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

“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)

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?

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!

———from AdAge———-

Houston: We Have A Problem
A creative exodus has walloped the city; now a local ad consortium says it has the solution

Houston 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!   

American Creativity Association International Conference 2006
Ed Schipul CEO
Schipul – The Web Marketing Company
Wed 22-Mar-06 8:00 AM to Sat 25-Mar-06 5:00 PM

Now for an interesting white paper from Mr. Barkan who I have not met nor read previously, but I found the following short very interesting from a visual communication perspective.  And of course it may be a bit “the sky is falling” but it IS true that many organizations experience a real performance gap as described below:

Strategic Review on Association Development: International Trends, Issues and Options
Mr. Terrance A. Barkan, AGS (Association Global Services) www.agshq.com

<snip pg.6>Associations with their consensus decision-making processes, tend to be following rather than leading organizations in the implementation of new business practices, programs and services.  In contrast, it is within associations that professional development issues, trends, standards and benchmarks are debated, forged and communicated.

When the rate of change of the external environment exceeds the ability of an association to anticipate or react to that change, a gap develops between what the environment demands and what the association can deliver.  It is this disconnect between the rate of change in the environment and the capacity rate of change of the association to adapt that poses a serious threat to the continued relevance of the organization.

Blatant plug disclaimer. It is the closing of this association performance gap that Tendenci represents.  Even if you don’t know what CMS, RSS or Podcasting are; you get them anyway.  That is the power of a cutting edge MMS application sold in the ASP sales model where everybody wins and your organization remains relevant.  The most important aspect is the enabling of distributed authoring for the association members.

Why was it there?  Who knows, it is a college campus so there is no telling.  And the design is cool, but what is really cool is the notepad that was on it with commentary from the students in the creative process.  Here is the object, followed by the creative process which I will let speak for itself.