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 >>

An awesome presentation and Q and A with Gary Vay Ner Chuk. In this he talks very powerfully about "Working the Room", His Strategy, And about how the internet is about getting eyeballs. To use his term he is pretty Potty Mouth. But don't get put off by that, he is authentic, deep and extremely passionate. Awesome and thank you Gary. To View More >>

All day I have been trying to find a moment to publish a quick post, giving a shout out to Google for another awesome product that's in the works. We already use analytics, webmaster tools, gmail etc and think this is probably one of the most exciting announcements since search. As a company this offers us exciting collaboration options to supplement what we already have, but it's even more exciting when you consider the integration with our wider community. Well done Google ... simply awesome. Mashable have 4 great articles on Google Wave http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/ the To View More >>

I saw my blog traffic jump by a huge amount yesterday, with most traffic coming from Stumbleupon, and I wondered how I could check who had reviewed me, and what they had said. I found a webpage on Stumbleupon that links to this information. It doesn't seem to be directly accessible from your user account but I found part of the answer in this post. You need to build a URL using a base URL of: http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url= plus the page URL, eg http://stephenbaugh.com/2008/09/the-guy-that-turns-her-light-off/ This means the full URL would be http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http://stephenbaugh.com/2008/09/the-guy-that-turns-her-light-off/ To View More >>