John's Music Blog

I recently attended the TEDxBoston conference. If you’ve never been, I encourage you to go.  This year’s conference was overflowing with both people and ideas.  For me, it’s a vacation from the day-to-day, an opportunity to find new inspiration, and a place to cross-pollinate ideas.  I never go to find more business, but rather to get better at what I do.

One presentation that I found particularly valuable was by Michelle Borkin, who explained her interdisciplinary approach to data visualization.  She brought together professionals from astronomy, who were working on how to get better 3-dimensional  pictures of objects in outer space, with radiologists, who were trying to get better 3-dimensional pictures of organs in the human body.  The results were both beautiful and amazing.

It would be easy to say “Outer space is very different from the human body, so it has no relevance to what I’m doing,” but she took the opposite approach and asked, “What are they doing that is similar to what I’m trying to do, and what can I apply from what they have already learned?” With all of the discussion around data generated on the internet, I kept wondering, during her presentation, what data visualization techniques can be taken from astronomy and radiology and applied to understanding consumers and influence.

My goal when I started this blog almost a year ago was to:

1. Create a resource for entrepreneurs and inventors
2. Have a conversation with those entrepreneurs (or entrepreneur wannabes) on strategies, tactics, and best practices.  

On the second goal, I feel like I’ve fallen short.  There’s not enough dialogue.  (more…)

Howard Perlstein, founder of HOW, a  management consulting services company based in Brookline, Massachusetts, just became my 1000th connection on LinkedIn.  We were introduced by a mutual friend and met for coffee. He talked about his business, and I talked about mine.  We also talked about ways that we might be able to help each other.   I have no idea, yet, whether I or he will reap any financial reward, but, as I said to Howard, if you don’t take the occasional random walk, you’ll wear out your path.

Someone asked me recently, if I actually know all of the people in my LinkedIn network.  The answer is “yes.”  And I wish that I had started using LinkedIn sooner, because I’m missing the other 5000 people I’ve met during the past 10 years. OK, 5000 is a guess, but I’m not far off.   And somewhere in those 5000 is someone I can help. Sometimes for fun and sometimes for profit.  And while I can’t help everyone, as a good friend, Barba Hickman, founder of Applied Clarity, said to me, “If I start off each day thinking about how I can help someone, the business pretty much takes care of itself.”

I’ve always been one to appreciate the support of an IT department.  Notice, I didn’t say “a good IT department.”  I mean any IT department.  No matter how underfunded the department, I can pretty much guarantee that an IT department will do a better job of satisfying my information-access, communication and collaboration needs than I can do on my own.   They build, install, and support a variety of email, customer relationship management, accounting, and collaboration tools that make sure that I can do my job better.  Since striking out on my own, however, I am, from an applications perspective, pretty much on my own.

(more…)