Karim Vaes

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.

A while back Garr Reynolds posted an article about the “Tips for creative success from Pixar“.

An interesting quote from this article is the following statement :

Accept every offer. Don’t judge it, you’ll stop it. It becomes a dead end if you judge it, but unlimited possibilities if you go with it.

To be honest, when being a junior engineer, you accept a lot more tasks without judging it. It’s a zen saying that one must approach things with the child’s mind. So approach it without judgement. Creativity & openness is something we have to maintain, as it’s something we loss over the year due to our prejudices & the context we’re accustomed too.

A year and two months after posting it here, google wave says goodbye.

• Webware : Eric Schmidt on the demise of Google Wave
• Slashdot : Google Kills Wave Development
• Webware : Google pulls plug on Google Wave
• Arstechnica : Wave cancellation: Google gives up on next-gen messaging platform

“Yes” in an answer. “No” is an answer too. Even ” I don’t know” is an answer.

To not respond at all is the worst response ever… It’s plain rude & ignorant! How many times I’ve seen this in business scenarios.

“Let’s just play ostrich and let it all blow by. It’s not my problem!”

Source : Startup Culture Lessons From Mad Men

Interesting post, yet some things don’t work out in environments which require attendance (conform low attendance helpdesk) :

Vacation Policy = No Policy : Nice one, where I would only add one exception “until minimum attendance is reached.

“We don’t care which 80 hours you work” : Agree completely! An happy employee will work more. A time registration system will only do the opposite of which should be the objective of the system.

Extreme Transparency : This gets rid of all the rumour flows and so on which paralyse the performance of any organization.

Seat rotation : Sounds like a cool concept. In (even not so) big coorporations, one may find that (s)he only knows their “cubicle”.

HubSpot Fellows : A coaching concept which is needed in ALL companies. Don’t hire people, push them in the pool and say it’s a good guy/girl if (s)he doesn’t drown.

All other points : … focus on the social side of the human being. Where creativity is needed (and trust me, you need it to let your company grow!), you need a social environment where people feel comfortable, appreciated/respected & nourished.