View from my hotel room in Frisco, TX (outside of Dallas) The other thing I'll mention about Texas, and something I say every time I am in Texas, is the people here are some of the nicest you'll ever meet. I've lived on the East Coast, West Coast, have relatives in the Mid West, and can honestly say Texas in my opinion has the nicest people of all places I visit or have lived. You...
Culture Comes Before Technology Evan Rosen wrote a nice article in Business Week titled "Creating Collaboration Takes More Than Technology." Worse yet, the tools may have created no real value, and the decision-makers who had pinned such high hopes on these tools are surprised. Are the tools the problem? More likely, the problem is the organization. When tools fail to create value, it's usually because decision-makers adopt tools before the company's culture and processes are...
The Power of Company Culture This is a great article on how the founder/CEO of Zappos.com learned how important it is for companies to focus on culture and choosing the right employees for their company. If you have time, the very first question and answer is my favorite, so be sure and read that one if you can. Tony Hsieh is the chief executive of Zappos.com, and this interview was conducted by Adam Bryant. Below...
Book Review: The Unemployed Millionaire Escape the Rat Race, Fire Your Boss, and Live Life on YOUR Terms I purchased this book from Amazon.com last week, and it sat on my coffee table until today. I can't remember the last time I've picked up a book and read it all within a day, but that is what I did with The Unemployed Millionaire by Matt Morris (I started it at a coffee shop this morning...
A powerful command-line tool for all your multimedia conversion needs Recently, I needed to create a .FLV file in Ubuntu from a .MOV for the Jungle Jim's video. During this process, I discovered FFmpeg—an incredibly versatile command-line tool that makes converting between media formats remarkably simple. FFmpeg is a powerful, open-source multimedia framework that can decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter, and play nearly any type of media. It's the Swiss Army knife of...
Insights from The New Yorker Profile John Mackey, the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market The New Yorker has a long article on Mackey which was a very good read. Since it is so long, I've summarized what I found interesting from it below. I'm terrible at summarizing and in college never got into highlighting my textbooks. When reading I either found it all really interesting or all really dull, so it was...