Bertrand Doux › Comments

"Jazz is impromptu, intimate, and improvising. Jazz musicians can create great things out of disparate inputs because of their raw individual talent and adaptive skills. Like jazz, strategy at the formation and early growth stages happens in real time, and the leader plays along with the band. It's about sensing a "vibe" and evolving as necessary. It is critical to have a big vision and directional sense of what the strategy and business model might be, rather than a perfectly premeditated plan. The "beat" of early stage companies is continuous execution with frequent adjustments. The one thing certain of early stage business plans is that they'll look quite different within a year or even within months. Creativity and intuition go a long way during the start-up stage." - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

This guy flew around the globe in a balloon and now wants to do so in a solar-powered aeroplane. Inspiring. - Bertrand Doux

"Billboards have gone up in the past few days in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with the familiar red, white and blue Pepsi logo, but under it is the word "Pecsi." It's a classic case of if you can't beat 'em, join 'em: Pepsi has decided that because people in Buenos Aires have been ordering "Pecsi" at refreshment stands for decades, there's no real point in fighting them. On some billboards, under the word "Pecsi," are Spanish words that mean "freedom of expression" or "freedom of pronunciation." - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

HP, IBM and Yahoo were among the recipients of grants from the Department of Energy for projects aimed at making data centers more energy efficient through innovative components, better power supplies and improved cooling tchnologies. The $47 million in federal stimulus money will be matched by $70 million in private... - Bertrand Doux

HP, IBM and Yahoo were among the recipients of grants from the Department of Energy for projects aimed at making data centers more energy efficient through innovative components, better power supplies and improved cooling tchnologies. The $47 million in federal stimulus money will be matched by $70 million in private... - Bertrand Doux

"Avatar, like Titanic, is one of those movies you’ll want to see over and over. - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

Nearly impossible to single one out. - Jack&Cleo

Some of my favourites... Janine Benyus - 12 sustainable design ideas from nature: http://www.ted.com/talks... Gever Tulley - 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do http://www.ted.com/talks... Paul Stamets - 6 ways mushrooms can save the world:... more... - Ken Morley

Downloadable PDF - Bertrand Doux

"The best thing that could happen to Microsoft would be successes by Apple (AAPL) or Google (GOOG) that cause a significant loss of sales and market share. The shock would create a sense of urgency and cause the leaders to clean house. The worst thing that could happen is a success with Windows 7, which would reinforce management’s focus on the desktop. Then, as customers move away from the desktop to smartphones and other devices, market share will decline. But if share declines slowly, maybe a point or two a year, the drop will not be enough to overcome the pride that comes with high margins and high profits. Over time, the desktop mafia will experience a shift from pride to hubris. Welcome to the General Motors scenario." - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

"None of us, whether we are vegan or omnivore, can entirely avoid foods that play a role in global warming. Singling out meat is misleading and unhelpful, especially since few people are likely to entirely abandon animal-based foods. Still, there are numerous reasonable ways to reduce our individual contributions to climate change through our food choices. Because it takes more resources to produce meat and dairy than, say, fresh locally grown carrots, it’s sensible to cut back on consumption of animal-based foods. More important, all eaters can lower their global warming contribution by following these simple rules: avoid processed foods and those from industrialized farms; reduce food waste; and buy local and in season. - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

“Good news is that I truly out did myself this year with my Christmas decorations. The bad news is that I had to take him down after two days. I had more people come screaming up to my house than ever. Great stories. But two things made me take it down. First, the cops advised me that it would cause traffic accidents as they almost wrecked when they drove by. Second, a 55 year old lady grabbed the 75 pound ladder almost killed herself putting it against my house and didn’t realize that it was fake until she climbed to the top (she was not happy). By the way, she was one of the many people who attempted to do that. My yard couldn’t take it either. I have more than a few tire tracks where people literally drove up my yard.” - April Buchheit from Bookmarklet

Not a bad idea. - Ashish

"For years after Parmalat collapse, chairman and founder Tanzi was rumored to have had a "hidden treasure" somewhere. On Nov. 29, a state TV show alleged that Tanzi had hidden a collection of artwork to try to shelter himself from the effects of looming collapse of Parmalat. [...] Among the masterpieces was a pencil on paper portrait of a ballerina by Degas, two Van Goghs, including a depiction of a trunk of a willow tree and a still life, a watercolor by Cezanne and a pencil-work by Modigliani. - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

Be aware of your leadership shadow. One reason to be aware of where you are on the Mood Elevator is that moods are contagious. The central finding of my doctoral dissertation on organizational culture published over 30 years ago was that an organization's culture and climate is most greatly influenced by the shadow of their leaders. The biggest shadow we bring to work each day is our state of mind or mood. It is also the biggest one we carry home at night. That should be food for thought for all of us. - Bertrand Doux

Excellent article - we all need these kinds of reminders. - Steve Burris from email

Be aware of your leadership shadow. One reason to be aware of where you are on the Mood Elevator is that moods are contagious. The central finding of my doctoral dissertation on organizational culture published over 30 years ago was that an organization's culture and climate is most greatly influenced by the shadow of their leaders. The biggest shadow we bring to work each day is our state of mind or mood. It is also the biggest one we carry home at night. That should be food for thought for all of us. - Bertrand Doux

No I do not have a "Retweets" page on my Twitter.com home page - Kevin Tunis

Elizabeth: I disagree. If Twitter had comments it would be like Facebook or FriendFeed. It would also get very noisy very quickly and one thing I like about Twitter is that I control everything that appears in my streams. Adding comments would change that radically. - Robert Scoble

Now testing Pixelpipe from my Yahoo mail /brettb So is pixelpipe = ping.fm + possibility to send by mail? - Bertrand Doux

"It used to irk Melissa Calapini when her 3-year-old daughter, Haley, hung around her father while he fixed his cars. Ms. Calapini thought there were more enriching things the little girl could be doing with her time. But since the couple attended a parenting course Ms. Calapini has had a change of heart. Now she encourages the father-daughter car talk. “Daddy’s bonding time with his girls is working on cars,” said Ms. Calapini, of Olivehurst, Calif. “He has his own way of communicating with them, and that’s O.K.” As much as mothers want their partners to be involved with their children, experts say they often unintentionally discourage men from doing so." - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

"Fathers tend to do things differently, Dr. Kyle Pruett said, but not in ways that are worse for the children. Fathers do not mother, they father. Dads tend to discipline differently, use humor more and use play differently. Fathers want to show kids what’s going on outside their mother’s arms, to get their kids ready for the outside world.” To that end, he said, they tend to encourage risk-taking and problem-solving. - Bertrand Doux

"Analysts estimate that virtual goods could bring in a billion dollars in the United States and around $5 billion worldwide this year — all for things that, aside from perhaps a few hours of work by an artist and a programmer, cost nothing to produce. - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

Hard to believe such a big business. How to explain the consumers' motivations? - Bertrand Doux

"A "distributed" approach, with both the search index and the additional data spread out over a larger number of smaller data centers. With this approach, smaller data centers would contain locally relevant information and a small proportion of globally replicated data. Many search queries common to a particular area could be answered using the content stored in a local data center, while other queries would be passed on to different data centers. - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

"The distributed approach remains a long-term aim, Baeza-Yates admits. "But for the Internet," he adds, "long-term is only about five years." - Bertrand Doux

Analysis of the future of mobile OS market - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

"Business professor David Logan talks about the five kinds of tribes that humans naturally form. By understanding our shared tribal tendencies, we can help lead each other to become better individuals. - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

"Yahoo!'s new homepage, officially launched on Sept. 28 but in a beta release for the past three months, is already yielding information about users that will ultimately change the way people charge for advertising on the Web, company officials say. With enough metrics, and proven predictors of behavior, he says, Yahoo! hopes to charge for ads not just based on "primitive" measures like how often someone clicks on them, but on areas like "hover time" on the page, or the number of "friends" the user has in his social network, or someone's propensity to recommend content to others. The science of it is a year away, and then we have to talk to tens of thousands of advertisers, convince our colleagues in the industry to do this," says Raghavan. Still, he is confident it will happen. - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

The inPulse watch is not being made by/for BlackBerry (it won't feature a BlackBerry logo), but is being made for use with BlackBerry Smartphones. - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

"The Vancouver Olympics made a smart choice in deciding to use precious metals from old electronics. By salvaging medal materials from old products, the Olympic committee is saving perfectly good gold, silver, and bronze from ending up in landfills. - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

The word on the table that morning was "cloud computing." To translate the English term for computing resources that can be accessed on demand on the Internet, a group of French experts had spent 18 months coming up with "informatique en nuage," which literally means "computing in cloud." - Bertrand Doux

The painful process of translating "cloud computing" to French :-) - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

"We all agree that growth is an imperative. But uncontrolled growth without continual pruning and streamlining is a potential recipe for disaster. So take a look at your own company. Are you in danger of getting "too big to fail" — or at least too big to succeed? - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

"Yahoo’s open vision is really starting to take shape following years of talk and behind the scenes infrastructure fixes. Yahoo’s app effort is a solid start and could turn into something big. - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

"Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that's what you like to do. - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet

I'd talk exactly like her, if I was her. And I'd add: "you have to relax: give you 6 months of holidays around the world!" /sarcasm - Claudio Cicali

"knowing how to find the right thing to work on" - the actual answer to this question is very computationally expensive. Rather than "the right thing to work on", it might be more feasible to find "a right thing to work on", but even then proving that what you found is right might be still very costly. Then you would and up with "something that seems to be a right thing to work on". - Meryn Stol

"On October 19, Amazon begins shipping a new version of the Kindle that can be used to purchase and download books in over 100 countries - Bertrand Doux from Bookmarklet