A fascinating talk on a potential future for food production. By utilizing “bio-printing,” Andreas Forsace and team at Modern Meadow can organically produce meat and leather without actually harming an animal. And the economic, societal, and environmental impacts are astounding (96% fewer greenhouse gases! 96% less water!?), to the point that, if adopted, much of the modern pricing and economic culture we know would be nothing but a memory.
Eight Lost Quotes from Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs is indubitably one of the most creative, charismatic, and quotable leaders of our modern time. His combination of business-savvy, logic based in programming, and study of the finer things like philosophy, art, and design separated him from most of his business peers then and now. And man, was he willing to say what he thought.
Recently, the entirety of his seminal interview with Robert Cringely - truncated to fit the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds - is now available on Netflix. And does he drop some great lines!
Paste Magazine has a nice little write-up laying out their eight favorite quotes from the documentary. They offer a fine look at one of our great minds.
8. Success
“I don’t really care about being right, I just care about success. You’ll find a lot of people that will tell you I had a very strong opinion, and they presented evidence to the contrary and five minutes later I changed my mind. I don’t mind being wrong, and I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.”7. Asking “Why?”
“Throughout the years in business, I found something. I always ask why you do things. The answers you invariably get is, ’That’s just the way it’s done.’ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply in business, that’s what I found.”6. Really Good People
“When you get really good people, they know they’re really good, and you don’t have to baby people’s egos so much. And what really matters is the work, and everybody knows that. So, people are being counted on to do specific pieces of the puzzle. And the most important thing you can do for someone who’s really good and really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isn’t good enough.”5. Dynamic Range
“I observed something very early on at Apple, I didn’t know how to explain it then, but I’ve thought about it since. Most things in life, the dynamic range between ‘average’ and the ‘best’ is, at most, two-to-one. If you get into a cab in New York City with the best cab driver, as opposed to the average cab driver, you’re probably going to get to your destination with the best cab driver maybe thirty percent faster… Or a CD player, the difference between the best CD player and the average CD player is what? Twenty percent? So two-to-one is a big dynamic range in most of life. In software—and it used to be the case in hardware too—the difference between the average and the best is 50 to one. Maybe 100 to one. Very few things in life are like this, but what I’ve been lucky enough to spend my life in is like this.”4. Computer Science
“It had nothing to do with using [programs] for practical things, it had more to do with using them as a mirror of your thought process. To actually learn how to think. I think everyone in this country should learn to program a computer. Everyone should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think. I think of computer science as a liberal art.”3. Product People
“The technology crashed and burned at Xerox. Why? I learned more about this with John Sculley later on. What happens is, John came from Pepsico. And they—at most—would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was a new sized bottle. So if you were a ‘product person’, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So, who influences the success at Pepsico? The sales and marketing people. Therefore they were the ones that got promoted, and they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for Pepsico that might have been okay, but it turns out the same thing can happen at technology companies that get monopolies. Like IBM and Xerox. If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums. The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”2. Content
“People get confused; companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, ‘Well, somehow, there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created.’ So they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people start to get confused that the process is the content. And that’s ultimately the downfall of IBM. IBMhas the best process people in the world. They just forgot about the content. And that happened a little bit at Apple, too. We had a lot of people who were great at management process. They just didn’t have a clue about the content. In my career, I found that the best people are the ones that really understand the content. And they’re a pain in the butt to manage! But you put up with it because they’re so great at the content. And that’s what makes great products. It’s not process, it’s content.”1. Culture in the Products
“The only problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. They don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product. You say, why is that important? Proportionally spaced fonts come from type-setting and beautiful books, that’s where one gets the idea. If it weren’t for the Mac, they would never have that in their products. So I’m saddened—not by Microsoft’s success, I have no problem with their success. They’ve earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them. They have no spirit of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that a lot of customers don’t have a lot of that spirit either. But the way we’re gonna ratchet up our species is to take the best and spread it around everybody so that everybody grows up with better things and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And Microsoft’s just McDonald’s.”
Source: pastemagazine.com
Man was meant to be upright
Man was not meant to spend all day hunched over a dimly lit screen; disturbingly high incidences of obesity, joint pain and fatigue are our bodies’ not-so-subtle ways of saying they want to get up and move around. After piloting a walking desk – a standing desk attached to a treadmill – for a month, I’m convinced they should become the default workstation. Immediately, my daily calorie burn jumped 30.7 percent, and I lost 3 pounds and a percent of body fat in a week. I also experienced less joint pain throughout the day.
-Gregory Ferenstein, Techcruch
Source: TechCrunch
The Youthful Social Network
Pop quiz: what is the favorite social networking site of Americans under age 25? If you guessed Facebook you are way behind the eight-ball, because Tumblr now enjoys more regular visits from the youth of America.
You do something all day long, don’t you? Every one does. If you get up at seven o’clock and go to bed at eleven, you have put in sixteen good hours, and it is certain with most men, that they have been doing something all the time. They have been either walking, or reading, or writing, or thinking. The only trouble is that they do it about a great many things and I do it about one. If they took the time in question and applied it in one direction, to one object, they would succeed. Success is sure to follow such application. The trouble lies in the fact that people do not have an object, one thing, to which they stick, letting all else go. Success is the product of the severest kind of mental and physical application.
(via explore-blog)
![fastcompany:
5 Insanely Simple Work-Life Balance Shortcuts From People Who “Have It All”
Make it your responsibility to decide what matters, and when to get it done—no one else is going to determine or prioritize it for you.
Don’t keep separate work and personal calendars or priority lists. (Fast Company likes Clear, if you need an app.)
Frequently take stock of what’s working and what’s not—because it’s always changing. Put that on your calendar.
Schedule time for small, manageable steps in the areas of their life they’ve identified as important instead of just identifying huge, lofty goals.
Focus on and celebrate what does get done, not what falls by the wayside—small or partial steps are better than nothing.
[Image: Flickr user Joe Plocki]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/5598b1dc8ce282b5f2fc1349934e213a/tumblr_mheipl1fiT1qzt7h7o1_1280.jpg)
5 Insanely Simple Work-Life Balance Shortcuts From People Who “Have It All”
- Make it your responsibility to decide what matters, and when to get it done—no one else is going to determine or prioritize it for you.
- Don’t keep separate work and personal calendars or priority lists. (Fast Company likes Clear, if you need an app.)
- Frequently take stock of what’s working and what’s not—because it’s always changing. Put that on your calendar.
- Schedule time for small, manageable steps in the areas of their life they’ve identified as important instead of just identifying huge, lofty goals.
- Focus on and celebrate what does get done, not what falls by the wayside—small or partial steps are better than nothing.
[Image: Flickr user Joe Plocki]
We're In This Together
Dr. David Katz is an opponent to Coca-Cola, but he also knows that if actually want to change, we have to let them
It’s about us, and the choices we make. And we apparently have some hard ones. We have water, but choose to drink Coke. We have broccoli, but choose to eat bologna. There are no bears involved. We have met the enemy- and it is us.
Yes, we are also the victim. Yes, the food industry really has manipulated us with foods engineered to specificationsborn of functional MRI scans. But come on: does anyone think Coke is good for them? Does anyone not living under a rock think you can drink a gallon of that stuff daily and not suffer any consequences? Is there really anyone left who has not heard therumors about sugar? And does anyone bemoaning the unbearable (pun intended) burden of a soda tax truly not know where to find a water fountain?
Coke is quite right about one thing: we are all in this together.
Definitely worth a read
I worry that something has gone seriously wrong with the way we run companies. If you read the media coverage of our company, or of the technology industry in general, it’s always about the competition. The stories are written as if they are covering a sporting event. But it’s hard to find actual examples of really amazing things that happened solely due to competition. How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing? That’s why most companies decay slowly over time. They tend to do approximately what they did before, with a few minor changes. It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time. Especially in technology, where you know there’s going to be non-incremental change.
So a big part of my job is to get people focused on things that are not just incremental. Take Gmail. When we released that, we were a search company—it was a leap for us to put out an email product, let alone one that gave users 100 times as much storage as they could get anywhere else. That is not something that would have happened naturally if we had been focusing on incremental improvements.
To me, the thing with the most impact is that there are no set platforms anymore. Nothing is hardened in cement like TV or print was; figuring out how to create and deliver messages now is liquid, constantly evolving as new technologies are introduced. It’s incredibly exciting. Interestingly, in this new world, powerful storytelling—a form as old as humanity itself—is more important than ever. Goddard said, “Sometimes reality is too complex; stories give it form.” I agree with that. Storytelling is timeless and, as we’re seeing, how to deliver a story is very much of its time.
I don’t believe in market research. I don’t believe in marketing the way it’s done in America. The American way of marketing is to answer to the wants of the customer instead of answering to the needs of the customer. The purpose of marketing should be to find needs — not to find wants.
People do not know what they want. They barely know what they need, but they definitely do not know what they want. They’re conditioned by the limited imagination of what is possible. … Most of the time, focus groups are built on the pressure of ignorance.
