The Tao Jones Report
"For
everyone
of
our
failures,
we
had
spreadsheets
that
looked
awesome."
- Scott Brown,
Intuit
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 07:25 AM | Comments (2)
April 26, 2010Failure Is Not What You Think It Is
What do Henry Ford, Miles Davis, Thomas Edison, Confucius, Robert Louis Stevenson, Horace, Bill Cosby, Robert Kennedy, Sir Laurence Olivier, Thomas Watson, Beverly Sills, Douglas McArthur, Winston Churchill, Malcolm Forbes, John Barrymore, Paramahansa Yogananda, and Charles Kettering have in common?
An enlightened view of what "failure" is.
If you want to innovate, you will first need to let go of your notion of what failure is all about...
"An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots." -- Charles Kettering
"Do not fear mistakes. There are none." -- Miles Davis
"The way to succeed is to double your failure rate."
-- Thomas Watson, Founder of IBM
"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently."
-- Henry Ford
"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." -- Confucius
"Give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself." -- Robert Louis Stevenson
"Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it." -- Horace
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody." -- Bill Cosby
"I have not failed once. I've just found 10,000 ways that didn't work." -- Thomas Edison
"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."
-- Robert F. Kennedy
"No matter how well you perform, there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy." -- Sir Laurence Olivier
"If your life is free of failures, you're not taking enough risks."
-- H. Jackson Brown
"You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try." -- Beverly Sills
"I failed my way to success." -- Thomas Edison
"99 percent of success is built on failure." -- Charles Kettering
"Act as if it were impossible to fail." -- Dorothea Brande
"Failure is success if we learn from it." -- Malcolm Forbes
"You can only be as good as you dare to be bad." -- John Barrymore
"The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success." -- Paramahansa Yogananda
"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
"You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down." -- Mary Pickford
"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." -- Winston Churchill
"We are not retreating -- we are advancing in another direction."
-- Douglas MacArthur
"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." -- Thomas A. Edison
"Fall seven times, stand up eight." -- Japanese Proverb
"Stumbling is not falling." -- Portuguese Proverb
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:19 AM | Comments (5)
April 23, 2010The Real Flowering of Innovation
ED.NOTE: The following is dedicated to all the male readers of this blog -- especially those who are married, work too hard, and think about "innovation" just a little too much.
Today, in a sudden fit of love and appreciation, I bought a dozen roses and brought them home to my wife.
Usually, when I think of buying roses, I go through a predictable sequence of events. First, I surrender to a wonderful feeling of expansiveness that takes me over. Then I get curious and smell the flowers. Then I ask the shopkeeper how long she thinks the roses will last. Then I ask the per stem price, do the math, and reach the pitifully male conclusion that $46.95 is way too much too spend on something that won't last out the week and is probably less expensive somewhere else and it's obviously indulgent of me to be buying so many roses when I've got two kids to put through college in a few years and besides, beauty is within.
All of this, of course, is my inner Woody Allen taking the low road in response to what is obviously a Johnny Depp moment.
So I dig deep and bring the roses home -- my entire living room taking shape around them.
I then become very aware that there are definitely not enough flowers in the room. In a curious way, the recent appearance of roses has made the rest of the room seem barren. Tabletops and shelves that only minutes ago were doing just fine, are now utterly flowerless.
So I do the only thing a man can do when faced with such a paradox -- I return to the flower shop.
But the shop is closed. Closed? Impossible! I need flowers!
So I get back in my car and speed my way to the other flower shop in town.
It, too, is closed -- or, should I say, closing. The owner is shutting the door and giving me the "too-bad-you-didn't-get-here a few-minutes-ago" look.
But I will not be denied. And he knows it.
"What do you want?" he asks.
"Cut flowers," I reply.
He signals me to enter and I buy way more flowers than makes sense. A ridiculous amount.
Let's put it this way: if I was in the federal witness protection program, my sudden flower buying behavior would have put my government handlers in a tizzy.
Fast forward ten minutes to my wife in our kitchen.
She is looking at me as if I am totally insane -- me, the guy who, only days ago was making an airtight case for a more modest household budget.
Here's my philosophy:
Flowers first. Logic second. If money is tight, buy more flowers. The more flowers you buy, the more money will appear. And if not in this lifetime, then the next (or maybe the one after that).
OK. There you go -- my not very financially sound, flower-centric view of the universe. You, my friend, are a witness. If I forget, please remind me.
Indeed, next time we meet, you have my permission to ask me how the flower thing is going.
Remember, flowers first. (OK. Stop reading this blog. Go out and get some flowers, already).
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 12:36 AM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2010A General Rule of Thumb
"Never
tell
people
how
to
do
things.
Tell
them
what
to
do
and
they
will
surprise
you
with
their
ingenuity."
-- General George Patton
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2010Innovating for Haitian Orphanages
As a resident of Woodstock, NY, I am proud of my town's legacy of love, creativity, and compassion. The legacy continues on Friday 4/23. That's when the Haitian People's Support Project and Evelyne Pouget will be producing a fabulous concert and dance, in Kingston, NY, featuring Haiti's #1 band Boukman Ekperyans -- to raise funds for five Haitian orphanages. $25 at the door. $20 in advance. If you can't attend, give anyway. The "Haitian News Cycle" is over, but not the need for food, water, infrastructure, and hope for the future.
"If you can't feed a hundred people, then just feed one." - Mother Teresa
"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." - Winston Churchill
"The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving." - Albert Einstein
"The wise man does not lay up his own treasures. The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own." - Lao Tzu
"For it is in giving that we receive." - St. Francis
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2010The Top 18 High Tech Excuses
A few months ago we asked our readers to tell us what they thought the most common high tech excuses were -- the modern day, techno-centric equivalents to "The dog ate my homework." We primed the pump with seven of our own. Here are the results:
1. "The server's down."
2. "You're breaking up."
3. "Your email ended up in my spam folder."
4. "I'm out of range."
5. "My laptop crashed."
6. "I can't find my Blackberry."
7. "I forgot to recharge my battery."
8. "I couldn't open the attachment."
9. "I didn't get a calendar reminder from Outlook."
10. "I don't remember which password opens that application."
11. "I had a power surge and I'm using a dial up connection."
12. "The magnetic strip on my ID card is damaged."
13. "I couldn't find your fax number."
14. "The main fuse in the building burned out."
15. "My dog ate my mouse."
16. "I don't have an Orkut account anymore."
17. "I had trouble getting online."
18. "My cat urinated on my laptop."
Any more to add to the list?
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 04:53 PM | Comments (1)
April 15, 2010Einstein Wasn't Into Six Sigma
"Not
everything
that
counts
can
be
counted;
not
everything
that
can
be
counted
counts."
- Albert Einstein
Idea Champions
Awake at the Wheel
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:11 AM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2010Shameless Self-Promotion #23
It's recently dawned on me that a lot of the readers of this blog have no clue what the authors of this blog actually do -- or what companies we (Idea Champions) have helped along the way.
So... in case you are wondering... take a look.
We've worked with just about every industry on planet Earth. Our clients have included: GE, AT&T, Lucent, General Mills, Chubb Insurance, Coca Cola, Allianz, Met Life, Con Edison, Goodyear, Michelin, MTV Networks, A&E Television, Merck, Pfizer, NBC Universal, Atlanticare, Mitre, Pricewaterhouse, Towers Perrin, Gap, Rio Tinto, Duke Corporate Ed, Dover Corp, Fuqua School of Business, Citibank, Scotia Bank, Babson College, MBooth & Associates, and a host of other forward thinking organizations.
Oh, I almost forgot, our Free the Genie tool is going virtual in about a month or so. Want a preview? Let us know.
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:31 PM | Comments (0)
