Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Amen Thought for the New Year [FoundRead]. [base "]Man[base ']s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.[per thou] [~] Oliver Wendell Holmes, 19th century American poet, and physician. Found|READers: Here[base ']s to thinking BIG and wide with your ideas in 2008! Happy New Year! [GigaOMNET] 4:10:22 PM    comment []

No TV for you From Doc Searles on future of TV. Note also the reference to Dave Winer's FlickrFan. I haven't been home much since it came out. But that might be a better use for my large flat panel TV than more Rachael Ray and Ellie Krieger. (Food Network for you culturally challenged geeks). Less T, more V. As a photographer with nearly 18,000 shots on Flickr (and hundreds of thousands on hard drives), Dave Winer[base ']s FlickrFan looks like a killer thing. I[base ']m especially interested in turning our idle flatscreen [base "]TV[per thou]s into useful ways to display the work photographers and services (such as the AP) that I like. When I get home to Santa Barbara later this week, I[base ']ll give it a whirl. Meanwhile, I think we[base ']re going to see TV undermined absolutely by [base "]content[per thou] of the users[base '] own choosing. TV itself isn[base ']t even TV any more. It[base ']s just one way among many for people to display pictures and video that could come from anywhere, produced and distributed by anybody, including (and especially) the user himself or herself. When the TV ceases to be a TV, and can be whatever you want, wherever you want [~] yet still remains that attention-grabbing thing that a screen tends to be [~] all kinds of interesting things can happen. I think we[base ']re not only seeing the end of TV, but the beginning of a new life for digital photography. [Doc Searls Weblog] 4:07:58 PM    comment []

Align actions with goals I interviewed Mark for the January issue of Automation World. Key here is alignment of choices of action with choices of strategy. [Gary] The Smallest Building Block of Strategic Execution Have you ever thought of the smallest increment of what it takes to get something done? I may be alone here but it seems to me to be a matter of incremental choices. Stephen Covey's quote for the day today is that we are a product of our choices. No argument there. But what actually influences choice? How are choices made? Are choices controllable? This is an important question because the big choices made by a company to enter markets, create new products or implement new systems must be supported by all the choices made by the people in the organization or the big choice becomes a big flop. Shad Helmstetter once pointed out that there are thousands of choices in a day and all of them count. If your organization has thousands of people, then there are at least a million choices in a day for each thousand people you have. Do the math. This is a critical issue. So the thought for the day is this... based on my experience there are the following influencers on choice that boil down to strategic execution A sense of why we are here in the first place Development of character The ability to take the longer term view and defer gratification The climate we create around us The culture we manifest as style How we organize the support network around us The goals we set How we measure success Milestones we adopt Objectives we choose The basic design of how we intend to get to where we want to be Coherence among these aspects are the heavy influencers of choice and choice is imbedded in some of them. We choose our goals for instance. But if our choices of action do not align to our choice of goals, there is a critical lack of integrity that derails our efforts to reaching the goal So the control point is choice. If we want to get something done, it is a matter of choices. If we influence the choices we make and those that others make, we stand a really good chance of getting something done. If not, at least we know where to keep working. Good luck on the choice of today and if you read this, thanks for making that choice. Mark - mark@stratexadvisors.com [Strategic Execution Forum] 3:57:38 PM    comment []

Super HMI Ah, the first post of 2008. Cool gadgets. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) begins Monday. This report from InfoWorld says that LG Philips is planning to show a 52-inch multi-touch LCD. Imagine this as an HMI. Cool. 11:43:37 AM    comment []