Gifted Slacker

This article on Fortune doesn’t have a printer-friendly option, so I’m distilling the wisdom (and non-wisdom) here.

• Michael Bloomberg: When the customer says yes, stop talking. Think before reacting.
• Larry Page: Pick a promising idea, stick with it and do it better than anyone else.
• Peter G. Peterson: Focus on the things you do better than others, regardless of whether it goes against prevailing opinion.
• General Petraeus: Pursue experiences outside of your comfort zone.
• Tina Fey: Stay in control of your money.
• Mark Hurd: A slick presentation doesn’t cover bad smells.
• Indra Nooyi: Always assume positive intent.
• Sam Palmisano: Be selfless. Focus on the needs of others.
• Eddie Lampert: Practice, prepare, anticipate.
• Thomas S. Murphy: Do the right thing. Spend time on things you can control.
• Bob Iger: Be true to yourself.
• Nelson Peltz: Increase sales and minimize expenses.
• Zhang Xin: Specialize. Work with people you have strong relationships with.
• Charlene Begley: Spend a lot of time with customers.
• Craig Newmark: Embrace humor. Laugh.
• Joanna Shields: Walk away from the table leaving everyone feeling like a winner.
• Elon Musk: Don’t panic. Don’t ignore bullies.
• U. Mark Schneider: Learn other languages. Be careful about showing independence and contrarianism.
• Tony Robbins: Nothing is sacrosanct: Pick your friends and advisers carefully.
• Eileen Collins: Follow your heart, despite what others say.
• Stewart Copeland: Be careful with your money.
• Andrea Guerra: Commit. Work with the best. Learn from the best.
• Leonard Lauder: Good things belong in writing. Unpleasantness should be conveyed face-to-face.
• Nell Minow: Change your schedule to fit the way you work.
• Alan Mulally: View the future with the customer in mind, and deliver to that end.

Incentives, incentives, incentives. You must be aware of how they’re aligned (from here):

But here’s what’s really interesting. It’s a hard job, answering phones and talking to customers for hours at a time. So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.

After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for.

Most people are talking about Web 2.0, 3.0, and the Semantic Web as the next big things. I think an undervalued concept is the live web. I’m not even sure that Searls highlights the idea as much as he should in this LinuxJournal column.

The future is not in monetized widgets, Beacon-style advertising platforms, Web 2.0/3.0 or the Semantic Web (though Semantic Web technologies might play a part in things). The future is in moving from a static web to a rich, highly interactive (on the order of a FPS) live web experience.

I would rather not vote. Not because it let’s me say I have no responsibility for poor policy and legislative decisions. I believe I have as much responsibility for those things as people who vote for them.

However, when my all-over-the-place ideology conflicts with something like the Patriot Employer Act, I won’t vote for those who endorse it because I don’t need to be a hypocrite in a way that I can avoid. (I will say that I won’t eat cookies for my health, and that you shouldn’t either. But you and I both know I’m going to eventually have a cookie.)

If the Patriot Employer Act is enacted and turns out to be the best thing for the economy and everyone involved, then I will be ecstatically happy that I was proven wrong.

A question occurred to me as I wrote this, and I’ll leave it as a mind-reading exercise for the reader: Why does the philosophy behind this potential legislation remind me of something born from the same people who opposed NAFTA?

There’s this program at Google where they bring in interesting authors to give talks. This is so unfair (yes, whinge-whinge). My University doesn’t have anything of the sort. We get lectures from boring old fucks and guys that wrote tedious books about little ideas that nobody cares about.

To be fair, there was an interesting-sounding seminar-ish thing here two weeks ago, but it conflicted absolutely with exams! How about putting a business program on when a big portion of business students are not stuck in exams?

The UK government is hoping to start issuing a national id card by 2012. The Reg reports that two of the potential suppliers have pulled their bids for “commercial and political” reasons.

There is quite a lot of trepidation in the population about this card in light of the regular data loss by government agencies here. It’s kind of shocking that UK citizens are concerned with these privacy issues, but they welcome CCTV cameras.

The national id card program (or should I say “programme”?) has a lovely adoption strategy:

Documents leaked yesterday reveal the Home Office will target teenagers for early take-up of the cards. Anyone wanting to open a bank account, apply for student funding or buy alcohol or cigarettes will be forced to buy an ID card.

The reality is that privacy is increasingly a thing of the past. For better or worse, whether we want it to or not, it’s going to disappear for all intents and purposes. Fundamental cultural changes are inexorable like that.

Information wants to be free ,and technology is enabling it to be so. That’s a good thing. But it’s also what erodes privacy.