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Can you factor this? 
If you're like most people, you get a little queasy at the thought. And when you were in tenth grade, you surely wondered why they were bothering you.
(the answer is (x-2) times (x-2), in case you were curious.)
It turns out that the real reason you needed to do this work was to be able to play with numbers in your head. Abstract numerical thought is an important skill among educated people.
Which brings us to TED, a conference held every year in Long Beach. It's going on right now.
Watch a few TED videos and try to get ahead of the speaker. They have an idea...it's probably a conceptual tricky idea, one with a lot of moving parts. And there is a lot of shorthand and arm waving ... basically, it's similar to a quadratic equation. If you need the other person to slow down and explain every little bit, you've missed the point. The point is to do abstract conceptual thought. To get in practice taking the accepted status quo and questioning it, at least for a little while, at least this or that part of it.
I think this is a skill, a rare one. The ability to be facile in the manipulation of ideas, both theoretical and established, is a valuable one, and I think the TED videos and art of reading books (at least the first ten minutes of each) are two great ways to getting better at manipulation of ideas. It takes practice, and it's worth it.
I sat in a meeting last week with someone who was 100% tactical. She couldn't let go of the urgency of the moment long enough to envision a different future, even for five minutes. The abstract conceptual part was missing from her part of the conversation.
The trick is to be able to leap to, "if we did A and B, would that get us C? Would C be a good thing? Is it possible to do A and B if we really commit?" and then move on to the next one. And that takes practice. Why wouldn't it?
BONUS: Hugh MacLeod, artist, good friend and creator of the cartoon above, has created four cube grenades about being a linchpin. These are limited editions, first come first shipped. (You can sign up for his free cartoon of the day).
In the face of significant change and opportunity, people are often one of the three. If you're going to be of assistance, it helps to know which one.
Uninformed people need information and insight in order to figure out what to do next. They are approaching the problem with optimism and calm, but they need to be taught. Uninformed is not a pejorative term, it's a temporary state.
Clueless people don't know what to do and they don't know that they don't know what to do. They don't know the right questions to ask. Giving them instructions is insufficient. First, they need to be sold on what the platform even looks like.
And frightened people will resist any help you can give them, and they will blame you for the stress the change is causing. Scared people like to shoot the messenger. Duck.
The worst kind of frightened person is one with power. Someone in a mob of other frightened people, someone with a gun, someone who is the CEO. When confronted with a scared CEO, time to run. Before someone can change, they have to learn, and before they learn, they have to cease being scared.
One reason so many big ideas come from small organizations is that there is far less fear of change at the top. One mistake board members and shareholders make is that they reward the scared but hyper-confident CEO, instead of calling him on the carpet as he rages at change.
When I first encountered surfing, I was scared of it. It looks cool, but an old guy like me can get hurt. A patient instructor allayed my fears until I was willing to get started. When you first start out, the things you think are important are actually irrelevant, and it's the stuff you don't know is important that gets you thrown into the ocean. Finally, and only then, was I smart enough to actually learn.
I'm bad at surfing now, but at least I know why.
Comfort the frightened, coach the clueless and teach the uninformed.
One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. That's actually what they spent most of my time at business school teaching me.
No sense putting more on that pizza, sending more staff to that event, answering the phone in fewer rings... what's the point? No sense being kind, looking people in the eye, being open or welcoming or grateful. Doing the least acceptable amount is the way to maximize short term profit.
Of course, there's a different strategy, a crazy alternative that seems to work: do the most you can do instead of the least.
Radically overdeliver.
Turns out that this is a cheap and effective marketing technique.
Here's the spec. If you build it and it's great, I'll use it and I'll blog it.
A while ago, I posted about the talking pad and a modern version of it.
I think there's a killer app version of this for the iPad, and I hope someone will build it. The talking pad is an interactive presentation tool for smart people.
Overview
It's a very simple concept: a collection of pages (slides, images, type, let's call them pages) that are easy to navigate in a non-linear way. Along with the standard zoom features, I'd like to be able to write on any of them in real time using my finger. I can also call up, on demand, a calculator or a blank drawing pad.
Creation
I can create the talking pad files on my Mac or on the iPad using a builder app, and sync both ways. The builder is really simple, just the ability to organize pages I create in other apps, with simple navigation, scale and type tools.
Navigation
Instead of it being linear (like Powerpoint or Keynote), the pages are arranged in a grid or checkerboard. From any page, then, I can go back, forward, up or down, and the four diagonals as well. So depending on the conversation I'm having with my audience, my 'next' page can be any of 8.
In addition, the app supports an external monitor. When I'm hooked up to the projector or screen, I see twenty or thirty of my pages in thumbnails on my ipad screen, and I can click any of them to instantly bring that page up on the projector.
In essence, I want to be able to play a presentation the same way some people play jazz piano.
As a prompt, each corner and side of the page can have little keyword reminders, so I can easily remember, for example, that pressing the bottom left corner of the page about dogs will display the page about tigers.
So now, someone asks a question and I can just jump to the slide that answers that question. If I want to circle something or zoom in, I just put my finger on the screen and do that.
Bonuses:
1. the ability to have one of the pages be a web browser with address already loaded, so if I want, without leaving the talking pad app, I can jump to this.
2. the ability to embed links within the pages, so I can actually have a page that points to other pages (this is currently built into keynote and powerpoint, but people don't use it because those programs are so linear). In essence, a page becomes a piano keyboard with each key pointing to another page.
Reporting
The app can keep track of which pages I used the most, and for how long. This is useful in a corporate setting. Imagine that the sales manager dreams up a talking pad file and offers it to 100 salespeople. Every day, when they re-sync, we can see how often the pad was used and which slides got used the most often.
The Killer App
A killer app is a program that all by itself is good enough to justify the price of the hardware. The killer app for the PC was Lotus 1-2-3. The killer app for the iPod was iTunes. This is reason enough to pay $500, I think.
PS I've received so much interest in this I've started a wiki on this topic so you can find fellow travelers.
If you've ever hired or managed or taught, you know the feeling.
People are just begging to be told what to do. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is: "If you tell me what to do, the responsibility for the outcome is yours, not mine. I'm safe."
When asked, resist.
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