It’s appropriate that in the same week Al Gore gave his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, HP Labs – the research arm of Hewlett-Packard – has published an elegant summary of a range of innovations which help deliver on the promise of a greener information technology landscape.

Al Gore challenged the world’s scientists to focus their research on confronting a planetary emergency:

The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun’s energy for pennies or invent an engine that’s carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.

So it’s significant that research institutions like HP Labs, with a network of seven R&D centers spread around the world, focus attention on environmental sustainability.

Innovative solutions from HP Labs which provide a way to minimize the environmental impact of data center computing include Dynamic Smart Cooling and Data Center Thermal Assessment Services – as well as looking beyond the data center to energy-adaptive displays, better ways to keep chips cool and video conferencing that has the feel of a face-to-face meeting. From the glass house to the executive jet there are now a range of environmentally sensible solutions that you can implement today, if you choose to do so.

These solutions from HP Labs allow customers the choice of an environmentally conscious alternative to the more profligate computing technology they may currently use.

So if you work in corporate computing, ask your CIO two things.

Firstly, ask them to evaluate the environmental impact of the entire IT life-cycle in your organization. Are there ways to implement technology that is good for business and good for the planet?

Secondly, ask them to consider their response to the question Al Gore posed yesterday in Oslo:

The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: “What were you thinking; why didn’t you act?�

Or they will ask instead: “How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?�

It’s your choice.

Tim Ferriss has posted a fascinating tale of a contest he ran at Princeton as part of a class on entrepreneurship. He challenged students in the class to contact high-profile celebrities and CEOs and get their answers to questions they have always wanted to ask.

For extra incentive, Ferriss promised the student who could contact the most hard-to-reach name and ask the most intriguing question a round-trip plane ticket anywhere in the world.

“I believe that success can be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have. I felt that if I could help students overcome the fear rejection with cold-calling and cold e-mail, it would serve them forever,â€? Ferriss said. “It’s easy to sell yourself short, but when you see classmates getting responses from people like [former president] George Bush, the CEOs of Disney, Comcast, Google, and HP, and dozens of other impossible-to-reach people, it forces you to reconsider your self-set limitations.”

His technique is to hack the target’s email (easy enough in most cases) and then use a sophisticated personalized approach to get past their handlers.

Ferriss claims that “impressive networks are built one superstar at a time. It’s another case of working smarter and not harder.”

This technique is covered at length in his book The 4-Hour Workweek.

Go for it!

A recent San Francisco Immigrant Entrepreneur’s Meet-up hosted by the entrepreneur queen herself – Edith Yeung – featured a talk by pioneering podcast Sci-Fi author Scott Sigler. He’s the first author, ever, to podcast a novel in it’s entirety.

Scott’s first novel Earthcore was podcast back in March of 2006 and is available today, by subscribing to the free download from the iTunes Store. Simply fire up iTunes on your computer, choose ‘iTunes Store’ and enter ‘Scott Sigler’ in the search area. You’ll see that Scott also has other books, Ancestor and Nocturnal, available online as well. There’s hours of listening pleasure available at no charge (a warning for our under-18 readers: Scott’s novels are marked EXPLICIT by iTunes and have more than their fair share of blood and guts.)

As compelling a read (or a listen) as these books are, Scott is an accomplished marketeer in the Web 2.0 world as he is a Sci-Fi author. You’ll see if you check out the links to his works that I’ve used already in my blog that his work is available through multiple channels:

• via iTunes or any of the other podcasting sources as audio
• on Google books as a downloadable .pdf file
• on Amazon
• and last, but not least, on his own portal: www.scottsigler.com

I missed the opportunity to interview Scott at the event in San Francisco. But not to worry. I followed his suggestion as a ace podcaster and thought outside the envelope. I installed the PrettyMay plug-in to SKYPE and arranged to interview him remotely. The sound quality on my first recorded SKYPE call is a bit spotty in places (having a webcam operate at the same time as you are recording is NOT recommended!)

In my interview I asked him how he could make any money giving the best stuff away for free. He’s very blunt “What people forget is the marketing and sales angle…”. To hear Scott discuss how podcasting and Web 2.0 technologies such as Instant Messaging, Wiki’s and free content downloads provide for user involvement and the growth of his fan-base click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:53 — 1.3MB)

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That was then…this is now

The founders of Fairchild Semiconductor (est.1957) in the company’s production area. Back row, left to right: Victor Grinich, Gordon Moore, Julius Blank, and Eugene Kleiner. Middle: Jean Hoerni. Front: Jay Last and C. Sheldon Roberts. Facing the group: Bob Noyce.

This photo shows the “Traitorous Eightâ€? who left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild Semiconductor — using $3,500 of their own money they developed a method of mass-producing silicon which changed the world.

However, the founders did not stick around. Although most breadwinners in the 50’s looked for employment for life (my Dad worked for Rolls-Royce his whole career) these guys practiced the serial monogamy that was typical of executive life in the Valley from the get-go. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, as well as several others, got the “eleven year itch” and left to form Intel in 1968.

There are a number of interesting things about the photo. Firstly, they are all white males, wearing ties and pressed shirts. Their hair is short. They are spookily conformist in their cult-like attention to Mr. Noyce. OK, so it was the 1950’s. McCarthyism ruled. But consider by way of contrast this photo from the 1940’s of Dave Packard with a couple of HP staff, notice that he’s seated alongside, not in front of them. And, hey! One guy has a check shirt on.

Both of these photo’s show that, as the world has changed, so has leadership style in Silicon Valley.

It’s not just a matter of personal grooming. The tech industry innovates relentlessly. Product life-cycles are shorter than ever. As with machines, so with people. Broader social changes have obviously taken place alongside the technology.

Look at the Fairchild photo again. There were no women in the executive team at Fairchild in 1950’s California. Today, 40% of HP’s top executive committee are women. Two of HP’s top managers are foreign-born. In fact, nearly 40% of all the current residents of Silicon Valley were born outside the USA. Things were different back then. Many of today’s successful high-tech companies were started by immigrant entrepreneurs. A number of these successes are profiled in a wonderful new book They Made It! by Angelika Blendstrup.

Back in the 50’s it appears from the photo that the women who were employed at Fairchild Semiconductor were dutifully engaged in mind-numbing assembly work. Today, there are almost no assembly plants left in the Valley. Manufacturing is sourced off-shore in Asia, where legions of women from the rural hinterlands labor at the same jobs their enfranchised sisters used work at in California sixty years previously.

At least they don’t have managers perched at their elbows while they continue with relentless heads-down production. The Fairchild photo begs the question “What defines ‘work'”? It looks as if the women are ‘working’ more than the men, but their rewards would argue otherwise.

A time of transition

Bob Noyce was instrumental in putting the “Silicon” in Silicon Valley. He inspired legions of colleagues at Fairchild and later Intel (although there are reports he and Andy Grove did not get on well.) Here’s a moment in history where he mentored the young Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer:

Management and leadership style in the Valley has moved on. Some argue the HP Way is a thing of the past. Companies today are more a loose network of employees, contractors and self-branded individuals. Tempus fugit.

The conformity of the 1950s made for a particular leadership style (and makes the courage of Hewlett & Packard in bucking the trend more astonishing.) It was probably easier back then to issue edicts that were obeyed. Today’s leaders swim in different waters.

How do leaders today inspire and motivate? Let me know if you have pertinent examples.

Rebecca Knight, writing on modern philanthropy in the Weekend Financial Times, highlights Gilbert Maurer, the former Hearst Corporation COO who noticed something odd about bright college graduates he encountered:

They could write okay, but they couldn’t articulate,� he recalls. “If ever they had to give a presentation, it was ‘like’ this, and ‘you know’ that. I called it verbal landfill.

His response was to fund the Maurer Professorship, an endowed chair of speech and rhetoric, at his alma mater, St Lawrence University, a small, private liberal arts college in upstate New York.

“Even if a St Lawrence graduate – whether an economics major, a biologist or a philosopher – is able to express himself just 10 per cent better [than his peers] it will be a worthwhile endeavour,� he says.

The St. Lawrence School for Communication Arts offers classes in Advanced Public Speaking; Argumentation and Debate; Interpersonal Communication; Gender and Communication; Communication Theory; Native American Oral Traditions; American Public Address; Rhetoric of Social Movements; Ritual Studies and Presidential Campaign Rhetoric. (There’s no apparent connection between the last two courses – although Presidential campaigns are as filled with ritual as any shamanic rite.)

Specific course descriptions show the depth of the studies:

211. Advanced Public Speaking.
Intensive study of the principles and practices of researching, organizing, writing, delivering and criticizing persuasive speeches. Students employ contemporary theories of persuasion to analyze a variety of rhetorical situations. Students construct persuasive speeches for different speaking situations in order to develop critical and practical skills.

326. American Public Address
A study of American history through examination of the speeches of spokespersons for social, political, legal and religious institutions and movements. From Thomas Jefferson to George Bush, from Susan B. Anthony to Phyllis Schlafly, from George Wallace to Martin Luther King Jr.: a study of the impact of rhetorical strategies upon ideas and events and of ideas and events upon rhetorical strategies.

The school website also references a fascinating resource: the Silva Rhetoricae guide to the terms of classical and renaissance rhetoric.

Congratulations to the Maurer family for this much needed correction to the, you know, persuasiveness of American youth, like.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee stopped by HP’s Research Labs on Tuesday. He’s the guy who invented the World Wide Web. Unlike the plutocrats at Google, Yahoo, eBay and the many others who’ve grown fat and happy off the web, Tim remains an academic, seemingly of modest means, as excited by the technology as ever.

It was back in 1989 that he began work at CERN in Switzerland on the basic HTML and http protocols which form the foundation of the Web. There was a time in 1991-92 when he had a list of every web server in the world on a piece of paper in his office drawer. There are now millions upon millions being served. There are few people in the world alive today whose innovation have had such an effect on so many.

Yet to hear Tim (although Knighted by Her Majesty he prefers informality) describe it, when he was first outlining his concept of linked pages on a world-wide network to rooms filled with of smart people in the late 1980’s only two or three in each group of 100 “got” it. So goes the uphill struggle to communicate change. The best & brightest often cannot see the benefits of truly radical innovation. Many inventors have the devil’s own job communicating the advantages of their new idea to others.

I recently wrote about Robert Chesebrough, the inventor of Vaseline, who suffered self-inflicted burns to demonstrate the effectiveness of his product. There’s the tenacious Ed Lowe, inventor of Kitty-Litter who “started visiting cat shows, where he cleaned hundreds of cat boxes each day in exchange for a booth to display his new product.”

The story of the 30-year struggle of the English inventor and lone genius John Harrison to prove his clocks provide a solution to the problem of a ship’s longitude position at sea are wonderfully told in Dava Sobel’s book.

So it was refreshing to hear Berners-Lee talk. His speech lacks the polish of the corporate suits. Indeed, as one audience member commented, it lacks linear thoughts and meanders from link to link as does the web. “Yeah,” Berners-Lee responded, “linear sucks.” The observation that his presentation style matches the web is not a trivial one. He stated that “I’ve been told the Web has 10 to the 10 to the 11 (number of) Web sites. The brain we study is as complex a system.”

Is the logic of a formal presentation or speech with a beginning, middle and end and one rhetorical section leading in a linear fashion to the next soooo last century (not to mention the dozen or so preceding centuries)? Will future generations raised on the interconnections of the web prefer to absorb presentations of linked hypertext? Who knows.

What we can see, in the non-linear tradition in literature is a prescient demonstration that the “linear sucks”. As far back as the 18th Century with Tristram Shandy, published by author Laurence Stern in nine volumes that had neither a beginning or end, a celebration of digression and multiple plot-lines. The tradition segues into Nabokov’s Pale Fire; Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and so on.

Many of these novels mix poetry and prose. And on the web, sprung from Berners-Lee’s Swiss-time imaginings, we find poems which celebrate randomness and chance in the late-time twitters of people saying what they are doing now:

eve11: Confectioners sugar matte icing powdered over gothic cake...what the Salt Flats look like at the bewitching hour of slate blue dusk. November 21, 2007

TwitterPoetry: Winds buffet the twitterpoem, casting thoughts and emotions about with wild abandon. March 31, 2007

LloydDavis: Waiting for lunch date on bench in sloane square. Feeling rather george smiley... November 27, 2007


In the end the poets say it best:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?

T.S. Eliot The Waste Land

Just signed up for Twitter, seeing what happens. Short messages like this. A lot.

Need to know some in-depth information about the next location you’re scheduled to speak or visit on business?

You can Google the local newspaper and Chamber of Commerce website for background. Enter the name of the organization you are speaking to in Wikipedia. Even listen to a local radio station for news and views.

But to really scope out the neighborhood nothing beats a geographical tour.

Zipskinny is a delight for anyone who loves the visual display of quantitative data. Get the skinny on a ZIP code. Compare the demographics to dozens of others.

Team this up with Zillow and see what people locally pay for their homes. Could you afford to move there? Could they afford to move to where you live?

Spin up Google Earth and trigger some Layers. I like the Geographic Web overlay for Community Notes, Panoramic photos and Wikipedia entries about different areas.

There’s a lot of cool ways to find out more than the natives know about their own neighborhoods. Just weave a few pertinent bits of information into your opening remarks and the audience will take notice and appreciate your research.

What other ways are there of researching a location? Suggestions anyone?

Entrepreneurs must not only be able to invent the next new thing, they must be able to communicate about their innovation to the world. Otherwise, as marketing guru Robert Middleton says, no-one will even know you exist.

Many people underestimate the difficulty of communicating about a new idea or product. In an age of instant gratification and shortened attention spans, we measure our successes and failures on ever-shorter time scales. In large corporations the life-span of a Chief Marketing Office averages less than two years. The temptation is to market nanotechnology in nanotime.

This was not always the case.

Consider the case of Robert Chesebrough. Who? Read what Luke Johnson’s excellent Entrepreneur column in today’s Financial Times has to say:

Take the case of Robert Chesebrough. He was a British-born chemist who patented petroleum jelly, which he discovered in 1859 at the age of 22 in Titusville, Pennsylvania. It took him 10 more years to perfect the compound, and even then no one wanted to buy it. So he became a travelling salesman, giving away free samples of his product, which he named Vaseline. He even used to inflict burns on himself to demonstrate the soothing powers of his miracle gel. Eventually the public took to his invention, and he became a wealthy industrialist, with operations in dozens of countries. His persistence, self-belief and positive thinking paid off.

Do you have what it takes to market your product? Are you ready to feel the burn?

I spent the weekend at the annual ‘Camp NSA’ training program held at the headquarters of the National Speakers Association in Tempe, Arizona. This workshop takes future Presidents of the regional Chapters in the USA, Canada, South Africa and Australia through an intensive consideration of what’s involved in serving as President of the Board of Directors of a Chapter. I’ll be the 2008-09 President of the Northern California Chapter. It’s been fascinating to hear discussions on subjects such as financial planning; fundraising; program development; membership building and retention; conflict resolution and the mechanics of holding successful Board meetings.

One of the skills a good Chapter President cultivates is communicating the value of joining this organization to potential members interested in the business of speaking.

I realized I had a unique opportunity to ask my fellow Chapter Presidents-in-waiting at the event what attracted them to NSA, what’s the value in being a member and why, in fact, someone who is involved in the speaking, training, workshop facilitation or speechwriting business should consider joining the National Speakers Association.

The voices on the podcast are, in order, those of Naomi Rhode, CSP, CPAE who is the Chair of the Camp NSA program and a past National President of NSA; Manny Diotte, NSA Heart of Texas; Jennifer Powers, NSA Oregon; Glenn Ray, NSA Ohio; Ria Botzler, NSA New Mexico; Steve Mertz, NSA Colorado; Jeanette Nyden, NSA Northwest; Alex Ramsey, NSA North Texas; Myra Corrello, NSA New Orleans; Debra Burrell, NSA New York City; Ted Rogers, NSA Phoenix and – last but not least – the irrepressible Vinny Verelli, NSA Georgia.

To hear their comments, click on the podcast icon below.

If you’re inspired to join the National Speakers Association, or just want to find out more, contact your local Chapter or click here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:49 — 1.3MB)

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