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…notwithstanding my lack of recent posts. I’ve been busy with projects and haven’t had much time to blog. In the meantime, check out this Slate article (co-written by my fiancee). It’s a little off topic but that’s a proud guy’s liberty…
Paramount studios announced today that they’ve severed ties with Tom Cruise after a 13 year relationship due to his “unacceptable” behavior. Strangely, Cruise’s agents claim that they terminated negotiations with Paramount after turning to a pair of hedge funds to finance Cruise’s future projects. Clearly, there’s more to this story: as my fiancee said, Tom Cruise could declare himself the spiritual leader of a small group of zebras and studios would still bank his movies if they believed in his money-making appeal. The real question is why would hedge funds want to get involved? Didn’t they see this?
A year ago, the Boston Globe wrote about how hedge funds are beginning to poach on venture firm’s traditional turf by financing early stage companies. I suppose a certain amount of “mission drift” is normal, but today’s move seems wacky.
From 1984, as he presents the original Macintosh computer:
The screaming crowd reminds me of footage of old Beatles’ concerts–maybe it’s the bow tie?
Umair at Bubblegeneration recently wrote a great note on the “post-network” economy–the main idea being that bland strategy is increasingly a commodity, and that in mind, the next great shift in value creation will come from creativity.
But what is creativity?
The best answer I’ve recently heard comes from Sir Ken Robinson. If you haven’t seen his talk from TED, available here, I recommend you check it out when you have a free 20 minutes.
In a nutshell, Robinson defines creativity as the process of generating original ideas that have value–and typically, these ideas come through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of looking at the world. Robinson argues that our current educational systems look for and cultivate a narrow set of skills–typically related to mathematics and language–at the expense of many others. As a result, he believes, we aren’t fully preparing ourselves for the future.
Robinson’s ideas (which deserve a much fuller explanation–check out the video) have significant implications for managers and policy makers. At a macro level, what is the right composition for functional teams tasked with key projects? What are the right metrics to track, measure, and change? How can different ways of thinking be effectively synthesized into a coherent plan?
At a micro level, what do you do to foster creativity? If you’re a software engineer, would it be helpful (not to mention fun) to visit an exhibit on Dada-inspired art? If you’re a painter, would you gain from building your own TiVo?
Kiko, the online calendar I picked as my favorite Ajax application back in September 2005, is now for sale on eBay. The starting bid is $49,999.99, with no takers yet.
While Kiko’s functionality was solid (and improving, especially with recent releases), the team apparently wasn’t able to develop a viable business model to compete with the many other free alternatives (30Boxes, CalendarHub, Airset, and–oh yeah–Google Calendar).
I suggest keeping an eye on company founders Justin Kan and Emmet Shear–they’ve no doubt learned lessons here and will go on to bigger and better projects…
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