Adii Pienaar

Crazy kids.

Doing some research work on “designing a user experience” and stumbled onto this amazing TED talk by Don Norman. Do watch “The Three Ways That Good Design Makes You Happy”.

Only caught onto this now, after reading some of 37Signals’ unique thoughts on the matter. Interesting idea nonetheless… In their own words:

“…the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network…”

Do we need another social networking platform? Maybe not.

Can they beat Facebook? Probably not.

But with $170k in funds already, they have to at least try do *something* that is at least semi-significant, so I’m keen to see how this plays out.

I felt so inspired by this post and specifically loved this bit:

These business models will leverage the passion of individuals, create networks and build communities. They’ll provide ways for people to connect, to build, to contribute, to give. They’ll let employees be people. They’ll build products with a purpose. They’ll build companies with a purpose, with a mission that is understood, supported and created by their employees, customers and fans.

Taylor Davidson, Doing Good is Good Business.

Being a bit of a business models junkie, I think Taylor raises quite a few good questions here. A few of the things, that I think needs some urgent attention (from the world’s leading thinkers on business):

1. Old metrics are just old. Things change and it doesn’t help to teach students old metrics just for the sake of it anymore.
2. Markets are agile and metrics need to be flexible enough to allow them to adapt at the appropriate pace.
3. Find a way the quantify “social good”.

So whilst there may be more questions than answers at the moment, this is a great read and should be on top of your “to read”-list this week.

The world would probably be a better place if all employees had this attitude towards their work, but instead the world is riddled with people who absolutely hate their jobs and just-just manages to contribute the minimum of which is expected of them.