game changers

Great article by Naomi Wolf on Occupy Wall Street. Arrested in an evening dress for peaceably walking on a sidewalk and not blocking other pedestrians.

Keynote @Social-Loco : Clara Shih, CEO, Hearsay Social (Author of Facebook Era) The Facebook Era. Social and mobile are the undisputed game-changers today. Using concrete examples from some of the nation’s largest and most diverse brands, Clara Shih, bestselling author of The Facebook Era, will demonstrate how successful companies are adapting their strategies to the new set of customer interactions made possible through the convergence of social and local, and how the marketing discipline is being transformed once again. Clara blogs at The Faceboook Era Blog and you can find her on Twitter @clarashih

The author, Bill Taylor says, "The game-changers at Southwest Airlines, who have prospered for nearly 40 years by challenging conventional wisdom in the airline business, have embraced the "hire for attitude" philosophy more intensely than any big organization I've encountered. Sherry Phelps, who spent 33 years at Southwest, and, as a top executive in the People Department, helped design many of its hiring practices, explained the philosophy to me."

"The first thing we look for is the 'warrior spirit'," Phelps says. "So much of our history was born out of battles — fighting for the right to be an airline, fighting off the big guys who wanted to squash us, now fighting off the low-cost airlines trying to emulate us. We are battle-born, battle-tried people. Anyone we add has to have some of that warrior spirit."

Bill Taylor illustrates from dramatically different industries the age old proposition of hiring for attitude and training for skill. He is right. I've always said in education that the mark of a great educator is not taking an above average class of 9th graders and finding out their an above average group of 12th graders. It is taking an average or below average group and having them be above average or extraordinary. In business, we want to START with good people and eliminate more variables to our success.

So, as Mr. Taylor ends..."What are the attitudes that define your best performers? And what are the techniques you've devised to search for those attitudes in new performers?" Great questions.

Via @jonfernquest @futurescape @business_design

I know you can create games. We need to extend our skills in creating apps. Read the following piece from mobclix.

The video in this article shows a couple of game changers:

- Brute force works
This changed how we did speech coding back then. Why not do full search over all possibilities in the coding space.

- It was all about engineering
If you have a problem to solve, then throw a bunch of engineers with a budget at it.

- A human can think out-of-the-box
Deep blue, today done on a single chip, could only do what is good at and that is AI of today called machine learning.

- Maybe the brain is not as clever as we thought
Maybe, maybe the brain was not made to solve the same problem over and over again.

Very interesting!