Why Common Wisdom is Often Unwise
Heard this recently; “There’s always room for improvement”? What about “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? W. Edwards Deming was an American engineer and statistician who educated the Japanese about quality control for the best part of the last century. Imagine that. He was worshipped in Japan for his ability to find continual improvements [...]
We can all learn a lot from the humble ant.
Have you ever watched ants close up? It’s an interesting study. A few months ago I watched a group of ants converge on some food scraps in a park. Over the course of several hours they carried all of the scraps away presumably back to their colony. Fascinated by this I set up a few [...]
Re-Invent The Book Review with The Rise of “Collaborative Consumption” & Win
We have teamed up with Collaborative Consumption and Shareable.net to give you the chance to win. We believe in sharing and recognize that sharing is also an important emerging industry. It’s critical for the future of the environment, the way we mobilize and socialize—ultimately, the way we live and function together as a society. It’s [...]
An Eclectic Office Made up of Shipping Containers in Geneva
This eclectic interior architecture of an office building in Geneva was recently realised by the internationally acting practice Group8. The office is called Cargo and Group8 worked with the furniture manufacturer Dynamobel to create this insanely cool space. Old and disused cargo containers are stacked one upon the other in order to provide some silent work and [...]
Yes I am Precious. A Bike with a Brain Doing Good.
Meet Precious, the bike with a brain that’s riding across America to raise funds for Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG charity. Bike with a brain? Well, it’s a bike with all sorts of sensors attached to some pretty cool code and a few silicon chips to bring the bike to life.Precious will be expressing his experiences and feelings [...]
An Environmentally Aware Brand Exploring Better Ways to Carry
uncluttered white spaces contributor, c0-founder of investling and multi time entrprerenuer Andrew Fallshaw has launched his latest project upon planet earth named Bellroy. Bellroy has pretty loose edges… It’s probably easiest to describe us as a small group trying to improve the way we carry. For the moment, that means we are tackling wallets – an [...]
5 Articles Uncluttered White Spaces Read This Week
1. FROM FAST COMPANY // Alex Bogusky Tells All: He Left the World’s Hottest Agency to Find His Soul (view) 2. FROM SIMON MAINWARING // Dear Brands, no amount of damage control can match no damage at all. (view) 3. FROM DANA GOLDSTEIN // Can Schools Impact Obesity? Should the Day Be Longer? (view) 4. [...]
Otarian | The First Ever Low-Carbon Restaurant
Australian chain Otarian bills itself as “the first ever low-carbon restaurant, using a cradle-to-grave analysis in the carbon footprinting of every menu item.” Almost everything in Otarian’s restaurants—from the floor to the tables and chairs—is made from recycled materials. Its “Eco2tarian Labelling” shows the difference in greenhouse gas emissions between its veggie meals and similar [...]
7 Collaborative Companies That Will Change The Future.
We have curated a list 7 of our favorite sharing platforms. Collaborative consumption is used to describe the cultural and economic force away from ‘hyper-consumption’ to re-invented economic models of sharing, swapping, bartering, trading or renting. These methods have been enabled by advances in social media and peer-to-peer platforms over the past 12-24 months. In [...]
87 Really Cool Things According to Google
Insanely insightful. This presentation from Google, describing several cases of succesful and creative uses of their platform is full of awesomeness. A must for everybody with a bit of a techie, creative, planner or just bored. Click on the image now. Quick.
Jamie Oliver Introduces the openIDEO Challenge with Food Revolution
Jamie Oliver Introduces the OpenIDEO Challenge / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo. How can we raise kids’ awareness of the benefits of fresh food so they can make better choices? Jamie Oliver won the TED Prize wish last year. His wish was to create a Food Revolution in America, to change the way kids eat [...]
The Bull’s 10 Rules for a Successful Business
The first thing I’ll say is that the above title is written with a heavy dose of irony and my tongue wedged firmly in my cheek. The truth is that I’m not a big fan of rules generally and even less for those that get in the way of sensible progress. Break them and create [...]
What BP Could have Bought With All the Money They Lost in the Oil Spill
Life in the world of planetary destruction. Visual Economics have created an amazing infograph pointing us towards things BP could have bought with all the money they lost in the oil spill. 10 years of clean water for each of the 884,000 people without access to it. A new home to replace all 275,000 homes lost [...]
Is “Creativity” the most effective trait in business?
IBM’s Institute for Business Value has shown that CEOs value “Creativity” as the most effective trait. For too many companies, their customers are becoming more and more connected to the gloabl community but unfortunately, they are becoming less connected to the company. With the world interconnected from an economic, social, and political persepective, its about time [...]
Calibrate Your Thoughts and Move a Few Steps Closer to Being Steve Jobs
What standards are you working to? My father liked his sayings, and one of the most oft spoken was the proverb “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well” But just what is a job done well? If you show a grandparent your PHD thesis, they’ll say it’s a job done well. But unless [...]
4 Books That will Change Your Perspective on Business, Marketing, Productivity and the Environment
4 books that changed my thinking I read a lot. Perhaps a bit too much. I figure that with 100 billion humans having lived, there must be a heap of amazing minds that I can learn from. It’s mostly non-fiction; business, marketing, design, creativity, life. So here are four books that I rate as powerful, [...]
From the Bull | The (Very) Public Face of Your Business
A couple of years ago my wife and I decided to install a pool in our back yard. We asked around among our friends and acquaintances for references of pool installers they knew. After some work we settled on a short list of five installers. We decided to check them out further, initially by looking [...]
Electrolux – Cleaning Up the Oceans, Turning Garbage into Vacuums
Home appliance manufacturer Electrolux is setting out to clean up plastic-covered marine environments and turn the spoils into a limited range of vacuum cleaners. Causing the deaths of over a million seabirds and 100,000 mammals and sea turtles each year, Electrolux hopes ‘Vac From the Sea’ will raise much-needed awareness on marine trash and ‘environmental [...]
1 of Six Tips For Designing a Memorable Brand
Fast COmpany have created an article highting 6 really cool tips for creating an engaging brand. “You never see a logo by itself,” says Yang Kim. Instead, it’s usually part of an overall brand that when well-executed takes into account everything from self- and outward perception to media landscape. For their new book, Kim and [...]
The Four Pillars of Awesomeness… fed by Passion
Lets talk about awesomeness. However, lets start with awareness and what it means? Surely it is the ability to uncover and pursue what you can do best. Such as knowing know what drives you. How does your drive scale throughout your life? Your company? Your market? Does your definition of awareness or drive differ from [...]
A BATHING APE and DAIWA create the 144 hour pop-up retail store.
A BATHING APE are creating a special pop-up store alongside fishing brand DAIWA. The collaboration will come to life on July 24th, as both companies officially open the retail spot dubbed 144H, for the amount of hours it will remain open to the public. Featured product include fishing supplies, outdoor goods, and fishing apparel. Further [...]
From the Bull | Which levers should I pull?
When you break business down to its fundamentals it is actually a simple concept. Basically, you need to have a product or service that solves a market problem, that you can sell in large enough quantities and at high enough prices to earn an acceptable return on investment for the owners of the business. It [...]
The State of Online Video in 2010
Tammy Camp has produced a detailed look at the State of Online. A few pop up such as Myspace and Facebook being a more powerful or chosen platform for uploading video content. Only 7% of users pay for online content and the major demographic sits between 14 and 29. What are your thoughts? Source | Tammy Camp
Who is Really Driving Your Strategy?
Inside most modern companies, strategic innovation is still being approached from fragmented departments in covert labs with almost zero consideration for the end consumer. Whilst this is changing, there is still an imbalance in the approach for companies and leaders in relation to innovation strategy. Running a think tank for a business in Sydney last [...]
