Cronyism

During the dot.com boom I worked for an eCommerce company that, like so many others, was going through it's share of difficulties. Toward the end we were playing a good game of management roulette, as the folks in the valley tried to figure out what to do with our group.

With each new "top dog" came a few tag alongs. Some of them were quite sharp, even sharper than the man they followed, but at least one of them was a complete fish out of water. We'll call him "Tim". I'm sure Tim was quite competent in the role he had when he was the client of our new VP, "Jay", but he was woefully unprepared for his new leadership role on the other side of the table as a consultant. These two Dilbert's tell the story masterfully:

Business as Mission and Scale

Something I’ve noticed as I read through the literature on “Business as Mission” is that most of the efforts are focused on a relatively small scale. There is nothing wrong with starting small, but there almost seems to be a “common wisdom” that starting out small is the only way to go.

While I won’t argue the value of proof-of-concept efforts, there are times when small won’t cut it. Certain ideas need to start out at a scale that necessarily involves a great deal of risk. A good example is the Grameen Phone company started by Iqbal Quadir and discussed in his TED talk below:

Patient Capital: A Third Way to Think About Aid

For the past year I’ve been thinking about ways to use my entrepreneurial skills to help the international communities I work through the Vineyard. The ideas around “patient capital” that Jacqueline Novogratz proposes seem right on the money, so to speak.

Plants that clean the air

I’ve had a post-it note hanging around my desk for a while now with a list of plants that in combination supposedly clean the air of indoor pollution. I jotted it down from a TED talk. I’m posting it now so I can throw the note away. All quantities are per person. All plants are pre:

(4) Areca Palms--shoulder high (Chrysalidocarpus lutescens) take it outdoors every 3 months

(6-8) Mother-in-Law plants at least waist high (Sansevieria trifasciata)...called a bedroom plant because it converts CO2 into oxygen at night

(1) Money plant (Epipremnum aureum) removes formaldehyde

Here’s the video:

MacJournal

I’m writing this entry with new software, MacJournal, I just downloaded from MacHeist. It promises to be a whizzy new way to organize my thoughts, create, write, journal, etc. I’ve been using a Mac for over 25 years now and I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for this kind of software. Remember HyperCard? I loved it. Learned it. Helped create a HyperCard users group. Then there was MORE, still the ultimate outlining tool (OminOutliner is more powerful, but I still miss the simple elegance of MORE).

This tool promises to let me organize and then post to my blog, which seems like a good way to motivate me to blog more since I can write drafts and keep them organized without having to log into blogger....we’ll see.