This post really on the topics I’m suppose to be blogin about, but I gotta say If your finnish and understand the lyrics in this video you’ll laugh your ass off. Not PC, but who care’s - innovation in Finland is alive’n kickin.
Sometimes I feel a need to get motivated for whatever I’m doing - even going back to work on an assignment I’d rather throw in the trashbin. But then there are times you take a look at what others have done and get the kick in the butt to do anything. The story of the TEAM HOYT is one of them.
The efforts that go into compleating the Ironman competition are overwhelming, but to race 950 races, 63 marathons and 6 Ironman competitions while taking your disabled adult son along for the ride out of nothing, but love is amazing. Again we are stopped to think of the facts about what can be done and can’t.After whatching this you’ve got to look at yourself in the mirror and say I can - no matter what it is.
Fiction is never as astounding as facts. Go Team Hoyt!
My last post was on the TEDtalks available for free on their website. Today I watched Charles Leadbeater talk about the innovation and especially the innovation made by users, the Pro Amateurs. These are the 1% of people all communities passioned about the subject, product or service they use. The Pro amateurs are surfers of the blue ocean - the guys in the garage cooking up software, the college guys creating communities for friends or the dudes taking a surfboard and modifying it to go down snow filled hills.
Charles makes so many great points in his speech, but the last minutes are the climax for me - what is the future bringing in the world of open and closed innovation. Could even the public sector mix up the open innovation strategies to better their productivity and efficience. This could open up the lines of communication from office to HQ making improvement a joint effort instead a down poor of consultant cook-ups. Well this is enough ranting about the possibilities of open innovation culture within closed innovation business. Just listen to Charles - 18 minutes not wasted.
The web can be a sea of information and full of fun stuff, cool things and pics, but sometimes you stuble upon something amazing - tonight I stubled upon TEDtalks.
The annual conference brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).
This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. Almost 200 talks from their archive are available, with more added each week. The videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.
I was blown away by some of these talks and really wen’t “kid in a candy store”. I couldn’t believe all these great talks made available - and for free. There is just something about good talks that really makes learning an experience as much as a rock concert or a magic show - they move minds, souls and even hearts. I just can get enough of these.
So if you have 18 minutes to spare, go and check out a TEDtalks. I’m probably gonna post some of the talks later on, but for now JUST DO IT - GO TED.
Ever done a Powerpoint? Yep.
Ever used a lot of time making it? Yep.
Still end up deleting half of what you’ve made, just before the presentation and cramming things in too tight? Yep.
Well going a round the world wide web I found several good sites and blogs on giving presentations - I’ll post a list of them later but now to the topic - The ten 10/20/30 rule. This a “For Dummies” kind of approach to giving presentations, but it’s a rule everyone should work with - why? Well.. because I think I couldn’t do a better job presenting it than Guy Kawasaki in his blog, I just made an abstract of his great post on 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. This rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, a project summary, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc. Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting.
You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.
The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.
The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, the I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.
So just remember 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30px font - THE 10/20/30 RULE!
“How we believe the world is and what we honestly think it can become have powerful effects on how things turn out.”
James Rehm, Executive Editor, National teaching and Learning Forum
When working with people you always expect something from them and their work, especially when working with difficult people you tend to expect as little as possible and after the results you often come out of the room with an “I knew it” state of mind. But does our low expectations affect the end result?
According to a several tests your expectations do.
According to the Rosenthal and Jacobson report teachers led to expect enhanced performance from some children, the children did indeed show that enhancement. In some cases such improvement was about twice that shown by other children in the same class.
Another test was done as an aplication of racial expectations. This effect is seen during Jane Elliott’s blue-eyed versus brown-eyed discrimination exercise, where third graders were divided based on eye color. One group was given preference and regarded as “superior” because of their eye color, with the other group repeatedly being considered inferior in intelligence and learning ability. On the second day of the experiment, the groups were completely reversed, with those oppressed against one day being regarded as superior the next. Elliott gave spelling tests to both groups on each day of the experiment. The students scored very low on the day they were racially “inferior” and very high on the day they were considered racially “superior.”
The purpose of the experiment was to support the hypothesis that reality can be influenced by the expectations of others. This influence can be beneficial as well as detrimental depending on which label an individual is assigned. The observer-expectancy effect, which involves an experimenter’s unconsciously biased expectations, is tested in real life situations. Rosenthal posited that biased expectancies can essentially affect reality and create self-fulfilling prophecies as a result.
Here we go again.. Finally I cooked up the some time to get my wordpress blog up and running - this as much of a trial of blogging systems as it is a real serius blog (actually serious it will never be). But If someone stumbles upon my blog please do drop me a comment.
What the blog is about is that things can be done better and constant improvement can be made all of our lives. There is no reason anyone can’t do anything in their lives, as long as they are ready to put in the work to make it happen. I’ve not saying cause I’ve done something great or that I am here to give you advice on how to do it, but to give a insiders view as I try out new things, explore new possibilities and try to improve my life - one day at a time. Frontrow seats, frontlne results, in front of the crowd, in FRONT - where I wan’t to be!
