Henry Hagnäs

CEO Performance Index

I just watched Kevin Rose interview the former CEO of Linden Labs (creator of Second Life), Philip Rosedale. The whole interview was excellent but one of the most interesting and bone-chilling ideas he had as a CEO was the most memorable:

Every month he'd send out an anonymous survey to all employees and just ask three simple questions:

* Do you want to keep me as a CEO?
* Regardless of your previous answer, do you think I have improved during the last month?
* Why?

The statistics on the two first answers he'd post publicly so anyone could follow the trend and see when it started to be time to for him to leave or change. The answers to "Why?" he'd keep secret but read himself.

That is just such a bone-chillingly scary idea, yet extremely good feedback for him and great honesty towards his employees. Can you imagine how much balls it takes to do that and how few CEO's would be capable of it?

You can watch the whole interview here (the part I'm talking about is within the last 5-minutes or so):

UNDERCITY, Urban Exploration

Polaroid SX-70 Ad

Top of the World

Click straight into Youtube (lower right corner of the video) for higher-res version of the video. Taken from the top of Ukko-Koli.

Rainy day in Lapland

Took this while playing around with the camera on a rainy day last week:

My new Panasonic GF1 was absolutely fabulous to have along while on the move. Really fast, versatile and reasonable size. Still learning about editing both video and RAW pictures. The pictures from my Fujifilm are actually easier to edit because they come out all full of vibrant color straight off the camera. This is more real-world I guess.

I didn't have to recharge the camera at all during the trip and saved almost 10GB of media on it, 544 RAW pictures (20-30 with flash), 26 minutes of 720p video. Glad I got the 16GB memory card :).

More pictures to come when I get them sorted out!

Pixar's Ed Catmull on Management

A very interesting video from 2009 of Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar, showed up in my twitter-feed this morning; its called “Keep Your Crises Small”:

It’s almost an hour long and was filmed at Stanford Graduate School of Business so it's mostly from a management and business perspective about the challenges that Pixar has had even though it has been successful. I spent a few years being pretty interesting in a lot of management and business stuff and read a lot about it; enough to become a little cynical I guess — management theory has some truth to it but there are lots of gurus who don’t really know very much in the end. This presentation is far from some management consultant guru and is packed with interesting and useful knowledge. Ed seems like a very pragmatic manager and he cuts through a lot of bullshit. I’d like to think its because of his technical background but I might be biased there :).

Anyway, watch that if you have any interest in either background information about Pixar or practical management stuff, albeit on a a pretty high level.

Some of my notes:

• Don’t confuse organizational structure with communications structure, i.e. keep information flowing between teams and everywhere even if you put up a hierarchical structure 
• Managers hate being surprised, don’t let them know about something new at a meeting among everyone else 
• Success hides problems. Just like a healthy body can take a lot of unhealthy behavior, a successful company can get away with a lot of bad decisions 
• People (and teams) are more important than ideas, good teams will do great things with mediocre ideas but mediocre teams will do mediocre stuff with good ideas 
• People copy the wrong things, don’t copy 3D technology if the really good thing is the storytelling — easy to copy technology but almost always the wrong thing to copy 
• Always do a post-mortem after projects but always change the metrics so people don’t game the system 
• There are services that give you the essence of business books and they are really interesting because they show how content-free the books are (Henry: YES!) 
• There are some phrases that are “truths” and important in the community but doesn’t actually change behavior, “Story is important” (movie making), “Designing from the inside out” (Architecture), “Quality is king” (Engineering) 
• Human organizations are inherently unstable but fail very slowly, most people won’t notice it and let the success blind them — collapse is then quick. 
• Constant self-assessment important, look for the hard truths — especially when successful.

TEDTalk: Gaming can make a better world

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

I especially like the whole idea about human resources not fully utilized in gamers. I also think there are, especially among young people, other groups of people that are underutilized in today's world because the people with money and resources don't understand them. Daniel Suarez's books Daemon and Freedom(tm) touch open these issues aswell. Maybe companies should start giving experience points for a job well done?

Friday productivity killer: List of old Youtube favourites

Not sure if I have any twitter-follower anymore but today I decided to ruin everyones productivity by posting funny,old Youtube-clips on twitter. My favourites-list on Youtube came in handy here (you can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/user/hagnas#g/f ).
Instead of continuing this barrage I will list all of the ones I posted and planned to post here and anyone can use their own judgement about viewing them or not :).

Already posted:

Comedy: Henry Rollins - Rave and Modern Rock Music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyRDDOpKaLM

Comedy: Sniper Business http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfz2D6dglCo

Comedy: Mr. Deity and the Science Advisor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Clm6nlWxzc

Extreme Sheep LED Art http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2FX9rviEhw

Cannonball in mercury http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm5D47nG9k4

Old Woman and Airbag http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZCoIege8oM

Inspired Bicycles - Danny MacAskill http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z19zFlPah-o

Urban Sprinting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96OljGZapv4

Public Dancing at Centraal Station Antwerpen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UE3CNu_rtY (Magical!)

Cat Shit One Movie Trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr4QBZfjtqs

Important information about the danish language http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

Rodney Mullen showing how skateboarding is done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U-cgn3cEGA

Ali-G interviews Posh Spice and David Beckham: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P842Tmi6lrc

Christopher Judge of SG-1 learns about Furries http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_1SK0I_sM

Club Coach, howto prep for tonights night out! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xts0mCO3bQ8

Coolest 8-year old! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8x14cLGh5o Wonder what she does novadays?

I have decided to ruin your productive friday by posting links to old Youtube clips: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2XQ97XHjVw

Planned to post:

Short film: Validation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbk980jV7Ao

Excellent interview with @donttrythis (Adam Savage from Mythbusters) from Reddit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8jqea8R-bE

Trailer: Office 2010 - The Movie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUawhjxLS2I

Comedy: Handsome Men's Club http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyGJXLxtVEo

Comedy: Tim Minchin (@timminchin) - Storm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujUQn0HhGEk

Comedy: Louis CK - Everything is Amazing and Nobody is Happy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOtEQB-9tvk

Comedy: Jeff Dunham - Achmed the Dead Terrorist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uwOL4rB-go

Comedy: George Carlin - Saving the Planet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw

Comedy: Mithchell & Webb - The Evil Genius http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgX6JFoV0TM 

Comedy: Dara O'Briain - Homeopathy & Nutritionists vs Real Science http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIaV8swc-fo

Music video, Fear the Boom and Bust (Hayek vs Keynes) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk

Music video, Helsinki Complaints Choir http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATXV3DzKv68

Music video, Dub FX - Soothe Your Pain http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F6EoMdn95E

Music video, The Guilt Song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGas0D9_zgI

Music video, Rock and Roll Nerd http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP9pnSXhibw

Music video, The World is Just Awesome XKCD-edition http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQAk_T9SBbw

Music video, The World Is Just Awesome 2009 (Boom De Yada!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0jZzBEKIMc

Music video, The World Is Just Awesome 2008 (Boom De Yada!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at_f98qOGY0

Music video, The BossHoss - Hey Ya! (new vid b/c old link was killed.. ) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQVWXAlEUB8

Music video, Large Hadron Rap http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM

Music video, The Space Camp Song! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY0xwRIGOdc

Music video, Richard Dawkins Rap - Beware the Believers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFXIALf9zDA

Music video, C.I.L.F (Cartoons I'd Like to F) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82DjpPX60xU

Music video, TSA Gangstaz http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7AWw7t5zj0

Music video, The Day The Routers Died... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y36fG2Oba0

Now I can't use the same trick to ruin everyone's productivity next friday, luckily there's a whole week of brainstorming until then.. Have a nice weekend everyone!

Mobile video upload with N900

The Youtube version takes around 10-15 minutes to be "processed" into 480p-quality after upload but then the quality is way better after that (nothing stunning still though).

I used Pixelpipe to upload the ca 40MB video, very easy and pain-free. Twitvid isn't really necessary I think; will instead setup autosharing to Twitter on Youtube and use Youtube exclusively for video in the future. Until Bambuser finishes their work on the Maemo-app, then I might have to start using that instead at times.

Video: The Next 4 Billion with Tomi Ahonen