Buffett Talk

[via Yuvaraj] Warren Buffet addressing a group of students: "If there's one thing that you leave here with today, it should be this: And I'll start with a question to get to my point. If you could pick 10% of one person in this room to own or 'go long' for the next 30 years, who would it be? It wouldn't be the person with the highest IQ; it wouldn't be the star athlete; you would look for certain other qualities… And if you had to pick one person to 'short' for the next 30 years, who would it be? Now ask yourself why you have made those selections. If you've considered these questions properly, the person you've gone long is probably someone who is honest, courageous, and dependable; the person you've shorted is probably someone who is egotistical and likes to take the credit. The point is that success is mostly dependent upon elective qualities, not anything with which you are born. You can choose to be dependable or not. And it's not easy to change, so choose correctly now. Bertrand Russell once said, 'The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken.' So ask yourself, 'Who do I want to be?' At the end of this process you should determine that the person you want to buy is yourself. You all are holding winning tickets."

Apps for Mobiles

Mary Hodder writes: "I had an idea the other night, at the 106 miles meeting, that we should develop applications for cell phones that creatively route around the carriers. And we most definitely should not use their framing of the customer situation: 'consumers' and 'enterprise', to describe the possible user markets. I think what's key to breaking the cellular provider stranglehold is developing cool apps that can sit on phones, but that only require users to download these apps in simple ways (not through carriers but through web access and SMS messages sending them the link to the web download). That way carriers will lose the monopoly they have on users access to applications. Because the phone IS the platform, not PC's."

Web 2.0 for Events

pc4media writes:

The cool event web 2.0 application may be how we put a listing of events into a calendar for the purpose of discovery. BUT, I'd bet that a cooler web 2.0 application for events is how we combine other information that is important to the event, into one interface for the purpose of event marketing and sharing experiences.

what should be integrated into an event website?

Who's talking/blogging about this event? powered by technorati, feedster, blogpulse
What blog posts are related to this event? powered by waypath
What images were taken at this event? Powered by flickr
What books should I buy before attending this event? Powered by Amazon
Is this event an auction? Can I bid online? Powered by ebaylive.
Are there other events happening around the same time in the same city? Powered by upcoming.org, evdb
Who's bookmarked this event? Powered by delicious, spurl.
What music is playing at this event? powered by iTunes, purevolume (maybe not yet)
Who's coming to this event? Powered by WhizSpark, FOAF, evite, upcoming.org, EVDB (maybe not yet)

What else?

After our own identity aggregation, and our own reading habits aggregation, events are the glue that brings us all together. Events are the next big aggregation puzzle.

Social Tools

WorldChanging has a post by Dina Mehta discussing:

Blogs - building bridges and communities
Voice over IP via Skype – a new communications lifestyle
Social Networking Services (SNS's)
Tagging - creating new language and shared meaning

Running Your Company on Web Apps

Evan Williams has some suggestions

* Basecamp - project/task management (much is moving to FogBugz, though)

* JotSpot - internal information management (haven't fully committed, but looks good)

* Blogger - for, ya know, the blog

* Gmail - I think nearly everyone here uses it as their client. We just forward our @odeo.com mail there.

* FogBugz - Awesome bug and customer email management (although we haven't tried the email yet). We were using something I think called BugTrack, which comes with Textdrive, but it was a little sparse in features. (FogBugz also has discussion forums, which we're not sure if we're using either.)

* Google Groups - internal and external mailing lists

* Kayako - a really intersting customer support app. Haven't decided how to use it yet or its relationship with FogBugz.

TECH TALK: Good Books: What Great Managers Do

Rounding off the trio of recently published good books on management is “The One Thing You Need to Know : ... About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success” by Marcus Buckingham. This is Buckingham’s third book, after “First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently” and “Now, Discover Your Strengths.”

The March 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review has an article by Buckingham based on the book. Buckingham writes: “Great leaders tap into the needs and fears we all share. Great managers, by contrast, perform their magic by discovering, developing, and celebrating what’s different about each person who works for them.” This is the central premise of the book.

Brand Autopsy has a few excerpts from the HBR article:

Great managers play chess, not checkers
Average managers play checkers, while great managers play chess. The difference? In checkers, all the pieces are uniform and move in the same way; they are interchangeable. You need to plan and coordinate their movements, certainly, but they all move at the same pace, on parallel paths. In chess, each type of piece moves in a different way, and you can’t play if you don’t know how each piece moves.

Great managers know and value the unique abilities and even the eccentricities of their employees, and they learn how best to integrate them into a coordinated plan of attack.

Identifying a person’s strengths …
To identify a person’s strengths, first ask, “What was the best day at work you’ve had in the past three months?” Find out what the person was doing and why he enjoyed it so much.

Remember: A strength is not merely something you are good at. In fact, it might be something you aren’t good at yet. It might be just a predilection, something you find so intrinsically satisfying that you look forward to doing it again and again and getting better at it over time. This question will prompt your employee to start thinking about his interests and abilities from this perspective.

Great Managers find ways to amplify a person’s style
Great managers don’t try to change a person’s style. They never try to push a knight to move in the same way as a bishop.

They know that their employees will differ in how they think, how they build relationships, how altruistic they are, how patient they can be, how much of an expert they need to be, how prepared they need to feel, what drives them, what challenges them, and what their goals are. These differences of trait and talent are like blood types: They cut across the superficial variations of race, sex, and age and capture the essential uniqueness of each individual.

ManyWorlds adds: “To become a great manager, Buckingham says, you need to know three things about each of your person: their strengths, so that you can focus on those while helping them overcome their weaknesses; the triggers that activate those strengths – recognition being the primary recommendation; and how they learn – so you can tailor your management style to fit those who analyze, those who do, and those who watch.”

Next Week: Good Books (continued)

Related Entries:  [All]
TECH TALK: Good Books: Beautiful Evidence and More Than You Know [November 3, 2006]
TECH TALK: Good Books: Winning Decisions [November 2, 2006]
TECH TALK: Good Books: The Go Point (Part 2) [November 1, 2006]
TECH TALK: Good Books: The Go Point [October 31, 2006]
TECH TALK: Good Books: In Spite of the Gods (Part 2) [October 30, 2006]