Skip to main content

Never Eat Alone

Okay, I've reached the height of laziness. I'll explain later.

My excuse is that I'm on the road. I came back to BYU for a homecoming reunion since I'm the treasurer of an alumni chapter (very easy job, since we have no money). And of course we trashed UNLV at the game! Also, I've wrapped a bunch of work into the trip out west so I'm doing Utah, Idaho, Arizona and possibly Nevada if I get time.

Here is a picture of campus. The Y is on the mountain, and they light it up at special occasions such as homecoming. The reason why there is only a Y is that they started to put BYU up there and they ran out of money or something. So now it's just the Y and that's what we call the school for shorthand.


Okay, so now to the lazy part. I brought a jillion books with me and I'm trying to plow through them and send them back media mail. I read the book Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi. The book treats the topic of networking, and does it really very well--and realistically. But I am not going to review it but rather link to reviews. Here is one that gets the really good stuff. Here is another from Harvard Business School.

I had lunch with JNott before leaving, and we had some fascinating conversation, thanks for that! I am working on digesting We've Always Done it That Way, that will be forthcoming. In a nutshell, it was great.


Popular posts from this blog

An Army of Davids

So, I've been spending some time with Glenn Reynold's book (Glenn being of course the seminal and highly influential Instapundit ), and I must say that it gives me lots of language I can use to talk about phenomena that are easily observable right now. I think you could say that Glenn Reynolds has done for technology what Virginia Postrel did with design topics . Which is to say, they beat the drum and say, hey, look at what this democratization of knowledge can do for you! In that vein, the book is really pretty visionary, pointing out the magic of the internet age. And I for one see it as magical. You know how Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa in Little Town on the Prairie said to Laura that it was an amazing time to be alive (that was in the 1890s)? I've been actively thinking that to myself for the past few years, and An Army of Davids gives me ample evidence to back that up with its talk of citizen empowerment and the "comfy chair revolution." The theme of ...

Public sector information design

Here's an article from the UK's Design Council talking about how information design is important in public-sector efforts. Of course, it's helpful to everyone, but this is a good example of the universal need for better presentation of information--and more design.

Managing the Nonprofit Organization (Part Three)

1. What is the bottom line when there is no bottom line? Businesses as a default can rely on profit as an effectiveness measure. Nonprofits cannot use this concrete measure meaningfully. There are many different ways of looking at measurements that can serve as bottom lines of sorts, but the trick is to pick the right measurement to look at. And that can change over time, so it needs to be incorporated into the strategic planning (or whatever you want to call it) process. Nonprofits have many different customers which all need to be pleased to differing degrees. Drucker talks about the difficulty nonprofits have abandoning lost causes. Nonprofits have to distinguish between moral causes and economic causes. A moral cause is an absolute good. Preachers have been thundering against fornication for five thousand years. Results, alas, have been nil, but that only proves how deeply entrenched evil is. The absence of results indicates only that efforts have to be increased. This is the essen...