From AdPulp, by way of Stilgherrian:

The tall towers that house our corporations are the new palaces of our day, the places where real power resides, but those towers are full of paradoxes. Made of glass, you can’t see inside. They’re pillars of our democracy, but they are run as totalitarian states. Their names are reduced to a set of initials. Their leaders are …

Thoughts sparked by Stilgherrian’s post of the same title:

Much conventional business practice is simply incompatible with humanity. The less human we can be, the more successful we will be in business.

For too long now there is only one way to do business, and one definition of success, and one goal. The domain of business has long been dominated by the uncreative, the greedy, the exploitative, the …

It is rare to stumble upon a blog with thoughts that seems to fit so well with mine. This is what happened today when I discovered Emma McCreary’s Joy Ninja.

Reading through Emma’s posts, I suddenly realised why I have always been uncomfortable with conventional marketing and PR.

As I have often said on this blog, conventional business practice seems to assume there is only one “right” …

Another GREAT post by Stilgherrian. Well worth a read.

“Innovation is creative work.”
“Happy employees are loyal employees”

They keywords are: Creative and Happy. How often do they come up in management meetings of most businesses?

“Mr Calacanis may have generated more dollars in a shorter time…”

And here in lies the problem, all too many businesses, and the media around business practice, are still focused on how to make as …

The demand for innovation (the myriads of definitions thereof) is certainly out there more so than ever before, judging by the magazines and media. I am talking about business innovation here – that is new ways to design, run and “be” a business.

I predict that increasingly many colleges and universities will start offering degree programmes and qualifications in “Innovation”. It will be interesting to see the different approaches.

Notable …

I got another spam phone call today from an Indian call centre. They had all the usual characteristics:

The one minute delay upfront.
They knew who I was, but did not say who they were.
They talked AT me; with the fake “you are my long lost friend” tone.
The script was very defensive – we are a community organisation, we are incorporated in Australia…

The community organisation part did perk my …

These are my highlights from Dacher Keltner’s article The Power Paradox which takes a more humane and positive look at the idea of power, contrary to the Machiavellian views of Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power.

[The belief] that attaining power requires force, deception, manipulation, and coercion … [is] dead wrong.

Instead, a new science of power has revealed that power is wielded most effectively when it’s …

Guy Kawasaki’s post Power 3.0: Kinder, Gentler, and Better discusses the idea of “power” in business.

Conventional business practice tends to promote the idea that power = aggression, founded on the myth that everyone is out to get you, that the fittest win. This is the sort of power that is based on fear - fear of punishment and deprivation. This sort of “power” leads to sociopathy.

Guy …

I put some extra RAM into a friend’s laptop over the weekend. A lame dog with 256Mb, it now runs like a dream with 1.2Gb.

I am flabbergasted that Dell would sell a Windows XP laptop with only 256Mb of RAM. Sure, that is Microsoft’s published minimum requirement for XP; which of course, is the barest minimum it will take for the operating system to …

My friend Christina Jayne Duncan said in an email:

“The heart core of the issue is the only way!”

“Heart core” immediately made me think of “hard core” (mind out of the gutter please, just for the duration of this post).

So much of the conventional business world is about the hard core stuff - we are business MEN and must therefore must only make hard core MANLY “rational” decisions; we …