J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

http://webonly.harvardmagazine.com/159-Rowling.mp3 
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Text of speech here:

http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

Excerpt:

“Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.  I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me… So rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

What is more, those who choose not to empathize may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy. One of the many things I learned was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.”

Avenue A | Razorfish is one of the most successful on line advertising agencies.  AARF has done leading edge work for many of the most respected brands including Mercedes, JC Penney and Kraft.  They are in the thick of the Internet revolution as broadcast advertising dollars move dramatically to on-line in search of customers.  Agencies live in the space between Advertisers, Publishers, and Consumers.  It is a rapidly evolving field as the rich interactivity of the Web enables advertisers and consumers to meet and have a conversation about products and services.  AARF brings together professionals in marketing strategy, creative user experience design, and Internet technology to deliver world-class web-based experiences.

“Twenty years from now you’ll be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the things you did.” (Mark Twain)

“Good judgment comes from experience; often experience comes from bad judgment.” (Rita Mae Brown)

“Mild success comes from skill.  Wild success comes from luck.” (Nassim N. Taleb)

This is a very simple but powerful model for Change Management.  These are the key success factors for managing complex change and the consequences of failing to address these factors.

Caveat: I found many variations of this on the Internet; not sure who to attribute it to, but it’s not my original work.

Burke-Litwin Model here.

From the book, “212 The Extra Degree”:

"At 211 degrees water is hot.   At 212 degrees it boils and with boiling water comes steam and steam can power a locomotive.   Only one extra degree, but that one degree more makes all the difference.   The one extra degree of effort in business and in life separates the good from the great.”

Excerpts:

212 degree KINDNESS - “One of the most beautiful compensations in life is that we can never help another without helping ourselves.”  (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

212 degree BELIEF - Belief fuels enthusiasm and enthusiasm explodes into passion.

212 degree FOCUS - Having a simple clearly defined goal can capture the imagination and inspire passion.   It can cut through the fog of life like a beacon in the night. 

The movie can be found at http://www.212movie.com

Sean Carroll (University of Wisconsin) provides a captivating and enlightening account of the latest findings in evolutionary developmental biology ("evo devo").  It explains how genetics really works to turn DNA into the visible traits and physical forms of living things.  The book is a must-read for anyone who is "interested in the origins of complexity".  Have you have ever wondered why there are so many similarities between us and other animals or why in the midst of multitudes, there are so few, common patterns (e.g. two eyes, five fingers, etc.)?  This is the place to start.

Here is a bit of what I grasped from his richly exampled book.

All creatures begin as a single cell that divides and differentiates.  As this embryonic development gets underway, chemical markers identify the location of the cell in 3 dimensions much like a globe: longitude, latitude, and altitude.  Each cell knows where it is relative to the others--its global position.

There are regulatory genes that, based on the cell's position, trigger a cascading series of cell development.  These regulatory genes are ancient and nearly identical in all animals.  At the very onset, the embryo divides into a "head" and "tail", and into "topside" and "bottomside", and "left and right".  Within the "tail" section, cells further subdivide into segments.  The future site of arms and legs are marked very early, when the embryo just looks like a blob.  Later these marked cells trigger growth of limbs, which involve their own cascading sequence of genetic triggers.

The key things to note:  The foundational genes that organize the body pattern is the same or similar in almost all animals, especially vertebrates.  These body patterns begin forming in the first few hours of embryo formation.  Therefore these common basic genes are shared across an incredibly vast variety of creatures large and small.  Thus it is no coincidence that we have so much in common with even a fruit fly.

In fact, the same proteins involved in the production of a fruit fly's eyes are used in the formation of our eyes; the same proteins, if disrupted, cause birth defects in humans.  The underlying chemical system is the same in all living things.  This is to be expected given that we know that DNA is shared by all living things.  But what this means is that not only is nature using the same "paper and pencil" but is using the same drawings as a starting point, and "simply" embellishing the drawings with more and more layers and details, or sometimes stretching or repeating patterns to suit a different need.

Sales is an alignment process where two parties explore an opportunity for mutual benefit and agree to take action together.  The seller helps the buyer by solving a problem using known solutions.  The buyer has to trust the seller’s advice.

Step 1.  Create interest in the buyer and diagnose a “pain” (a need with urgency) having negative consequences.  This is also when the seller needs to qualify that the buyer has the Power to decide.  Alternately a Sponsor can lead to a person with power.

Step 2.  Offer a vision of how that pain and its consequences can be eliminated and assign a value to the solution.  The key at this stage is credibility and proof.  The seller must have credibility and expertise in the problem domain.

Step 3. The seller needs to “close” or lead the buyer to a commitment.  The seller has to drive the process by having an “evaluation plan” from start to finish (“If I can show you…, would you…?”).

Translate customer Needs into a Commitment by way of a Vision-

Vision:  “Imagine being…”
Capability: “If you could…”
Impact:  “What happens if…”
Need:  “So you need/want/wish to…”

Sir Ken Robinson speaks at the TED conference. This is a humorous and provocative talk.  Check it out: Link to Site

Every eduation system has the same hierarchy.  Everywhere, no matter where you go, at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts.  And within the arts, art and music are normally given the higher status than drama and dance.  No one teaches dance every day to children the way we teach mathematics…  [The way we teach suggests we think] our bodies are only a form of transport for our heads.

All public education systems around the world came into being to meet the needs of industrialization.  So you are steered benignly away as a child from subjects on the grounds you would never get a job doing that…  Now profoundly mistaken…  Many brilliant, creative people think they are not, because the thing they were good at wasn’t valued or was stigmatized.  We can’t go on that way.

Viktor Frankl is a renowned psychologist and survivor of Nazi concentration camps.  His book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, sold two million copies.  In it, he expounded “Logotherapy”.

Logotherapy in a Nutshell (Quotes)
Striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man, not a "secondary rationalization" of instinctual drives (Freudian theory).  That is why man is even ready to suffer on the condition that his suffering has a meaning.

People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.

Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.  These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.

What man needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.  Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment.  Everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

In the same way fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes.  Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue from the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.

Humor is another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor more than anything else in the human makeup, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves…  Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

The true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world of experience rather than within man's own psyche as though it were a closed system. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct... Taking the responsibility to fulfill the tasks which life constantly sets for each individual.

A recent study shows that philanthropy, while inherently satisfying, taps a uniquely human faculty to make difficult moral choices.

Excerpt from The Economist:

The Joy of Giving (October 12, 2006)

Researchers at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland, wanted to find the neural basis for unselfish acts. They used a standard technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, which can map the activity of the various parts of the brain.

The subjects of the study were each given $128 and told that they could donate anonymously to any of a range of potentially controversial charities. These embraced a wide range of causes, including support for abortion, euthanasia and sex equality, and opposition to the death penalty, nuclear power and war.

They found that the part of the brain that was active when a person donated happened to be the brain's reward centre—the mesolimbic pathway, responsible for doling out the dopamine-mediated euphoria associated with sex, money, food and drugs. Thus the warm glow that accompanies charitable giving has a physiological basis.

Donating also engaged the part of the brain that plays a role in the bonding behaviour between mother and child, and in romantic love. This involves oxytocin, a hormone that increases trust and co-operation.

A third part of the brain, which lies just behind the forehead and thought to be unique to humans, was involved in the complex, costly decisions when self-interest and moral beliefs were in conflict. Giving may make all sorts of animals feel good, but grappling with this particular sort of dilemma would appear to rely on a uniquely human part of the brain.

Full Story in the Economist

From personal to global, there are a lot of hard problems that we need to solve.  While there is no single approach to creative problem-solving, there are various frameworks including one that originated in Russia known as “TRIZ”.  This technique consists of transforming a hard problem into a different “domain” where known solutions exist, and then translating or mapping back to a specific solution of the matter at hand.  The diagram below is my rendering of this methodology.

(Click Image for Larger View)

This is a wonderful quote from Danny Hillis, computer game creator & innovator:

You go to a theme park with people you have a relationship with - friends, family - and you interact with each other in ways you wouldn't in normal life. You get into situations where you're frightened or excited together.

Parks take you out of the everyday and re-create that sense of wonder from childhood, the time when nothing made sense, when you didn't know what would happen next and didn't need to. They're wonderful, thrilling, and unpredictable - but safe.

Article in Wired Mag

Photos by Vitoria Falabella : Flower | Water | Light Bulbs | Doorway

Inverted Circle | Grecian Street |

Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993 for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) .  PCR is a remarkably simply yet revolutionary method of selectively multiplying and mass-producing specific DNA segments in just hours.

Like so many great scientific discoveries, the ideas for PCR came suddenly, as if by direct transmission from another realm. It was during a late-night drive in 1984.

"I was just driving and thinking about ideas and suddenly I saw it," Mullis recalls. "I saw the polymerase chain reaction as clear as if it were up on a blackboard in my head, so I pulled over and started scribbling."

Mullis kept scribbling calculations, right there in the car, until the formula for DNA amplification was complete. The calculation was based on the concept of "reiterative exponential growth processes," which Mullis had picked up from working with computer programs.

After much table-pounding, he convinced the small California biotech company he was working for, Cetus, that he was to something. Good thing they finally listened: They sold the patent for PCR to Hoffman-LaRoche for the staggering $300 million - the most money ever paid for a patent. Mullis meanwhile received a $10,000 bonus.

Link to full article...

On New Year’s Day millions of us are thinking the same things: “Did I take all my vacation last year?…  This year I’m going to finally make that trip to New York.”  We almost always resolve to do something differently (though we might not say it out loud).  Yet, maybe we should all resolve to be a little different, more like someone we know or respect.

A few days ago, I was like a bee in a bookstore, moving from flower to flower, sampling a bit here, then winding a path to the next.  I alighted upon a remarkable book by a remarkable person: Reflections of a Peacemaker by Mattie Stepanek.  I recalled hearing about him on the news when he passed away last year but did not know the details.  You can learn more about Mattie’s story on Oprah Winfrey’s website, on Larry King and in this Washington Post article.  He wants to be remembered as a “Poet, Peacemaker, and Philosopher Who Played".

Mattie’s words are profound for a fifty-year-old, much more for a boy who wrote from ages 3 to 13.  He called our unique message to the world, our “heartsong”:

We each have a song inside our heart
That can make peace in the world,
If we first make peace inside ourselves.

To all of us busy-bodies, he called for stillness and made this wish:

Let us not say
"I am someone
Who will change,
Who can do better,
Who might be gentler."
Rather, let us pray
And let us say,
"I am someone
Who is loving,
Who is peaceful,
Who is thankful for
The fact that I am."