For anyone who has anything to do with corporate meetings…

strategy

Warming ‘em up for the big day

August 16, 2011
timer

Olympians train for four years (and a lifetime) to prepare for their event at the Games. Sometimes that event only lasts 30 seconds. But even when it lasts a couple of hours, the contrast between the lead up time and the actual playing time is enormous. I imagine that both the athletes that give the [...]

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How nice, how aligned

August 9, 2011
tv dream blur

As a parent of school age children, there is nothing more frustrating than the sudden realization that my kids are now getting their information from sources other than our family. When we were their one and only encyclopedia, things were good. It gave me this sublime sense of control. Even when, and this never, ever [...]

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There’s more than one way to skin a…

July 22, 2011
lego

Note: I am fascinated by LEGO® products . Always have been. And I recently learned some things that took the WOW factor up several notches. * There is a proprietary software used by LEGO Group that takes any image and transforms it into a 3-D image…a blueprint of LEGO bricks, layer by layer. This took [...]

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Keep it in the jar

July 15, 2011
wrong tool

A friend of mine was telling me about her chicken soup. Or rather, the process of making it. It’s long and involved, and includes things like soaking the chicken in cold water with two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar for one hour before cooking it for 24. She cooks the soup in a monstrous stainless [...]

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Choices: the guts of ‘invention’

June 24, 2011
ingredients

A songwriter can write an original song, but she doesn’t invent new notes. A painter can paint an original painting, but he doesn’t invent the colors. A writer can write an original story, but she doesn’t invent new letters. A chef can cook an original dish, but he doesn’t invent new food. What these artists [...]

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Riffing to find new ways

June 17, 2011
trading 4s

A couple of weeks ago, I headed to New Jersey to hear my boss play. Besides his gig at WPP, he is a prolific jazz guitarist. On this night, he had pulled together a trio—his guitar, bass and drums—and as jazz musicians tend to do, they played together for awhile, and then they broke apart. [...]

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Some things just aren’t contagious

June 10, 2011
disconnected

Some things just aren’t contagious I was at lunch the other day with a good friend who is a chemist for IBM (he’s got like 10 patents under his name for them…so clearly he loves this stuff!). He was feverishly telling me about the advancement he just made in their chemical plating process….something about erosion [...]

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Thousands of attempts

June 7, 2011
faceplantcoffee

Thomas Edison made thousands of attempts before the light bulb actually worked. And it was great when it worked. And I’ve never heard anyone bemoan the thousands of failures. They were, dare I say, worth it to get to the end result. There’s this video that I love. And by love I mean, I might [...]

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The cool is in the pudding

May 3, 2011
cool

The Fonz. Arguably one of the coolest cats of our time. But not because of the leather jacket. It wasn’t the tight jeans. His hair. His bike. Or the fact that a single finger snap pulled hot chicks to him faster than the spark of a dumb idea lured Potsie and Ralph Malph. At the [...]

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Even without the vowels

April 18, 2011
dog in box

See if you can read this sentence: “th brwn dg jmpd n th bx.” Studies show that you can. That even though the vowels are missing, your brain puts everything exactly where it should be. Have you ever tried to proofread a document that you’ve been working on for hours, even days? You swear it’s [...]

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