Source: Fast Company
Despite a seemingly stout business plan, and all the financial, social, and educational benefits it would bring, the FCC’s just turned down M2Z’s application for a coast-to-coast free wireless broadband system.
The FCC did not elaborate on why it turned down a plan from a new company called M2Z which would’ve created a U.S.-wide, free wireless broadband network. M2Z’s trick was going to be to use a spare bit of the radio spectrum, the 2GHz “AWS-3″ band, and earn itself cash by embedding ads in its free Net service as well as licensing out part of the spectrum it would then be controlling for other commercial uses. The entire nationwide system could’ve been up and running inside 10 years, and 5% of M2Z’s revenues would’ve gone straight to the Treasury.
Ignoring all the potential commercial benefits, educational uses, opportunities for new businesses to spring up that utilized the free network, and all sorts of enterprising stuff that isn’t even dreamed up yet, the FCC has finally ceased its deliberations, and has completely denied M2Z’s application. Early on, the plan ran afoul of puritanical concerns about how it could be used for viewing pornography–but the FCC’s intention to filter porn ran into opposition with civil liberties groups.
The FCC is known to have heard complaints about M2Z’s plan from existing wireless carriers. Though M2Z’s network would’ve operated at under 1 mbs peak speeds–meaning it was very slow by today’s standards, and probably snail-like by tomorrow’s–its free pricing may well have tempted many folks away from spending cash with an established ISP. Those carriers are now reported to be pleased with the FCC’s decision, though they argue it’s in line with the greater National Broadband Plan. Whenever that actually gets off the ground.
To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.
Posted in Technology by .
Sep 10
2
Moments of Truth, Improvised
Source: Trust Matters
Anyone who’s been in professional services for more than a week has probably encountered a tricky client situation or two. Some examples:
- A prospective client asks you point blank, “What experience do you have in xyz industry?” and even though you saw that question coming, you didn’t think it would be quite so direct, and the honest answer is zero, zip, nada—only you’re afraid to say so because you think it’s a deal-breaker and you’ve got other relevant experience that surely they’ll want to hear about before summarily dismissing you!
- You thought the draft deliverable you turned in yesterday was pretty good until you got an email from your client saying how disappointed she is in the product and that, quite frankly, she’s seriously re-considering sending you to London for the next and largest revenue-producing phase of the project.
- You’re seconds away from beginning a meeting with a very senior client, originally scheduled to discuss how to expand the successful work you’re doing together, but an hour earlier you accidentally overheard him in the lunchroom speaking with colleagues about dumping your company and hiring your number one competitor instead.
(By the way: 2 of those 3 really happened to us: which is the made-up story?)
I call these Moments of Truth—when something happens, and suddenly it feels like you’re alone on a sinking ship with no life preserver in sight, and you’d rather be anywhere but where you are.
Daniel Goleman, author of “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ,” taught us to understand the science behind our reaction, using the phrase “amygdala hijack” to describe how our well-functioning “thinking brain” (the neocortex) gets completely overruled by the part of the brain that manages our survival. Then our amygdala-threatened-selves do stupid things like spin a great story of how we don’t exactly have direct experience in xyz industry but blah blah blah … or subtly (and maybe overtly) blame our colleague for the sub-par work product … or completely sidestep an awkward interaction altogether in favor of maintaining the pretense that everything really is OK after all. In other words: we're in fight or flight mode, and often both at once.
Moments of Truth become Moments of Learning
We spend a lot of time dealing with Moments of Truth in our learning programs because they happen a lot in your business relationships. How you handle them speaks volumes about what you’re made of. It speaks to whether or not you have the mindset, motives, and agility of a Trusted Advisor. Being effective in a Moment of Truth requires more than mastering a few behavioral tricks; it demands a new way of thinking and being.
So we do a lot of out-of-the-box experiential learning that deals on the spot with your own live, real situations. Occasionally we use our own caselets for you to experiment with—ones that have been tested for a decade and earned a special place in the hearts of our alumni, like “The Lunchroom.” In other words, we do what most classroom learners universally dread: we role-play.
All right, collective groan–I know, I know, I hate role-playing too. It’s scary and contrived. And there’s never enough background or history or facts to be really comfortable in a role-play. It’s a common refrain during debriefs: “If only I’d known more about the situation I could have handled it better.”
But let’s be real: How many times have you prepped for hours for a meeting, only to learn in the first two minutes that the client just came out of another meeting in which a major decision was made that completely alters not only your agenda for this meeting but your entire set of recommendations for the engagement?
In a Moment of Truth, background and history and facts don’t matter one iota because your reptilian brain doesn’t care—it’s focused exclusively on the emotions of the moment. It has neither the time nor the inclination to process anything else.
Q. Faced with an MOT, what’s a Trusted Advisor to do?
A. Learn how to improvise.
The Practice of Improvisation: a Key Trusted Advisor Capability
To improvise is to “invent, compose, or perform with little or no preparation.” Which is exactly what is called for in a Moment of Truth—the ability to deal on the spot with something unexpected.
Believe it or not, you get better at improvising by practicing improvisation. (And that only sounds like an oxymoron—it’s actually very true). Practice is exactly how professional improv comedians (think, Whose Line is it, Anyway?) become so skilled at their craft.
They practice being quick to respond instead of over-thinking. They practice “yes-and” responses, where they build on what’s already been said, instead of contradicting or denying what someone else has already offered. They practice subordinating their own egos to support what’s being created by the collective instead of hogging the spotlight and stealing a scene. They practice giving up being clever and witty and funny and instead get real.
How do they do this? They get together and … role-play. They do it again and again, always with new scenarios and relationships that are completely made up on the spot. And when it’s show time and the curtain goes up, they still have no idea what they’re going to create together because everything is based on audience suggestion. But what they do know is that they’re fully rehearsed at being responsive, collaborative, and authentic.
In Trusted Advisor terms, they’re credible, transparent, other-oriented, related.
And that is something worth practicing to get good at. So: role-plays? Yep, role-plays.
The Trusted Advisor/Improviser—a Brief Commercial
If you think your skills could use a tune up or you wish you felt more confident in the Moments of Truth you face with your clients and colleagues, we’d love to have you come practice with us Sept 28 and 29 in Washington, DC. Being a Trusted Advisor: Walking the Talk is a rare opportunity to immerse yourself in the mindsets and skill sets of a Trusted Advisor.
We’ll improvise. We’ll laugh a lot. And we’ll be sure you walk away with far greater value than you expected.
Over 12,000 people have taken our Trust Quotient quiz. Check out the NEW VERSION and learn your Trust Temperament.
Posted in Marketing, Business Development by .
Sep 10
2
Value Billing | LawBiz Blog
Source: LawBizBlog
Posted in Marketing, Business Development by .
Source: www.nytimes.com
When Autodesk rolled out a great app for the iPad, I was shocked. But I wasn’t prepared for this news:
In the latest sign of that comeback, Autodesk plans to announce on Tuesday that it is bringing its flagship AutoCAD design and engineering software to the Mac for the first time in nearly two decades.
The return of AutoCAD to the Mac could help Apple sustain its momentum in the competitive market for personal computers, especially with business customers, where Apple has made significant inroads recently. Autodesk estimates that 10 million people use the AutoCAD software around the world, and the company said that its customers had been asking for a Mac version with growing frequency.
“This is an endorsement from our side that design and engineering customers are taking the Macintosh seriously again,” said Amar Hanspal, senior vice president for platform solutions at Autodesk.
The Mac was once a popular platform for AutoCAD. But Apple’s share of the personal computer market dwindled in the early 1990s, so Autodesk made its last version of AutoCAD for the Mac in 1992, and stopped supporting it in 1994. The company continued to make other products for the Mac, including software used in the entertainment industry.
Posted in Technology by .
Source: gmailblog.blogspot.com
Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.
Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”
Posted in Technology by .
Aug 10
24
Dilbert on Viral Videos
Source: Presentation Zen
A long time ago — before PowerPoint was invented — in a galaxy far, far away, leaders gave presentations backed by large electronic wall displays. Below, for example, is a photo of General Dodonna (from Star Wars IV) briefing a packed room full of starpilots, navigators, and droids. Notice how he uses the entire wide screen to display only visual information, a digital vector animation of the inner workings of the death star. Notice too how he has gathered the troops close to the front, how he himself stands close to the back-lit screen (even slightly in front of it at times), and maintains eye-contact with the audience, occasionally pointing to key areas of the animation on screen.
Above: General Jan Dodonna stands and delivers with confidence and brevity.
Above: What the same presentation would look like while following conventional slideware templates found on present day planet Earth. “You can’t see this well on this Micro Galactic ProjectionPoint, but an analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has demonstrated a weakness in the battle station. Follow this link at the bottom of the screen for more info if needed.”
Above: Nothing inspires like a “thank you slide.”
A New Hope for clear communication
Let’s embrace the spirit of the Rebel
Alliance and push back against Imperial template propaganda and the scourge of habit and conventional wisdom. If you have a large screen, use it to show visuals, not lines
of text that remind you what to say. You do not have to use a screen, but if you do, use it to display visual information that illustrates or amplifies your message in the clearest way possible. Stand with your visuals, becoming a clear part of the visual experience from your audience’s point of view. Do not stand meekly in the corner or behind a lectern, removed from both the audience and the bright screen. May the Force be with you in your next presentation and beyond.
Related
• Contrasts in presentation style: Yoda vs. Darth Vader
Posted in Marketing, Business Development by .
Aug 10
20
The Secret to Modern Advertising
Source: lifehacker.com
People love their multiple monitors, and we’ve been told over and over again that multiple monitors “boosts productivity.”
Let’s shine some light here on the multi-monitor setup. Just where do these productivity claims come from?
The first report I could find is a report from the University of Utah in 2003 followed up by a new one in 2008. If you follow the money, you can likely predict the results—the study was commissioned by monitor manufacturer NEC. And surprise, the results of the study are: buy bigger, more expensive monitors!
What’s surprising is that the media crooned over the multiple monitor part of the study, when the study came to the conclusion that it was pixels, not monitors that increased productivity. What’s also surprising is that while the report mentioned that there were productivity gains in certain tasks with more screen real estate, those gains begin to taper between 26 and 30 inches, or at monitors where the native resolution is 2560×1440 or greater.
My take: there’s an optimal number of pixels you need to complete the tasks you need to complete. Worry about that number, not the number of monitors you have. That optimal number, for the vast majority of people is about 2500×1400. In 2003—before widescreen became commonplace—it was the case that 2 17-20″(2560 pixels wide) LCDs was the only affordable way to acquire an optimal number of pixels. Today, you can pick up a 27 inch display with 2560×1440 pixels along with a computer attached to it for under $1500. This number of pixels allow you to accomplish most tasks—whether it’s writing code and debugging, writing a blog post and reading primary sources, or editing one spreadsheet with data from another.
Posted in Technology by .
Aug 10
18
How to kill a law firm | Law21.ca
Source: www.law21.ca
There’s a story told about Jack Welch, former GE president — it might be from one of his books, or it might be apocryphal; quite possibly it’s both. The story goes that soon after he took over the company, he called in his vice-presidents and other senior people and advised them that countless smaller companies and start-ups were out there gunning for GE, hoping to take down the top dog by finding the chinks in its armour and exploiting them. He directed his people to locate these companies, identify the disruptive innovations they were coming up with, and prepare defences against them.
Two days later, Welch called those same people back into the boardroom and told them he’d changed his mind. When his VPs and senior leaders found these companies and figured out what they were doing to destroy GE’s business, they weren’t to prepare defences against those innovations. They were to adopt them.
In a nutshell, that describes the challenge facing companies in virtually every industry today, especially legacy industries like music, automobiles and publishing where complacency has led to ruin. Very rarely, companies rise to the challenge: consider The Atlantic magazine, which is meeting this innovator’s dilemma by doing exactly what Jack Welch prescribed: reinventing its business model before competitors force it to do so. In the words of the company’s media president:
“‘If our mission was to kill the magazine, what would we do?’” said Smith, who added that a digital competitor was going to do that anyway, so they did it themselves.”
The article continues: “There are so few companies that realize this needs to be a key element of their strategy. Someone else is out there trying to kill them. So do it yourself and reap the rewards. … [The Atlantic] recognized that digital wasn’t just an adjunct to the print product, but a core element of the brand and the publication. So, they … looked for ways to make the digital product be fantastic on its own. And, now, nearly 40% of the brand’s revenue comes from its online properties….
Posted in Marketing, Business Development by .
