I liked Penelope Trunk's interview so much that I asked her for more material. Here's her list of the nine biggest workplace myths: You’ll be happier if you have a job you like. The correlation between your happiness and your job is overrated. The most important factors, by far, are your optimism levels and your [...]
I’ll be speaking at the Salesforce Developer Conference on Monday. This is a free event. I learned something recently: Salesforce.com is really a software-as-service “platform” that has applicability beyond “salesforce automation.” Ergo, this conference is also for software entrepreneurs. Hope to see you there.
Penelope Trunk is the author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success. She is a career columnist at the Boston Globe and Yahoo Finance. Her syndicated column has run in more than 200 publications. Earlier, she was a software executive, and then she founded two companies. She has been through an IPO, an acquisition [...]
Richard Stearns is the president of World Vision. This organization is a "Christian relief and development organization dedicated to helping children and their communities worldwide reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty." Stearns holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. [...]
Pam Slim provides a great list of things to do prior to making a presentation. If you make speeches, presentations, or pitches, you need to read this. Here’s one more power tip: Show up with your own Countryman E6i microphone. (And tell your host that you need a Shure or Sennheiser body pack.) This has [...]
Check out a blog called Trendsspotting. It’s written by Taly Weiss, a social psychologist who runs a market research firm in Israel. She’s recently wrote about a bunch of interesting topics including: Self testing the degree of hardcore Web 2.0 usage. Crocs. (There are two pairs of Crocs in the Kawasaki family!) Influence of MySpace [...]
Where ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise—“On a Distant Prospect of Eton College” by Thomas Gray With all due respect to Thomas Gray, he missed the target when it comes to entrepreneurship: ignorance isn’t bliss, ignoring is. For example, last week I posted a “help wanted” entry soliciting “truemorists” for a site called [...]
Slideshare.net announced the winners of the World's Best Presentation Contest today: Winners (chose by judges) ShiftHappens by Jbrenman Meet Henry by Chereemoore Sustainable Food Lab by Chrislandry People’s Choice Winners PaniPuri--An Introduction by Thakkar ShiftHappens by Jbrenman Meet Henry by Chereeemoore The commonality you’ll see in these winners is big fonts, big graphics, and a [...]
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 [...]