Monthly Archives: April 2011

It is all about Empathy

Posted on April 23, 2011 | 1 comment

In the last weeks, I follow two blogs by Maz Iqbal.  Maz, a UK based Marketing Strategist, writes a personal blog as well as a customer experience related blog from which I already quoted one brilliant article ( Why you should not confuse ‘personalisation’ with ‘personal’) and I plan to quote others.

On his personal blog, on a very personal post, Maz linked to the following TED talk  by the sociologist Sam Richards.  I really liked it. The bottom line is simple, even trivial – “try to put yourself in the other’s shoes in order to understand him” but the way he conveys thus message is through a fascinating thought exercise.

I would like to finish this post with a quote from the end of the talk. If you are not planning to watch the talk  then at least read these (and then you might want to watch it…):

Step outside of your tiny little world.
Step inside of the tiny little world of somebody else.
And then do it again, and do it again, and do it again
and suddenly all of these tiny little worlds
they come together in this complex web
and they build a big complex world.
And suddenly without realizing it
you're seeing the world differently.

Everything has changed.
Everything in your life has changed.

Enjoy… and many thanks to Maz.

1 Comment

Posted in Life, linkedin, TED

The power of words

Posted on April 12, 2011 | 2 comments

I am sorry, I just can’t  help it.  I have no intention of turning this site (blog?) into a way to send what we used to call in the old days”Fun Mail”, namely viral videos. And I will not.

However, I had to share this video with you. I can write so many words explaining why. But I will not.  It literally speaks for itself.

Just watch it.

2 Comments

Posted in Customer Experience, Life, linkedin, Uncategorized

Great Minds Think Alike

Posted on April 11, 2011 | 7 comments

How many times you had a great idea that you believed will make you the next Mark Zuckerberg (or at least pay your mortgage)? And then you Google it, just to find that someone else somewhere in our small Universe already thought about it and implemented it (or “stole” your idea…)?

If it never happened to you then either you are a very boring person (no offense) or you are not searching good enough. It happened too many times to people around me lately.

But wait, there is an upside to it ! The fact that other people thought long time ago about what you think today means that anything you need, is  already out there. As the saying goes – “Necessity is the mother of innovation”.

Want an example? I read a lot of material and many times I want to keep paragraphs, links or just scribble something related to what I read, so I can read it later with my notes.  I used many tools – OneNote, bookmarks (online, local, copied URL to a notepad), ReadItLater service etc. All have their drawbacks and none really provided what I really needed.  Armed with the insight mentioned above, I just Googled “online highlight collect web pages” and found Diigo, which is exactly what I needed (and even more) – their slogan is Annotate, Archive, Organize.

This is a prefect tool if you are researching, writing, comparing prices and specs of laptops, or doing anything that requires you to collect excerpts from various sources. And the basic version is free.

Their video is a bit too marketing but you can get the idea from it (or just start using it)

… and no, I do not work for them.
And they “stole” an idea I had long time ago…

7 Comments

Posted in Entrepreneurship, linkedin, Tools