Seth Godin starts the year we a fascinating insight: Pain is part of work, and it leads to two mistakes…

When confronting with pain at work we think we have two choices:

• The notion that we can trade our way out of pain.
• Embracing our current pain, thus avoiding newer, unknown pains.

… but the one that pays is the third one.

“As a Director of Marketing, what’s the #1 thing you need to figure out about the web?”

This is a question that was recently posted at the Marketing Executives Group at LinkedIn, and the participants’ responses to that question were very revealing.

Most of the answers were of tactical nature, such as “use web analytics”, “get your site in Google”, “have a great UI and excellent SEO & SEM”, “leverage the unique capabilities of the channel” (i.e. “the-web-as-a-channel”), and so on.

But was it the right question to ask in the first place?

Framing a question correctly is 80% of the solution and sometimes even more

When we frame the question about “hot to figure out the web”, we are implying that “the web” is another thing that marketers need to “figure out” as if this “web” is a one-dimensional “thing” that lends itself to be “figured out”.

But the reality is that “the web” has changed the game in such profound manner that only these companies that embrace the disruption and the massive societal change it represents, will succeed. In fact, “the web” demands that an entire organization re-invents itself, not only its marketing.

Maybe what is needed is a finer distinction, and much, much better questions:

What is “the web”, in your opinion? Your website? A channel for communication about our company’s products or services? A channel for talking to your customers or a channel for talking with your customers? A platform for engaging with your customers in rich conversations? A platform for engaging your customers in the definition and fine-tunning of your products or services? A place to do market research or the place where a market is being defined?

Who controls the message in “the web”. You or your customers?

What is scarce in “the web” and what is abundant?

This may be obvious, but often disregarded: It is only by asking the right questions that we will get useful answers.

Consider also this: when we ask questions, how conscious are we of the possibility that we are applying confirmation bias?

From Wikipedia:

In studies of hypothesis-testing, people reject tests that are guaranteed to give a positive answer, in favor of more informative tests. However, many experiments have found that people tend to test in a one-sided way, by searching for evidence consistent with their currently held hypothesis. Rather than searching through all the relevant evidence, they frame questions in such a way that a “yes” answer supports their hypothesis and stop as soon as they find supporting information.[…] Even a small change in the wording of a question can affect how someone searches through the available information, and hence, the conclusion they come to.

If our experimentation becomes permanent, that’s not an experiment, but a decision.

Problem is we sometimes forget to make that distinction.

And we end up either being afraid to experiment because we think it will become permanent, or we end up making decisions which are permanent, when we think we are experimenting.

Crisis management expert Jonathan Bernstein, says that even though some organizations are prepared to respond to the operational components of a crisis, and as there are audiences potentially affected by any crisis, each of these audiences will need to know the facts as soon as possible. Otherwise, these audiences will start to needlessly worry or react inappropriately in the absence of these facts. But is that enough?

There is abundant material on the subject, and many theories and models associated with crisis management, and obviously, crises need to be addressed and in may instances addressed quite immediately. But at the same time, we ought to leave some spare cycles to look beyond the crisis and tap the collective intelligence and creativity of people to find innovative ways to forge ahead, rather than allowing these crises to hold us back by forcing our focus on “solving the problem”.

We have too many “problem solvers”, because our culture loves heroes. But how many of us are willing to exchange the mindset of problem solving for a mindset of innovation?

In 1982, when the war broke out on the northern border of Israel, I knew it wouldn’t be long before the reserves were called in: me included.

As a citizen of Israel — which I was at the time — I was a reservist soldier. I had my uniform, my boots, and my weapon in the closet.

So, there I was, a young man pursuing a path of inner peace — who loved life and loved people — suddenly confronted with a crude reality: you need to go to war and fight for your country. And so I did.

I served in a special unit of M60 Patton tanks in Division 252 of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). We were trained to fight in mountainous terrain: quite difficult for a 50-ton vehicle. My buddies in my armored platoon were puzzled when they saw me coming to join them. ‘What are you doing here?’ they said. ‘Didn’t you join some strange group of people that meditate and speak about peace all day long?’ They thought I had lost my marbles, and were not reassured to see me there. After all, would you go to war with a person that had devoted himself to fostering peace and believed in the sanctity of life? Would you trust that person to protect your own life when push came to shove? I understood where they were coming from.

So, after three days of preparation, we were on our way to the border to spend what ended up being fifteen long days in the frontline.

These days are a blurred memory of little sleep, endless drives on moonless nights, huge precipices right and left, the unavoidable confusion over the radio during combat, the clanging noise of the 105-mm cartridges falling inside the tank turret after firing, and terrifying moments of absolute fear: fear of the kind that I could never have imagined experiencing. But what I remember vividly is that most of what I knew about myself or what I thought about myself — my concepts, my ideas, my beliefs — all left me within the first minutes of the first shelling we took. All gone, as fast as rats abandoning a sinking ship. And that included my beliefs and concepts about peace.

All gone, but one thing did not. It was not big, not impressive: no booming voice from the sky or sense of spiritual enlightenment. None of that. Just a tiny, itty-bitty thing that did not leave me. It was a small understanding — nothing too impressive. But it was there and I could feel it. It was a seed of understanding about my life. Not what I thought about myself. Not what others thought of me. But it was real, and it was in me, and I could feel it.

I then recognized that this seed of understanding had been planted a few years back, after I had been introduced to Maharaji’s message. I had learned the techniques of Knowledge, and I had watered that seed for a while. It hadn’t grown a lot, but nonetheless it had grown enough, if just barely, for me to actually see it.

Did that seed of understanding protect me from bullets and shells? Of course not. Did it remove my fear, so that I valiantly stood on the tank turret, wind on my face, defying death? Of course not. So what did I really have, then? I had Knowledge. A simple experience. A cornerstone. Something that would never abandon me. Doesn’t sound like much? It was for me. And apparently for my buddies in the platoon as well.

After the cease-fire, when we cleaned our tanks, had a long-awaited shower and then some hot grub back at the base, many of them came over to shake my hand — they wanted to thank me. I was very surprised when they did.

In particular I remember Koren, a burly mountain of a man with a shaved head, John Lennon-style glasses, and a handlebar mustache. He thanked me for my courage and strength throughout the ordeal, for my calmness, and for lifting his spirits. I was amazed: I thought I was as afraid and confused as they were. But that little seed of understanding must’ve been much more than I thought.

Even when everything seemed to be lost, that understanding — as small as it was — was still there. It shined on its own. It was real.

Illustration by Sara Shaffer.

The script provided by ipinfodb, does not have a timeout option, resulting in the function hanging for 30 seconds or more (depending on your PHP time out settings.)

The solution:

Add a context to the file_get_content function on the Geolocation class:

$context = stream_context_create(array(
'http' => array(
'timeout' => 3 // Timeout in seconds
)
));


… and then call file_get_contents with that context:
$xml = @file_get_contents('http://' . $this->service . '/' . $this->version . '/' . 'ip_query_country.php?key=' . $this->apiKey . '&ip=' . $ip, 0, $context);

This will force a timeout of 3 seconds if IPinfodb servers are down.

“I’ve written this book fully intending to change your mind about the way we create. And to start a revolution in the context of your work.” Tessa Zeng

I first met Tessa in 2004, when she was sharing her art at DevianArt as a 14 year old amazing poet.

(Now Tessa came out with her new eBook, ‘Change Creation’. Free download, generous giving, worth spreading.)

Listen

Both the Andean wind instruments and the Native American flutes use the pentatonic scale, making the transition from one to another quite natural.

From Wikipedia:

Pentatonic scales are very common and are found all over the world, including Celtic folk music, Hungarian folk music, West African music, African-American spirituals, American folk music, Jazz, American blues music and rock music, Sami joik singing, children’s songs, the music of ancient Greece and the Greek traditional music and songs from Epirus, Northwest Greece and the music of Southern Albania, the tuning of the Ethiopian krar and the Indonesian gamelan, Philippine Kulintang, melodies of Korea, Malaysia, Japan, China, India and Vietnam (including the folk music of these countries), the Andean music, the Afro-Caribbean tradition, Polish highlanders from the Tatra Mountains, and Western Classical composers such as French composer Claude Debussy. The pentatonic scale is also used on the Great Highland Bagpipe.

The ubiquity of pentatonic scales, specifically anhemitonic modes, can be attributed to the total lack of the most dissonant intervals between any pitches; there are neither any minor seconds (and therefore also no complementary major sevenths) nor any tritones. This means any pitches of such a scale may be played in any order or combination without clashing.

Native American, cedar, by Rick Heller (2001)

This flute, crafted by Rick Heller in 2001, features five holes (G scale), and has a nice timbre and tonal qualities.

Listen:

Each year, at my birthday, I try and add to my collection. This year hope to add a low A bass flute from one of the few craftsman still creating these wonderful instruments.

“Choosing is a creative process, one through which we construct our environment, our lives, ourselves.”

Iyengar describes the glorification of choice in American culture,  which emphasizes individuality, and the differences with  Asian cultures in which the deference of choice to parents or elders and harmony preservasion is preferred.  In  her article “Choice and Its Discontents: Challenges for the New Millennium”, Iyengar writes:

From the beginning of our nation’s history, the concept of “choice” has been glorified. “Liberty,” after all, is enshrined subordinate only to “life” itself in our Declaration of Independence. Even today, the glorification of “choice” permeates many aspects of American life–from the plethora of options available within our local grocery stores, where there are often aisles devoted solely to different types of potato chips or soft drinks, to the use of choice, or more specifically “pro-choice,” as a persuasive device in current political debate. In our day-to-day lives, the choices we make may range from the trivial, such as what to eat and what to wear, to the consequential, such as what career to undertake and whom to marry. Inherent in all of these practices is the belief that choice is both desirable and powerful.

[...]

One recent and highly influential cultural analysis presented by Markus and Kitayama implies that preferences for, and benefits of, choice might well vary across different cultural contexts. In particular, Markus and Kitayama have suggested that whereas personal agency is an essential element of the self-identities of American individualists, it may be considerably less relevant to the self-worth of members of more collectivistic cultures, characteristic of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere. If so, then the links between the provision of choice and job satisfaction, motivation and performance may prove less universal and more particularly relevant for North Americans and Western Europeans.

Westerners, Markus and Kitayama suggest, possess a self-identity that is fundamentally independent. Such individuals will strive for independence, seek a sense of individual autonomy and desire to express their personal preferences in order to establish their uniqueness within their environments. For Americans, therefore, making a choice provides an opportunity to display one’s preferences, and consequently to express one’s internal attributes, to assert one’s autonomy and to fulfill the goal of being unique. For Americans, individual choice and personal autonomy may be deeply intertwined with their sense of identity.

[...]
By contrast, consider a different cultural context in which the members possess a more interdependent model of the self. As opposed to American individualists, Markus and Kitayama theorize, members of more interdependent cultures (i.e., most non-Western cultures, notably those in Asia) strive for interconnectedness and belongingness with their social in-groups by seeking to maintain harmony and endeavoring to fulfill the wishes of those in-groups.

“It is difficult to have a conversation about choice with Asians. It was difficult to have a conversation about harmony with Americans.”

TED Talk