innovationguy.com

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.

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.

This is worth a read. “Security Theatre” over on Seth Godin’s blog is a refreshing post. It talks about how there are many cases where we “put on a show” or a bit of theatrics for our customers. His primary example is the safety talk that we all hear before we take off in an airplane, where the speach is meant to calm and re-assure a potentially nervous crew. Excerpts concerning seating arrangments, the need to turn off electronics, and the effectiveness of that flotation device you are sitting on all gave me a good chuckle. I for one have always questioned the veracity or at least the motivation for some of the instructions you hear before you take off in a plane. What does turning off my mp3 player or cell phone have to do with the navigational system? I sure hope they have a system that is more robust than to be affected by my $100 portable music player. Should I even be on this plane if it were the case?

He goes on to make an anology to how many companies do the same thing when relating to their customers. Sometimes selling “customer experience” is much like that speach in the airplane.

• Are there situations in your interactions with customers where by eliminating these “theatrics” and getting to the truth you can provide improved customer satisfaction?
• Are there other situations where you are selling these theatrics on a commondity product and extracting more profits by doing so?

Guy Kawasaki has a great Post on his website about the book Founders at Work. I’m gonna have to go buy the book now. If you look at the first three sentences on Amazon you get a quick idea of the book contents:

“Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? “

So Guy puts up some of his favorite passages. My favorite one from Guy’s list is:

James Hong (Hot or Not) on his first beta site. “My dad was the first person that ever saw Hot or Not besides Jim and me, and he got addicted to it! Here’s my dad, a 60-year-old retired Chinese guy who, as my father, is supposed to be asexual, and he’s saying, ‘She’s hot. This one’s not hot at all.’”

The first part of the post was also about how Guy draws inspiration from books like this, notice the picture of all his bookmarks. (I am glad to see that others do that with postits)

It is also amazing that some of these people are houshold names now, but at that stage they were just guys with an idea and the passion to make it happen.