Working Out in the Open and Eating our own Dog Food
In an earlier post, Tom mentioned that one of our goals for 2008 was to work out in the open. We often recommend this in Dance Floor Theory™ leadership sessions – telling students to hold their meetings in the commons every once in a while, with a flip board showing what they are doing. It […]
2008 Themes for Swift Kick
1) WORK IN THE OPEN IMAGE FILE NO LONGER AVAILABLE Like the jewelry maker, we want to work in the open for every to see how we do what we do. Share our work whether raw or polished. Share our work with others and have others share with us. It takes a village to grow […]
Trying to Avoid the Advertising on the Horizon
Catching up on my feeds from the weekend, I came across Danah Boyd’s posting about youth, advertising, and social responsibility. by strangeinterlude The short of it is this: marketing necessarily creates ideals, these ideals put substantial pressure on our youth, and the “kids”, in turn, take it out on each other. In her blog, Danah […]
2008: Strategy Review (History before Future : )
In the process of putting together the 2008 APCA Advisors’ Institute tech keynote, I came across this slide from the 2007 keynote. The simplicity is probably because I made it late at night, but in the light of day, and one year later, I love this unequivocal explanation of Swift Kick: The implementation order of […]
Keeping the Focus – Posting our Projects
By design, we move fast at Swift Kick. Our staff is small with 2 full-time employees (Kevin and Me), 1 part-time (Emma**), and a team of ad-hoc consultants (designer, programmer, accountant, etc.) Kevin and I are always impressed when we look back 6 months and see our progress. A major advantage we have is an […]
Orchestration: Building Bridges – Academia and Business
Integrated business models are when you do everything yourself. Orchestration is when you put all the people and pieces together and orchestrate the outcome of their work. We are pursuing orchestration. photo: D. Knisely** We are busy trying to orchestrate very diverse pieces of this project. We have a development team in Uzbekistan. A project […]
The Amazing World of Remix or Why Our Software Will be Open Source
This kid has a great vision of himself. Imagination, determination, clearly some nascent kick ass: VIDEO FILE NO LONGER AVAILABLE He’s got sooo much, it’s just that he’s missing a little . . . something . . . something that is critical for real success. So he does his damnedest and posts it on youtube. […]
From Easiest to Hardest
Idea Money People Execution Of course, you need them all. I talk to so many would be entrepreneurs that have this order confused. They think because they have an idea, they have some value. Sure, better to start with a good idea than a bad one, but if you have the rest the original idea […]
Ed Reform: Whose Job Is It Anyway?
Capitalism and business models go together. It’s a natural conversation. Do you want a better business? Get a better business model. This blog post below inspired me. Whose Job Is It Anyway?: “Henry Chesbrough’s article in today’s WSJ about the importance of business models in innovation reinforces a point we often make here: the most […]
The Design Frame
Whitespace design (Yellowspace, Blackspace, etc.) has been a hot choice the past few years as some high-profile companies started using it as their anti-marketing response to the more common image-overload approach. To determine our marketing style, it is important for us to move past the descriptors that we like and rather focus on our beliefs […]