Status-Q

From The Dilbert Blog...

I think the worst super power you could have would be x-ray vision... If everyone had x-ray eyes, you would hear sentences that you've never before heard, such as: ""Let's take a break. As you can see, my bladder is pretty much topped off.""

"The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression."

Humphrey Carpenter is a great writer of biographies, and I'm currently enjoying The Inklings, a sort of 'group biography' of C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams and friends. I liked this quote from Williams:

Much was possible to a man in solitude, but some things were only possible to a man in companionship, and of these the most important was balance. No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly.

Guy Kawasaki has some interesting observations on what makes Silicon Valley work, for those wanting to replicate its success. Some of them are quite unexpected:

High housing prices. If houses are cheap, it means that young people can buy housing sooner and have kids. When they have kids, they can't take as much risk and don't have as much energy to start companies. (I have four kids--I barely have the time and energy to blog, much less start a company.) Also, if houses are cheap, it's easier to ""make it big,"" and you want it to be hard to make it big.

A while back, I wrote about the danger of putting too much emphasis on what customers say they want. I've just come across this quote which is rather nice:

Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don't listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal -- they blog a lot -- but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. "[Wii] was unimaginable for them," Iwata says. "And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds."

Stick to satisfying expectations and they'll end up being the limits you're chained to!

My brother sent me a birthday card recently with a picture of a spider on it. Inside he had written:

Little Miss Muffet,
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And said, "What's a tuffet?"

I missed this when it came out... Guy Kawasaki says that anyone pitching their company to a VC should adopt the 10/20/30 rule:

It's quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

If you like Scott Adams' cartoons you may also like his blog.

Here, from a recent post, is some advice for new graduates starting in business:

Your potential for senior management will be determined by the three H's: Hair, Height, and Harvard degree. You need at least two out of three. (Non-Harvard schools will be acceptable if it's clear that you ""could have gone"" to Harvard.)

Your hard work will be rewarded. Specifically, your boss's boss will reward your boss for making you work so hard.

There's no such thing as good ideas and bad ideas. There are only your own ideas and other people's. If you want someone to like your idea, tell him he said it last week and you just remembered.

John (not doing so) in his Observer column about the record industry.

In the end, of course, rationality will prevail, because the record industry will run out of money to pay for lawyers long before kids get bored with file-sharing.

I'm reading a book edited by Joel Spolsky and came across this nice footnote:

This reminds me of my rule: if you can't understand the spec for a new technology, don't worry; nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won't be important.