Archive - February, 2010

Don’t miss your own Avatar – what we can all learn from James Cameron

February 24, 2010 in Culture, Entrepreneurship, Family, Generosity, Inspiration, Leadership, Life with 0 Comments

I was fortunate to be able to attend my 6th consecutive TED event last week. As always, it was awesome. You should listen to every 18 minute talk that becomes available (with the exception of the spider talk – it’s worth 5 minutes of your time).

James Cameron spoke about his life, his movies, his oceanic expeditions and more. It is well worth the 18 minutes of your time (not yet posted so check back here and I will post or at TED.com). One key walk-away for me is something that he didn’t necessarily say but  I read between the lines and Cameron later stated during a one on one interview.

While Cameron was filming Titanic, he developed a love for the ocean and exploration. As a child, he had always dreamed of traveling to outer space. For James, the deep ocean was outer space – just as mysterious, beautiful and unexpected. He completed Titanic and spend a decade focusing on the Ocean. In order to explore the depths of the ocean and the Titanic in more detail, he had to build new instruments and machines. He controlled these machine from his submarine, which allowed him to enter the Titanic with cameras as if he was actually exploring the inner depths himself.

Flash forward 10 years to Avatar. If you have seen Avatar you may recognize the parallel between creating the Avatars that could explore a different world from within the pods. What James experienced while he was “taking time away from movies” was a new way to experience the unknown through an intermediary – the equipment that he built for deep exploration. He directly applied these concepts to Avatar, to its great success.

To me, the key message is to be observant. The concern that I have with the world of micro-attention streams (and I’m active on them) is that we fail to observe some of what is truly happening around us. If we cannot observe then we cannot leverage these concepts to other activities. This is where the balance needs to happen – try to find your attention balance. You might read @chrisbrogan‘s post about his activity streams here.

Take what you want from this post but my goal was to deliver the following message – put down your mobile device and pay attention to the world around you, whether it’s your friends, family or the environment around you as you walk down the street – it all matters. Wouldn’t it suck to miss your own Avatar?

Cheers.

@mwalsh

The most important thing I learned in engineering school – remove friction, it is very expensive.

February 23, 2010 in Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Leadership, Life with 6 Comments

The most important thing I learned in engineering school – friction is very expensive. Remove it and increase revenue.

Friction is something that we first learn about in grade school, maybe high school, and was a focus of my first year of engineering school. It is a function of surface roughness, contact area and chemical bonding. The mechanical costs are energy consumption, wear, and tear. Why do I think friction was the most important thing that I learned about as I studied to be a mechanical engineer? It’s because it applies to everything – it’s practical, it’s real life.

I think of it as the variables that slow us down, that get in our way, that prevent progress and delay results. In business terms, the costs are waste, inefficiency and failure. Relatively low friction within a start-up is the very reason that start-ups, with limited resources, have a fighting chance at gunning for the big guys. The friction within start-ups is much, much lower than most established enterprises; allowing people to make decisions, act and progress.

This notion is important because we can increase efficiency and drive progress if we can minimize or remove it. This applies to everything – completing personal taxes, traveling, building stuff, going to the gym, creating something new and one of my favorite topics – selling.

Simply put, if you can remove friction from the evaluation and sales process then you can sell more of what you produce. Ways to remove it include:

  • the use of customer video testimonials
  • offer a free trial
  • find influencers that want to talk about you
  • use simple language
  • make it easy to buy
  • give pricing on website, in plain english
  • describe what you are not, or don’t do
  • make it easy to sell internally
  • make it easy to understand competitive differentiation
  • provide the cost justification or investment thesis
  • make it dead easy to use
  • make it dead easy to talk about

Salesforce.com and HubSpot do this very well. The cost of not doing these things are likely very high, depending on your business or activity. The cost may mean wasting cycles (buyer and seller cycles), never closing the deal, confusing the market, preventing word of mouth from happening, and worse.

I visited a company yesterday and they have friction throughout the entire company which is preventing them from competing effectively. Friction exists in marketing, in the sales process, through delivery of the solution, within customer support and engineering, operations, and between these functional areas. It has crippled the company. It has prevented the company from being able to make decisions and act swiftly. The good news is that they can remove it in all of these areas. I suggested that they should all be thinking “always remove friction (ARF)” in everything that they do. It’s a terrible acronym, but it could save their company – it could save your company.

It turns out that this F-word can kill your business. Remove it where you can and minimize it where you cannot – use lubricants if necessary.

Stay tuned for a detailed Slideshare presentation on this topic – which you can learn about on this blog.

Next week, I will blog the most important thing I learned in business school (Columbia University and HAAS).

DECIDE – the book – let’s make better decisions, together.

February 17, 2010 in Culture, Entrepreneurship, Family, Generosity, Inspiration, Leadership, Life with 31 Comments

When is the last time you made a really big decision, or even a small one for that matter? Did you have access to all the input, feedback and expertise that you wish you had? Recently, it seems that many friends and others I know have been making life changing decisions. Many have asked for my advice which I happily give, yet, in many cases I don’t necessarily have the experience to provide the best guidance or insight. In fact, this type of input or advice isn’t often readily available. While considering how I could more effectively provide guidance, I decided to write a book about decision making. The book concept was very well received at TED, with a dozen leading authorities agreeing to an interview for the book.

This will not be a technical reference about how or why we make the decisions we do, rather, will be a compilation of interviews of leaders in a variety of industries that I believe many will want to hear from. The individuals I interview will include business and industry leaders, the greatest philanthropists on the planet, chiefs of fire and police, artists, musicians, actors, homeless, entrepreneurs, spiritual leaders, teachers, military leaders, politicians and more. The goal is to deliver a compelling compilation of real-life stories about decision making, told through interviews.

I decided to invest in this project because I believe that higher quality decisions will make the world a better place. If we can learn how those whom we respect have made their decisions, perhaps our decisions will be better and we will share the goodness. Worse-case, you may make a better decision that can change your own life for the better – which isn’t such a bad worse-case.

I want your help – I want your participation. If you would like to hear from a specific individual or a type of individual please share it here. If your suggested individual is interviewed then you will be credited in the book. If you have an idea or suggestion, please comment here. No suggestion is too outlandish for me to consider. I want this to be an adventure; something unique, creative and compelling. Along the way, I will post interviews, podcasts and videos to document the progress of the book. I expect this project to last throughout the year. If this sounds interesting, please subscribe to comments and you will be updated with new comments and posts.

Let’s make the world a better place by making better decisions – thank for your generous contribution and time.

Mike

You were born to be a Rockstar

February 5, 2010 in Culture, Entrepreneurship, Family, Generosity, Inspiration, Leadership, Life with 10 Comments

Rockstars have the best jobs on the planet. Let’s face it – everyone wants to be a rockstar.

You were born to be a rockstar – we all were.

At Rockstar Group, it is our goal to pull the rockstar out of individuals and companies. I’m a huge fan of Hugh MacLoud so it was natural for me to invite Hugh to help us convey our values and objectives through his brilliant illustration. I conveyed the company mission to Hugh and the feeling that I wanted the audience to have when seeing the message and this is where we ended up. I think Hugh did a great job – please let us know what you think.

In a Noisy World – Create like a Kid

February 4, 2010 in Culture, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Life with 0 Comments

Everyone is born with immense creativity. We create games, characters and inventions and then we become tentative. This slideshare presentation addresses the need to filter out the noise to let our creativity shine through.  I hope you enjoy it and I look forward to your comments!