Steven's Thoughts

It is so easy to fall into a rut. We have a decent paying job, a good standard of living and because of that we don't want to rock the boat too much. I think it is important to remind ourself, why we are here and what motivates us. There is so much that we can accomplish. A quote from Seth Godin reminded me this morning of that.

“How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?” – Seth Godin, Seth’s Blog

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

I just finished reading "Cradle to Cradle", a  book that is one of the most important environment and business books of our time. McDonough and Braungart redefine how we should develop products and run companies at large. The book is a must read for anyone who is interested in ensuring that our planet stays a place where humans want to live.   

Continental ties Carbon Offset to online booking

I just booked a ticket for a friend of mine who is visiting me from Japan.  Continental has added a nice feature to their booking site that lets you offset your carbon from the flight:

"Leave the World a Better Place™ - Carbon Offsetting Option
	Continental has partnered with Sustainable Travel International (STI), a non-profit organization that supports global climate protection and environmental conservation. STI offers customers the option to make a contribution to offset their carbon footprints for travel on Continental. All contributions are paid directly to STI. Continental does not receive any portion of any contribution."

This program would even be better if they donated the offset as their contribution to the environment.

Great business idea - give all subscription $ to charity

I was on my way to Tokyo when I stopped at one of the newsstands in the airport.  Because I was getting ready for a 14 hour flight I bought a bunch of magazines. One of them was this magazine I had never seen before called "Good".

On the plane I got completely sucked into the content.  I barely skipped any of the articles, which is very uncommon for me. But this what makes this magazine a great business ideas is not only the excellent targeted content, but also their subscription model.

First, this magazine is targeted as they call it at people who give a damm:

"We see a growing number of people tied together not by age, career, background, or circumstance, but by a shared interest. This revolves around a passion for potential mixed with fierce pragmatism and creative engagement. We sum all this up as the sensibility of giving a damn. But to shorten it, let's call it GOOD. We're here to push this movement and cover its realization."

Second, the subscription money goes to a charity that the subscriber choses. This is why they say they do this:

"We're doing this because

1) it's smart business and 2) we believe in this.

Let the secret be known—most magazines do not make money on subscriptions or newsstand sales. Traditionally, the best way to get a bunch of new subscribers is to send millions of pieces of unsolicited mail—junk mail—to people who might have some interest. We don't like junk mail, and we don't like the thought of spending millions of dollars on it. So we came up with the idea of giving away all subscription fees and allowing subscribers to choose which organization they would like to support.

This whole thing is an experiment. If it works, we'll actually spend less than half of what it traditionally costs to acquire subscribers. The success of this campaign will allow us to:

a) meet a self-selecting group of quality subscribers who find us through word of mouth, internet links, media coverage, our partner organizations, or the other crazy schemes we like to come up with; b) raise significant money for organizations that will do something important with it; and c) save resources and prove that you can do well by doing good.

Our goal for our launch year is to create 6 amazing issues of GOOD, sign up 50,000 subscribers and donate $1 million to their favorite organizations.

If you like what we're doing, please help us make it happen. Choose GOOD. Thank you".

The magazine didn't bridge the majority of my flight, but was a great read and got me to subscribe to it.

Yvon Chouinard my hero

When I applied to colleges I had to write essays on people who inspired me. I wrote about historical figures such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King because I genuinely admired their principles, however, I didn't really feel such a personal connection with these great men because they are almost like gods in our society -- not real human beings.

Yvon Chouinard's book "Let my people go surfing" finally changed that.  He is an entrepreneur that has high aspirations and sees business as a means to change the world.

Chouinard began his life as a young climber whose sole goal in life was to surf in the winter and and spend his summers in Yosemite. His goal was to work as little as he could at a "real job" so he could focus on his true passion -- climbing. Out of this work/life philosophy, he ended up starting a clothing company for outdoor sports that grew into a multi-million dollar organization. His company, Patagonia,  believes that work needs to be fun in order to be successful and should be conducted in a way that is beneficial to his employees and the environment.

He believes that in order for an individual to claim a love of wild and beautiful places, then one must participate in the fight to save them, as well as help reverse the steep decline in the overall environmental health of the planet. Patagonia donates time, services and at least 1% of their sales to hundreds of grassroots environmental groups all over the world.

Patagonians have been pioneers in designing products with the least possible environmental impact.  The company uses recycled polyester in many of their clothes and only organic, rather than pesticide-intensive, cotton.

He treats his employees with respect and recognizes that they have lives that need flexibility. Patagonia has 300 employees at its headquarters, in Ventura, and one hundred children in their on site development center.  They provide at least sixty days' paid maternity/paternity leave. He believes that work/family balance is essential. The company is consistently one of the top 100 firms to work for and Chouinard questions why anyone would run a company that is "hard" to work for.

Chouinard, demonstrates to corporate America that profit is not the goal. He puts it "the Zen master would say that profit happens when you do the right thing."

I have been out of college for many years now, but it took me several years now to find a person that I aspire to be like -- a hero if you will. Yvon Chouinard understands what is "right" and has made it his mission to run his company that way and that's what I aim to do for kasina.

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play

I love this quote and wanted to share this with you!

"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both".

-François Auguste René Chateaubriand

This quote closely resembles my attitude to work and life.

Incomplete Manifesto for Change

Bruce Mau, a designer and architect has published his Incomplete Manifesto for Change. It is a a list of 43 ideas to get you beyond thinking differently but doing differently.  It is a little lame for me to post the entire thing, but I  think it very good and  a lot is true.  Enjoy 

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."

28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'

31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea -- I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces -- what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference -- the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.

NCAA Picks

Every year I struggle with the same things:

• I know nothing about college basketball,
• I don't care about college basketball,
• but I still want to participate in the kasina NCAA pool. 

Non of my previous 10 approaches worked, this year I consulted Jeff Sagarin NCAA basketball ratings, let's see how I will do. 

How to manage your responsibilities

At kasina, we just took the Franklin Covey time management course and I feel a little overwhelmed. Why? Well, in the past if I let things fell off the radar, if it meant that other tasks would becme more manageable. In the end, there were a number of obligations that I just missed.

The important thing to remember about the Fraknlin Covey method is that you should start from the top by identifying your values, set your goals, to weekly planning and daily tasks. So I do the following:

1. I review my values weekly, the things that are really important to me, such as my family, health, creativity, compassion and community.
2. Then I review my different roles and the associated relationships I need to foster:
   • My self
   • CEO
   • Father
   • Son
   • etc
3. Then I schedule my week, including all the task for the week
4. Lastly, I review every day to ensure that everything got addressed or get addressed in the future.

Including my roles has really helped me focus on the things that I truly care about. For the few days that I have been doing it, it has help me be much more responsible and in charge of my actions.

Was Buddha the first Babyboomer?

Perry Garfink from National Geographic describe why he thinks Buddhism is an approach  that makes sense for Boomers overwhelmed by stress and materialism.

National Geographic video