Human Ventures

Filed under: seth godin

Technology is Always a Complementary Strategy

@Justin_Bacon shared this fantastic blurb from Seth Godin on social networking yesterday. 

Seth comments:

"The internet this giant cocktail party with all these people swarming around connecting because they're keeping score[...] Networking is always important when it's real and it's always a useless distraction when it's fake. What the internet has allowed is an enormous amount of fake networking to take place[...] What matters is, Where are the real relationships?"

It sounds a bit reactionary, but he makes a great point, and one that I tried to convey in a short talk that I recently gave to a class at a local business school. While Godin is cautioning people against seeing online social networking as a cure-all, I was nudging an audience of relative non-users to get online as a way to complement their offline networking strategies. Our goals are different, but messages are very similar.

Here are a couple of the images I used to make my point. Hope you'll find them interesting/useful.

Seth's Blog: Everyone's model of work is a job

That's is the conclusion of a very long essay on startups by Paul Graham, and it's an insightful quote.

The reason you feel most comfortable with a job (unless, like me, you're in the minority--a job would destroy my psyche) is that you've been brainwashed by many years of school, socialization and practice. I pick the word brainwashed carefully, because it's more than training or acclimation. It's something that's been taught to you by people who needed you to believe it was the way things are supposed to be.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

This is exactly the conclusion I came to over the summer after having the opportunity to collaborate with a host of young social entrepreneurs and seeing colleagues struggle with getting laid off.

I realized that we are raised to think that work is something that is provided to us by a benevolent corporate body. But that view denies the humanity of the reality that a livelihood is something that people for millenia have created for themselves.

Check out the documentary Lemonade for great testimony to this idea.

Seth Godin on Sliced Bread

A classic TED Talk on making your ideas spread.

Certainly, there are no shortage of great ideas and inventions out there, but rather a shortage of great execution. That includes not only getting the right people on your bus, not only designing products and services with your customers and their needs, habits, tendencies, circumstances, etc. in mind, but also getting in front of customers, investors, and colleagues in a way that will compel them to get on board.

If you haven't already read it, the Heath Brothers's "Made to Stick" is another fabulous "how to" along these lines. Enjoy!
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