• When we think of the great innovations, our minds typically jump to the inventor hero who redefined or created new industries with his revolutionary idea. However, history shows that most of these were the result of combining existing inventions and ideas in interesting ways, with many people involved in the process.
• Innovation is the result of synthesizing, or bridging, ideas from different domains. E.g., Henry Ford created the assembly line after observing sewing machines, meatpacking, and Campbell soup factories.
• Increase the potential for innovation by expanding the network that links people, ideas, and objects in ways that form effective and lasting communities and technologies.
• “Discovery is seeing what everyone else has seen but thinking what nobody else has thought” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, who discovered Vitamin C
• Valuable and novel information comes from weak ties; strong ties pass information quickly but it’s usually low value because the constant interactions lead to the same knowledge base (get out of the echo chamber).
• “A researcher builds the future 10 years from now; a technology broker [ or innovator] redistributes the future that is already here.”
• On collective effort: “Nobody is really sure who is the inventor because the inventions emerge in the interactions of the group.”

While reading the book, I saw many of these ideas reflected in coworking spaces like The Creative Space, and events like BIL. We need to ensure these spaces we are constructing connect new people working on different problems in different industries to keep ideas flowing between networks. Cody and I have become more involved in the Bio/Life Sciences arena recently, and have found ways to apply our existing knowledge in new and interesting ways.

Some other great books I’ve read recently:

• Enough – This book can best be summed up by the anecdote from whence it gets its title: “At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, ‘Yes, but I have something he will never have… enough.’ ” It talks about how businesses need to refocus to serve customers, create value and focus on the long term, not short-term speculation. It’s directed towards the finance industry (which needs the most refocusing), but the novel is applicable to all businesses. (This was also the first book I read on my iPhone with the Kindle application. Worked great!)
• Scratch Beginnings – A real-life story of the American Dream. The author shows up to a town with $25, finds the local homeless shelter, and works his way up to a furnished apartment. Beyond the motivational story, it’s a great example of how your attitude and work ethic do more to shape your future than what you start with.
• Clueless in Academe – Describes how our current educational system makes the scholarly, learned life seem more unreachable by adding unnecessary barriers of language and structure. We leave it up to the students to ‘crack the code’ in higher education, and only a few do (hint: it’s all based on arguments; understanding how to properly take apart an assertion and create an argument will help you excel in any graduate or PhD program).
• Still Life with Woodpecker – Beautiful mental floss. Tom Robbins’ creative use of the English language will entertain you almost as much as the story itself.
• The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming – I haven’t finished this yet, but the short stories I have read have been great. The character development and internal dialogue remind me a bit of David Foster Wallace, without his length and ridiculously detailed tangents (see Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace if you haven’t read any of his novels).

What’s up next in my reading list? My current “to-read” pile includes a bunch of old Vonnegut’s (Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, Bagombo Snuff Box, and more (I’m trying to read all of his works)), some business books (Animal Spirits, The Age of Unreason…), and some fun ones (The Ethical Slut and Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science).

I read a great post about how in this economy, we’re all entrepreneurs. Our educational system is built to print out mass quantities of specific “student templates,” like Accounting major, Finance major… and restock the large institutions.  While this works in a growing economy, when the Big 4 just hire all the Accounting majors, it doesn’t prepare them for a competitive job market. For the most part, graduating students have been commoditized. How do they compete with all the other Accounting majors when they are exactly the same in all relevant respects?

What our educational process needs is a dose of entrepreneurship. It needs to teach students to sell themselves, find a unique niche in the organization to serve (NOT a mass-produced, interchangeable cog), and establish a personal brand (or unique identity if you think the phrase “personal brand” belongs to those with scents). But most of all, students need to pursue something in which they’re interested. Too many have gone the Accounting/Finance track because it’s well defined  and makes good money (see Brittany’s post).

Those who followed the easy path straight into a career they didn’t really enjoy will most likely be the first to get cut. They aren’t passionate about their work, and don’t provide more value than they cost to the firm in the downturn.

Those who follow what they love make a job for themselves, either by working for themselves (startup, freelancing or consulting) or by convincing others to create a job at a company for them. When a company creates a job for you, you get to do exactly what you’re passionate about (by design), and there’s no competition for that position – who is more qualified at being you than you?

While the financial organizations might be “too big to fail,” the individuals at those organizations aren’t. When you work for someone else, there’s not much you can do to prevent yourself from getting fired – it’s mostly out of your hands.

Howard Lindzon came up with the term “too small to fail.” When you’re self-employed, you can’t fire yourself. If you need more money, you work harder or find different things to work on.

This is the entrepreneurial spirit, and a lot more people are going to need to find it if they want to succeed in this environment.

While people have searched high and low for ways to improve cognitive performance, from doping themselves with Red Bull to redesigning the layout of offices, it appears that few of these treatments are as effective as simply taking a walk in a natural place.

This definitely rings true to me. My personal escape is gardening and cooking. There’s something about interacting with nature, watching your fruits and vegetables grow and then eating them, that just excites me.

My garden isn’t too big, but it does take up over half of my (very) small backyard. It’s small enough to enjoy but not worry about. I’ll probably have to start over when I get back from London next week – snow, cold weather, and no one watching it for a month will have hurt most of the garden. But now I’ll have something to work on for my last semester of college.

How do you relax and recharge?

(found article via Ben Casnocha)

It had a great premise: there was a “timequake” and we had to relive the past 10 years. Everything you did last time, you had to do this time (no free will). You know exactly what’s going to happen but have to say and do it all over.

People got used to being on autopilot, and disaster struck when the timequake ended and free will returned. People just sat in their cars as they crashed into walls, not knowing they were in control. Everyone had to be “woken up” from their daze and start living.

I’m always amazed at how many people are living their lives as a timequake. They have the exact same weekly schedule, never seeking randomness or new experiences. If a timequake hit, they wouldn’t know because they are already on autopilot.

2008 was a great year for me because of randomness. My friend Todd Huffman inspired me to be more open to randomness, and so much good has come from it. When I’m traveling, I post to twitter “I’m in [some city], anyone want to meet up?” – and I’ve met so many interesting people this way. I’ve also increased my traveling; any time I’m not in school (and sometimes when I should be) I’m usually flying or driving somewhere.

I encourage everyone to give randomness a try. If you’re invited to some event or gathering, don’t find a reason not to go; find a way to fit it in your schedule. You never know what great things will happen.

(By the way, the above photo was from a Robot fight put on by Cody Marx Bailey to launch Youth Inspired Robots. These are the kind of random events I’m always looking for.)

Great post. This should be required reading for all graduates, not just marketing majors.

I think an important but overlooked topic in college is managing your personal brand. In this digital age, we’re all building our own brands through facebook, flickr, twitter, and personal blogs.

In our junior or senior year, we’re all told to clean up our online personas to make sure you’re hire-able. For some this means deleting drunken photos, but for many they simply remove all digital references to themselves by deleting their facebook profile.

In our increasingly digital economy, a lack of an online persona is comparable to a drunken photo – a reason for not hiring someone. In a time when <a href=”http://englishcut.com/”>English tailors</a> have a blog, if you don’t show your digital competence by maintaining your personal brand online you’re much less valuable to a business than someone who does.

This doesn’t just apply to the tech and marketing sector. Many businesses are using their new hires to help them understand social media – if you have net natives inhouse, why hire a social media consultant?

Next time you’re up at A&M, you should give a talk on this subject.

In the first seminar of the Business Ethics series, the professor introduced us to his definitions of Morality and Ethics, which would form the basis of his discussions. While I disagree with the definitions, for the sake of argument I will accept them to see where it leads. First, the definitions:

Morality – one’s internal belief structure of what is good and true
Ethics – the core values defined by a community of what is good and true

You can probably see the problem already. What is ethical is whatever the community (either as a whole or just a majority) believes is right. The guys at Enron were ethical because they were doing exactly what their community (Enron) believed was right. To determine if they were moral, one must look to see if there was an internal conflict between what he did because of Ethics, and what he wanted to do because of his Morals.

You can counter this with the notion that the Enron community didn’t align with the larger community (our society), and that our society is where Ethics are truly derived. But this is wrong – by deriving Ethics from a community and not from universal truths, you recognize that there are multiple communities with differing ethics. Because Ethics are derived from that community, members from one community can’t say the Ethics of another community are wrong.

This leads us to one of the biggest problems in modern philosophy today – the concept of relativism. I won’t go deep into the philosophy behind it, but basically if you follow this line of thinking to its end, you reach a point where you find a community that represents any possible combination of Ethics. I can murder people as long as I associate with a community that believes murder is right.

The existence of a practice does not entail its being ethical. We must use our intuition to determine if it is truly right.

Is whistleblowing right or wrong? According to this definition of Ethics, it is always wrong because it always is in disagreement with the core values of a business (whether those be lieing, cheating, stealing…). In my mind, this fails the Intuition Test.

Which leads me to my argument: We shouldn’t be taught “Business Ethics” if Ethics is defined as principles which the business as a whole says is right. We should be taught “Business Morality” in order to question the norms in a business to ensure they truly are right.

Knowing that I’ve always wanted to be at Oxford, my Mom had saved an ad in a magazine about The Oxford Experience. Of course I didn’t see the advert until the final day for applications, so within an hour of reading about it I sent in my application.

The Oxford Experience is a summer program where you study one course for one week at Christ Church in a class of 6-12 students. The ages of the students range from 20 to 80+, with a majority of the students being older and already retired. You don’t receive university credit for the course (it’s only a week long), which is why there aren’t too many younger students.

I took Moral Philosophy – one of my favorite subjects. People often ask my why I prefer philosophy over business or computer science. Entrepreneurs seek to change the world, and philosophers seek to understand it. I find entrepreneurship and philosophy quite similar. I also love philosophy because no matter how many times you take it, you learn something new. Most the learning comes from the great discussions you have, which is why it’s important to study it with a great group of people. Here’s a photo of my class:

I stayed on campus in the student housing, which is much better than the on-campus housing here at Texas A&M. I had a bedroom and a reading room all to myself, and some people even had pianos in their reading room. Every meal is eaten in the Great Hall – the same dining hall where Harry Potter was filmed.

The typical day started with breakfast in the Great Hall, followed by class from 9a-12:45p (with a tea break in the middle), lunch in the Great Hall, then the afternoon free, and dinner in the Great Hall.

Every dinner was a 3 or 4 course meal, and everything tasted amazing. I spent the afternoons doing tours of the campus, exploring the many gardens, and reading.

I encourage anyone interested to spend the summer at Oxford. It’s only £980/week, which is quite reasonable considering what you get. Here’s the Oxford Experience Flyer if you’re interested.

While I always wanted to go to Oxford, I feared it might not live up to my high hopes of a true university environment (like Texas A&M). I took this week-long course to see if I’d be comfortable getting a graduate degree here, and I found it even better than I hoped.

Right now my plan is to graduate from Texas A&M this year, then spend a few years doing consulting or doing a startup (possibly in Boulder), and then go back to Oxford for a Masters in Philosophy.

As he tried to show them the problem with this, he gave the following story:

Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren’t many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek – even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, “What were Socrates’ ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?” – and the student can’t answer. Then he asks the student, “What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?” the student lights up and tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.

But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!

What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then the sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand.

I said, “That’s how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids ‘science’ here in Brazil.”

Does this sound familiar? This is why I’m so disillusioned by our educational system. No one is here to learn, only to get good grades so they can get a good job. How do they get good grades? By memorizing.

Some of you might know that I consider studying a form of cheating. If you’re being tested over your knowledge of a subject, studying is the means by which you fake that knowledge. That isn’t to say I don’t study – I don’t study much, but I do skim my notes before a test. Our educational system has devolved from testing your knowledge to testing your memorization skills. Studying isn’t cheating because you’re not being tested for knowledge.

I try not to let school get in the way of my education, and do a good deal of learning outside of class through things like the BIL Conference. BIL was so exciting because it was a gathering of really smart people who wanted to learn. While the lectures were great, I most valued the hallway conversations. It’s so refreshing to spend time with people who have a passion for learning.

I often feel like I’m missing out on the real college experience, and that Texas A&M University isn’t a “real” college. I want to hang out around Oxford, Stanford, Princeton, and MIT and have those interesting and random conversations with intellectuals, which I was always told college was like. I want to take classes that are interesting and actually learn something, without worrying how the class will affect my GPA. I want to spend my four undergraduate years in an environment similar to the one we created for two days at BIL.

Now that I’m almost done with school, I feel like Texas A&M cheated me of an education. Everything I’ve done and learned these past few years have been despite this institution, not because of it. I want to take a few years getting a “real” education – go to a great university and sit in on classes that interest me. I don’t care about grades or a degree, I just want the knowledge.

When you work for a grade, you’re learning for someone else. Whether you have to get that 3.5 GPA to get a job with one of the Big Four, or you need a 4.0 to get into some graduate program.

True learning is internal. I learn because I want to learn. Selfish, I know.

I have been repeatedly disappointed by my formal education, and I now turn to my informal education to teach me.