TED talks for startups

I came across a RWW post entitled "10 Inspiring TED Talks for Startups", and being an avid TED watcher I thought I'd take them all for a spin. I pulled a muscle in my back and it only hurts when I move/breathe, so I didn't feel guilty watching TED videos for a bunch of hours on end.

There were some I'd seen before, and some that I don't want to watch again. Long story short, the TED website slice and dice their content a zillion different ways, providing many ways to discover and consume the 'best' talks, including a top 10. My advice, is that there are more interesting talks for the intellectually curious, including those who have a bent on starting a startup.

Nevertheless, if all of the talks on the list are new to you, my picks would include: 1, 3,  4, 7, 9.

Like most TED talks, there is a key thesis or idea in each talk and a whole lot of analogy and case studies designed to make you understand/think you had the idea yourself. Naturally, I didn't consume them passively, see below for my 'workings out' (notes).

1. Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action.
• Golden Circle: Why, How, What (start with what and work in)
• Great leaders invert the circle (start with why and work out)
• People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it
• Examples: Wright Brothers, Apple, Martin Luther King
• Why speaks to decision making centers in the brain (limbic), What speaks to rational/language centers (prefrontal cortex).
• Communicate your "why" (belief, purpose, vision) and let people buy in for themselves, then try to sell them the "what" and "how".
• Sell to people, hire people who believe what you believe.
• There are leaders and those who lead (power vs inspiration).
2. Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids.
• Childish - dreams for perfection (unconstrained optimism)
• Adult - reasons not to do things (focus on constraints)!
• Kids think of good ideas, not thinking within traditional limitations.
• Learning between adults-kids should be reciprocal.
3. Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity.
• User generated content - how to open it up.
• Avoid top-down, professionalized, read-only culture, seek read-write and participative.
• cases: talking machines killing culture,  flights a trespassers over the land below, broadcasting, BMI a more democratic management of music content.
• Revive the read-write culture using digital technology.
• User generated content - amateur culture - produce for the love not the money.
• Remixing content - not piracy, recreating with existing content.
• Democratizing techniques (digital techniques - tools of technology become tools of literacy) - say things differently.
• Architecture of copyright law - makes remix illegal, everything is a copy online.
• Adopt permissive non-commercial licenses, need private solution like BMI, let competition in the marketplace solve this problem.
4. Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.
• Candle problem - example of overcoming cognitive fixedness.
• Control vs rewards/competition, reward motivation can make them perform worse.
• On lots of tasks incentives don't help and can make things worse.
• Incentives really only work well for simple problems, narrow focus with well defined constraints.
• rewards narrow focus, hamper creativity 
• The creative problems are more of the types of problems we do now - the easy problems are outsourced and automated.
• Use intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, purpose  over extrinsic (carrot and stick).
• Engagement: self-direction works better than management.
• Examples: Atlassian and Google (20% time), Wikipedia vs MS Encarta
5. Rory Sutherland: Sweat the small stuff.
• Worry about the little things (marketing and if you want to make a difference).
• The little things are the things that people remember.
• Behavior change inverse to the amount of force applied.
• The big stuff has money and is done well.
• too powerful, too high level
• people with the power want to do the big expensive things
• makes the high salaries seem worth while
• The small stuff is done badly - the user interface.
• We want input and change to be proportional (Newtonian)
• Reality is much more complex
• This is not the world, small change has big effect. (complexity theory)
• Need to look for those small risky things that can have a huge effect.
• Need a name for this, very important.
• chief detail officer 
6. Seth Godin on standing out.
• Case study on sliced bread patent focused on how to make it, was a failure for 15 years, took good marketing to take off.
• This is the century of ideas diffusion (those who are best at it, win).
• We are currently focus on trying to get the front page on google, how to grab attention.
• Advertising is currently all about interrupting the consumer.
• Consumers don't care, too much choices, too little time, they ignore stuff.
• Purple cow - you need to stand out - is it remarkable (worth commenting on).
• We're all in the fashion business now - not about interrupting people.
• old: mass marketing: average products for normal people
• new: never market to normal people, market to innovators and early adopters - then word of mouth will push it into mainstream
• You need a group that cares about what you have to say.
• Find out what people really want, then give it to them.
• Riskiest thing you can do is being safe - the safe thing now is being remarkable
• Being very good is boring. (get scrappy?)
7. Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce.
• Breakthrough: There is no best Pepsi, there is best Pepsi's.
• Spaghetti sauce.
• Created a search space, tested the space.
• Measured the modality of the space - the peaks
• three groups: plain, spicy, extra chunky
• pickles: regular and zesty
• You need to provide choice - multimodal not unimodal distributions of preference.
• This changed the way the food industry makes you happy
• old way: what do you want in product? always wrong, people don't know what they want
• new way: horizontal segmentation. trial lots of things, collect data and analyze 
• Mustard's: french and golden, then dijon
•  lesson: make them aspire to something - a better product, sophistication (wrong!)
• It is not a hierarchy, it is a plain, a spectrum with clusters of preference.
• You no longer you have a platonic dish.
• authentic dish was the way to go, seeking cooking universals
• Now - the understanding of variability
• interested in the details of the differences 
8. Jan Chipchase on our mobile phones.
• Types of possessions: owned, consider, carry, use
• 3 most important things: keys, money, mobile phone
• core reason: survival (lowest level in Maslow's hierarchy of needs)
• mobile phone can transcend space and time (call, and sync messages)
• personal and convenient
• methods for avoiding forgetting: tap your pockets, turn around, rituals
• center of gravity - where you look for things
• never forget: have nothing to remember
• art of delegate
• Turn phone into ATM in Africa
•  decentralized, street innovation
• peoples identity is mobile
• effects of everyone having a mobile phone: immediacy of ideas, immediacy of objects (adoption), the street will innovate despite you in ways you cannot anticipate (design), direction of conversation (learning how to listen)
9. Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world.
• 20th Century taught us how to be good consumers, now new media gives us all an ability to also be producers 
• Cognitive Surplus - enabling ability of digital media and contribution of peoples free time (ability to create, ability to share)
• Examples: Ushahidi and LOL cats. Difference is LOLCats is communal value (the group), Ushahidi is civic value (good of society).
• Once you allow creation/experiments, you have to allow the spectrum, the Ushahidi and the LOL Cats (gap is between doing anything and doing nothing)
• Design for generosity - manage economic contracts (money for goods and services) and your social contract (being good) - they are different and incompatible .
• Only going to get more participation, both types of value, but the latter value will change our society.
10. Chip Conley: Measuring what makes life worthwhile.
• Finding meaning makes you happy.
• Hierarchy of needs - Maslow
• apply hierarchy of the individual to the business
• survival, success, transformation: for business/life
• Adoption results in lowered turnover, increased customer loyalty
• manage what you can measure - old way
• need to manage the intangible (top of the pyramid)
• we think they are important - no idea how to measure them
• an alternative measure of success: gross domestic happiness (GMH)
• start measuring and monitoring happiness 
• about creating the conditions for happiness to happen
• have lots of indicators, questions, etc
• emotional equation
•  happiness: wanting what have (gratitude) / having what you want (gratification)
• USA/West are a bottom heavy culture
• happiness is not an object
• GDP is important although doesn't count a lot of things that matter to us in life
• maximizing GDP optimizes tangible success, but not tangible happiness
• need to create conditions for happiness
• can have inspired employees and tangible profits
• what counts?