Category Archives: Culture Heroes

Why Orwellian selfishness matters to me

Posted on July 1st, 2012

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm have long been heralded for their prescient storylines and earned the writer a reputation as one of the greatest in the English language. And it didn’t stop there. In between the two, in 1946, he wrote an essay entitled Why I Write, which with classic Orwellian insight described [...]

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Why positive people will always win in the end

Posted on March 5th, 2012

I’ve found myself in an environment of late where I am surrounded by people that I can believe in. Naturally positive people. It’s a really good place to be for someone like me and I thought I’d share a few specific observations: 1) Positive people don’t only make negativity uncomfortably out of place, they have [...]

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We don’t want to believe what we know

Posted on March 3rd, 2012

Filmmaker Yann Arthus-Bertrand says that ‘we don’t want to believe what we know’ in his TED talk about the state of the planet. In context, he is talking about the looming exhaustion of our natural resources and the ways in which ecosystems are going to be wiped out by sea temperature changes. But the statement itself [...]

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Culture Heroes: NASA’s Apollo Teams: R&D-I-Y and one of the greatest stories ever told

Posted on December 11th, 2011

Between April 11 – 17, 1970, the Apollo 13 saga gripped much of the world as three NASA spacemen in a badly-damaged ship wound their way around the moon and home to Earth with all bets of their survival fundamentally off. Or at least that’s how it seemed to the world at large. But there [...]

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Culture Hero: Daryn Basson, founder of Del Fuego Designs. ‘I just do sh*t the way it’s intended.’

Posted on December 1st, 2011

Disclaimer: this time I’m writing about a friend, but I’m doing so unprompted and without remuneration; just with a sincere sense of appreciation for the way he’s innovating customer service based on what can only be described as engulfing engagement. His name’s Daryn Basson and his company is the up-and-coming Del Fuego Designs; a South [...]

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Lessons on greed from a real-life Slumdog* Millionaire

Posted on October 28th, 2011

If Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London and all the other recent protest actions have achieved anything at all, it is to highlight the general distaste in these times for pure greed. Whether that message has been heard or will lead to any sort of change appears to be doubtful, which is a pity. But it’s [...]

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Make sure you hire skills from the crazy pool

Posted on October 23rd, 2011

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.” So ran an ad in one of the London newspapers in 1912 as Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton began to recruit for his next attempt to plant the Union Jack firmly in [...]

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Steven R. Covey is not a quack. It turns out he’s a clever man. You may now all read his book.

Posted on September 26th, 2011

If my life had a subtext, it would probably be the sincere hope that the term ‘better late than never’ is actually true. Often I have come across ideas in complete earnestness, but been so unable to get to grips with them that I have discarded them as total nonsense, only to rediscover them years [...]

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Culture Hero: Derek Sivers, founder of CDBaby. ‘It’s okay for things to be simple.’

Posted on August 2nd, 2011

You remember the Jerry Maguire manifesto? The one that got him sacked in the 1996 movie? Of course you do. Or you should anyway, because even the most die-hard anti-Cruiser would have to admit that movie was fundamentally awesome. Anyway, not to get all film-school on you, but there were two major themes in that [...]

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Deliberately catch people doing things right

Posted on July 28th, 2011

Maintaining a world-beating culture can be as easy as doing a bunch of little things regularly. Take for example the simple process of deliberately catching people doing things right. None of us are total strangers to giving positive feedback. But generally, and rather sadly, we’re more given to voicing the negatives and letting the positives [...]

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