(via hitrecordjoe, wirrow)
SoHo Factory Turned Family Home
I’ve definitely had dreams about living somewhere like this.
Subtlety, Deconstructed
The ever-sagacious Seth Godin:
Subtle design and messaging challenge the user to make her own connections instead of spelling out every detail. Connections we make are more powerful than connections made for us. If Amazon and Zappos had been called ‘reallybigbookstore.com’ and ‘tonsofshoes.com’ it might have made some early investors happy, but they would have built little of value….
It’s tempting to turn the dial all the way to 11, the make everything just a bit louder. The opposite is precisely what you might need.
"If you are not embarrassed when you ship your product, you waited too long"
Reid Hoffman
These are SO good. And this one might just be the best.
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The rule is for everyone in the room: if their attention is elsewhere, they aren’t listening. Frank, the guy who plays Plants vs. Zombies during staff and swears he’s listening? He’s not. He’s getting 50% of what’s being said, and worse, he’s giving everyone else in the room permission to slack.
However, the problem here isn’t with Frank, it’s the referee. Frank is not sensing progress, so Frank has left. The referee has forgotten…
If steam isn’t coming from their ears, they might stop listening. It is the responsibility of the referee to constantly be visually surfing the room to determine who is and isn’t engaged. This is hard.
Referee. Solid agenda. Seven people. At any given point in the meeting, three of these people are verbally sparring about the topic. In addition to making sure the three active participants don’t kill each other, the referee — in real time — needs to figure out whether the other four are mentally present, and, if not, what to do about it. This is really hard.
This is really hard because refereeing these meetings is incredibly situational. You’ve got seven people, each with their own personalities and agendas. You’ve got whatever mood they happen to be in at that precise moment.And you’ve got whatever topic merits this meeting in the first place. Given all of these fuzzy variables, what possible relevant advice can I give you to keep everyone engaged? Here are a few small tips:
Pull them back. If they don’t look engaged, steer the conversation toward them and ask them a question relevant to the current state of the topic: “Stan, no code reviews? Really?”
Reset the meeting with silence. If several folks have checked out, one of my favorite moves is referee silence. When all eyes are on you, count backwards for 10 and watch what happens — Frank is going to look up from Plants vs. Zombies and wonder, “Why’s it so quiet? What’d I miss?”
Change the scenery. Are you sitting down? Ok, stand up. Have you been writing stuff on the whiteboard? No? Try it. Small tweaks to the scenery might change nothing or they might give someone a nudge out of their mental haze.
A meeting’s progress is measured by the flow, and the referee’s job is keep it moving along at a good clip, which is why the referee sometimes needs to…
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If I were, say, Sir Richard Branson, I’d set up a race track that didn’t have go-karts or shifter-karts… no. I would set up a race track purely for Audi S1’s
Then, if I were, say, me… I’d go to there. And live next door to it happily driving these little guys all the time. :P
"..The best sound in the world, to an 11 year-old boy in the 80’s, is a five dollar bill being converted to quarters."
via @danbenjamin on the Talk Show with @gruber. #truth
(via parti)
Joy!
