…

At today’s Dev Learn 10 in San Francisco I attended a seminar where a woman at the back of the room said “social media is great and all but I am overwhelmed with the influx of information all around me”.  I liked what another person said which was that just because there is lots of data in the world it doesn’t mean you have to consume everything available to you.  The 3-4 minute discussion gave me a lot of ideas so hopefully you beat me to solving the problem because either way we’ll all win.