innovation

Bullet Points: Embrace the Fail

The Hired Guns on February 22, 2012

bullet points, failure, marketing Comment

Should we be trying to learn from freshly shut-down companies the same way we try to learn from shiny new startups? [Washington Post]
It’s “practically a religion” in lots and lots of offices, but does brainstorming even work? [The New Yorker]
Leonardo da Vinci, failure. [Boxes and Arrows]
Social media has had lots of successes, but that doesn’t mean that any of them came without spending real money. Writing in Inc., Hollis Thomases tallies up social marketing’s likely costs, using everyone’s favorite viral, that Old Spice guy, as an example.
Why is the talent pool in IT, entertainment, and management so shallow, and why are the wages so high? Maybe it’s not that the raw talent’s so rare — it’s that it’s just really, really hard to identify it, and to train it once you do. [Marginal Revolution]

Why Modern Marketers Need to Do More Than Just “Love Data”

Tom Burg on February 21, 2012

data, data analysis, marketing Comment

As I wrote in a a post last year, we’ve entered the era of using data to tell stories. Natalie Zmuda’s article in last week’s Ad Age, “When CMOs Learn to Love Data, They’ll Be VIPs in the C-Suite,” did a good job of explaining the other side of the data coin –- using data to inform and power marketing programs. Marketers haven’t been lacking for data; instead, the issue has been about how to contextualize the information and how to separate the truly important from the irrelevant.

THG @SXSW: Revealing Design’s True Power

Jeff Gothelf on February 15, 2012

design, innovation, THG@SXSW Comment

We have a bumper crop of Hired Guns presenting their ideas at next month’s SXSW Interactive. Over the next few weeks we’ll be profiling them, so that you can get a taste of their ideas — whether or not you’ll be making it to Austin yourself. Today’s selection, Jeff Gothelf, will also be cochairing next week’s AgileUX New York City conference.

Demystifying Design:
Fewer Secrets, Greater Impact
Sunday, March 11, 5:00
Presenter: Jeff Gothelf

Your Twesume
(your resume in 140 characters or less):
Interaction designer, author of upcoming book on Lean UX (O’Reilly, June 2012), founding partner at Proof.

Why did you want to speak at SXSW?
SXSW offers an international audience of creatives and technologists with whom conversations about the web, design and technology are always interesting and diverse — plus it’s one hell of a party.

Bullet Points: The End of “More Is More”?

The Hired Guns on February 14, 2012

Agile, bullet points, Facebook Comment

Hired Guns blogger Jeff Gothelf is cochairing the AgileUX NYC conference, to be held Saturday, 25 February — a few tickets are still available….
The neighbors are a little unsure about the new house that Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, is building. (It’s 40% bigger than Zuckerberg’s, but the Wall Street Journal opines that by “billionaire standards, [her] mansion is nothing special”).
Speaking of Facebook, it’s using you. [NYT]
Stanford University’s online “Introduction to AI” course attracted 160,000 students from more than 190 countries, with a median age of around 30. And about 23,000 of them finished the course. [The Guardian]
Have we reached the end of more-is-more when it comes to online content? Felix Salmon writes that “If we have reached that point — and I hope that we have — it’s a function of the way that the world of the web is moving from search to social.”
Valentines for the curve-loving economic wonk in your life. [Freakonomics]

Bullet Points: What Makes Good Companies Tick?

The Hired Guns on February 2, 2012

bullet points, corporate culture Comment

What makes a company a good place to work? It’s not the free quinoa at lunch. The Vault takes a stab at answering for real.
Hiring’s up, but it still lags behind the numbers from January 2011. [SHRM]
A graffiti artist is one of the more unlikely stockholders standing to become much, much more wealthy because of Facebook’s IPO. [NYT]
Flexing his mentorship muscles, the former CEO of Tyco, Dennis Kozlowski, has been encouraging his fellow inmate, the hip-hop star Ja Rule. to go back to school. [Business Insider]
This five-year-old has some idea of what lots of logos stand for, but McDonald’s, Apple, and GE lead the pack in recognizability:

[from the Next Web. See also: The Top 15 Brands on Twitter]

In the News: Todd Cherches Tells Crain’s Where He Finds His Best Ideas

The Hired Guns on January 19, 2012

innovation, Todd Cherches Comment

Hired Guns blogger Todd Cherches was quoted in yesterday’s Crain’s NY Business, in an article (“Fountain of inspiration”) about possible reasons that the best ideas often seem to come in the shower:

Mr. Cherches’ activity of choice involves heading for the bath—–a direction made considerably easier by the fact that he runs his business from his Manhattan apartment and has no employees. “Showering blocks out everything and everyone, so you’re away from it all,” said Mr. Cherches…. “You’re creating a cocoon of solitude.”

For Mr. Cherches, it’s all about the “creative pause,” a term probably coined in the 1960s by Edward de Bono, a famed scholar of creative thinking. The concept refers to a time when someone stops thinking about a problem on purpose, engages in another activity, and often unexpectedly comes up with a solution without even trying.

Bullet Points: Happy 2012!

The Hired Guns on December 29, 2011

bullet points, innovation, productivity Comment

Michael Wolf believes that 2012 will be the year of artist-entrepreneurs, who can cut out the middleman through spunk, digital knowledge, and much easier ways of getting goods to consumers.
It’s too late to use this advice for Christmas, but it’s not too late to use it to make your resume more winning: “What Clever Advertising Can Teach Us About Buying Gifts.” As Jordan Weissmann writes, “The trick for a good gift-giver, or good marketer, is to think like the person they’re trying to connect with. In one of the experiments, subjects told to think about the big picture when putting together a resume abandoned the more is more approach, and instead focused on a few appealing accomplishments. It worked.”
New York’s American Museum of Natural History has begun a fully paid Master of Arts in Teaching program for aspiring science teachers. An open house for the program will be held on Saturday, 7 January.
If there was one previously admired work habit that took a beating in 2011, it was the energy-sapping habit of multitasking. But even if you’ve already stopped trying to do a dozen things at a time, there’s always room for improvement in other areas: “7 Things Highly Productive People Do“. [Inc.]

And from The Hired Guns blog:

Get Your Blog On: Janice Croze, Cofounder of “5 Minutes for Mom,” on Success and Getting Noticed by Being Genuine

Bill Brazell on December 20, 2011

5 Minutes for Mom, blogging, Janice Croze Comment

Janice Croze and Susan Carraretto, identical twins, launched 5 Minutes for Mom in early 2006 as a site to help promote small businesses (“mom and pop shops”) and the online parent community in general. Back then, web directories and blogrolls were the main method for growing traffic and creating community; social media hadn’t yet managed to make much of a splash. Pageviews came quickly, but not without a lot of hard work.

4 Things You Need To Know About HTML5

Lisa Schneider on December 15, 2011

HTML, HTML5, innovation, technology Comment

Lisa Schneider writes for The Hired Guns blog about the technological changes that everyone in digital organizations needs to know about, whether it affects their own job directly or not. Questions about technology or making the transition to a primarily digital career? You can either put them in the comments or ask them via Twitter.

Recently, a colleague left a dinner where there was lots of talk about HTML5. “What does this mean for our website?!” was the fairly panicked email I received.

Gone are the days (if they ever existed) when people outside the digital or IT teams could ignore the technology behind websites and applications. And while not everyone needs to know how to code, workers in management, editorial, marketing, and other areas all definitely need to know enough about the technology to understand its implications.

HTML5 is simply the next iteration of HTML. But what’s different, and why are people excited?

The Rule of PLUMB: The Future of Product Management

Matt Smith on December 14, 2011

innovation, project management Comment

Here’s an obvious statement: the web (internet, computers, mobile, all of it) is changing. Here’s maybe a less obvious statement, but still nothing groundbreaking: the rules for how you build, maintain, and grow business on the web are also changing. This means that you need to adapt, to be prepared to change how you operate, and to be different from what you are today. What works today is almost certainly not going to work tomorrow.

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innovation

Bullet Points: Embrace the Fail

Why Modern Marketers Need to Do More Than Just “Love Data”

THG @SXSW: Revealing Design’s True Power

Bullet Points: The End of “More Is More”?

Bullet Points: What Makes Good Companies Tick?

In the News: Todd Cherches Tells Crain’s Where He Finds His Best Ideas

Bullet Points: Happy 2012!

Get Your Blog On: Janice Croze, Cofounder of “5 Minutes for Mom,” on Success and Getting Noticed by Being Genuine

4 Things You Need To Know About HTML5

The Rule of PLUMB: The Future of Product Management

Gunsworthy

THG @SXSW: Salary Negotiation Secrets No One Ever Taught You
by Jim Hopkinson

Why Modern Marketers Need to Do More Than Just “Love Data”
by Tom Burg

THG @SXSW: Revealing Design’s True Power
by Jeff Gothelf

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