David Lidsky's Blog, page 3045
February 26, 2015
The CEO Of The Future Is A "Designer-In-Chief"
A trends report from Wolff Olins says CEOs are starting to harness the good ideas of others rather than cracking a whip.
A century ago, the CEO was a fearsome whip-cracker. Fifty years ago, he was motivator dangling corporate incentives. And now, according to the 2015 Wolff Olins Leadership Report, the CEO has evolved into something new: The Designer-In-Chief of corporate culture, a mentoring figurehead who gets into the trenches with his employees and inspires them to create the next great innovation. How? By instilling them with the qualities that designers have: the ability to recognize problems or opportunities, propose fixes, and iterate those fixes until they've found the one right solution.
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The Secret Million That Y Combinator Invests In All Its Startups
How Transcriptic, an on-demand life sciences lab, benefits from the startup factory's growing array of free services.
"This is the heart of the business. This is our server rack."
10 More Companies Every Entrepreneur Should Know
Did you ace our first test on the world's most innovative companies? This one is more difficult.
Each year we publish a list of the 50 most innovative companies, our comprehensive guide to the enterprises at the forefront of business innovation. The organizations that made the list this year have outdone themselves (and others) with bold ideas and new momentum.
The Entrepreneur Fighting Gender Stereotypes In Combat Sports
How a combat sports company for women is doing more than just transforming how we see female fighters.
Women athletes have made great strides in recent years. In 2012, 4,847 women competed in the London Olympic games, the most ever in Olympic history. Not only that, women represented every country in every sport that year, and CBS Sports launched the first all-female sports talk show, We Need To Talk, in September 2014.
February 25, 2015
BuzzFeed's Silly New Animals App Is Very Smart Business
BuzzFeed just launched a Tinder for pets. Here's why that's a shrewd move.
BuzzFeed, purveyor of all things shareable, has released a new app and it is as simplistic and entertainment-driven as "Which Teletubby Are You?"—a real quiz you can take right now on the site. Straightforwardly titled "Cute or Not," the brightly colored app is best described as Tinder for pets. Users swipe right (for "Cute") or left (for "Not Cute"), earning badges along the way and uploading pictures of their own pets. And at this juncture, that's about all the app does.
"We wanted to keep the interaction pretty light," says Chris Johanesen, BuzzFeed's vice president of product and an eight-year veteran of the media company. "It was this idea running in the back of our head—especially in the last year or two as apps are more and more important—that this would make just a really fun, amazing app."
Born from an eponymous feature on the main site, Cute or Not is BuzzFeed's second app in its nearly 10-year history and the beginning of what, according to Johaneson, will be a "year of apps" for the viral content creator.
"What makes this experiment exciting is that most of our experiments are about creating pieces of shareable media," says Johanesen. "Whereas apps really are going to be about word-of-mouth and the people who get excited, download it, and evangelize it. So, the dynamics are definitely a little different than what we're used to. But this definitely won't be the last app.""
This Chair Pops Up Like A Frat Boy's Collar
Who has the coolest chair now?
There are chairs you sit in for a meeting with someone. And there are chairs you nestle into to read a book or sip a cocktail. The Reves Chair, by Muka Design Lab, wants to be both. So it deploys a clever back that pops up like a shirt collar, converting it from low-backed conversation chair to high-backed reading chair instantly.
Tiny Homes, Big Problems: Portlandia's Perfect Send-Up Of Microliving
A fold-up litter box! A home office/bathroom! Portlandia perfectly parodies the woes of microhousing.
Compact living may be better for the environment, but living in a 120-square-foot box isn't always easy. No matter how many space-saving designs your little home includes, it'll always be a pretty tight squeeze, especially for multiple people, as this recent Portlandia sketch reminds us.
The Five Types Of Mentors You Need
You can't expect one person to be able to give you all the career guidance you need. Here are the people you need on your team.
When we talk about mentorship in the workplace, we often focus on finding one person who can help to guide us through the challenges we will face at work. It might be better to think about the set of people you need to have around you to help you succeed.
Google Taps Starchitects Thomas Heatherwick And Bjarke Ingels For New Headquarters
The Googleplex is about to get an upgrade.
Google's Mountain View-based Googleplex is a whopping 3.1 million square feet—that's almost half the size of the Pentagon, and enough space for 53 football fields, side by side. But its architecture is uninspired, consisting of the anonymously functional buildings you'd see in any suburban commercial park.
Yves Béhar's Fuseproject To Design For A New Social-Good Accelerator
Yves Béhar's industrial design firm will work with 18 selected ventures whose services support girls in Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya.
This week, Yves Béhar's award-winning industrial design firm, fuseproject, announced it will provide design services for a new accelerator program that will help develop businesses whose products and services support adolescent girls in Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya. Created by the Nike Foundation, USAID, and the UK Department for International Development (DFID), SPRING will provide finance, mentorship, and technical expertise for 18 ventures selected each year for the next five years.
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