20 Slides. 20 Seconds Each. Pecha-Kucha
How would your next presentation go if you only had twenty slides and could show each one for "only" twenty seconds (for a total of 6 minutes 40 seconds? A format embracing these very constraints is called Pecha Kucha, and was started by two architects in Tokyo as part of a designers' show and tell. It seems like a natural fit for an Idea Market, as a replacement for a panel presentation, or any time a lot of presenters have something to say.
I'm doing a very short speech (nine minutes) on innovation in two days, and am going to give this presentation format a try. I'll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, if you'd like to learn more, check out several examples on You Tube, or this recent Wired magazine article. If you are in the St. Louis area and want to have a Pecha Kucha night, let me know.
Idea Market in the News
I've written about my Idea Markets here before. Here's an article from the local Suburban Journal that talks about one I did for the International Association of Business Communicators.
The Mobile Lawyer 2.0
It has been a long while since I've been so WOW'd by a business model as I've been this morning. Simply put, this is the BEST template I've seen for building a home-based practice from, of all people, a physician. Dr. Jay Parkinson, MD is building a web-based medical practice. From his website:
- I AM A NEW KIND OF PHYSICIAN.
- I strictly make house calls either at your home or work.
- Once you become my patient and I've personally met you, we can also e-visit by video chat, IM and email for certain problems and follow-ups.
- I'm based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My fees are very reasonable.
- I'm extremely accessible. Contact me by phone, email, IM, text, or video chat. Mon-Fri 8AM-5PM. 24/7 for emergencies.
- I specialize in young adults age 18 to 40 without traditional health insurance.
- When you need more than I provide, I make sure you wisely spend your money and pay the lowest price for the highest quality.
- I've gathered costs for NYC specialists, medications, x-rays, MRIs, ER visits, blood tests, etc...just like a Google price search.
- I mix the service of an old-time, small town doctor with the latest technology to keep you and your bank account healthyl
How much for this service? According to the "How it Works" on his site, his fee is "far less than your yearly coffee budget but a little more than your Netflix." His web site also provides "Real Life Examples" that describe, in plain English, how you'd use his service. Oh, and he's blogging, too.
Lawyers, if you are looking for a real dose of inspiration (or a glimpse to the future of mobile practice) you HAVE to check this Parkinson's site and business model. Simply brilliant. Great idea, great web site, amazing copy. If I were still practicing, I'd steal it in a heartbeat. Look at it now.
Via: Zoli's Blog.
Travel Tip: Wakerupper
If you are on the road a lot and have grown tired of trusting your hotel's wake up call, check out Wakerupper. It is a free service that will call your phone at a pre-determined time and read you the message you asked it to. Thanks, Lifehacker.
To Make More Money, Charge More Money
Reluctant to raise your fees, check out this article from CNNMoney.com on how to raise prices while keeping customers. Worth a read. Here's a taste:
Many business owners assume that any price increase will drivecustomers away. But consultants who work with small companies say theyoften under-estimate their pricing power. Those owners know their costsare rising but sometimes forget that fuel prices are soaring worldwideand that workers are demanding higher wages even in China, India, andother developing countries. Many small U.S. manufacturers, inparticular, become so focused on price competition with larger rivalsor foreign ones that they don't appreciate the value of the addedquality they offer, their fast and reliable delivery, or other superiorservices they provide - or could provide - to justify higher bills.
The Five Most Dangerous Words in Business
The five most dangerous words in business, according to Warren Buffett, are:
Everybody else is doing it.
Lose Your Receptionst's Desk?
Via Brand Autopsy comes a pointer to the Building Better Restaurants Blog's Top Ten Reasons to Take a Sledgehammer to Your Host Stand. I think a lot of these are also good reasons to rethink/redesign/remove your receptionist's desk:
- It accumulates clutter that is an eyesore.
- It does not have any functional utility for the guest.
- It allows staff to “hide” from the guest.
- It forces the guest to come to you, and not the other way around.
- It becomes a hub for business other than the business of the guest.
- It becomes a leaning tool and not a Hosting [verb] tool.
- It will force you to talk to your guests and actually “Host” [verb] the guest experience.
- It will force more physical contact with the guest and thereby a more meaningful greeting.
- It will allow the guest to take in the whole “show” as they enter and immediately be caught up in the experience more.
- Because you don’t have one at your house when you host people there!
Justify that Messy Desk
From an 2002 New Yorker Essay from Edward Tufte:
Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture,for instance, the top of your desk. Chances are that you have akeyboard and a computer screen off to one side, and a clear spaceroughly eighteen inches square in front of your chair. What covers therest of the desktop is probably piles—piles of papers, journals,magazines, binders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other artifactsof the knowledge economy. The piles look like a mess, but they aren't.When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several yearsago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually makeperfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth ingreat detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. Thepile closest to the cleared, eighteen-inch-square working area, forexample, generally represents the most urgent business, and within thatpile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top.Piles are living, breathing archives. Over time, they get broken downand resorted, sometimes chronologically and sometimes thematically andsometimes chronologically and thematically; clues about certaindocuments may be physically embedded in the file by, say, stacking acertain piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the stack.
But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because pilesrepresent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologistAlison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively,argues that "knowledge workers" use the physical space of the desktopto hold "ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how theymight use." The messy desk is not necessarily a sign ofdisorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal withmany unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers ontheir desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas intheir head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use thepapers on their desks as contextual cues to "recover a complex set ofthreads without difficulty and delay" when they come in on a Mondaymorning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. Whatwe see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, thecontents of our brains.
Ah, now I know the piles are there for a perfectly good reason. Thanks to Stephen O'Flynn for the tip.
Personal Technology Challenge: 10 Things
I really liked this post in Zen Habits titled The 100 Things Challenge. The essence is that you cut your personal possessions down to 100 things. Things that are shared, non-personal stuff, books, and tools don't count. It got me wondering about our personal technology burden. How many different programs, web applications, tools, toys and gadgets do we accumulate? How many of those do we use everyday?
I'm going to cut my tech burden down to ten items for the next 30 days. This includes hardware, software and web apps. Here's my initial list:
- MacBook Pro
- iPod
- Treo
- Google Reader
- GMail
- Google Notebook
- Entourage
- MindManager
- Keynote/Pages
- ScanR
What's on yours?
Dis[is the]place to be Creative
My friend Scott Ginsberg has another great post on building your own creative environment. The best tip:
Make a list of five alternate environments for your creative success.Perhaps your art is more conducive to the park, the bus station orsitting in a public square. If so, great! Experiment by displacing yourself regularly.Onceyou’ve narrowed your list down to a few options, visit them regularly.Learn to incorporate various components of creative stimulation intoyour “portable creative environment.”
That way you can thrive anywhere!
As someone who has been on the road a lot lately, I'm going to give it a try.
Youth Plus Inexperience Equal Success
I ran across a paper published by my friend Betha L. Whitlow, the director of the Visual Resources Collection at Washington University, titled "The Shock of the New: Using Youth and Inexperience as Tools for Success." In the paper (link to Word document), Betha argues that newcomers to her field of Visual Resources should view their youth and inexperience as distinct advantages to be leveraged, not handicaps to be overcome:
[Because] there are still many people at your institution who are unable to letgo of the previous culture, thus limiting their ability to move forwardand offer your institution a new and highly productive perspective ... [i]t is my belief that by the very nature of being a [young] Visual Resources professional, you are uniquely positioned to be at the forefront of changes in the culture of your institution. With just a little bit of a brave and diplomatic push forward, [you] can embody the new role of the resource provider, promote interdisciplinary teaching and learning, be the model of the flexible professional, and tread the fine line between providing access to solid yet technologically innovative resources.
Young professionals, take this advice to heart. There are plenty of things you don't know, and even more things you'll never know. Get used to it. Use your ignorance to your benefit. The most significant advantage you possess over those who've come before you is that you don't believe what they do. Because you've never "always done it that way," you're free to do it differently. Question the business model. Deliver products (yes, products) and services your elders would never consider. Embrace technology. Innovate. Revel in your inexperience. You have but one opportunity to start from scratch. Don't waste it.
Back Home and Blogging (for now)
In the last six weeks, I've been to Minneapolis, Portland, Boston, Seattle and Anchorage. Regular readers of this blog have noticed that I'm no longer a regular writer of it. That's going to change. Though I've not been blogging a bunch, I've been doing a lot of thinking about innovation, community and group collaboration. While I get my thoughts together, you might enjoy this profile of me in Law Practice Magazine. Check it out.
Idea Market X
The tenth Idea Market takes place Monday. We are going to be doing some cool things, including working on personal mission statements and learning how to give better presentations by using children's books. If you'd like to come, sign up here.
Best/Worst Law Firm Song. Ever.
Before it goes down, you've got to listen to Nixon Peabody's theme song. It will make you feel like a winner, too!
Get Your Clients Home Free
The Springwise Blog has a story on a pilot program in Minneapolis (where I'll be next week) called Get Home Free. Here's how it works:
Launched in eleven Minneapolis suburbs this month, Get Home Freeis a flat rate, prepaid cab card that gets its holder home safely.Mainly targeted at teenagers and college students, the concept'sinitiators are aiming to help out kids who are stuck with car trouble,have been drinking, or whose ride home has fallen through. Cardholdersplace a call to the Get Home Free hot line, and a car is immediatelydispatched to bring them home, no questions asked.
If your firm is looking for a image-boosting promotion, this one just might work -- especially if you regularly represent clients accused of DUI. Having your firms name and number on the back of each card isn't a bad idea either.
TED's 100
From the TED Blog: 100 Websites You Should Know and Use. Some pretty cool sites here, especially under the category, "Curiosity and Knowledge."
Meet Musicovery
I LOVE Pandora, and listen to it almost all day long. Today (courtesy of VSL), I found Musicovery. Hard to describe (think Pandora meets a mood ring meets the Visual Thesaurus) but if you like music, check it out.
Congrats to an Inspired Solo
Congratulations to my blog friend Sheryl Sisk Schelin, who's ventured out into consulting land with The Inspired Solo. Check it out.
Client Stuff
Paul Graham has another great essay. This one's on Stuff -- and more particularly, how to acquire less of it. Here's my favorite quote:
Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall cost of owning it. The purchase price is just the beginning. You're going to have to think about that thing for years—perhaps for the rest of your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.
I can't think of a better thought to have before taking that next client. When you take a client -- especially that client that your gut tells you not to take -- think about the overall cost of having that client. Don't focus just on the money you'll make from them, but how you'll feel while working for them. Will their file keep you up at night? Will you dread their call? Will you be able to give them your best work? Search for clients whose personality matches yours and whose work challenges you to do your best. They are the only clients worth having.