Dylan Hunter

After seeing this post from Tim O’Reilly, decided to order the two books suggested for myself. Currently reading Juicing the Orange, and one of the things they point to in the book is this mental beatdown of 127 questions that they use to diagnose a client’s situation to figure out what to do for creative campaigns with them.

Obviously won’t be able to, and don’t need to answer / use all in the normal course, (we all have actual progress to make, Man! ) and definitely seems to be oriented toward much more mature companies, but still looks to be a good source for thinking about the kinds of things that are, or will be, important when launching / relaunching your own company, product, etc.

Now this definitely is exciting - helping impoverished kids, and thus, impoverished nations, to help themselves in ways we take for granted with our own kids everyday. See? All truly great things start out with one simple thought that everyone else thinks is insane / stupid / foolish. “A $100 laptop?” Come on. “Man landing on the Moon.” A fool’s errand. “Ensuring that every car can travel @ 60 mph at any time of day.” Utter madness. Hey, DOT - hear that last one?!

“….[One Laptop per Child] Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said, ‘Any previous doubt that a very-low-cost laptop could be made for education in the developing world has just gone away.’ Quanta has agreed to devote significant engineering resources from the Quanta Research Institute (QRI) in Q1 and Q2, 2006, with a target of bringing the product to market in Q4….”

More

Just finished Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma yesterday. An excellent book, well recommended, and, more importantly, with some very significant insights to go into the top level of the long-term knowledge base, (work just commencing, as mentioned). For now, especially given the backlog, (i.e. just finished Seth Godin’s Free Prize Inside! about a week and a half ago - need to get some good insights from that up, as well) will focus more on content, and will work on “re-purposing” a nice web design hopefully in the near future. And no, I didn’t whip through Christensen’s book in a week and a half, (it’s much too dense a work for that if one truly tries to examine one’s own business practices in light of what he’s suggesting) I often will start a book, read it for a bit, and if it starts getting a bit slow, etc., and/or if a pressing need for me to enhance / refresh some additional expertise comes up, will put the first book down for a bit, start another and come back (to some of them) later.