Through the Keyhole

Plant trees

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
 - Nelson Henderson

Ivy League v. incarceration

There is no cost difference between incarceration and an Ivy League education. The main difference is the curriculum.

 – Paul Hawkens, Social Waste

The talent department

Understand that in days of yore, factories consisted of people and machines. The goal was to use more machines, fewer people, and to design processes so that the people were interchangeable, low cost and easily replaced. The more leverage the factory-owner had, the better. Hence Personnel or the even more cruel term: HR. It views people as a natural resource, like lumber.

Like it or not, in most organizations HR has grown up with a forms/clerical/factory focus. Which was fine, I guess, unless your goal was to do something amazing, something that had nothing to do with a factory, something that required amazing programmers, remarkable marketers or insanely talented strategy people.

So, here's my small suggestion, one that will make some uncomfortable.

Change the department name to Talent.

The reason this makes some people uncomfortable is that it seems like spin, like gratuitous double speak. And, if you don't change what you do, that would be true.

BUT...

What if you started acting like the VP of Talent? Understanding that talent is hard to find and not obvious to manage. The VP of Talent would have to reorganize the department and do things differently all day long (small example: talent shouldn't have to fill out reams of forms and argue with the insurance company... talent is too busy for that... talent has people to help with that.)

Microsoft and Google both have a very healthy focus on finding and recruiting Talent. McDonald's recently announced that they want to hire people who smile more. The first strategy works, the second won't. Talent is too smart to stay long at a company that wants it to be a cog in a machine. Great companies want and need talent, but they have to work for it.

– Seth Godin, Marketing HR

Punkin' chunkin'

As one of the comments notes, “one of life's simple pleasures: trying to chuck a pumpkin upwards of a mile…”

Gamers are catching the attention of advertisers

[video removed - see first comment - egg on my face!]

Bottled water

A must-read from Fast Company on the bottled water industry:

Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water--you have to leave empty space.) Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. . . . in Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water. Which means it is easier for the typical American in Beverly Hills or Baltimore to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fiji water than it is for most people in Fiji.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-message-in-a-bottle_Printer_Friendly.html

Don't boil your family

Don't boil your family while trying to change the world.
     - Dave Wakerley

Kidologist.com: The 212 \Principle\ - Motivation To Get Burned?.

American productivity

The average U.S. worker produces $63,885 of wealth per year, more than their counterparts in all other countries, the International Labor Organization said in its report. Ireland comes in second at $55,986, followed by Luxembourg at $55,641, Belgium at $55,235 and France at $54,609.

The productivity figure is found by dividing the country's gross domestic product by the number of people employed. The U.N. report is based on 2006 figures for many countries, or the most recent available.

Only part of the U.S. productivity growth, which has outpaced that of many other developed economies, can be explained by the longer hours Americans are putting in, the ILO said.

The U.S., according to the report, also beats all 27 nations in the European Union, Japan and Switzerland in the amount of wealth created per hour of work - a second key measure of productivity.

Report: American workers world's most productive - Sep. 2, 2007

I hope this electric car pans out

This is an interesting article on the Think City, a new electric car being developed in Norway:

• Can Think's electric car revolutionize the auto industry?
  

I wonder if this could be used for research interview transcription

http://www.teach42.com/2007/07/05/speech-to-text-for-a-price/