ideasarehere

January 25, 2013

It’s a game, but different

Filed under: business,creativity,workflow — Erik Dobberkau @ 18:43

We all know them, the often motivationally intended comparisons of organisations, working teams, to sports teams. Or armies. But let’s stick with the sports.

The shortcoming with these comparisons: They do not reflect reality. And even if you knew that already (which I assume), I wonder if you’ve ever asked yourself why that is. And the answer that hit me the other day is that you are not only Team Red, you’re also Team Blue, and there are at least two balls in the game.

Just like every person is the biggest obstacle on the way to [success, happiness, self-actualisation …], so is an organisation. Because the dynamics work both ways: Not only do you have to move “the” ball from your side towards the other goal, but at the same time prevent “the” ball from hitting yours. The ball(s) you’re moving forward are your assignments, and the balls coming towards you are (or will become) problems. Not only linked to assignments, some are random, “outside-world factors”, nevertheless you have to deal with them.

It’s not enough to focus on the development of your “offensive game”, you must also -at the same time- prevent or solve problems quickly and effectively or your score will be diminished by the problems that hit you in the back. After all, what’s hitting a goal worth when you get hit twice at the same time?

So the next time you’re going for the team circle, you may want to keep this in mind. You’re both teams, and there’s many balls in the game. All need to be taken care of, otherwise you better not bet on yourself.

The bachelor box

Filed under: creativity — Erik Dobberkau @ 18:22

Last weekend I’ve been reviewing a senior thesis, the lecture of which brought me to the simple question: What’s the use?

Most of this kind of effort is devoted to paraphrasing knowledge from books, professional journals, and the web. Add a little survey with some rudimentary statistics, top it off with a case study, there you go. The problem I see is all this is too much academic work with limited practical or scientific use, little original thought, but that’s what we (organisations, entire economies, or people in general) need.

We need to move forward, and the only way this will be accomplished is by original thought. New ideas, “what happens if…”, that’s where we need to direct our attention.

January 6, 2013

Video quicktip roundup

Filed under: creativity,video,workflow — Erik Dobberkau @ 21:25
  • If you need to install Final Cut Studio 2 (FCP6) on a Mac running OS X Lion (10.7) or Mountain Lion (10.8), you should either have a Snow Leopard Installer Disc at hand to install Rosetta first (from the “Optional Installs” folder) or you can use Terminal to do it without the Graphic installer (which is the reason why it doesn’t install without Rosetta, it’s still PPC code (not the FCS apps themselves, to be clear), whereas Final Cut Studio 3’s installer is Intel only).
    The magic Terminal command is (one line)
    sudo install -package /Volumes/Final\ Cut \ Studio/Installer/FinalCutStudio.mpkg -target /
    Use your respective source directory if you copied the installer to disk beforehand. Hat tip to Jeremy Johnstone for solving this.
  • External disks which are supposed to be accessible for read/write on both Mac and PC should be formatted to exFAT (available since Mac OS X 10.6.5 and Win XP, for which you need to install an update filed under KB955704). This circumvents the 4GB file barrier of FAT32.
  • GoPro Hero HD footage (no matter what model) is best to be converted with MPEG Streamclip, especially if you need to go to SD formats. It’s way faster than Compressor and can merge all your files into one (open source files sorted by date), plus it takes everything to a “standard” codec (which GoPro’s CineForm Studio doesn’t, they have their own, which is not bad either, but…). Note that on the Mac you have the benefit of merging several clips into one, which doesn’t work that well on a Windows machine because the single clips are not always in the right order. You may circumvent this by (copying and) renaming the Gopro files to the correct sequential order.

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