"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." Leo Tolstoy

"A person is a success if they get up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do." Bob Dylan

"We don't need more strength or more ability or greater opportunity, what we need is to use what we have." Basil Walsh

Today's image: Bicycle by Elenapaint. Great shot. Thanks for sharing.

"Free is more complicated than you'd think."

Scott Adams writes Giving Stuff Away on the Internet for WSJ...

"A few years ago I tried an experiment where I put the entire text of my book, "God's Debris," on the Internet for free, after sales of the hard copy and its sequel, "The Religion War" slowed. My hope was that the people who liked the free e-book would buy the sequel. According to my fan mail, people loved the free book. I know they loved it because they emailed to ask when the sequel would also be available for free. For readers of my non-Dilbert books, I inadvertently set the market value for my work at zero. Oops.

So I've been watching with great interest as the band "Radiohead" pursues its experiment with pay-what-you-want downloads on the Internet. In the near term, the goodwill has inspired lots of people to pay. But I suspect many of them are placing a bet that paying a few bucks now will inspire all of their favorite bands to offer similar deals. That's when the market value of music will approach zero.

That's my guess. Free is more complicated than you'd think."

Read Scott's entire commentary via WSJ here. The lessons here are...

We teach people how to treat us

What we allow, we encourage

Congrats & cheers: Tom Curley, AP prexy and CEO. For the courage to tell it like it is, to wit:

"The first thing that has to go is the attitude. Our institutional arrogance has done more to harm us than any portal. We must understand and embrace the new ways people...are consuming content.

There’s still a place for appointment media -- a home-delivered newspaper on the porch each morning or an evening newscast while making dinner. But it is a smaller place. People, of course, want the news when they want it. Even more difficult to accept, they want control over what they get.

Think of it this way. The perfect paper or newscast is becoming possible -- at least in the reader’s or viewer’s eyes. What is it you really want to know? We can personalize content now."

Read Tom's prepared remarks here. Bravo Tom!

"Successful leaders make sure that they succeed! They are not afraid of strength in others. Andrew Carnegie wanted to put on his gravestone, 'Here lies a man who knew how to put into his service more able men than he was himself.'" Peter Drucker

"Success and rest don't sleep together." Russian proverb

"You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion." E. S. Raymond

Todays image: Vine Grapes by Elenapaint. Outstanding. Thank you!

Paradigm

Let's revisit one of those words. The difference today is we will employ the considerable intellect of two gifted guys. First, Gary Hamel, to wit:

"Modern management isn't just a suite of useful tools and techniques; it is a paradigm, to borrow a sound bite from Thomas Kuhn's overused argot. A paradigm is more than a way of thinking - it's a worldview, a broadly and deeply held belief about what types of problems are worth solving, or are even solvable. Listen to Kuhn on this point: '[A] paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that...can be assumed to have solutions. To a great extent these are the only problems that the community will...encourage its members to undertake. Other problems...are rejected as metaphysical...or sometimes as just too problematic to be worth the time. A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the [familiar] puzzle form because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools which the paradigm provides.'

We are all prisoners of our paradigms. And as managers, we are captives of a paradigm that places the pursuit of efficiency ahead of every other goal. This is hardly surprising, since modern management was invented to solve the problem of inefficiency." From Gary's new writing - The Future of Management. Highly recommended. (Amazon info here).

Second, Michael Rosenblum. Michael writes...

"There is an old expression that says ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

What happens in fact is that invention comes along, and it messes up everyones way of doing things, so they want it to go away. They bury it. It wrecks their lives. Executives in corporations put off dealing with new inventions until their tour of duty is over. “Leave it for someone else… I don’t really understand it” they say.

Ice, of course, is our classic example.

Once a massive industry, it was rendered obsolete in a stroke when refrigeration was invented.

No one in the ice business wanted refrigeration, and almost no one in the ice business ‘got’ refrigeration.

All they ‘got’ was unemployed."

Read Michael's entire post Frozen Assets here. Put Michael's blog, here, into your reader. Highly recommended.