METHOD AND SYSTEM TO BOND, OR INTEGRATE TIGHTLY, SOFTWARE TO HARDWARE, SOFTWARE TO OTHER SOFTWARE, HARDWARE TO OTHER HARDWARE, AND THE RESULT OF ANY BONDED COMBINATIONS TO ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE OR ADDITIONAL HARDWARE.

A zen master and his student were watching a fox chase a rabbit.

The Zen Master said, “who will win?”

The student replied, “Master, of course the fox will win, he is much faster than the rabbit and has sharp teeth.”

“No” replied the master. “The rabbit will win. The fox is running for a meal. The rabbit is running for his life.”

___________

{Image by Le Petit Poulailler}

Don’t forget to take action!

Seth’s best blog posts from the last 2 years

#1

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The secret of the web (hint: it’s a virtue)

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.19 points

#2

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You should write an ebook

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.15 points

#3

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Scarcity

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.15 points

#4

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Tribe Management

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.15 points

#5

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Understanding the funnel

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.10 points

#6

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The web doesn’t care

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.9 points

#7

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Starting over with customer service

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.8 points

#8

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How to get traffic for your blog

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.8 points

#9

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Seth’s Blog: Building an albatross

I spent hours watching the albatross in the Galapagos hang out. The first thing you notice is that they have a terribly difficult time taking off. In…8 points

#10

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Seven tips to build for meaning

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.7 points

#11

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Make something happen

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.7 points

#12

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How to create a great website

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.7 points

#13

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Top 10 Secrets of the Marketing Process

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.7 points

#14

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The Long Tail and the Dip

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.7 points

#15

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Permission Marketing

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.7 points

#16

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Looking for trouble

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.6 points

#17

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One, a few, most or all

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.5 points

#18

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Nine things marketers ought to know about salespeople (and two bonuses)

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.5 points

#19

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How to create a good enough website

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.4 points

#20

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What do you know?

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.4 points

#21

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The intangibles

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.4 points

#22

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Seth’s Blog: Rough edges and attention

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.4 points

#23

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Seth’s Blog: The forces of mediocrity

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.4 points

#24

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Hungry

I had lunch (a big lunch) with a college student last week. An hour later, she got up and announced she was going to get a snack. Apparently, she was…4 points

#25

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Seth’s Blog: Memo to the very small

What should my local chiropractor do? Or the acupuncturist? Or the pet store? What about that small church or mosque? The web has changed the game for…4 points

#26

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Seth’s Blog: Urgent personal finance advice

If I could only share one piece of personal finance advice to grads or to just about anyone, it would be this: Only borrow money to pay for things tha…4 points

#27

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Seth’s Blog: Do you deserve it?

Do you deserve the luck you’ve been handed? The place you were born, the education you were given, the job you’ve got? Do you deserve your tribe, your…4 points

#28

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Seth’s Blog: The spirit of the game

There are two ways to get ahead. You can work the system or you can beat the system. Beating the system usually involves some sort of subterfuge. Once…3 points

See the original lens

created by sethgodin

Someone said: If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

If you are reading this article, you must in the business world.
And if you an entrepreneur (or an entrepreneur-in-the-making), trying to navigate the uncharted waters ahead of you, you’ve left the safety of land behind you long time ago, and you are now the captain of your own boat, on this wonderful journey of entrepreneurship: I hear you.

Are you or someone else you know at a major fork on the road? Maybe evaluating your next move, your next start-up, or contemplating getting a job (or a iob) coasting for a while, or even evaluating the pros and cons of going to business school?
How about something different? Something truly different? If your vision is to BE an entrepreneur, if entrepreneurship as a lifestyle fits your worldviews, and yet you feel as if there’s one missing piece that you can sense but can’t eloquently describe . . . how about being exposed to a highly entrepreneurial environment, with access to one of the brightest marketers, surrounded by like-minded peers? Does that sound appealing?
Seth Godin (yup, the Purple Cow guy) has pulled another one of his move. He has put together what he calls the “Alternative MBA”, an internship at his offices, part working on his projects, part working on your own projects, part engaging in intriguing conversations.

Is it for everyone? Hardly.
And the only things in life worth doing are the ones that are not made for everyone, but only for those selected few. And yet I know that Seth is going to get inundated with applications from the world over.
Now, you owe it to yourself to:

1. read what Seth has concocted;
2. seriously think if that’s for you;
3. whether it is for you or not, spread the word to anyone you think might be interested or might know of someone who might be interested;
4. get inspired by Seth approach, he gives and gets, and chances are that at the end of the game, both parties, the interns and Seth will walk away feeling that they got a GREAT deal, win-win-win-win at its best;
5. ask yourself: how can I do something like this in my business? Maybe not an internship, how about hiring your customers as consultants? How about sending your CXO or VP of something to work at your best customer location for a week, free of charge of course? What insight would he or she draw? How about doing it with your worst customer, the one that left you last month after 5 years and vouched to NEVER do business with you, if you collaborate with the with no string attached, what insights would you gain? Could you ever get that from the best consulting outfit?

So here’s for you the link to the Squidoo Lens about the Alternate MBA, and to Seth’s post If you could change your life .

Whether you apply or not, the choice is yours, and remember a couple of things:

Guarantees: none.
Possibilities: limitless.

___________

{Photography by Baston}

There’s a conspiracy of misinformation and half truths, one of them is the quote: “It’s not about you, it’s about the people that you choose to surround yourself with”. I believe consultants must have come up with this quote. It’s not wrong, it’s just that it is a 1/2 truth, for TWO main reasons:

1. Finding, convincing to join and retain top-notch employees & consultants is a rare skill and
2. Guiding these employees and consultant to follow the plan within the vision, and the guidelines is no small feat

Therefore, it is all about you, but not in a selfish way. Bill Gates surrounded himself of MVP (most valuable people), but he was the one with the vision, he saw what nobody else (who could execute) could see, and he sold to the team the concept to give 100% toward his vision. Sure he listened to everyone worth listening to along the way, incorporated thoughts and ideas into his own thoughts and ideas.

How does this affect you as the entrepreneur? It does, in many ways:

• The journey and the communication starts within you: not only WHAT you do, nor HOW you do it, but the essence of WHY you do it. Steve Job wanted to free people from using user unfriendly computers. Have you discovered the WHY you are an entrepreneur? is it only money?
• If it’s just money, that is the WHY and the WHO that will be the driving force of the business, that will determine the hiring that you will be doing (more WHO), your management style as well as theirs (HOW), the corporate culture of the company (HOW), the language and vocabulary that will show up over and over in emails, memos, web site copy, marketing collateral, and conversations (HOW).
• Strategy. Got a strategy to fulfill the vision, and a plan to achieve it. And if you don’t . . . that’s also a strategy, whether it is valid or invalid the point is mute, since it is part of the WHO you are. It would not be Debbie Fields, that Debbie that sold Mrs Fields Inc. for $800 million. Debbie said “if you don’t plan, plan on failing”.

Who are you? Who is the “WHO” reading this? If you are a successful entrepreneur and you are reading this, you already have your WHAT->HOW->WHO->WHY aligned.   If your company is not doing well and you believe you’ve given it enough time to mature, and it is still not working, you are in trouble: you’ve got your WHAT (your company products / services), you’ve got your HOW in place (brand, corporate culture, marketing, story, etc.), which are the product of a WHY that is not supporting the WHAT and the HOW, because it never went into realizing the WHO, which is you. What is your passion, what makes you tick, what makes you wake up at 5:00 AM before the alarm goes off, jump out of bed looking forward to work. Is it really work if you love it so much?

If you are an entrepreneur in the making you are in the best position, like a painter with a blank canvass you can paint any picture you want, you get to pick the theme, colors, tone, mood, and you can even cut the canvass Lucio Fontana’s style, and declare to the world that it is indeed a sculpture, not a painting. As an entrepreneur in the making, you don’t even have a canvass, you can go into any art form and medium of your choosing, and you can even make up your own art form or medium, and break all the rules there are and make then your own, John Cage did.

Business is indeed art.

And business is indeed the outmost form of self expression: think Steve Job and Apple, and how the iPod and iPhone is shaping and enhancing people’s lives, that is Art indeed.

WHO are you? What’s your art? What’s your voice? What’s your story? What’s your BRAND? Trutfully and congruently answer those questions to yourself, and that is just the beginning, the base for discovering the WHY, your WHY to entrepreneurship, which will lead to the HOW of doing things, which is going to be your own, and your own only style. From there it is a natural progress to build the WHAT, the vehicle that will carry forward your vision, the healthy WHO in the link WHO->WHY->HOW->WHAT.

You’ve got friends: Jackson, Walt, Paul, Ben & Jerry, Debbi.

Inspired by: http://www.brain-fun.com/Brain-Teasers/EinsteinsRiddle.php Einstein’s Riddle: Einstein believed that 98% of people could not solve the following logic riddle. Wouldn’t it be interesting to use this as a hiring tool, not so much to make sure your candidate has the answer – although it would surely be nice – but to see how they will approach solving a problem. Here’s the riddle: There are 5 houses each with a different color. Their owners, each with a unique heritage, drinks a certain type of beverage, smokes a certain brand of cigarette, and keep a certain variety of pet. None of the owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigarette or drink the same beverage. Clues:

• The Brit lives in the red house.
• The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
• The Dane drinks tea.
• The green house is just to the left of the white house.
• The green house’s owner drinks coffee.
• The person who smokes Pall Malls raises birds.
• The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
• The man living in the center house drinks milk.
• The Norwegian lives in the first house.
• The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
• The man who keeps a horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
• The owner who smokes Bluemasters also drinks beer.
• The German smokes Prince.
• The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
• The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

Who owns the fish?

<- – - end of riddle – - – >

One way to arrive to the solution is to find those absolute statements that give the most significant information. I re-wrote the statements as follows:

1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is just to the left of the white house.
5. The green house’s owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Malls raises birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the center house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps a horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters also drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

Also, I called the the first house 1, the second 2, etc. . . we have that:

• Statement I tells us the Norwegian lives in house # 1
• Therefore according to statement N, house #2 must be Blue.

• Statement H tells us the house # 3 drinks coffee;
• Let’s combine statements D and E. D tells us that the Green house and the White house are next to one another, with Green being on the left, and Green drinks coffee. The only possible location that fits these criteria is Green on house # 4 and White on House # 5.

• Now the easiest next step is to complete the color allocation, we have only Red and Yellow to assign, and only house #1 and #3 without color assignment. Statement A tells us that the Brit lives in the red house. Since we already know that the Norwegian lives in house # 1, house # 3 is the only one who can satisfy statement A.
• Conversely House #1 must be Yellow and according to Statement G, the owner must smoke Dunhill, and statement K tells us that house #2 has a horse.

• By combining statements J and O, we can see that the person who smoke blends can only be living in house # 2 or # 3. While looking at statement L, we can see that whomever Smokes Bluemaster and Drink Beer can live either in house #2 or house #5, and the only combination that satisfies J, O, and L is for the owner of house # 2 to smoke Blend (and therefore the Norwegian in house #1 to drinks water), and the owner of house #5 to smoke Bluemasters and drink beer.

• The easiest set to complete now is the “drink” set, with house # 2 being the only one that can accommodate statement C.

• House #4 is the only one that satisfies statement M of the relationship between nationality and cigarette

• Let’s now complete the cigarette set by applying statement F

• Having placed “birds” in House #3, we can now apply statement J

• We are now left applying statement B

• Leaving only the German who lives in the Green House #4, smokes Prince, and drinks coffee as the only possible owner of FISH!

Al, eat your fish out! P.S.: solved using the classic whiteboard and color markers