Linchpin and LessConf

March 10, 2011 | 2 Comments

On the eve of SXSW Interactive, accurately referred to as “spring break for geeks”, I wanted to tell you about a lesser-known but equally awesome conference. Also for geeks.

LessConf, put on by Allan Branch and Steve Bristol, the supergeeks behind LessEverything, is an annual two day conference held in Atlanta, GA.

Last year, I was lucky enough to speak at LessConf alongside friends and heroes Dan Martell, Saul Colt, Cameron Moll, Chris Wanstrath, Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, Peldi Guilizzoni and Alex Hillman. I spoke about the concepts in Linchpin, Seth Godin’s seminal book.

The video of my presentation is below. It’s almost an hour long but the concepts are important.

(if you can’t see the video, click here)

This year, LessConf is in Atlanta again, April 29th – 30th and features some amazing speakers.

  1. Josh Williams – CEO of Gowalla
  2. Jeff Lawson – CEO and Co-Founder of Twilio.com
  3. Amy Hoy – Fearless Leader of Freckle & UnicornFree.com
  4. Micah Baldwin – CEO of Graphic.ly
  5. Hiten Shah – Co-founder of KissMetrics.com
  6. Rhonda Kallman – Co-founder of Samuel Adams, Founder of New Century Brewing
  7. Tom Rossi – Partner at The Molehill
  8. Steven Walker – Lead Designer at Groupon
  9. Jason Beaird – UX Designer at MailChimp.com
  10. Sarah Hatter – CEO of CoSupport

Early-bird tickets are sold out. Remaining tickets (and a list of attendees) is here.

To get an idea of the buttoned-up, serious tone of LessConf, check out these videos.

Warning, language NSFW:

If you’re free on April 29th – 30th and want to be inspired, I highly recommend attending.

HEALTH | TECH | FOOD open innovation

March 7, 2011 | Leave a Comment

On Tuesday, February 8, 2011, I was lucky enough to help facilitate the Health | Tech | Food event that Luminary Labs put on for Social Media Week.  125 people gathered to openly innovate around the core health issues of New York through the lens of social technology.

There were amazing presentations and brilliant ideas that came out of the workshop sessions and the unique “open innovation” model means that Luminary Labs has published all input and output under a creative commons attribution 3.0 unported license.  This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as they credit the event for the original creation.

See the original post on Luminary Labs’ blog.  You can view all the published content at www.healthtechfood.com and the summary SlideShare presentation below.

Health | Tech | Food Open Innovation Output 2011
View more presentations from Luminary Labs

If you only read one thing this month…

December 14, 2009 | 1 Comment

…make it this free e-book from Seth Godin.

Seth has rounded up seventy big thinkers to contribute concise but brilliant one-page essays.

The simple question….

What Mattters Now?

The result is priceless and amazing.

Read it. Share it. Pick your favorite five pages and make something happen now.

What_Matters_Now

Download PDF here

Costly inertia

June 18, 2009 | 1 Comment

dunceThanks to Sandra for this USA Today article, and the McKinsey report of the economic impact of the achievement gap in America’s schools.

The most amazing statistic?

McKinsey & Co., recently ran the numbers, and found that if U.S. children did as well as students from nations such as Finland, our economy would be 9%-16% larger. This means our schools are costing us $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion every year. Just for comparison’s sake, as of late May, economists thought the recession would shave 3.7% from our economy.

America is still the greatest country on earth, but our education system is very badly broken. How bad do things have to get before wholesale changes are made to improve education?

We’re not lacking for ideas.

We are lacking in execution of these ideas and it’s costing us dearly.

Give an "A"

June 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment

There has only ever been one conductor for the Boston Philharmonic.

Benjamin Zander.

We can all learn a lot from Mr. Zander, author (along with Roz Zander) of The Art of Possibility.

In this video from Teachers.tv, he shares three key insights:
1) It’s all invented
2) Standing in possibility
3) Rule #6 – Don’t take yourself so goddamn seriously (that’s the only rule)

In his TED talk below, he tells the story of two salesmen sent to Africa in the 1900′s to determine if there was any opportunity for selling shoes. Two very different telegrams came back to Manchester, England.

Salesman #1: “Situation hopeless! Stop. They don’t wear shoes.”
Salesman #2: “Glorious opportunity! They don’t have any shoes yet!”

(Which salesman would you rather hire?)

He also converts an entire room of people who thought they didn’t like classical music.

Ben Zander has changed thousands of students who pass through his class and millions of others who have seen him present, either live or through videos like these.

Ben was also very generous in contributing a story to our upcoming fear.less e-book, coming in July 2009.

Ben Zander

Pay attention

April 16, 2009 | 1 Comment

Educators…..imagine giving your students the following assignment:

Class….you’ve got 10 minutes to receive a text message from anyone outside of this school.

a) What they had for breakfast.
b) What the weather is like where they are
c) The one thing they last purchased.

Bonus points will be given for people in other countries…using languages other than English.

How much richness does your curriculum provide?

What do your students create?

Most teachers think cell phones and iPods are the enemy. More than ever, students are digital learners. Teachers need to learn how to leverage that to better connect with their students.

Do schools kill creativity?

April 11, 2009 | 1 Comment

Sir Ken Robinson gave this talk at the 2006 TED conference.

It is simply amazing and as true now as it was then.