Culture
View more presentations from Reed Hastings.
a digital product firm
Archive for September, 2009
The Power of A New Idea
Saturday, September 19th, 2009
A short film prepared by Jelly Helm for Oregon Humanities.
On Cities, Hives and Human Clusters
Friday, September 18th, 2009
The Tower of Babel
Cities live and breathe. Cities are no more artificial [technological] than the hives of bees. As we go about our daily lives [mostly unconsciously,] we psycho-drift from block to block through neighborhoods that we know well, in amongst communities that have been drawn together by like-minded people. Think East Village in Manhattan, Venice Beach in Los Angeles, Camden Town in London, Pigalle in Paris – and here in Portland, the Pearl District.
Where we tend to live and work is often amongst communities of like-minded people, unless, as in the USA, one lives in a far-flung exurb and commutes for hours to work. Over centuries we have moved as a species from the rural countryside into large urban centres. As we have done so the ‘idea’ of the city sprang up. Throughout different periods in history, planners and architects have had differing ideas about how to cultivate urban living arrangements. There has been some success and much failure.
As James Kunstler writes in his book, The City in Mind, – “[the] nation’s massive suburban build-out was an orgy of misspent energy and material resources that squandered our national wealth and left us with an infrastructure of daily life that, left as is, has poor prospects in the new century.” Kunstler points out that as global warming, oil depletion and other epochal disorders are upon us, we must reconsider what is a ‘city.’
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Tammy Erikson on The Next Generation of Business Leaders – What's next Gen X?
Friday, September 18th, 2009
Image via http://www.masternewmedia.org
Tammy Erikson, the award winning author, will have her latest book released in December. It is titled ‘What’s Next, Gen X? Keeping Up, Moving Ahead, and Getting the Career You Want‘ and is the result of her studies and interviews with people born roughly during the years between the 1960′s and the 70′s.
She has an article on the Harvard Business Publishing web site where she gives a top level view of her work in this arena. She makes a compelling case for how the next generation of business leaders will be unlike any who have gone before. As she points out in the article – “Perhaps the biggest change from the past: leaders will have to listen and respond to diverse points of view. There will be no dominant voice.” I sense that her book will be a fascinating read. Below are some of the important elements that she says will have shaped the Gen Xers as future business leaders:
“In this context, I’m convinced that Gen X’ers will be the leaders we need. The experiences that shaped those of you who were teens in the late ’70s and ’80s, as I’ve outlined in past posts, translate into valuable contemporary traits and perspectives.
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Conversations with Lions
Monday, September 7th, 2009
“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement from Philosophical Investigations is a sort of heartbreaking realization for anyone who has ever bargained with their pets, as I have, offering all sorts of rewards if only they would admit that they can speak. At it’s core though, this idea also rings fundamentally true to me, separating the concept of hearing from understanding and asking if we can ever really understand something without the empathy that comes from similarity.
A few years ago I was listening to Andrew Keller give a presentation about CPB and at one point he asked the audience, maybe rhetorically,
“Why didn’t Kodak’s agency come up with Flickr? How much more relevant might Kodak have been in digital photography if they had come up with Flickr?”
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