Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the emotional world of the Web. With deep compassion for the human condition, his projects troll the Internet to find out what we’re all feeling and looking for.
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Jonathan Harris: The Art of Collecting Stories
May 1, 2009 by happyorcaShai Agassi’s bold plan for electric cars
April 15, 2009 by happyorca
“So how would you run a whole country without oil? That was the question that sort of hit me in the middle of a Davos afternoon about 4 years ago and it never left my brain, and I started playing with it more like a puzzle. The original thought I had… this must be ethanol so I went out and researched ethanol and found out that you need the amazon in your backyard in every country. About 6 months later I figured out it must be Hydrogen, until some scientists told me the unfortunate truth which is you use more clean electrons… if you use hydrogen so that’s not going to be the path to go… and then sort of through a process of wandering around I got to a thought that actually if you could convert an entire country to electric cars in a way that convenient and affordable you could get to a solution. Now I started from a point of view that it has to be something that scales en masse – how do you do this so that it scales to 99% of the population. The thought that came to mind is that it needs to be as good as any car that you would have today… so 1) it has to be more convenient than a car and 2) it has to be more affordable than today’s cars. And affordable is not a 40 thousand dollar sedan – right – that’s not something that we can buy or finance today and convenient is not something you can drive for an hour and charge for eight. So we are bound the laws of physics and the laws of economics. So how do we do this still within the boundary with the science we know today… how do we do it within economics today, how do we do it from the power of the consumer up and not from the power of an edict down. And on a random visit to Tesla on some afternoon, I actually found out that the answer comes from separating from the car ownership and the battery ownership…. This is the classic “batteries not included”…
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Reality check?
March 12, 2009 by happyorca
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The Crisis of Credit Visualized
March 12, 2009 by happyorca
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The Four Conversations
February 26, 2009 by happyorca
As a management professor and management consultant, we have had the opportunity to work, train, and problem-solve with executives and managers in nearly every type of organization, from small businesses and Fortune 100 companies to nonprofits, associations and government agencies at the city, state, and federal levels. The most frequently cited challenge, beyond all others, is “communication”. Over the last twenty-five years of teaching and consulting, we have discovered two things about the “communication problem” in organizations.First, most people do not know that communication is actually made up of different types of conversations. People think of communication as a broad general area riddled with problems, gaps, and pitfalls in which success is a matter of skill or luck or both.
Unfortunately, this generalization is like saying, “I have a driving problem” when one needs to start by learning the difference between ignition, steering wheel, accelerator, and brake. Generalizations do not solve the very real problems of organizational work.
Second, most people do not understand that their own communication, not someone else’s, is the key to recognizing and resolving the communication problem. It is easy to blame others, either individually or as a group, for not communicating well. Now we need to consider that we might not be using the appropriate conversations, or using them properly.
(More…)
The Three Laws of Performance
February 22, 2009 by happyorca
Book Review | Podcast | Download
From the Introduction:
The power in this book stems from using the Three Laws of Performance. A law isn’t a rule, tip, or step, but distinguishes the moving parts at play behind an observable phenomenon. A law is invariable. Whether you believe in gravity or not doesn’t lessen its effect on you.
The greatest advances in history have come from applying newly discovered laws. Think of Newton’s three laws of physics. Each on its own is interesting and insightful, and when combined together and applied, they become powerful and predictive.
When the Three Laws in this book are applied, performance transforms to a level far beyond what most people think is possible. It doesn’t happen bit by bit, but all at once, as individuals and organizations rewrite their future.
The first section (Chapters One, Two, and Three) takes these laws, one at a time, and shows how to apply them. You’ll see how to jettison what’s holding you back, create a future for your business, and your life beyond what’s predictably going to happen. Along the way, you’ll likely see and transform much of what is holding you back, both professionally and personally.
Through the journey of these first three chapters, we’ll visit companies in South Africa, Japan, and the United States, looking into diverse industries such as aerospace, energy, construction, and mining. We’ll make stops in a high-tech start-up, a Brazilian conglomerate, even in the Harvard Business School. We’ll see that the Three Laws always hold – they are universal principles that apply any time human beings are involved in any kind of effort. We’ll see the result of understanding and applying them – dramatic elevations in performance.
Section Two (Chapters Four and Five) looks at leadership in light of the Three Laws. This section identifies key leadership principles, and how to apply them in organizations. We also look at the new frontier of organizations: working effectively in the developing world, creating sustainability in communities, and generating the expansion of wealth (both material and in the well-being of people). This section is intended for people interested in organizational leadership. If your interest is mostly personal application, you might want to skip to Section Three.
Section Three (Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight) is about the personal face of leadership. Chapter Six shows how you can apply the Three Laws to yourself – and in the process expand your own leadership. Chapter Seven is about taking the walk down the path to mastery of the Three Laws. Chapter Eight is some guidance on how to take these new ideas out into your world.
This book is not an academic study, although its conclusions draw on well-established lines of research. Our intent is to introduce these laws, and illustrate how their application can enhance performance. The examples almost all come from cases in which we and our colleagues have been personally involved. We’ve been there, seen it, and now we want to share it.
In reading this book and applying the Three Laws, you’ll do more than find fixes to your problems. You’ll find the power to rewrite your future.
The nature of leverage
October 7, 2008 by happyorca
From 8 min 25 secs…
So we have a motor here on the left… and it goes through a gear train… there are 12 pairs of 50:1 reductions… so that means the final speed of that gear on the end is so slow that it would take 2 trillion years to turn once, so I’ve embedded it in concrete because it doesn’t really matter – it can run all the time.
That’s no problem when this pyramid is full and everyone is paying their mortgages – but if only 30% pay then suddenly… at the end of the month this row… is generating zero. Now he has his own pyramid… that is to say he has his set of investors to satisfy but unfortunately when you have… nothing at the end of the month… then nothing is filling the top, nothing is filling the second row, nothing is filling the third row and yet they are still rated as if they were as safe as the original asset. Now this is the problem… 100s of millions of dollars have been invested in this kind of secondary CDO… investment managers… have hawked these bonds… all over the world… the net result is these investors… have packed our funds with these securities which are not paying anything now and are liable never to pay anything again especially if the situation in the housing market persists… The fact is we are in a mess of our own making.
Where The Hell Is Matt?
September 24, 2008 by happyorca
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Garry Schyman…
New Matt Harding Video on youtube
Sunday, June 22, 2008My score/song for Matt Harding’s latest video is now up on youtube and Vimeo and has received over seven million views so far (first three weeks). For those interested here’s the link and my album notes that was not published with the song on Amazonmp3.com.
Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY
Amazon Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001B8R3MS/
Album notes “Praan”
Credits:
Music By Garry Schyman
Drums and Engineering Dan Blessinger
Vocals Palbasha Siddique
Guitars and bass Kevin Dukes
Concertmaster Belinda Broughton
Orchestral contractor Ross DeRoche (DeRoche Music Inc.)
Vocal Contractor Melissa Nixon
Lyrics adapted from the poem “Stream Of Life” from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore
This song is my fourth collaboration with Matt Harding. How we met and got started working together is an interesting story in itself, without detailing it here I will just say it is one of those serendipitous events that can play a big part in ones life.
I wrote this music without particular lyrics in mind because, for one thing, I don”t really write lyrics. Matt would send me early edits of the video which I used to inspire me as I composed. I used my film and television experience to build the song in the appropriate places.
When it came time for lyrics and to find a singer Matt suggested that we consider non-English lyrics, which instantly sounded right to me. I immediately thought of Rabindranath Tagore who is considered the poet laureate of India. He was given the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913 for his English translation of his book of poetry entitled Gitanjali and was the first non-westerner to win the prize.
Matt was particularly fond of the poem “Stream Of Life” which seemed perfectly in tune with his video.
Bengali is a beautiful language so we decided to have it sung in Tagore’s native tongue, however we had no idea who the singer would be.
I started listening to countless demo mp3’s of various studio singers, who all sounded terrific but just didn’t seem right for the song. Bengali is a particularly difficult language to sing if you don’t know the language and we wanted someone who could really bring off the poem in Bengali. To the rescue came Matt’s girlfriend and co-producer of the video Melissa Nixon. Melissa is amazing and searched youtube for just the right voice. Astonishingly she found her in the person of Palbasha Siddique. Palbasha had a couple of videos that included her singing and though the videos did not do her justice, they were enough for us to contact her and learn that she was a 17 year old high school junior living in Minneapolis Minnesota (Palbasha was born in Bengladesh and moved there when she was six years old). To be honest I was initially very skeptical as to whether she could really pull off what we wanted for the song, but when I spoke to her she was keen on being involved and was willing to record a demo for us. I sent her a rough mix of the song and she recorded over it and sent it back. We were all just completely amazed at how perfect she was. She completely understood what we were doing and she sounded fantastic. We immediately invited her and her mother to Los Angeles to record at a session planned for June 5th of this year. She came in and was so professional and sounded so awesome that it could not have been better. Later that day we recorded live strings and if you look closely at about 3:40 into the video you will see Matt dancing with the string section with me next to him conducting (I have the honor of being the only person in Matt’s video whose backside is prominently featured!). Our concertmaster was Belinda Broughton and she and the rest of the string section were wonderful.
I must also pay tribute to my recording engineer Dan Blessinger who records all of my orchestral music for me (I am not really known as a songwriter but rather as a film/TV and video game composer of orchestral scores, check out my score for BioShock). Dan also plays the drums on the track and did an amazing job. I also want to thank Kevin Dukes who has plays guitar and bass on all three songs I have written for Matt’s videos. Kevin is an amazing studio guitarist who can do anything you ask on his instrument.
Oh and the title of the song “Praan” is a particularly poetic way of saying “life” in Bengali.
I hope you like this track I loved writing and recording it.
Regards,
Garry Schyman
Stream of Life
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the lifethrob of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
A Glass and a Half Full
August 22, 2008 by happyorca
The Back of the Napkin
August 7, 2008 by happyorca
Dan Roam
All the presentation really is, is the ability to have someone else grasp what we see in here, in our own minds, in there, in their minds. And to do that sometimes things like spreadsheets and powerpoints just get in the way and the back of a napkin really is all that we need.
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Dan Roam presenting at Google
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