ungroundedthinking:

Introducing UnGrounded: a hack at 30,000 feet.

In some places in the world, an entire generation of brilliant minds don’t have the opportunities or partnerships they need. In other places, there are more opportunities than qualified people. It’s called the “global misalignment of talent.” 

British Airways has an idea to help tackle this problem.

Our Advisory Board is hand-picking 100 of the most forward-thinking founders, CEOs, venture capitalists, and Silicon Valley game-changers, and putting them on a flight from San Francisco to London.

On board, they’ll do what they do best—innovate and collaborate to find an effective solution to this growing global challenge.

Once back on land, they’ll present their ideas to ranking delegates from the United Nations. 

Follow along and see who will get a seat on this ambitious flight.

Tell us your ideas, share your insights, and offer your solutions. Who knows? You could help change the world.

A difference of culture

I’ve been to the United States a few times and I find it an endlessly fascinating place. I’m in the Bay Area for the first time and this is the closest I’ve felt Stateside to being back home. LA and NY have very different personalities.

For the first time though I think I’m starting to get my head around the cultural differences between our countries. I’ll blog about it once my trip wraps as there is still much to learn.

From an entrepreneurial perspective though, I was chatting with an Aussie here and he offered up a laugh out loud example of the difference:

If pitching a Holstein-Friesian cow, an Australian will point to the black and white colour, talk about the features of the cow, what it does, perhaps what it ate for breakfast; an American on the other hand will hold up a burger and exclaim how incredibly tasty it is.

Something for all budding Australian entrepreneurs to contemplate.

Grunge killed the music business

A few days ago I was reading a post on Digital Music News lamenting the state of the music industry (a term so broad to be almost meaningless):

Today you wrote that “the recording has effectively become worthless”. Turning music into a commodity has far reaching implications that go well beyond the destruction of the record industry. One of the results is the overall devaluation of the music experience.

I have a theory devoid of any empirical research — that’d make it an opinion then — that Grunge really started the music industry’s demise. Not the music per se, but the attitude that musicians were no different than their fans.

While this is true to the extent that (IMHO) no single person is greater or lesser than the next, what made the music industry great was that musicians like Hendrix, Page, Joplin, Mozart, etc, had abilities far greater than their fans.

But when musicians start saying they’re no different to the fans, we have a problem. Which is simply because as a species humans want what we don’t have and don’t value what we do.

As Chuck D said in a Tweet:

If the crowd feels they can do better than you why would they take the time & $ to be bothered?

For a very long time the crowd has felt they can do what musicians do, and if that’s the view then what musicians do has very little comparative value. It doesn’t matter whether that’s true or not: perception is reality.

The ‘straw’ that broke the banks?

Something has got to give in how business and ‘the people’ interact with the banking sector …

THE most memorable incidents in earth-changing events are sometimes the most banal. In the rapidly spreading scandal of LIBOR (the London inter-bank offered rate) it is the very everydayness with which bank traders set about manipulating the most important figure in finance.

“This is the banking industry’s tobacco moment,” says the chief executive of a multinational bank, referring to the lawsuits and settlements that cost America’s tobacco industry more than $200 billion in 1998. “It’s that big,” he says.

— The Economist

About the TSA

So, I’ve read all these amazing stories about the TSA and airport security. Google ‘em and you’ll get the picture. My experience was that airport security is pretty much the same as in Australia, albeit significantly enhanced since my last trip Stateside.

And I’m assuming things were a little tighter given it was 4th of July.

Stepping into the void

Philippe Petit, the French high-wire artist who famously walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers in 1974, has a few thoughts for entrepreneurs:

You must not fall. When you lose your balance, resist for a long time before turning yourself toward the earth. Then jump. You must not force yourself to stay steady. You must move forward.

I don`t have respect for people who walk on the wire with any kind of safety net. I don’t really like the fact that if you fall you die, but it’s part of what the wire is.

Of course when entrepreneurs fail we don’t actually die, but there’s no turning back once we step onto our ‘wire’.

Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge - and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope.

Petit’s walk is captured in the movie Man on Wire, and here’s a neat cartoon about Petit’s impossible dream.

Content has no value

Uber agent Ari Emanuel’s act at last week’s ATD conference was fun to watch, but he has one thing fundamentally wrong: content has no value.

Yes, content has end user utility (I love certain programming for instance, Breaking Bad anyone?) but those of us engaged in the creative industries extract our return from a very specific point in the value chain, not from the content itself.

Failing to understand this is a root cause of the conflict between Hollywood at the Valley. It behooves us to at least get this right.