on everything

By now, you’ve probably heard about Nick Hanauer’s Ted Talk and the controversy it created. If not let me summarize. The talk was on income inequality and it posited that middle class and not the rich were the real job creators. The talk seems to be well received by the audience and some even gave a standing ovation to the speaker.

The controversy started when Ted Talks curator Chris Anderson decided not to post it on the Ted website and share it with the rest of the world. His explanation was that the talk was too “political”.

Here’s Chris’s explanation.

I watched the video, unaware of the controversy. While it was clear that politically, Nick’s arguments were left-of-the-dial, he made a good case. His basic premise was:

I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a “circle of life” like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.”

Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalist’s course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn’t just inaccurate, it’s disingenuous.

Anyone with a basic knowledge of econ will tell you that both are valid premises. While not new, similar arguments have been made by other academics and policy makers such as Krugman & Robert Reich, but coming from a VC/businessman and how Nick Hanauer structured these arguments, made more sense to me.

Watch the video for yourself and decide.

ibmsocialbiz:

Despite their promise and potential, enterprise social networks (ESNs) have only received moderate traction. The problem is that most deployments are treated as technology deployments with a focus on adoption and usage. A different way to think about this is that enterprise social networks represent a new way to communicate and form relationships — and because of that, can bridge gaps.

Encourage sharing. Remember how revolutionary email was? It fundamentally changed the way we communicated by reducing the cost/effort and collapsing the time frame and scaling it to include multiple recipients. Social represents a fundamental change, simply because, at its essence, it encourages sharing. 

Capture knowledge. Capturing the collective knowledge of an organization is a daunting task because it includes a wide range of facts, information, and skills gained through experience. Yet few people proactively sit down each day to document and capture their knowledge. ESNs provide an opportunity to do just that, by capturing glimpses of knowledge through profiles, activity streams, and interactions.

Enable action. Having an ESN in place means that operations and processes can begin to change as well. This happens when the day-to-day process changes because the ESN enables new relationships and behaviors that address a gap that prevented actions from being taken.

Empower employees. The last way ESNs drive value is that they empower and embolden people to speak up and join together, as well as gives them opportunities to contribute their skills and ideas.

(Via Altimeter Group)

It can’t get better than this. Dennis Hopper reads Rudyard Kipling’s poem “if” on Johnny Cash’s TV show. Here’s the poem in it’s entirety:

“If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son!

” —Rudyard Kipling, “if”.

(Source: nedhepburn)

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

—George Bernard Shaw