Google and search engines are ruining our lives. I’m convinced of it. Sure, we can now find everything we want to know about any given subject by typing a word and hitting search. Now wait. We don’t even have to finish typing the word. Magical internet search engine elves anticipate our search criteria and fill in the rest of word or phrase for us, most of the time with eerily accuracy.  What’s so wrong about that? Well, the instant retrieval of exactly the information we search for is convenient for sure, but it is doing away with a part of my past I wish I could still have: serendipitous discovery. I remember looking through the card catalog and pouring through stacks of books in my college library in search of a book and finding authors and titles that were not even on my radar, but due to the “analog” nature…

I just found out about HAES, Health At Every Size, from a Google+ shared blog by Chris Brogan. The post By Amy Pershing titled “Is The Idea Of Health At Every Size Just Permission To Be Fat?” The implied answer in the title is “no” but I’m having a tough time with overall concept. In her own words Ms. Pershing says, According to the BMI chart and the cultural message, I still have about 35 lbs to go. My body, however, seems perfectly healthy and happy right here. I figure she knows better. So “HAES” is NOT about “permission to get fat.” It is about each of us individually listening with body and mind, letting our unique bodies find the way to the weight they are happy to be, and valuing whatever the result. While there is a lot of support for HAES, I think it’s a dangerous slippery slope…

I have been puzzled about Google’s inability to do well in the social media space. I have watched them take over Blogger and instead of making it better and more relevant, they managed to lose market share. There were another string of failures like Dogeball, Jaiku, Lively, Buzz and Wave. Even Orkut, the largest social network in Brazil, is now losing the Brazilians to Facebook. I have seen several of my friends migrate from Orkut recently. It wasn’t until a recent article in FastCompany profiling Larry Page, Google’s CEO, that I got a clue into the search giant’s ineptitude at social media. As it turns out, Larry does not use social media. Now it all makes perfect sense. Organizational culture is driven from the top. It makes sense that what the leadership values, their passion and interests get researched, funded and developed. It’s interesting to me that such a large…

The pace of change has picked up. Not only is the world flat, the world adopts technology, new standards at a much faster pace than ever before. Just look at what Google and Facebook have done for business and cultural expectations. Yesterday Facebook introduced a new profile feature and Google introduced an ebook store. Millions of people immediately adapted and adopted the new options. As a matter of fact, we have come to expect this kind of dynamic change. This fast pace has created a lot of opportunity for some and has been the demise of others. To me, this new business model is defined by ambiguity. What does that mean? It means that as a leader I still need to know where I want to take my organization, but I no longer have the luxury of planning my trip all the way to its final destination. Along the way…