Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. – CS Lewis
Great lecture on the Myth of Innovation by Scott Berkun.
“As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.
Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.
Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.”
- William McKnight, 3M Chairman, 1948 (45:34 in the video above)
Reading Scoble on bloglines. As a Microsoft employee he is at the office at 1:46 AM. He is not alone. The first post is followed up by another post including a photo link of a whole group of volunteers working on their own time. They believe in the product that much. That is formidable competition for anyone going up against live.com!
Live.com Upgrades in progress
Wow, that’s fast. There are a few teams pulling an all-nighter
across the freeway from where I’m sitting right now (yeah, I’m still at
the office at 1:46 a.m.) working on pushing up new code to Live.com and
Richard MacManus already has a post about the changes.
And Edelman just brought a committed employee on board
That was the situation I was in yesterday and it’s why I am now at 4:30 a.m. getting around to posting.
Is that what it takes to succeed in the attention economy?
As a company we have been involved with the OnlyInHouston initiative with the Houston Advertising Federation (also a Tendenci non profit client) for some time now. Lou Congelio and Ann Iverson really have things picking up speed with the relaunch of the site and a new layout!
Here are some visuals on progress of the site recently. The charts are simple, and are coming directly out of LiveStats by Deepmetrix with a little bit of cropping. The first one is visits over time for the last three months.
OiH has a new blog. And we are also in need of people to post with the flickr tag "oih" which pretty much looks unused at the moment.
And last but not least, here is another visual of the traffic over the last three months. Hopefully the billboards going up around Houston and the inserts in Time Magazine will help increase traffic and help the creative community in Houston!
Only in Houston, an initiative from the Houston Advertising Federation (both are Tendenci clients), got some great coverage in AdAge today. This effort is being driven by Lou Congelio of STANandLOU Advertising in Houston.
———from AdAge———-
Houston: We Have A Problem
A creative exodus has walloped the city; now a local ad consortium says it has the solutionHouston is the fourth-largest city in the U.S., with the Census Bureau pegging its population at slightly over 2 million. But it’s the 18th largest ad market, much to the dismay of local marketing executives, who say companies looking for advertising and production support view Houston as little more than an afterthought – a quaint suburban hamlet in the shadow of creative metropolises like Miami or Portland, Ore.
Even though it headquarters more Fortune 500 companies than any city except New York, few of those tapped local agencies as their primary ad partner. That’s caused an exodus of agencies – and talent.
"We’ve taken a major hit," Lou Congelio…
Hopefully the article will be posted in full on the OiH or AdAge sites soon!
