July Hiatus: Andy Swan's "Make Some Noise"

While I'm on my July blogging hiatus, I'd thought I'd share with you a few posts from friends whose thought leadership I admire. Here's Andy Swan on "Make Some Noise":

Make some noise

When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the facts are against you, pound the table.

Some ideas don’t work.  The market isn’t ready for them or doesn’t want them.  You can tell when every “sale" is a grind.  The plow is just too heavy.

Admit it:  You’re already dead.

That’s when you get a little crazy.

1. Radical shift.  Not to the product (if you think it’s good)…but to the process.  Break the rules. Complete change of target, price or distribution system.
   
2. Make some noise.  Get loud.  Every piece of momentum gets a touchdown dance.  See who dances with you.
   
3. Lever up.  Put everything into the one thing that works.  Everything. 

There is no excuse for a startup dying quietly.  

That’s pride.  Newsflash— she isn’t gonna dance with the guy slinking off in the corner.

Put it all out there.

Die loudly.

Win.

July Hiatus: Jack Ricchiuto's "Mindful Leadership"

While I'm on my July blogging hiatus, I'd thought I'd share with you a few posts from friends whose thought leadership I admire. Here's Jack Ricchiuto on "Mindful Leadership":

Mindful Leadership: The Key To High Engagement Organizations

It’s interesting that we have two kinds of leaders today. We have those who actively create cultures of engagement and those who actually engender disengagement.

What makes the difference? Is it their pedigrees or salaries, personality types or track records? Is it the obvious or a more subtle chemistry of factors?

We now have compelling evidence that our quality of attention is the key differentiating factor in how we learn, work and live. It is equally true for how people lead.

High engagement leaders are mindful leaders.

Mindful leaders live in the present. They pay attention to the uniqueness and possibilities of each moment. Clear that now is the only time they ever have, they exude a sense of presence that is contagiously engaging, buoyant and realistic.

The practice of presence gives them an agile sense of timing and an inspiring sense of perspective. They are flexible without being distracted and passionate without being myopic. They treat change as inevitable and vital.

Unmindful leaders live in the past and future. Their sense of timing is regularly off. They come across as somewhere between distracted and obsessed. As much inauthentic lip service they deliver otherwise, they treat change as the enemy to their illusion of power.

They stay untrustworthy with unspoken agendas and unrealistic in expectations because they don’t live in the present. Unmindful leaders squander an unproductive amount of time planning and reporting because these excuse them from accountability in the present.

Mindful leaders get measurably more done because they are continuously engaged in the present. Even their sense of planning and reporting has the character of presence.

The world of an unmindful leader is a world of drama and dogma. The world of a mindful leader is a world of discovery and difference.

Mindful leaders treat conversations as opportunity spaces for action. They are always making agreements, generating and testing options, initiating and completing things. Regardless of agenda, duration or location, their meetings have a palpable feel of accomplishment and engagement. They do not allow people to unmindfully postpone the possible in self-fulfilling excuses about the impossible.

Unmindful leaders see vision as the assumptive delegation of action into the future. They think they’re demonstrating leadership by treating conversations as spaces for endless discussing, defending and dictating. Their meetings result in more meetings. Communication around them remains consistently fractured, fictional and frustrating.

Mindful leaders ask great questions that move people from uncertainty to creativity and talk to action. Unmindful leaders see conversations as opportunities to convert others to the narcissism of assumptions.

Mindful leaders engage people’s strengths, passions and connections. Unmindful leaders are consistently uninterested in these because their priority is fixing people’s weaknesses, deficiencies and differences.

Mindful leaders are regularly seen engaging by walking around. Unmindful leaders don’t have to look up from their screens and meeting tables because they remain intrinsically uninterested in the present.

Mindful people have little tolerance for unmindful leaders because their unmindfulness creates a culture of disengagement.

Unmindful people prefer the disengagement of unmindful leaders because it entitles them to a lack of accountability they prefer. Their refusal to share authentic feedback enables their disengaging leaders to conspire in the illusion that their unmindful leadership is responsible for what people achieve in spite of it.

Fortunately, there is an emerging genre of leaders who doubt the value of the unmindful model. They have an intuition that, even though unmindful leadership is normative and incentivised, it doesn’t create an environment that brings out the best in people. They seek to become more mindful in their approach to leadership.

They have a sense that the engagement of mindful leadership has far more benefits and fewer costs than disengagement from unmindful leadership.

The good news is that becoming a more mindful leader is completely possible because everyone already has all requisite skills.

We now have solid evidence that mindful leaders outperform unmindful leaders on every dimension of performance, development and interaction. The key to high engagement organizations is mindful leadership.

Every organization, school and community needs to demand nothing less.

…

Jack Ricchiuto is a writer, engagement artisan and author of “Abundant Possibilities: The Power Of Presence In An Intentional Life” released this month. More: JackRicchiuto.com

Is NYC's Climate Resiliency Plan Too Shortsighted? Geophysicist Klaus Jacob Thinks So

"We have to have a long term view to create meaningful short term solutions," so says Klaus Jacob, research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

Jacob warned of New York's vulnerabilities to severe storm flooding long before Sandy and has emerged as a central figure in discussions about post-Sandy New York City.

In an interview with City Atlas, Klaus Jacob talks about flood risks, managed retreat, and taking a long-term view on resilience design. Read more about Jacob's response to NYC's new Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency report here.

New York City's plan, "A Stronger, More Resilient New York," contains actionable recommendations for rebuilding communities in the wake of Sandy, as well as increasing the resilience of the city's infrastructure. It can be downloaded here. 

Jacob feels that some of the recommendations in the report are dangerously unsustainable because they’re based on short-term assumptions, making climate adaptation even more difficult for future generations. The uncertainty in long-term projections should be actively considered to build a New York that can respond to a range of future scenarios.

"I’m not making any projections what NYC will look like in 50, 100, 200 years," Jacob imparts. "But I don’t want to create solutions now that I know will not survive for those time horizons. That's all I'm saying. Future generations will have to deal with their own problems. But we should not create liabilities now for them." 

Here's the video interview from TheCityAtlas.org:

Tesla's Elon Musk Shows Why Electric Cars Are the Future, Today

Last night in Los Angeles, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, Inc, staged a brilliant show in an attempt to convince skeptics of electric vehicles that charging, or in this case swapping, EV batteries is easier than filling your gas tank.

He did it by simultaneously swapping the battery of a Tesla Model S car on stage, while a colleague filled his Audi at the fastest gas station in LA, which pumps at 10 gallons per minute, according to Musk.

The comparison was shown on screen via remote video feed with a timer running overhead.

Not only did the gas-powered car take longer than one battery swap, but two, as Musk rolled out a second Model S and swapped its battery well before the Audi's tank was full and the transaction completed.

Musk failed to mention that the swap was also less expensive than the gas filling, but he probably didn't want to rub it in.

It was a brilliant piece of showmanship, which is causing some to refer to Musk as the new Steve Jobs.

Here is the video. Watch it all the way through and watch it again, if you still have any doubts.


 

Cleantech In Da House (Brooklyn's House, That Is)

NYU-Poly's MetroTech Campus

“Brooklyn is in the House” or Cleantech is in Brooklyn's House, I should say.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and New York University’s Polytechnic Institute (NYU-Poly) announced yesterday they will open a 10,000-square-foot cleantech incubator in 15 MetroTech in downtown Brooklyn.

There’s room for 20 cleantech startups in the incubator, including those focusing on energy efficiency and technologies that enhance New York City’s resilience in the face of climate change.

Last fall’s Superstorm Sandy helped focus the city’s attention on where the gaps are in its own ability to weather such storms, and heightened awareness about technologies that can mitigate such impacts, as well as reduce the causes.

Downtown Brooklyn is becoming something of a hub for the tech economy across the river from Manhattan with its Silicon Alley. The area even has a new moniker: “Brooklyn Tech Triangle.”

"Harnessing NYC's leadership in data and information technology, local entrepreneurs are developing new business models and technologies to help solve global urban problems, from energy efficiency to climate adaptation," David Gilford, assistant director of NYCEDC, told me via email.

NYU-Poly and NYCEDC already operate a cleantech incubator, New York City Accelerator for a Clean and Resilient Economy (NYC ACRE), which I’ve written about before on The Green Skeptic.

The new space will have room for more cleantech startups, including those in manufacturing, as well as cleanweb.

"We're really excited about this next phase of our growth, and the opportunity to work with great partners like NYCEDC, NYSERDA, Con Edison, National Grid and others," said NYU-Poly's innovation and entrepreneurship director Micah Kotch. "There are massive challenges to be solved around climate and energy, and we want to empower entrepreneurs to be part of the solution.

The doors of the NYC Clean Technology Entrepreneur Center will open in the fall of 2013.

With Artisan Exchange, Collaborative Economy Meets Specialty Foods Movement

Co-working works well for techies, freelancers, and artists -- why not for small food businesses?

That's what Frank Baldassarre and Artisan Exchange are trying to answer out in their West Chester, PA, manufacturing and distribution center.

Frank, Green Skeptic readers will recall, was the idea man behind e3bank, which wanted to be the first triple bottom line bank in the country.

When e3bank ran straight into the collapsing economy, a market weary of banking, and socially responsible investors without any capital, Frank had to pivot.

Frank Baldassarre's a survivor. As a banker, he's lived through the S&L crisis, the dot-com bubble, and the latest market downturn.

"I've seen these cycles before," he told me last Friday during a tour of his new venture. "And I really believe we're starting to see signs of real recovery."

Frank's wife and brother-in-law run Golden Valley Farms Coffee Roasters, which owned a 27,000-square-foot building where it housed its coffee service products and supplies. (Golden Valley has offices and roasting facilities at one end of the building.)

"Basically, the bulk of our facility was full of paper cups, lids, straws, stirrers, and stuff like that," Frank said. "You have to sell a lot of paper cups that have little or no margin to make enough to cover overhead."

Increasingly, the company focused on its core competency, Frank offered, "importing, roasting and distributing world class Fair Trade, organic coffee and shade-grown coffees."

At first, Frank tried to lease or sell the extra warehouse space, but there wasn't much call for light manufacturing in the region and there were no buyers for such a large space.

Frank and his family like to eat locally, healthy, and well; a combination that had them running around to specialty shop in the region.

Simultaneously, Frank began to wonder how all these food manufacturers with specialty, small batch products were able to survive. Many were working out of their homes, isolated and alone, and didn't have access to the commercial facilities that would make their business scalable.

With the expansion of the slow, local, and organic specialty food market, Frank hit upon an idea. He had an empty space; the market had a need. Why not combine the two?

Thus Artisan Exchange was born.

Dividing the space into 120-square-foot "blocks," Artisan Exchange rents the spaces to small-scale, individual food manufacturers -- from heirloom cakes to hot sauces, from cheese spreads to bake-at-home pizza and gelati -- providing the entrepreneurs access to a centralized, commercial-grade sanitation facility, shared retail space in the form of a year-round weekly market, and the kind of collaborative,"you're not alone" atmosphere that co-working spaces engender.

In addition, Artisan Exchange collectively markets the tenants under their own banner, which helps attract customers to the weekly marketplace at the site and makes advertising more affordable for the individual businesses. Artisan Exchange is exploring cooperative buying for supplies and materials the entrepreneurs need to create their products.

A year ago, Artisan Exchange opened its doors to its first member-tenants. Now, with one of the original tenants, a pasta maker, having outgrown its walls, the space is almost fully subscribed. There are plans for a brewpub, as well as a full commercial kitchen, and that's only the beginning.

Frank Baldassarre solved Golden Valley's real estate problem with an entreprenuerial solution that provides an affordable environment for entrepreneurs committed to producing hand-crafted, sustainable foods.

Now, that's a delicious idea.

For more of the flavor of Artisan Exchange, check out this video from WCTV: