Wednesday night at the DNC
While I’m a fan of politics (and my wife and I are active supporters of causes and candidates we believe in), I’ve never been particularly “political” and generally don’t find myself at political speeches, rallies, etc. But last night when I had the chance to head over to the Democratic National Convention being held here in Denver, I figured that it was something worth seeing in person. I wasn’t disappointed – it really was an amazing scene. …
August 28, 2008· 5 min read
Denver to the top of Mt. Evans (and back)
Long overdue, but here’s an account of my recent bike ride from Denver to the top of Mt. Evans (elevation 14,264 ft) and back. First some quick technical and summary data in case you’ve found this post looking to do a similar ride. I ride a lightspeed titanium bike with a standard front crankset (39/53) and a slightly climbing friendly rear cassette (13/27). The ride up took us 7 1/2 hour (ride time) and covered some 10,000 feet of climbing over 72 miles. While that’s a lot of climbing, the gradient actually didn’t kick up much past about 8% (and for most of the climb from Idaho Springs was more like 6%). My training had been pretty modest – I ride about 50 miles a week, including a hill ride at least every other week – and this ride was probably about 2 times the length (and difficulty) of any other ride I had attempted (which is to say that if I can slog it up – you probably can too). I twittered my entire ride up, which turned out to be great way to keep my wife and friends informed of our progress while on route. The ride profile (until the battery on the GPS went dead) looked like this: …
August 27, 2008· 6 min read
"The Board"
I’ve written before on effective board communication, how to run effective board meetings and other “governance” topics related to companies and their boards of directors. Today’s post is a little more ethereal. I’ve noticed a real difference in how various CEO’s I work with refer to their boards – particularly when talking internally to the rest of their management teams and employees. On the one hand are the CEO’s that consistently refer to their board of directors as “The Board” (capital “T”, capital “B”) and often use them as some kind of foil (as in “The Board has said that we really need to do XYZ”) – almost separating themselves from whatever decision or direction it is that they wish to convey and treating the board as some kind of amorphous entity like the borg in Star Trek. On the other had are CEO’s that more often refer to the board by their individual names, including themselves in the list as well. It’s obviously much harder to absolve yourself of responsibility for a decision if you speak in this fashion. It’s also much more difficult to use the board as the foil (since “Seth, John, Jamie and Susan” sounds a lot less threatening than “The Board”). …
August 26, 2008· 2 min read
A different take on Twitter
As you know, I’m a big fan of Twitter. I’ve even gone so far as to call it the new IM. My wife Greeley has watched on with some amusement as I’ve twittered my life away over the last year or so. She finally sat down this weekend and read a few months of my tweets. What follows is a note she sent to me – an “if I’d been twittering too” list of tweets (to be read with heavy sarcasm; I was laughing out loud, but maybe it’s just me…). …
August 12, 2008· 1 min read
Track your favorite Olympic sports with Filtrbox
Information tracking company Filtrbox has put out a handy little widget for tracking TeamUSA at the Olympics. By choosing both sports (for example: “USA Cycling – Men’s Road”) or an individual athletes (“USA Cycling – Men’s Road: Levi Leipheimer”) you can keep up to date on your favorite Olympic stories.
August 8, 2008· 1 min read
hello? …. echo …. echo …. echo
Apologies for falling out of the blogging habit over the last month. A nice, mostly off-line vacation was followed by a few weeks of slowly catching back up. Blogging (and keeping up on my blog reading as well) fell to the bottom of the list. Or maybe I was just being lazy. Either way, I was off the blogging circuit for a while and I apologies for any of you who may have been waiting with breath held for the next post (hopefully you didn’t delete me from your feed reader). …
August 8, 2008· 1 min read
Leave your ego at the door
My wife took me to kick-boxing class yesterday and if I was to be honest with you, I’d have to admit that I pretty much got my ass handed to me. Kickboxing is HARD. This isn’t athletic club kick-boxing. This is Muay Thai kick-boxing at the local Thai dojo. My wife’s been going for months and is really good (and before you ask – yes, she can clearly kick my ass any time she feels like it). She’s been asking me to go for a while but I’ve resisted. Not because I didn’t think it would be fun (and as it turned out it was even more fun than I thought it would be), but because I didn’t know how to do it and I was seriously afraid of embarrassing myself (although as you can imagine, none of the excuses I used to avoid prior participation included this openness of reasoning). Finally, having run out of good reasons not to go along, I acquiesced. And it was great. I had fun. I sweat (a LOT). I beat the crap out of my punching bag. I learned the proper way to kick and punch. And occasionally I put it all together and actually looked like I knew what I was doing. …
July 9, 2008· 2 min read
Any search groupies out there?
I’ve been mulling over a few ideas in search advertising. Curious if anyone out there has come across any companies innovating in the search value chain (I’m thinking about things like Yield and Clickable).
June 24, 2008· 1 min read
Just the beginning
In case there was any doubt how far advertising on the Internet has to go, consider that The University of Phoenix is the single largest brand advertiser on the Internet (with some $20m in monthly spend, which is pretty minimal in the context of brand ad spending) and that Internet advertising per household (dollars spend on online advertising divided by total US households) was $288. Compare that with $818 on newspapers (or just over $1k on “direct telephone”) (sourced from Mary Meeker’s TechTrends June 2008). We’ve got a long way to go, baby!
June 23, 2008· 1 min read
Inside the Foundry psyche
There are a couple of posts up this morning that I’d like to point you towards. The first is over at Mendelson’s Musings (written by my partner Jason Mendelson) that talks about our work with Nancy Raulston, our team’s executive coach (direct post link here). I’m fortunate to work with a group of partners that believe (as I do) that part of building a great firm is building a strong foundation for communication and feedback. We take this work very seriously (starting with the 360 degree review that Jason describes and continuing twice a year at team off-sites where we Nancy facilitates a group review) and even base a portion of our compensation on this work (literally putting our money where out collective mouths are). …
June 23, 2008· 2 min read