By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Jun 10, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
What’s in a name? In the business world, more than we usually think….
Award for worst named new technology in the past decade?
“The Cloud” A remote point for storing massive amounts of sensitive data
Nothing says security like “I’m moving my data from the server in IT to a place where it will be more secure and accessible. Something called “a cloud”
It’s like calling a sturdy new product for storing dangerous liquids “The Sieve.”
I know that were naming the new technology based on its physical (or rather non-physical) characteristics.
But it’s important to remember when naming a new product or service–especially one that is supposed to change the world— to think not only of the “appearance” but also of the benefit it produces for future users.
And surely the name “The Cloud” has given pause to IT directors who might otherwise be eager to take the leap (worth billions for a truly superior product)but resist because they have to explain to their boss how “The Cloud” isn’t anything like a cloud but just the opposite.
Of course in naming some things, like boys and girls, neither appearance nor functionality are helpful. But even painful names like Helga and Norbert would have been better for remote data storage than “The Cloud.”
I would feel secure with all my sensitive data stored in “The Norbert” or “Helga”
Then again maybe the person who came up with the name “The Cloud” was named Norbert or Helga —and was just trying to get even. That might explain it.
By Erica and Matt Chua, on Mon Jun 10, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
WHAT WAS YOUR SCARIEST TRAVEL MOMENT?
HE SAID…
For reasons yet unknown I found myself quite intoxicated. Maybe it was the beer with lunch, or the beers between lunch and dinner, certainly the beer at dinner didn’t help, but no matter when and how, I needed to go home. Home was our friend’s Hong Kong apartment which we had arrived to the day before. He lived, conveniently for those of us of Chinese descent, above a 24-hour Dim Sum restaurant and a 7-11. While great neighbors, both of these establishments are as frequent as skyscrapers in Hong Kong, which means it could be anywhere on Hong Kong Island. If you didn’t know exactly where his street is and where to find his discrete door, you’d never find his place. Luckily for me, with built-in GPS, even in the state of inebriation I was in, I could found his place after leaving LOCAVORista and Michael to drink the night away.
Hours later I woke to the sound of the door opening I saw Michael enter…alone. He turned on the light, looked me straight in the eye and said, “I lost Erica.” This was an “oh-shit” moment. I asked what happened, to which he responded, “last I saw her she jumped over a median and was running. You wouldn’t believe how fast she is! I tried to catch her but she was gone…” She had little money on her, didn’t have a credit card, or any way to contact us. We had no idea where she could be, how to find her, or if she’d be able to find a safe place for the night. We thought about going to the police, but realized that was best done in the morning, hoping we would find her before we would need to explain ourselves.
We had lost Erica. This wasn’t the first time, but definitely the most serious. Losing Erica on the Macalester College campus at home was one thing, Hong Kong, a city we’d been in for two days, was another matter. Knowing this was a situation with no resolution we cracked open another beer and watched “Swamp People”, because, you just lost your wife…what else are you going to do?
Read the rest of… Erica & Matt Chua: He Said/She Said FAQ — Scariest Travel Moment
We can learn a lot about innovation by observing the social behavior of honeybees. Who hasn’t been riveted by devastating stories of colony collapse? This is serious stuff. From a honeybee’s perspective watching 35% of your fellow Apis mellifera get wiped out is no joke. From a human perspective, think of it this way, one out of every three mouthfuls of food we eat is dependent on honeybee pollination. Bees are responsible for about $15 billion in U.S. agricultural crop value. Colony collapse really matters. It’s worth paying attention to bees.
The term colony collapse disorder was first applied to a drastic rise in the number of honeybee disappearances in 2006. It’s an eerie phenomenon where one day worker bees swarm together in great numbers and the next they are gone, poof they just disappear, leaving behind an empty hive. It’s not as if they leave to join another colony. They leave to die alone and dispersed which is strange given the social nature of honeybees. Scientists have been working feverishly to determine the etiology of colony collapse disorder.
I read with great interest the recent announcement that researchers collaborating from academia and the military had found the answer. I am a sucker for a good collaborative innovation story where unusual suspects tag team across silos to solve a problem that neither of them could solve on their own. This one is a classic. Army scientists in Maryland working with academic entomologists in Montana solved the mystery. They applied proteomics-based pathogen screening tools to identify a co-infection comprised of both a virus and a fungus. They found the combination of pathogens in all of the collapsed colonies they tested. Hopefully their findings will quickly lead to pathogen mitigation strategies dramatically reducing the incidence of colony collapse disorder.
While I am glad the mystery is solved I can’t help asking, what is it about organizing in colonies that prevents bees from innovating themselves. And closer to home, aren’t bee colonies like hierarchical corporate structures? Maybe understanding the social behavior of bees in their colonies will help us understand why corporate structures are also vulnerable to colony collapse.
Read the rest of… Saul Kaplan: Innovation Lessons From Bees
By Carte Goodwin, on Mon Jun 10, 2013 at 8:15 AM ET
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Some times crisis can be borne of tremendous good news – a chance of a lifetime; or put another way, when the dog finally catches the car. As one of my political heroes, President John F. Kennedy, once noted, “The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.”
I’m living testament to that principle. A childhood dream almost literally was dumped in my lap. It was an extraordinary opportunity. But it came with considerable responsibilities and posed some serious challenges.
And I learned a powerful lesson for all forms of crisis management: Keep your head and sense of humor when all around you are losing theirs.
* * *
In July 2010, I was a 36-year-old attorney, recently returned to private practice after an incredible four-year stint as General Counsel to West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin. Then, West Virginians were saddened to learn of the passing of Senator Robert C. Byrd – one of the true lions of the Senate and West Virginia’s most beloved public servant.
Governor Manchin had a strong interest in serving in the Senate (and ultimately, he would run for and win the seat); but as a man who believed in the sacred rites of our democracy, he did not want to appoint himself to the vacancy: He’d let the voters decide if they wanted to give him the honor of federal office.
But he also recognized that the people of West Virginia needed representation during the four months before a special election could be held. And much to my incredible honor, Governor Manchin appointed me to serve as West Virginia’s junior U.S. Senator.
Senator Byrd cast quite a long shadow, and it was daunting to contemplate being appointed to fill the seat previously occupied by the longest serving legislative member in the history of the United States. I could not begin to replace Senator Byrd or ever hope to fill his enormous shoes, but what I could do was emulate his work ethic and commitment to West Virginia – which is precisely what I strove to do during my four months in Washington, a town ruled by Congress, Blackberries and Members-only elevators; and a place where fame (and infamy) can come and go in a matter of hours.
(Side note: Years before, former Oklahoma standout and Chicago Bulls forward Stacey King saw limited action in an NBA game, hitting a single free throw. That same night, his teammate Michael Jordan poured in 69 points. Afterwards, King joked that he would always remember that game as the night that he and Jordan “combined for 70 points.” Similarly, rather that describing my term as “four months,” I usually characterize it by saying that Senator Byrd and I combined to serve over 52 years in the United States Senate.)
Within days of my arrival, men and women I had studied in law school were introducing themselves to me, welcoming me as one of their own, then asking for my vote in the same sentence. And I wasn’t alone; I was immediately put at the helm of a full Senate staff – many of whom had served for decades under Senator Byrd. I was given a personal secretary and press secretary – no longer would I be the one answering the phone in my own office. However, I declined the offer of a personal driver and walked myself to work.
In fact, as the august body’s youngest member – and one who had never stood before the voters – I found it especially important to strongly resist all temptation to allow any of the unusual attention get to my head. Maintaining humility was critical, but also approaching the extraordinary opportunity with a healthy sense of humor would be a necessary prerequisite.
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Click here to read the rest of Carte Goodwin’s extraordinary chapter by purchasing The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis for only 99 cents this week only.
By Jonathan Miller, on Sat Jun 8, 2013 at 12:36 PM ET
I was greeted this morning by a letter to the editor in my hometown paper, the Lexington Herald-Leader that repeated a variety of bizarre conspiracy theories (including the one where Bush and Cheney ordered the 9/11 attacks) and ended with this highly offensive line:
A continuation of 5,700-plus years of Jews buying their host country’s leadership in the name of a non-existing God of Abraham.
There’s no one who feels more strongly about the sacred nature of our First Amendment rights. I support anyone’s freedom to spew hateful, bigoted trash like this.
But there is no obligation on the part of the Lexington Herald-Leader to publish such offensiveness. Indeed, with all of the letters I imagine that fill their in boxes every day, I would imagine that they wouldn’t have room for such an blatant anti-Semitic rant.
I’m hopeful that we will hear an explanation or an apology soon from the paper’s leadership.
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Jun 7, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
If I could give high school freshmen one piece of advice to motivate them to work hard the next 4 years, it would be this.
“The primary importance of working hard and achieving a lot in high school is that high school, fairly or unfairly, is where we develop our core opinion of ourselves. If we do well, we have high self-esteem. If we do poorly, we worry we will have to spend the rest of our lives fooling our bosses.”
It’s a self-image thing primarily.
But there is also a very measurable financial component that can be measured.
Over the course of a lifetime your success over the next four years in high school will be worth about $300,000. In avoided therapy bills.
But at the end of all that therapy you’ll learn that the people who did well in high school that you envy, think they are faking it too and fooling their bosses. They just believe they are better at fooling others than you are. That’s the chief advantage in life. None of us feel we’re up to the task. Except that one family member we all have who is a certifiable narcissist. (Or four or more family members in certain families.)
And, if you don’t have a have a successful run in high school and become a therapist yourself, you’ll eventually get to treat those students from high school who achieved the most. They will want to meet discreetly and late at night and you can charge them a lot more than your other clients. And they can pay. So charge them. It will make you feel better and finally realize they really had nothing on you all these years and are a bigger mess than you are.
It’s awesome when that happens.
Which leads to the second thing I would tell 9th graders if I could.
The universe has a way of balancing out in the end. So don’t sweat it if you aren’t able to take advantage of my first piece of advice. Just be patient and keep a sense of humor. And have an office space you can meet wealthy but screwed up salutatorians after hours.
One pundit I admire, Ross Douthat, and another I admire and count as a friend, Reihan Salam, have waded into the debate over whether reform conservatism amounts to a coherent ideological vanguard, or is only a loose blanket for a set of sensibilities about what the political right should start to sound like. I lean more toward the latter, which is Salam’s take, for a variety of reasons: the splintering of conservative reformers over immigration; their imprecision on the bullet points of the healthcare fight (are they bothered by the “cadillac tax” for high quality insurance plans, or is it the one thing they like about Obamacare); the lack of a defense in conservative intellectual circles for Senator Pat Toomey’s bravery on guns; the fact that the class of reformers is made of columnists and bloggers and not congressmen and presidential aspirants all undercut the idea of even a sort of unified front. But what Salam calls a “tendency” still reminds me of what Democratic reformers were doing 20 years ago. And if history repeated itself, it wouldn’t be a bad thing.
First, the history: for all of the varnished memories of exactly how Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council reframed their party, it was no masterpiece of cohesion around policies or specific goals. To be sure, Clintonian reformers were virtually all free traders and advocates of tougher teacher standards and charter schools. To a person, they thought that welfare was too easy to obtain and even easier to depend upon, which distinguished them from 20 years of liberal rhetoric.
But these were relatively small sized pieces of the conversation at the time. On a much larger array of issues, Democratic reformers were all over the map. Some were ardent social liberals, who even then touted gay rights, others were notably sympathetic to the pro life movement and uncomfortable that liberalism verged on being libertarian. Some were anti-affirmative action, just as many thought anti-quota talk made them sound like mini Pat Moynihans (a Democrat, but a liberal scourge for years for his advice that the subject of racial injustice could use a dose of “benign neglect”). Some thought it a priority to readjust Reagan era tax rates to take a bigger chunk from the wealthy, others were self-consciously pro-business (the DLC’s bills were always heavily footed by industry lobbyists) and promoters of corporate rate cuts. One camp embraced comprehensive healthcare reform, another feared it was too costly and smacked of sixtyish redistribution.
There was, in other words, a consensus on a few second tier agenda items, disarray on the hottest subjects in politics, mixed with a strategic instinct about making Democratic political language more middle class friendly, deemphasizing identity based appeals, and there was a fondness for the word “community” without a lot of common ground on what that meant.
Yet, for all of the ambiguity, Democratic reformers in the gap years between Reagan and Clinton mattered a great deal. They introduced thematic arguments that were foreign to the liberal activists who had controlled the Democratic nominating process since 1972: notions like personal obligation, mutual responsibility and the concept that a downsized government could more efficiently promote progressive values, and that all of these principles were not code words for survival of the fittest. And by driving these arguments, DLC style Democrats showed a side of their party that was more attractive to blue collars and suburbanites than the interest group beholden, socially permissive brand of their intra-party rivals.
It strikes me that today’s right of center reformers are doing something similarly abstract, but potentially just as vital. The reform crowd is injecting into the conservative value stream the ideas that (1) middle class insecurity and stagnant wages are a genuine threat to the national wellbeing, a concept that explicitly rejects the assessment that over-regulation is the only source of trouble; that (2) public policy can and should promote economic upward mobility, although through market oriented means, which diverges from the Tea Party wing’s constitutionalism, and its single-minded desire to whittle government down to no domestic agenda other than protecting economic liberty; and that (3) there is such a thing as entrenched inequality, especially in areas like education and access to healthcare, and that the interest in social cohesion gives conservatives stakes in carving out opportunity based solutions.
If I had my druthers, I would push that reform mindset further than some of my cohorts on the center right would. I line up with the majority of Republicans who believe expanded background checks for buying firearms don’t shatter the rights of any law abiding citizen. I think the “Cadillac plan” tax in Obamacare is as lousy a policy as the individual mandate and is far more likely to break the backs of middle income workers. I am much more dubious than many conservatives that a First Amendment that was designed in a century where campaign contributions barely existed is a spigot for unfettered campaign dollars by businesses or individuals. I would rather see an immigration approach that got tougher in tangible ways, like making illegal entry a felony and making an illegal immigrant’s failure to declare and register a deportable offense, but still provided some form of legal gateway for the undocumented, to either the overly complex bill working its way through the Senate or to an enforcement only approach. And I would trust states to resolve the debate over defining marriage, which separates me from some reform conservatives who would embrace a right of same sex marriage as another extension of limited government.
But even the more slimmed down principles I describe earlier are a way of taking on the political and rhetorical landscape that has dominated the Republican Party of late and articulating a different path. That’s not much of a policy synthesis, per se; as Reihan Salam puts it, it is well short of a movement. But it is, I suspect, as essential as what the center left’s reformers did a generation ago. If only this right-leaning reform impulse is set to have as good a run as its Democratic predecessor.
If you’ve ever wondered what colors will bring out the handsome devil in you, you might want to consider having a color analysis done. This is a process by which someone trained in color drapes you in various fabrics to determine your optimal color palette. The idea is that the “right” colors will brighten skin tone, even out complexion, smooth skin texture, balance the shapes of your features and make you appear rested and younger. The “wrong” colors will dull skin and drain your coloring, making you appear tired and sallow…not cool at all!
Check out this video of me with the ever-dynamic Mary Schook on a Chinese news hour that aired this past weekend. In it, we discuss how colors relate to the Asian population, namely women:
Yes, color analysis may sound super girly, but it’s of particular relevance to guys, and here’s why: women can get away with wearing the “wrong” colors because they use makeup to help negate any ill effects those colors may have on how their skin looks. Most men, however, don’t wear makeup, so it’s crucial if they want to make flattering clothing choices that they know what colors will look fantastic on them.
If you’re in the New York Tri-State Area or metro-Boston and are interested in getting your colors done officially (and in English), contact me.
By Jennifer Mann, on Fri Jun 7, 2013 at 8:15 AM ET
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In the midst of my tenure in office as a Pennsylvania state representative, a statewide scandal uprooted the political landscape like a tornado of Wizard of Oz proportions. For those of us unscathed and continuing work in Pennsylvania’s Capitol, we were still left with a “we’re-not-in-Kansas-anymore” reality that proved tense, to say the least.
“Bonusgate” was the pithy pet name for a massive investigation into political corruption in which millions of taxpayer dollars were misappropriated as bonuses to legislative staffers who were campaigning while on the clock.
The investigation wound together deceit, cover-ups and political finger pointing into a whirlwind that swept up some of the state’s longest serving lawmakers. Some of my colleagues caught up in the storm of rapid-fire reporter questions and constituent scorn landed not in Oz, but in jail. Many more were thrown out of office, as voters took their anger to the polls and elected one of the largest freshmen classes in the state’s history. It was a scary time to be a state representative.
Just as a point of reference, I should note that Pennsylvania is one of the few states to employ a full-time legislature and no term limits. For those who choose to run for office and succeed, there is a scary realization that your career and income is suddenly in the hands of voters. And while I will defend the importance of maintaining a full-time legislature, I’ll admit that the overlying threat of getting the potential “pink slip” at the polls leads to a protective instinct that’s palpable around the Capitol. The desire to survive creates a sub-culture of risk-taking, and even forces a select few to cross the line between right and wrong. This is my assessment of what creates corruption, at least in this case.
When the Attorney General released the first of many findings in the Bonusgate investigation, careers and reputations were ruined almost instantly, and the career carnage kept coming. Fortunately, I was a Bonusgate bystander, a safe distance from the action.
Until one morning, I wasn’t.
When the reporter contacted me to get my side of the story on the juicy tidbit of information he had, supposedly tying my top aide to Bonusgate, I responded openly and with the same nothing-to-hide style that was the core of my political reputation.
Still, by the time I hung up the phone, my stomach was in my throat. The mere thought of the article hitting newsstands consumed my thoughts and nerves. I tried to hope for the best, like a sidebar blurb buried somewhere in the back of the paper.
The resulting banner headline that greeted me soon after was the antithesis of any style or reputation I had cultivated, and it was far from hidden. Instead, it alluded to a direct link between my senior staffer and some of those who had fallen the farthest in our state’s scandal.
In reality, the full-color, front-page exposé was all style, no substance. The emails cited were taken out of context. The source faced criminal conviction and had already established a jailhouse-snitch notoriety for trying to invite company into his misery. And the fact was that my staffer had not pocketed any tax dollars for his time spent on the campaign trail.
Still, the timing of the story and the wording in the headline alone suggested a cover up that could only serve to outrage vexed voters even more.
I processed the article like a boxing match transpiring in slow motion. I saw the heavyweight square up, cock his arm and start to pivot slowly as his fist came straight for my face. The best I could hope for was a permanent black eye, but I’d seen this fight before, and it typically ended in a total knockout.
My phone rang before impact. It was my staffer and subject of aforementioned article. We had a conversation that I vaguely recall as, “Oh crap! Oh crap! Oh crap!”
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Click here to read the rest of Jennifer Mann’s chapter by purchasing The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis for only 99 cents this week only.
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jun 6, 2013 at 10:00 PM ET
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On tonight’s MSNBC “Hardball,” host Chris Matthews plugged The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis after a discussion with former RNC Chair Michael Steele, a co-author of the book.
And surely the name “The Cloud” has given pause to IT directors who might otherwise be eager to take the leap (worth billions for a truly superior product)but resist because they have to explain to their boss how “The Cloud” isn’t anything like a cloud but just the opposite.
