For the benefit of my own crammed brain, I thought that I’ll start summarizing FastCompany (my favourite business magazine) from the November 2006 issue.
Page 14: The online exclusive article by Keith Ferrazzi (the guy who wrote “Never Eat Alone”, which is quite a good book on networking) titled Brand Yourself lists a simple two step formula. 1) Build expertise and 2) Get people to recognize the expertise. The first step is obvious, choose something in demand that you like and soak up everything. Be an expert. For the second step, Keith recommends people to talk about their expertise with everyone they meet plus have a one hour formal deck of presentation slides. In addition, write articles and books. Does a blog entry count?
Page 23: Even though I didn’t blog about it, a previous month’s story How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World? One. And You’re Looking At It is about cutting down on the use of energy to make an impact against global warming as well as saving money. Global warming is going to be a big problem but it is good that awareness is starting to build up steadily. Watch Al Gore’s presentation in my previous blog entry.
Page 52: Another environment related article. Apparently, Malaysian farmers burn the husks left over from harvesting palm-oil fruits and that’s obviously harmful for the environment. However, EarthCycle Packaging has commercialized the technology to manufacture bio-degradable packaging from the husks. That’s good news. This is not mentioned in the article but I thought I should rant about it. Singapore seems to be clean and green but the amount of waste we generate per capita is second highest in the world. That is alarming. So folks, try to reduce waste and really, we don’t need so many plastic bags.
Page 55: A good profile on the search engine ChaCha which is the anti-thesis to Google. The founder Scott Jones believes in the power of human intelligence to deliver better search results to computer algorithms. Article at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/110/next-inspiration.html.
Page 62: The underlying theme of this month’s FastCompany seems to be the environment (or those are the the articles that I enjoyed). A short piece on a cool car Tesla Roadster that people like Sergey Brin and George Clooney own. This car runs on electricity and hence, helps the environment as there is virtually no harmful emissions.
Page 72: This is the cover story and quite a scary experiment on using technology to never forget anything. Gordon Bell of Microsoft Research Labs is religiously saving every moment of his life digitally. It is supposed to make us more smarter and efficient. However, I tend to agree with the experiment’s detractors who reason that we need to forget and it is good to forget, for example, traumatic events are things that we want to forget and it is for a reason that by nature humans are programmed to forget.
Page 86: Down the Rabbit Hole is a story on the essential elements of viral marketing and it turns out, surprise surprise that curiosity is the most essential ingredient in creating a viral marketing campaign. Hotshot Professor Chip Heath (Note to self: Blog about his DVD Stanford breakfast talk “How to Make Your Ideas Stick: 7 Lessons from Urban Legends”) comments that in a viral marketing campaign, information is hidden strategically to add fuel to the fire of curiosity. Mike Monello, Gregg Hale and Steve Wax (the creators of The Blair Witch Project) are featured in this article.
Page 94: Hyper-Local Hero is the story of Rob Curley and how he is transforming the traditional newspaper business by taking them online in a very interactive way as opposed to duplicating offline content online. The strategy is to focus intently on local happenings and turn the community into news reporters. Closer to home in Singapore, the SPH online portal STOMP seems to be embracing Rob’s strategy.
Page 104: Pop!Tech seems to be similar to TED but I like TED better as they are giving away their talks for free. Check my earlier post on TED. Some familiar people like humanitarian architect Cameron Sinclair pop up at both talks (Note to self: Send Sinclair’s book “Design Like You Give A Damn” to bro-in-law).
Page 116: The final word features K. Anders Ericsson an Expert on Expert. He contends that there is no evidence that high achievers have innate gifts and there is virtually no physiological or mental obstacle that can stop anyone from being an expert. However, experts use a technique called the “deliberate practice” which is innovating in everything they do and/or using a technique/method that is not ordinarily used. As for experience, it doesn’t matter as much. Learning new things quickly is the key.
November 15th, 2008
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