Improv Wisdom
I've fallen in love with a gem of a book, Patricia Ryan Madson's Improv Wisdom. Madson is a retired professor of drama at Stanford University, with lots of credits in the areas of improv and creativity. Less than 150 pages,...
What Would You Say At the End of Your Life?
Two years ago, I did a series of interviews with Ilene Kouzel, a friend dying of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The inteviews eventually were packaged into episodes for a podcast, Conscious Living, Conscious Leaving. Ilene loved to...
Power with Participants, Community Managers, and Social Networking
Click here for a great interview with Forrester analyst, Jeremiah Owyang on trends in social media and lessons in online community-building. As Jeremiah points out at the beginning of the interview, the "power is shifting to the participants." Other nuggets:...
Startup School
A friend points me to this set of presentations from Startup School, a place for techies to learn about building a company from the ground up, from some of the stars in the high-tech biz. While I'm no longer a...
Community Building Through Contests, Breakfasts, Interactive Radio
Johnny Bunko leads the way again. I previously blogged about Dan Pink's effective roll out of his manga business book. Visiting the official site, I found that Pink is taking a hybrid approach to building community--using online contests and in-person...
What Hell Really Looks Like
Quote from composer Gian-Carlo Menotti:"Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did...
Building Upper Body Strength
This Dilbert cartoon points to what happens when technology is used without purpose behind it. As an ABV collaborator wrote, in an email with the cartoon: "In a humorous way, I think it speaks to problems on both sides of...
Inside the Mind of Your Customer: Bottled Water and Toothpaste
The bottle on the left is what I normally expect when I buy bottled water out of a vending machine. That's 20 ounces. The bottle on the right is what I received after I put 75 cents into the machine. ...