Year: 2018

The art of the elevator pitch

Carmine Gallo in HBR:

According to molecular biologist John Medina of the University of Washington School of Medicine, the human brain craves meaning before details. When a listener doesn’t understand the overarching idea being presented in a pitch, they have a hard time digesting the information. A logline will help you paint the big picture for your audience.

In Hollywood cinema, one of the greatest loglines of all time belongs to the iconic thriller that kept kids out of the ocean during the summer of 1975:

A police chief, with a phobia for open water, battles a gigantic shark with an appetite for swimmers and boat captains, in spite of a greedy town council who demands that the beach stay open.

What makes it work?

The logline for Jaws identifies the key elements of the story: the hero, his weakness, his conflict, and the hurdles he must overcome — all in one sentence. It depicts the overarching storyline in an interesting, straightforward way, rather than focusing on details that might seem meaningless without the context of the bigger picture.

More here.

2018-12-03

Update – november 2018

  • Attended a Ray Lamontagne concert – acoustic, excellent songwriting, material is bluesy and a little dark, great show.
  • Attended a talk by Louise Penny, author of the Inspecteur Gamache novels set in the province of Québec on the border with the state of Vermont – unassuming, funny, great stories, interesting way of mapping out in advance the whole series
  • Watched:
    • the movie Burning (South Korean, won an award at the Cannes Festival and is Korea’s submission at the Oscars) – good storytelling, probably could have done it in 90 minutes rather than two hours;
    • the Netflix series The Mechanism (inspired from a real case in Brazil that I was familiar with) and Narcos Mexico (no real character development);
    • Started last season of House of Cards – won’t finish it (no movement on the plot; too much navel-gazing). I can’t recommend enough the excellent original House of Cards by the BBC.
  • Books:
    • Finished reading Jean Chrétien’s Mes histoires (in French), Dani Shapiro’s memoir Hourglass, and Charles Krauthammer’s Things that matter;
    • I didn’t finish Marilynne Robinson’s What are we doing here? – the topics were attractive but the treatment is laborious and clunky;
    • Currently reading an academic thinkfest on Charles Taylor edited by Ruth Abbey and Amsterdam by Russell Shorto – excellent writing, he really draws you in. A recommendation from my friend Einar while we were visiting him and his family in… Amsterdam. He also recommended The island at the center of the world by the same author.
  • Started an online course on Diego Velazquez offered by Museo del Prado in Madrid.

2018-12-01

Pendulum waves. It’s just physics

And you’ll be mesmerized.

2018-11-23

Of politics and turkey

Frank Bruni in the NYT:

Every year around this time, I read about the fraught partnership of politics and turkey. How can a family survive the Thanksgiving meal with a mix of Democrats and Republicans at the table? What if some of the people voted for Trump and others didn’t? What if some continue to defend him even as others quiver in moral horror?


Well, that’s my family. And we manage just fine.


It’s not that we’re reticent, timid types. Um, we’re Italian. And while that primarily means a ridiculous abundance of food […], it also means a ridiculous abundance of opinions, registered in loud and overlapping voices.


Members of the family get worked up. Members of the family get stressed out. Members of the family even, on rare occasions, remove themselves from an overheated conversation and retreat to a different room — probably the kitchen, for seconds. We’re a ravenous lot.


But we’re a grounded one, too. All of us bear in mind that no division of thought, no partisan split, matters a fraction as much as the experiences that we’ve shared with one another, the support that we’ve lent one another and the compact that we’ve made to march together across the unpredictable years and through this messy world.


All of us, in other words, know where to draw the line. That’s key. Perspective. Proportion. I’m immeasurably thankful for relatives who hold on to those, and I hope that you and your relatives hold on to them, too.


And I wish you the happiest of Thanksgivings.

Amen!

2018-11-21

What makes a fulfilling life

Bertrand Russell on a fulfilling life:

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.

An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls.

Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

More here.

2018-11-20

Breathtaking video of the moon setting behind the Teide volcano

This is NOT a timelapse video

2018-11-16

The eight archetypes of leadership

Manfred Kets de Vries in HBR:

  1. The strategist: leadership as a game of chess. These people are good at dealing with developments in the organization’s environment. They provide vision, strategic direction and outside-the-box thinking to create new organizational forms and generate future growth.
  2. The change-catalyst: leadership as a turnaround activity. These executives love messy situations. They are masters at re-engineering and creating new organizational ”blueprints.”
  3. The transactor: leadership as deal making. These executives are great dealmakers. Skilled at identifying and tackling new opportunities, they thrive on negotiations.
  4. The builder: leadership as an entrepreneurial activity. These executives dream of creating something and have the talent and determination to make their dream come true.
  5. The innovator: leadership as creative idea generation. These people are focused on the new. They possess a great capacity to solve extremely difficult problems.
  6. The processor: leadership as an exercise in efficiency. These executives like organizations to be smoothly running, well-oiled machines. They are very effective at setting up the structures and systems needed to support an organization’s objectives.
  7. The coach: leadership as a form of people development. These executives know how to get the best out of people, thus creating high performance cultures.
  8. The communicator: leadership as stage management. These executives are great influencers, and have a considerable impact on their surroundings.

More here

 

2018-11-12

Once a year the people of Warsaw pay homage to their fallen heroes

Once a year on August 1st, the people of Warsaw pay homage to the fallen heroes that fought for freedom in 1944 during the Warsaw Uprising. The biggest rebellion against German Nazi occupation during WWII cost over 200,000 lives and destruction of the capital.

2018-08-01

A modest proposal: eliminate email

The concept is simple. Employees no longer have personalized email addresses. Instead, each individual posts a schedule of two or three stretches of time during the day when he or she will be available for communication. During these office hours, the individual guarantees to be reachable in person, by phone, and by instant messenger technologies like Slack. Outside of someone’s stated office hours, however, you cannot command their attention. If you need them, you have to keep track of what you need until they’re next available.

On the flipside, when you’re between your own scheduled office hours, you have no inboxes to check or messages demanding response. You’re left, in other words, to simply work. And of course, when you’re home in the evening or on vacation, the fact that there’s no inbox slowly filling up with urgent obligations allows a degree of rest and recharge that’s all but lost from the lives of most knowledge workers today.

This is from an HBR article by Cal Newport. You can and should follow his blog.

I want to hear what you think… particularly the ways in which you can make this (or some version of it) work. Drop me a note using the “Contact me” button on the ruler.

2018-07-02

“That one can hire only a whole man [or woman] rather than any part thereof explains why the improvement of human effectiveness in work is the greatest opportunity for the improvement of performance and results”.

– Peter Drucker

2018-06-27