Knowledge@Wharton interviews Sunil Bharti Mittal, who started in business more than 30 years ago with $1,500 borrowed to make bicycle crankshafts. Today, he heads the $5 billion Bharti Group, whose flagship company, Bharti Airtel, is India's largest mobile phone operator. Mittal spoke on lessons learned from his experience, including the emphasis on speed as a strategy.
If you're caught between speed and perfection, always choose speed, and perfection will follow. You never wait for perfect positioning, because in business you don't have the time; especially if you're small, you can't do it.
Thanks to AK for the link.
Myla Kent came up with the wonderful idea of pairing a quotation or passage together with a photograph and putting them both together on a blog.
Tina pointed to NY Magazine's short article on the architect/designers, Massimo and Lella Vignelli. There's a great quote in there that speaks about how the Vignellis arrive at solutions to design problems, and is certainly appropriate to the work we do while working on user experiences for the web.
It’s a matter of discipline, and it starts by looking at the problem and collecting all the available information about it. If you understand the problem, you have the solution. It’s really more about logic than imagination.
(via swissmiss)
I'm picking up quotable tidbits here and there this week. You may not recall this quote of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on love, that I blogged 5 years ago. I heard another terrific description of love when listening to Armand DiMele on WBAI today.
I accept you for exactly [who] you are with no desire to change you for my own needs.
Yes.
Majora Carter had quite a few quotable moments in her talk at Ted. This one was both funny and very reusable.
It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.
Reminds me of a quote we have on a Post It notepad here, which we like to point out for its irony. "To ask permission is to seek denial." I, for one, really believe that, though I think many corporates live in fear of retribution for doing things without permission. In a smaller setting, it's called communicating, not asking for permission. Levels of corporate hierarchy I suppose make some people feel powerless.
If you haven't seen Majora Carter's presentation on the work revitalizing the Bronx through the community development organization, Sustainable South Bronx, you should defintely check it out. She's one of those people committed to important work that impacts people lives in an immediate way. They do the kind of work I'm willing to contribute money towards.
As a side note, someone I'm freelancing for right now pointed out Majora's presentation. I like working for someone inspired by individuals doing great things in the real world. It's sort of like working with friends, who for the most part are people who align with your ideals.
I recently read a passage on education referring to John Holt's ideas about parenting. I thought it might be a good idea to capture this quote, in which Holt says:
"If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued."
This is the golden rule of reciprocity applied to parenting. I wanted to quote the above because it continues the theme from the compassion entry I wrote last week. Once you hold to this belief, it becomes extremely difficult to justify any kind of coerciveness over behaviors that simply do not harm the child or another person.
Mark Pilgirm provides an excerpt from "The Real Thing", a play by Tom Stoppard, to illustrate the point that writing is not simply about hurling words, but about choosing and ordering them selectively so that the ideas might travel.
Book and audio book CD borrowing service. Small monthly paid membership required to participate. Works on the same model as NetFlix -- you can only keep out 2 books/CDs out at a time, but can borrow an unlimited number per month within that 2 at a time limit.
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
The idea behind NaNoWriMo is so cool. Every year from midnight November 1 to midnight November 30, people write a novel with no expectations other than getting to 50,000 words. I don't know if I could do that and if it would be worth reading, but wow. What a cool idea.
What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time.
Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.
Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from your novel at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.
When: Writing begins November 1, 2003. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.