Some people bring out the worst in you, others bring out the best, and then there are those remarkably rare, addictive ones who just bring out the most. Of everything.
They make you feel so alive that you’d follow them straight into hell, just to keep getting your fix.
Are Developing Countries More Developed?
“Kenyans do it better” at TEDxVienna.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got, back when I was 23 and newly out of school, is this: look around and figure out who you want to be on your team. Figure out the people around you that you want to work with for the rest of your life. Figure out the people who are smart & awesome, who share your values, who get things done — and maybe most important, who you like to be with and who you want to help win. And treat them right, always. Look for ways to help, to work together, to learn. Because in 20 years you’ll all be in amazing places doing amazing things.
Source: John’s Blog
When someone cancels a meeting at the last minute and I find myself with an unallocated hour, I’m like
Source: runningastartup
Eko India: Chasing the Fortune at the Base of the Pyramid - CGAP on Blip
I consider it a great privilege to have worked with EKO. The great camaraderie and encouragement triggered a series of decisions, none of which would be possible without the time spent there.
Source: blip.tv
Professional loyalty now flows “horizontally” to and from your network rather than “vertically” to your boss. The employer-employee pact is over; extend loyalty to your network.
PayPal’s original idea involved beaming money to people over Palm Pilots. It was voted one of the worst 10 business ideas of 1999, which is saying a lot.
Source: cacioppo
Regardless of whether your goal is to innovate around a product, service, or business opportunity, you get good insights by having an observant and empathetic view of the world. You can’t just stand in your own shoes; you’ve got to be able to stand in the shoes of others. Empathy allows you to have original insights about the world. It also enables you to build better teams.
“We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do.”
We call them “T-shaped people.” They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T — they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. That’s what you’re after at this point — patterns that yield ideas.
These teams operate in a highly experiential manner. You don’t put them in bland conference rooms and ask them to generate great ideas. You send them out into the world, and they return with many artifacts — notes, photos, maybe even recordings of what they’ve seen and heard. The walls of their project rooms are soon plastered with imagery, diagrams, flow charts, and other ephemera. The entire team is engaged in collective idea-making: They explore observations very quickly and build on one another’s insights. In this way, they generate richer, stronger ideas that are hardwired to the marketplace, because all of their observations come directly from the real world.
Yours truly on Obopay’s list of “Top 20 Influencers in Mobile Money” on Twitter.
The funny thing about risk
is it can be justified in retrospect. Say aye if you heard this before —
“When I look back three years, it was a risk that has made all the difference.”
With all elements for a great narrative present —a warrior in distress, a challenge, a war and a triumph— it’s rather easy to be swooned by a decision and then directly match that risk to this success. Which, of course, is not always a one-to-one co-relation.
Yet, it’s completely valid for them to paint this mythical picture. Consider it an emotional reward for the shots they take. No wonder the safe keepers have fewer stories to tell.
Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.
One becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and consonance with other people. No doubt, such a person loses some of his innocence and unconcern; on the other hand, he is largely independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and avoids the temptation to build his inner equilibrium upon such insecure foundations.
