etsy:

LEGO rainbow R2-D2 made by monsterbrick, via nerdapproved.

fastcompany:

Do Your Employees Trust You?

They might like you, they may even love you, but can they be sure that you’ll get the job done when the chips are down?

Why are some companies successful in implementing change while others struggle? Why can some leaders inspire people to work together effectively, while others cannot?

These questions puzzled a friend of ours, Cynthia Olmstead, who worked for many years as a business consultant. Even though her methodology and practices didn’t change, outcomes from one organization to another varied widely. What was the key factor that allowed one leader to succeed where others failed?

One day on one of her many flights from the West Coast to the East Coast, our friend had a revelation: This key factor was trust. When initiatives failed and relationships were strained, it was usually because people weren’t confident in the leader’s ability or intentions. If an initiative was taking place in a high-trust environment, it had a good chance of success. If an initiative was being implemented in a low-trust culture, its chances of success were remote.

Four aspects of trust
Satisfied that trust was the key to effective leadership, Cynthia soon found that the concept was hard to define. What was trust? How could she describe it? Did trust mean the same thing to her as it did to others? And if people didn’t have a common definition of trust, how could they ever talk about it—let alone create trust where it didn’t exist?

After countless discussions with clients, colleagues, and friends—and the creation of endless flip charts—Cynthia identified four key attributes of trust and wrote about them in a new book, Trust Works! Four Keys to Building Lasting Relationships, co-authored by Ken Blanchard and Martha Lawrence. The four attributes are:

Able—Demonstrate Competence
Believable—Act with Integrity
Connected—Care about Others
Dependable—Maintain Reliability

Read the full story here.

navyhistory:

Museum Store Stocks Bric Tek Navy Warship Building Block Kits

The Navy Museum store, located in the National Museum of the United States Navy at the Washington Navy Yard, recently began stocking Bric Tek building block kits of simulated naval warships. We currently stock seven different construction kits, ranging from a small frigate, all the way to a huge helicopter carrier (seen above) consisting of nearly 2,000 pieces. These Bric Tek sets are fully compatible with LEGO building blocks. Many of the ship sets come with smaller aircraft including helicopters and jets, and the carrier set even includes a hovercraft that can be safely stowed in a well deck! The sets also include poseable figures with guns, radios, and other attachments.

(find out how to order yours today)

For all the LEGO fans I know.

standardhotels:

Water boarding = BAD

Yoga boarding = GOOD 

standardmoves:

Bakasana

Crow Pose

Standard Moves presented by Puma.

fastcompany:

The 5 Questions Every Company Should Ask Itself

IN INTERVIEWING SOME OF THE BIGGEST INNOVATION EXPERTS, INCLUDING CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN AND ERIC RIES, WARREN BERGER FOUND THAT ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS CAN BE MORE CHALLENGING THAN FINDING ANSWERS.

1. WHAT IS OUR COMPANY’S PURPOSE ON THIS EARTH?

Keith Yamashita

To arrive at a powerful sense of purpose, Yamashita says, companies today need “a fundamental orientation that is outward looking”—so they can understand what people out there in the world truly desire and need, and what’s standing in the way. At the same time, business leaders also must look inward, to try to clarify their own core values and larger ambitions.

2. WHAT SHOULD WE STOP DOING?

Jack Bergstrand

But the harder question has to do with what you’re willing to eliminate. If you can’t answer that question, Bergstrand maintains, “it lessens your chances of being successful at what you want to do next—because you’ll be sucking up resources doing what’s no longer needed and taking those resources away from what should be a top priority.”

4. IF WE DIDN’T HAVE AN EXISTING BUSINESS, HOW COULD WE BEST BUILD A NEW ONE?

Clayton Christensen

“…Answering this question can point to future opportunities and help your share price to outperform the market by showing “that there’s more growth here than analysts may have thought.”

4. WHERE IS OUR PETRI DISH?

Tim Ogilvie

Ogilvie’s question is really asking, “Where in the company is it safe to ask radical questions? Where, within the company, can you explore heretical questions that could threaten the business as it is—without contaminating what you’re doing now?”

5. HOW CAN WE MAKE A BETTER EXPERIMENT?

Eric Ries

“This means that instead of asking “What will we do?” or “What will we build?” the emphasis should be on “What will we learn?”

[Image: Sketch via Shuttershock]

nosql:

Another set of predictions from Gartner states: “By 2015, 65 percent of packaged analytic applications with advanced analytics will come embedded with Hadoop“:

Organizations realize the strength that Hadoop-powered analysis brings to big data programs, particularly for analyzing poorly structured data, text, behavior analysis and time-based queries. While IT organizations conduct trials over the next few years, especially with Hadoop-enabled database management system (DBMS) products and appliances, application providers will go one step further and embed purpose-built, Hadoop-based analysis functions within packaged applications. The trend is most noticeable so far with cloud-based packaged application offerings, and this will continue.

This seems to confirm my thoughts about Trough of Disillusionment and Slope of Enlightenment phases coalescing when speaking about Hadoop or Big Data.

Original title and link: Gartner: By 2015, 65 Percent of Packaged Analytic Applications With Advanced Analytics Will Come Embedded With Hadoop (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

anthonybourdain:

As our final episode of NO RESERVATIONS approaches, I’ve been asked to write a top ten list of personal favorites. That’s hard to do. It’s been a mixed bag—and deliberately so. Travel and food shows necessarily tell more or less the same story: somebody goes someplace, eats and drinks a lot of…

crookedindifference:

Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware.

The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell “neighborhood” properly and whatnot isn’t a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn’t going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.

Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever.

They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

thisistheverge:

Tim Carmody on Amazon to Apple: the game starts now

The key moment in Jeff Bezos’s keynote announcing Amazon’s new Paperwhite Kindle and Kindle Fire models came before he introduced any of the new hardware. “People don’t want gadgets any more,” Bezos declared, explaining why the Kindle Fire had succeeded where other gadgety Android tablets had failed. “They want services that improve over time. They want services that improve every day, every week, and every month.” This statement of purpose signals a new phase in Amazon’s evolution as a company, and its singular, emerging take on the developing consumer marketplace, and how it’s positioning itself towards its broad field of competitors.

Really awesome!

jamesnord:

We hadn’t spoken to each other in hours. 

It had been pouring rain all day, turning the dirt roads of Battenkill into mud and putting us all into a dark and quiet place. There are times when it’s not fun, the times when you can’t feel your hands, your legs are screaming and you are not anywhere near done. There are moments when saliva mixes with vomit and you try, try not to lose that wheel in front of you, the one that is inching forward, forward, forward away from you. 

But what can you do? You shake your hands out to get the blood back in them, you get in the drops and back onto that fucking wheel and you let the suffering of the day knock against you like waves. You do this and most importantly tell yourself, “this is worth it”.

Sometimes people ask me what I think about when I am on the bike for that long and the truth is I don’t know. I guess it depends. On a day like this you think about the pain, you think about your heros and imagine themselves tempering themselves in the rain and the mud. You think about love in the form of your riding partners not making fun of you when you can’t lift your head. Shit, you think about cheeseburgers and girls, anything to take you out of the horror that you are currently living, but then even on the darkest days sometimes you think about how beautiful it is.

You lick your lips, crunching the dirt that was on your face, look down at your quivering legs and laugh because it really is beautiful. You keep your head down and attack one more time because when you think about this ride in 10 years (and you will) you want to remember that you didn’t let the darkness win, if only for a moment you didn’t let it win.