Journey to the Land of Names, aka 2009: A Web Space Odyssey

Alrighty – A Name Has Been Chosen.

Ridiculously simple as it may sound to choose a new business name and web domain name – it wasn’t.

All of the super-coolest memorable names were gobbled up long ago by smart people with $10, porn producers, bands with no good songs yet, and software visionaries. Windows? Python? Apple? Oracle? Not exactly rocket science, but whoever gets there first, wins.

I started with a suggestion from Gif to call my innovation consulting biz The Oracle. His thinking on that was that I have a very high level of predicting the future and people come to me for advice having to do with things that have not happened yet – the exact job description of the Oracle of Delphi, who was relied upon to give advice and make decisions under the ancient Greek God Apollo.

Good idea but a name snarl. I tried. Then I went to The Pythia, which was her nickname. Thank you to everyone who tried hard to get me off of that direction – it took a couple of weeks but I did finally get it that it sounds like someone is lisping no matter what you do with Pyth. Thank you. Sorry for the delay on that one.

NEXT I went back to the Delphi idea which of course is totally taken, as is everything having to do with the Greek Alphabet or anything simple to say or spell that is related to the ancient world.

It was my Dad who finally cracked the code by suggesting I make up a word like Verizon. He does a kajillion crossword puzzles, so I enlisted him as a last resort.

He started with Del from Delphi and noodled around and came up with Delform. I countered with Delforma since Delform is too close to Deform. It doesn’t mean anything really, which is good. Easy to say and spell, so that’s good too. No major web hits. Still good. Del loosely means of or about in Italian. Forma means shape or form or mold or appearance. Still OK.

Then I called a close friend who is fluent in Italian and ran it by her to make sure it didn’t mean something awful. She is the one who told me that forma is feminine and it should be DellaForma.

So there you go. $10 later, I am now DellaForma and I own www.DellaForma.com

Blogging will happen!

Along the way, I ran into www.wordreference.com – an amazing site to play with words, definitions, word extensions, and more. In multiple languages. Really fun!

Now I am looking back through Christopher’s archives of the instructions from weeks ago on what to do next so that I can move through the time warp and get up to speed on my Beat.

I am snooping at others’ websites and blogs and asking people for blogs that they like the look and feel of.

Here are a few nicely organized EASY TO READ ones – what I want:

www.innovationinpractice.com (recommended by ChristopherA who had a lot to do with why it’s so clean)

http://www.robinavni.com/lifestyle-insights-blog/ (recommended by my colleague Celeste Tell, who is considering changing her actual name because of issues around Google porn-related hits!). This blog is done by a group of women and they have a STRICT 300 word posting limit. SMART. This post is 664 words. Too long. Noted.

http://www.livestrong.com/lance-armstrong/blog/ Lance’s most recent Tweets are all right there on the top right. Nice. The amount of traffic to various OTHER Tweets and blogs being driven by one word from Lance is staggering. Really amazing. I like the little Tools menu at the bottom.

http://www.ideo.com/ A little surprised to find this site LESS elegant looking than it used to be, but it’s still darn good looking and of course really interesting no matter how you slice it. Will keep an eye on it to see if it shifts again aesthetically.

What do you like the look and feel of blog-wise? What makes a “good blog”?

My Trash + MIT Research Study + Technolgy + Social Media = Clues for Creating A Better Future

Yesterday, 20 items of my most precious (but not valuable, obviously) trash were tagged by a research team from MIT with GPS tags. I can now track the progress of my trash as it travels to its final resting place, globally. MIT will track not only my trash but several thousand other pieces of trash using networks of tiny locatable and addressable microeletromechanical systems.

There is plenty of information on this very interesting multi-stakeholder trash tracking project on their website, so please check it out for yourself: http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/index.php?id=1

High-tech widgets, duct tape, foam-in-a-can, a camera, clipboards and pens and paper forms.





Once again, I am struck by how simple the most innovative ideas seem to be. Instead of guessing or extrapolating where this trash is likely to end up, just let each piece of trash report back to us and let it tell us where it all goes. Simple enough for you?





Then take that information and use it as a springboard for identifying problems and potential new solutions for a cleaner better future. Seems too easy - but on the other hand, nobody thought of doing this before the MIT SENSEable City Lab, so it’s a pretty innovative study.

I am becoming more convinced – daily -- that I am trained to overthink things. Untraining this tendency to think too much is looking really good to me today.

Why do I overthink things, I wonder? Is the shortest route between Point A and Point B too easy? Too simple? Too straightforward? Would I not get enough “intellectual credits” if I came up with a terrifyingly obvious idea?

I just did a quick Google search on the keywords: why we overthink things, and I got 5,590,000 relevant search results. Apparently I am not alone. There is a site where you can post your "personal overthinking" story and one guy said, "I am overthinking this post to the point where I can't even post". I get him.

This course is helping me weed out the noise by creating so much noise I will go deaf if I don’t filter and choose my brain inputs with more scrutiny. Not always a comfortable feeling learning new tricks-- yet -- but I really do get why this is no longer optional for me.

As I was told by 3 different classmates this weekend: “This changing of a few decades of old habits will not happen overnight. This is why we’re taking a CLASS on it - just start doing it!” Good people; good advice. On it.

Innovation: Infusing Personal Meaning into my Truckload of Homework

This past few days has prompted a major rethinking of this MBA, why I am here, what I want to do next, and how I can integrate all of these projects and posts and forums and papers and blogs into something that actually means something to me, rather than just choosing something I can write about and getting these tasks checked off.

At heart, no matter where I am or what I'm doing, I am first and foremost an innovator. It's what I do and what I've always done.

I made a major point starting a few years ago to formally study Innovation Strategy and figure out how it's "Really" done. What I found out: Same way I was doing it intuitively all my life, except with way better words and diagrams.

Not knocking training in this or in ANY field -- I am a serial student and I was secretly plotting some way to get a janitor job at MIT just to lurk in the halls, (noted: not an original movie plot anymore).

My point: I am rethinking all of my proposed BGI class projects and I now want to reframe all of it around the broadstroke topic of Innovation and drill down into some relevant subtopics.

I created a major S%$&#!storm in a Product Development Departmental meeting at work yesterday when I introduced the idea of launching a web-based consumer-generated product innovation project. It's basically free, you can get thousands of amazingly brilliant ideas from YOUR own loyal consumers, and the successes of companies like Lego have proven that companies NOT doing this are pretty much missing the boat. This one harmless low-risk suggestion derailed the whole meeting.

So...........why the resistance?

Organizational culture.

My company is primarily a "closed innovation" organization. We create it; we build it; we manufacture it; we protect it; it's ours. We do not ask others -- especially not consumers -- to "Design our products for us".

Too bad for us! Windows vs. Linux.

Granted, I personally don't believe it's possible to come up with truly breakthrough innovative ideas from a consumer focus group (it's just an unreasonable expectation), but I sure can use their ideas to read between the lines and identify umet needs and potentially extrapolate those into a disruptive new product or category.

Is there any possibility I can convince my company to harness this open-source crowd power? I simply don't know.

One major factor I have in my favor: tireless persistence for things I believe deeply in.

Watch this space.

Time Acceleration -- no lie

OK, so time is accelerating. I get that. But October 10th already...? Seriously!

I have always been pretty sure that the saying "Time is a constant" is a total lie. Time speeds up and slows down in my world, and recently I have been feeling it whoooosh by my face.

This BGI Social Web course is putting right into my face something I need to be in tune with and I have resisted -- not sure why -- but I just have:

I am perpetually behind. There is no cure.

Not so bad really, now that I am facing it head on.

So .... now that I am done with the delusion of ever "Catching up", how will I create a life for myself that involves balance (OK, so I'll start with less IMbalance as a reasonable starting place) while also embracing information as the golden key?

Everything I do career-wise in the innovation arena is based on my ability to collect and correlate and synthesize bits and pieces of information in a way that other's don't. And I do.

I read thousands of words per day, look at hundreds to thousands of images/objects/ideas per day, and I work full time while going to school full time. I also do a lot of other stuff besides those 2 Big Things. It is an insane (but temporary assuming I can graduate in June 2010) lifestyle, basically.

So far so good, but I am ready for a new level of this "information game" and I simply don't know how to play that next level......yet. I guess that's why they call it a class.

I am learning how much I do not know.

Letting go of whatever I thought it would be (meaning somehow "I will get on top of all of this soon") is a great start. I am there. There is no "on top of it" -- it's impossible. No battle; only surrender!

A few years go my Executive Coach directed me to this book when I brought up this idea of time acceleration: The Mayan Code. Time IS SPEEDING UP and I am NOT the only one feeling it. Who knew?! http://www.amazon.com/Mayan-Code-Acceleration-Awakening-World/dp/1591430704

The good news here is that the speeding up thing is connected to the collective consciousness thing, which is all good. I'd rather be Awake and wondering how the hell I will keep up than be Asleep at the wheel wondering where my life went.

I spent some time today -- time I most CERTAINLY did not have -- on a sailboat. I needed it. My eyeballs and brain really could not take in even one more pixel off a computer screen. Saturated.

Sailing is remarkably head-clearing, paradoxically especially if you are on a race crew. Should be LESS relaxing than cruising but somehow it's MORE relaxing because racing requires a greater degree of focus than cruising, at least for me.

Even in a lousy no-wind race like today, there is no time to think, and so thinking bubbles up on its own, sometimes then, but reliably always later on after a race. At night; in my dreams that night; the next morning when I open my eyes.

I looked at the 947 unread items in my Google Reader list (I'm not even kind of switched over to it yet) and panicked. Then I just started reading some of them. NOT very systematically. I learned a lot in just 30 minutes. I was not sad that I did not manage to get to the other 920-something unread items, because it's just impossible.

Tomorrow I will try the overdue experiment of scan for 15 minutes and then read for 45 minutes. I will feed this weeks unread class articles into Google Reader ......and then read them!

Filter or Die

OK, so my secret plan to get all nice and caught up on the readings and the postings and the firehose of information for this course did not quite come together prior to the Intensive. In a nutshell, I am just behind.

I've heard it's not fatal, but it just doesn't feel good. I'll live, and I'll get caught up. Monday night I did get some of the reading done and I realized that there was a virtual ocean of articles and posts to get through.

Incredible - the first week of school and all of a sudden I am hundreds of things behind - readings, postings, blogging, tweeting, and who knows that else.I went to bed sad and frustrated and considering bailing out of this class and trying to get into one where I know more and maybe had slightly **less** assigned reading. Less than a firehose of info coming at me sounded good. Sad because I think this is a cool course.

In the morning, I got it. No mistake we are getting firehosed with information.

Brilliant. Drown them in an imposible number of readings and things that will "encourage" the students to convert to Google Reader sooner rather than later. (Duh!). I am convinced.

Currently I spend maybe 5 hours a day on email and maybe another 5 on the Internet. Every day, and that is not including Elluminates or the Channel. I get several hundred emails a day that really do need to be read and many of them need immediate reponses. I read about 3 print magazines a day, 2 newspapers, 5 or 6 blogs and newsletters, and I have started some postings on some open innovation blogs.I hire people to do the research for me that I do not have time to do.

It's still NOT ENOUGH! I need more information than I am getting, and I need to be able to find and the retrieve it. Then read and assimilate it. Got the point. I need more info, not less, to do what I do in the business world.

Filter or Die! I need this course, these tools, this experience.Tomorrow is another day. Looking forward to it!