Alcatraz Island reopened this week, and I was lucky enough to be invited by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy for a tour. It is a very fascinating place that has long history: fort, prison, lighthouse, and museum. It was also occupied by Indians from 1969 to 1971 via this proclamation. If you’re visiting San [...]
According to a story in Reuters, Salary.com released a study that shows that a stay-at-home mom should earn $138,095/year for what she does. Salary.com provides this online tool so that people can calculate how much a particular mom’s work is worth. I hope lots of moms forward this information...
I need some help from people who are in the flow of interesting and true rumors. They would be folks who can provide “scoops” that begin with a phrase like, “Did you hear that...?” For example, did you hear that Angelina Jolie just adopted another child? Did you hear that Apple is working on a [...]
Zody Chair First, the kind folks at Sit4Less sent me a Haworth Zody. It is the most comfortable office chair that I’ve ever used. You can tweak it in more ways than an open-source SQL database. If anything, it’s so supportive that you’ll sit too long and blog too much! Valet Second, Valet is a [...]
Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo has been a Stanford University professor since 1968. Zimbardo’s career is noted for giving psychology away to the public through his popular PBS-TV series, “Discovering Psychology,” along with many text and trade books, among his 300 publications. He was recently president of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Zimbardo conducted the (in)famous [...]
Seth Godin provided me with a copy of his new book, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick), and I think it will definitely get people to think about life. To give you a taste of what’s in the book, here’s an interview with Seth about the [...]
On a recent trip to Bowling Green State University for speech for the Sebo Entrepreneurship Series, I met the guys behind Flat Daddies. This is a very cool service that provides full-size printed posters of parents who are serving overseas in the military. Sergeant First Class Barbara Claudel of the Maine National Guard came up [...]
Duct tape (the tape) is simple, effective, and affordable—it’s not always the prettiest solution, but it does always work. The central theme of Duct Tape Marketing: The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide by John Jantsch is that effective small business marketing is a system—not an event—composed of simple, effective, and affordable techniques. When [...]
I grant you that I know very little about music. The most I can say is that my parents named me after Guy Lombardo (I consider myself lucky because they could have named me after Guy’s brother, and I would be “Carmen Kawasaki.”) That said, I declare this “Violin Monday” for two reasons: First, I [...]
Amazon—yes the place you buy books from—has a cool service called the Mechanical Turk. It’s a system that enables people to complete online tasks (“HITS”) such as tagging, classifying, searching, grading, and transcribing. For example, you could pay people to do tasks such as: Grading a podcast transcription Summarizing a blog post Finding out who [...]
Since blogging about Bob Sutton’s notorious book, The No Asshole Rule, I have received a constant flow of emails from readers sharing their own tales of lecherous bosses and indignities suffered. Mean-spirited morons are still running much of the workplace, and it’s time to take a stand. Most nastiness is directed by superiors to subordinates; [...]
At the Elite Retreat I gave an off-the-cuff answer to a question concerning getting the attention of venture capitalists. My buddy Wendy Piersall blogged about my answer, and it was a very popular. However, to truly help entrepreneurs, I’d like to provide a cogent list of the tips to get the attention of a venture [...]
I love the Internet because I wake up every day and discover something cool. Today’s discovery is TrendHunter, a site that recruits people around the world to spot trends. Here are some examples: Condom testers needed in the UK—mum’s the word or shaken, not stirred? Portraits made of chewing gum—giving a whole new meaning to [...]
This is a follow-up to the posting of March 14th based on a new book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. It is a video of Professor Carol Dweck explaining fixed and growth mindsets. Also, this diagram explains the differences between the two mindsets. It’s great—but that’s not surprising because Nigel Holmes created it. [...]
This is the final issue of Science Daily Week. Here’s a three-fer. Researchers at the University of Oregon found that when people watch someone perform a task that they know they’ll have to repeat later, similar parts of the brain are activated that are used doing the the task itself. The source is “Watching With [...]
Today’s Science Daily tidbit is that advertising during television programs with sexy content is less effective than during programs with no sexy content. This is the research finding of Ellie Parker and Adrian Furnham of the Department of Psychology of the University College London. I loved this quote: “The fact that recall of adverts was [...]
Science Daily Week continues with the study of assistant professor Vanessa Patrick (University of Georgia) along with co-authors Debbie MacInnis and C. Whan Park (University of Southern California): “Marketing: Too Much Hype Backfires.” The study shows that “people take notice when they feel worse than they thought they would, but—oddly—not when they feel better than [...]
I recently learned about Science Daily. It is a treasure chest of interesting studies that has implications on business practices. I’ve collected so much material from it that this is going to be “Science Daily Week” in my blog. For example, have you ever wondered whether giving employees a pay-for-performance bonus or a merit raise [...]
I’m making a speech next week (March 29th) in Kelowna, BC for the Okanagan Science and Technology Council’s “2007 Silicon Vineyard Innovation Awards.” If any of you are in the area, I hope you can make it.
My Stanford psychology professor, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, and Zeno Franco, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology at Pacific Graduate School of Psychology wrote a terrific article called “The Banality of Heroism.” Dr. Zimbardo ran the (in)famous Stanford Prison Experiment, so he knows how circumstances can make good people do bad things. This article is different—it’s [...]