I just had a wonderful evening with CEOs from some of New Zealand's best companies. The group was brought together by Better By Design to visit some of the USA's best Design-led and Innovative companies. It's going to be an amazing week, challenging I am sure, but an interesting thing happened tonight: if you like, a small distinction became clear to me. There I was talking to Diego Rodriguez a partner at Ideo, a brilliant design company, and Perry Klebahn a consulting associate professor at Stanford Design School, two great people who were truly gracious in the knowledge they shared. To be honest, To View More >>

Wikipedia describes Empathy as the capability to share and understand another's emotions and feelings, and is characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes". This connection to others is both an honorable and natural feeling, but can also often drive us to do something that, is the completely wrong thing to do. Since joining the Fire Service I've seen many situations where peoples empathy for another has not only caused them to be unable to render help, but on occasions has actually put everyone in danger. In a blog post the other day Seth Godin talked about empathy and asked To View More >>

Derek Sivers did a talk at TED about this crazy dancing guy and what we can learn from him in terms of leadership, and more importantly about the importance of the first few followers. "If you want a movement, a leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous". What you really need however is the first few followers, you need to nurture these people as they indicate to the masses that following is ok. Because they help to establish momentum, we need to love and embrace our followers as equals. In the video watch a movement happen in under 3 minutes as Derek dissects some lessons To View More >>

People with dirty jobs are happier In this movie Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs does two things, first he talks about a day he worked on a farm and amongst other things docks lambs. I saw this show and couldn't believe he did what he did. I thought it was inhumane and as it turns out initially he did too, but in an entertaining fashion he talks through his learning and explains. The second thing he does is he makes the point that in his opinion people with Dirty Jobs are happier. He puts forward a strong case that following the advice "Follow Your Passion" might be bad advice. For some it To View More >>

Well today, has been a pretty exciting day. Apple launched their latest professional photography software, Aperture 3, and for me it was particularly special as we (Queensberry) were involved in our own small way. After approximately a year of working with Apple, including a trip to Cupertino in October, today's announcement shared information on how professional photographers could buy our wedding albums through Aperture. Using a cleverly developed plugin our clients can now use their favourite image tool to order albums from us. It's not just exciting because we're working with Apple, but I've To View More >>