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While browsing TEDTalks in anticipation of the 2008 installment, I ran across this gem by Richard St. John. I thought it was one of the most concise statements of what I have heard from many people I respect. Richard aggregated this view by interviewing 500 successful people over a 7 year period.

For those of you that can’t see the embedded video, here is the link to the page on TED.com For those of you that don’t have time to watch here they are:

1. Passion (Do it for the love not the money)
2. Work (Hard work, be a worka-frolic)
3. Good (Get damn good at something)
4. Focus (x-ray vision focus)
5. Push (through shy-ness and self-doubt)
6. Serve (others something they value)
7. Ideas (have them)
8. Persist (through the Criticism, Rejection, and Pressure)

For those of you that are working in nanotech or are interested in how nano will effect your lives should take some time and visit The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies Site. This site and the information there is a collaboration between the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and The Pew Charitable Trusts. Their Mission Statement is interesting in their goals. They also have some great content on there:

1. Frontpage with Nano News
2. Green Nano discussion series
3. Inventories of nano products in (Medicine, Agriculture/Food, & Consumer)
4. A list of government sponsors research on EH&S of Nano.
5. Some of the research projects they are sponsoring.
6. Some Publications they have been involved in.

One interesting item on the site I didn’t list above is the Nano Google Maps Mashup. One static image is shown below that shows the relative activity in Nano across the United States. At the link you can zoom in on your area and see the companies locally are working in Nano. Looking at my area, I know the data collection is not complete, but the concepts is a nice way to visualize the geographical relationships to data.

So is your company on the map? If it is you should at least check out the rest of the data at the site.

The team over at iinnovate.com always surprise me with the quality of their guests for their interviews. This latest interview with Carly Fiorina formerly CEO of HP is no exception.  Min Li Chan and Min Liu ask some very good questions which dig out some great answers and advise from Carly.

Carly gives some really great perspectives in this interview.  Here are a couple of my favorite questions:

 

When asked asked what element of being a CEO was most challenging at HP she Carly stated:

“The most challenging part about being CEO of HP was that we had to transform the company. It was a great company with a great history, but it was also a company that was lagging further and further behind when I arrived. ….. <stats on missed financials, lack of innovation , etc>… We had a great deal of change that needed to be done, and change is always very difficult.  It [change] is always resisted and particularly difficult with a large, tradition-bound company like HP was.   But that is also frankly the challenge and joy of leadership. Leadership is always about changing things. ….”

When asked how to preserve innovation and a sense of entrepreneurship in corporate America as companies  grow above 10,000 employees mark she stated:

“… So it is a challenge for every company.  The pressure for Corporate America boils down to the fact that the  focus on profitability sometimes causes people to cut costs as opposed to investing in innovation.  This is where leadership is so imporatant.  If the leadership doesn’t decide that innovation is a value worth celebrating then eventually it will whither.   If leadership doesn’t decide that instead of cutting that expense, they will make that investment in the future, then the investments won’t get made…..   I think it is about the culture of a place. Whether risk-taking is really celebrated and rewarded, and if you are going to celebrate and reward risk taking, you have to let people make mistakes.  Not every bet is goign to pay off and you have to deal with that…. There is no silver bullet, but it starts with a believe that innovation is the life-blood of a technology company….”

When asked about the trend of startup aquiring as the major source of innovation for a tech company and whether this was dangerous she replied.

“I think it is a trend which offers some advantaeges to startups…. It is dangerous when taken to extreme…. Every company gets to a place where the old answers don’t work anymore and then the only thing that works is for people to be creative and try new approaches to old problems. If you have outsources all your creativity, all your ability to take risk, all your ability to think about a new idea, then you are not going to be able to solve the problem you need to solve….”

Her talk on how medieval studies (college major) helped her and what a CEO is suppose to do she stated:

“That set of studies, more than anything, taught me how to think…. It [particular class in her major where she was required to read thousands of pages and condense them to 2 pages every week] taught me that to really undestand something you really have to go through all the detail of it, but then to be able to communicate something, to be able to prioritize action around something,  you have to get it down to the essence.   It taught me how you distringuish between the truly important and the merely interesting….”

When asked why she thought that anyone wanting to be a CEO should take on a sales role as some point in their career she stated:

” I think the human dimension of business is really important…. but beyond that, what selling is really about, if it is done well, is talking to people in a language they understand, that is meaningful to them.   If you are going to be successful in selling something to someone else, you have to speak to them in language that is familiar to them and in terms of things that are important to them….. Those are skills that any executive needs to have: How do communicate effectively. How do  speak to people in language they understand.  How tp speak to them in terms that are important to them….”

Interesting insights on some relevent topics to anyone in business. There is much, much more in the interview, well worth the listen.

Here a a couple of interesting links.

1. Scientists at NIST show DNA wrapped SWCNT of 200nm or less enter ex-vitro lung cells where longer ones don’t.  Not sure if this is like saying 200nm DNA stands enter lung cells, while longer DNA stands don’t?  Another confusion in the the debate on the safety of “nanomaterials”.  How does your company deal with  EHS and nanotubes?
2. I had a long drive this past weekend and was listening up on Phil McKinney’s Killer Innovations Podcasts from 2006.  This one on “Listening Skills and Rules of Future Forecasting”  was one that I enjoyed.
3. Ditto on the Podcast  “Observation Skills and Contradictions”  deals with a quick exercise for improving observation and the most concise and true-ringing explanation of TRIZ I have seen anywhere.
4. So how do you really test how building behave in an earthquake?  You build one on top of a giant shaker table and deck it out with sensors.  Pretty Amazing.
5. Inkblot Earth has a post about The first person killed by a robot.   Not the science fiction of Asimov, but  interesting.
6. Endless Innovation has a post from Design Sojourn about 7 ways to unleash your creativity  originally from IDEO.   (three level link action).  Those IDEO guys are great,  I got to meet a few through work.
7. Again with IDEO,  The 10 Faces of Innovation changed my outlook on how people work and what drives them.

I can’t really improve on Guy’s post linking to this interview with Eric Schmidt of Google.  Check out the original podcast over at iinnovatecast.com.   Good stuff in the interview on disruptive technology, managing innovation, and non-traditional organizational structures.  Worth the listen.

I ran across this podcast interview with Heidi Roizen of Mobius Venture Capital. Julio from iinnovatecast.com put together some great questions for Heidi ranging in topic from what is web 3.0 going to look like?, how to hire great people?, how to manage your list of contacts and build great relationships?, and how to balance work and life?. Some very interesting discussion on what she sees as chief motivators for employees and what has been most satisfying in her carreer. Her insights on women in technology and VC are great. Heidi offers some interesting perspective as she has lived both sides of the street in that she has been at the reigns of a sucessful startup and now funds those hopefully successful startups. For more insight from Heidi check out this interview over at PodTech.

Guy Kawasaki has a post on the TEDTalks from this years TED2007 being up on for your listening and viewing pleasure.  Looking at the speakers and the topics, this looks to be an interesting set of talks for anyone interested in trends and how the world is changing from the perspective of those that are changing it. I was not previously aware of TED (If you are not either, check it out here), but I will be working my way through these and some of the older talks. Note that both audio and video are posted. I will probably do a summary of a couple of these, so watch here for more.