Angus Blair

He ticked off some received wisdom: To improve the odds, wear red underwear and switch on all the lights before leaving home. To prevent a losing streak, avoid the sight of nuns and monks when travelling to the casino. Never use the main entrance. Always find a side door

If you’ve been to Vegas or Macau would like to one day, this is a must read. Loads of intrigue.

Dora and I spent a few days there before heading to Europe this year, it’s as crazy a place as it sounds. Also, the food is good.

So the marketer brags about how tasty the food on the airplane is, or how reliable the cell phone service is or how magically transporting the aromatherapy of the soap is—and then someone else, someone under different pressures and constraints—has to deliver. And they rarely do.

They rarely do because the paying customer isn’t their customer. Their customer is the quality control department, the accounting department and the “don’t-rock-the-boat” department.

My former boss reminded me with this article today why experience design needs to be at the forefront of a CEOs role. Couldn’t agree more b

If you’ve picked up a business book in the last four years, you undoubtedly heard it: the endless championing of Netflix’s $1 Million Prize.

It made for great “the future of business” fodder. A technology company crowdsources their R&D by ponying up $1,000,000 to anyone who can improve their recommendation engine. Netflix, stickler for user-experience as it is, was willing to pay all this money even if it meant making their algorithm just 10% better. Amazing! If you were looking for an anecdote to cheerlead web 2.0 to, this was almost too good to be true.

And in fact, it was.

I’m really digging the articles Ryan Holiday is posting at Fast Company. Really cutting just like his personal work. Worth following if you’re in marketing or strategy.

I’m savoring my time as an un-employed, illiterate and semi-mute citizen to get some distance from my day to day life in New Zealand and catch up on reading and thinking. It’s now 38 days since I’ve left New Zealand; I’ve read through a few hundred instapaper articles that I had in the queue, read 11 good books and soaked up 30 hours of french lessons. All the while meeting some new people and exploring Cote d’Azur. It is beautiful down here after all.

A post on my other blog where I write, giving some of my reasons for moving to France this year.

Deconstuctionists like to ask easy questions like, “why is a story for 15 year old girls so popular among middle aged women?” They asked this about Twilight, too, but it’s not at all surprising that these books are popular among middle aged women who still secretly believe women are second behind men. Not in terms of theoretical potential, perhaps, but they’ve grown up in a world with enough experiences that they can’t shake it. It’s still a man’s world. The real question is why it’s popular among 15 year old girls? 15 year old girls should, in theory, have grown up without 1970s sexism. Schools are hypervigilant about fostering girls development, and there are enough female everythings that it’s not remarkable that there are female anythings. And yet here we are, teen girls are reading fairy tales. This book should not resonate with 15 year olds, not this much. Which means that these girls are still getting sexist signals from somewhere, and, follow the trail, those signals came from the 40 year old women who like the story, i.e. “feminists.” This is what I mean when I say the system no longer needs men to maintain the status quo: it has feminists doing the job

This and his previous posts really hit a mark that I feel guilty for not seeing myself. If your a fan of the books and the movie I recommend checking this out.

Here’s how to undo the self-marketing. Stop using numbers.

You can have the stereo if you give up going to Starbucks every workday for the next year and a half. Worth it?

If you go to the free school, you can drive there in a brand new Mini convertible, and every summer you can spend $25,000 on a top-of-the-line internship/experience, and you can create a jazz series and pay your favorite musicians to come to campus to play for you and your fifty coolest friends, and you can have Herbie Hancock give you piano lessons and you can still have enough money left over to live without debt for a year after you graduate while you look for the perfect gig…

Fortunately a 5 year masters in NZ with living expenses will only set you back a quarter of that. Even so, great framing to consider.

But the point here is not to undercut Apple’s role: the iPod came together in somewhere between six and nine months, from concept to market, and its coherence as a product given the time frame and the number of variables is astonishing. Jobs and company are still correct when they point to that coherence as key to the iPod’s appeal; and the reality of technical innovation today is that assembling the right specialists is critical to speed, and speed is critical to success.

A trip down memory lane from 10 years ago. Does a better job of understand steve and design than a lot of the Isaacson biography.

I’m not a very good speaker. I say “um” a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don’t wish I were a better speaker like I wish I were a better writer. What I really want is to have good ideas, and that’s a much bigger part of being a good writer than being a good speaker.

Having good ideas is most of writing well. If you know what you’re talking about, you can say it in the plainest words and you’ll be perceived as having a good style. With speaking it’s the opposite: having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker.

I first noticed this at a conference several years ago. There was another speaker who was much better than me. He had all of us roaring with laughter. I seemed awkward and halting by comparison. Afterward I put my talk online like I usually do. As I was doing it I tried to imagine what a transcript of the other guy’s talk would be like, and it was only then I realized he hadn’t said very much.

I disagree with a lot of this piece but this middle paragraph is worth dwelling on. I think you can get the ideas to a certain point, but if you care about them then you need to work on the delivery in order to make them stick with your audience. Ideas are worth nothing if nobody is listening, regardless of how good they are.

Since you’re the person who is racing to work while panicking about the sky falling, I’m going to call you what we called these folks during my tenure at Apple: the Directly Responsible Individual or DRI. This name clearly describes the person who is directly responsible for whatever the situation might be and it’s a person. It’s not the Directly Responsible Group of People With Good Intentions Who Are Attempting to Feel Good by Building Consensus But Who Are Mostly Wasting Everyone’s Time.It’s an individual who is owning the entire situation.

Mr. Lopp on how to respond to those crappy work disasters when the sky is falling and are responsible for propping it up. Organizations with this kind of direct accountability are awesome.

The Book of Agape would direct diners to speak to one another for prescribed lengths of time on predefined topics. Like the famous questions that the youngest child at the table is assigned by the Haggadah to ask during the Passover ceremony (“Why is this night different from all other nights?” “Why do we eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs?” and so on), these talking points would be carefully crafted for a specific purpose, to coax guests away from customary expressions of pride (“What do you do?” “Where do your children go to school?”) and toward a more sincere revelation of themselves (“What do you regret?” “Whom can you not forgive?” “What do you fear?”).

I definitely don’t agree with everything in theirs piece (religion aiding to suppress violence?), but I would definitely want to eat at theIs restaurant.