Lt. Steven Hauk’s (Bruno Kirby) wonderful line from Good Morning, Vietnam. It was brought to mind by this observation in a story about Ze Frank:
“Most people aren’t funny, and most funny people are not funny most of the time.” — Clay Shirky, adjunct professor at New York University (interactive telecommunications program)
For my part, I’d rather be funny than know how to fly.
“Job titles, boxes in org charts, are so last-millennium. They are relics of an Industrial Age that was born of the doomed notion that people are best understood as cogs in corporate machines. … What matters most in the long run is who you are. Not who you work for.”
— Doc Searls on Robert Scoble’s value to Microsoft:
Seth Godin calls this the most important “marketing pothole”:
Great marketing pleases everyone on the team, sooner or later. But at the beginning, great marketing pleases almost no one. At the beginning, great marketing is counter-intuitive, non-obvious, challenging and apparently risky. Of course your friends, shareholders, stakeholders and bosses won’t like it. But they’re not doing the marketing, you are.
“Networks are about sharing now; they used to be about control. Networks are two-way; they used to be one-way. Networks are about aggregation more than distribution; they are about finding and being found. Networks are now open while, by their very definition, they used to be closed. You join networks and leave them them at will; you can join any number of networks at once and content can be found via any number of networks, there is no practical limit. Networks used to be static. Now networks are fluid.” — Jeff Jarvis
You need to read the full post to appreciate the point Jarvis is making. I’ve been thinking about how it applies to the various networks our company owns. And what does it mean to “own” a network? We have contracts with the radio stations that make up our networks. We own the satellite uplink and the downlink receivers that distribute our programming to those radio stations.
Our company has purchased other, smaller networks. And it was the affiliation contracts and the contracts with advertisers that we perceived to have the greatest value. Has that changed? Is it changing? Stay tuned.
The flyleaf describes Douglas Coupland’s new novel as “a lethal joyride into today’s new breed of technogeeks.” I very much enjoyed two of his earlier works, Microserfs and Girlfriend in a Coma, and offer these nuggets from the introduction to his latest novel:
Life is a contest between you and everyone else.
Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless poor people.
TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.
You can’t fake creativity, competence or sexual arousal.
Nobody has ever been happy in a job they obtained by first handing in a resume.
After a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless. — pg. 248
I think computers ought to have a key called I’M DRUNK, and when you push it, it prevents you from sending email for twelve hours. — pg. 386