Eino Leino (1878-1926)

Eino Leino

Originally Eino Armas Leopold Lönnbohm, Finnish poet Eino Leino was a playwright and novelist and considered a master of song-like poetic forms. He was the most important name in Finnish-language poetry at the turn of the 20th century is by now Finland’s most cited poet. Leino combined the “archaic and mythic tradition, symbolism, and influences from Friedrich Nietzsche with his romantic concept of the poet as a truth-seeking visionary”. 

Leino’s life style was bohemian and from the beginning of his literary career Leino was a well-known figure amongst Helsinki’s cultural elite. Here’s an extract from his work.

Short time’s to us allotted till our urn.
Living, like furnace flames then let us burn,
High let us in the fire be ascending,
Earth stays below, the spirit’s heavenward tending.
(from Hymn to Fire)

Image courtesy of wikimedia commons

Confucius of the heart

To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.

—Confucius, 551-479 BC

Also visit the Institute of Heart Math

Gosh, I never thought about it…

Data centers consume a lot of energy, much more than we’d care to think when we make a query in google. Yes, it seems each individual query to google consumes more than one hour of a lighted lighbulb’s energy consumption (let’s assume a 140W one). It seems information technology will rival air traffic by 2020 in polution capacity terms. Yikes. It could be the case that google is slowly releasing information to independent sources and the mainstream media on the issue in order to:

1. Convince people that search and data control has a cost
2. That you should assume your part of responsibility in this cost
3. That you should/would/will eventually pay google to actually search or some variation therein

From Nina Simone to Michelle, Paul’s belle

Michelle is a song that came about after Paul McCartney attended a party in Paris. Seems he made a mock of a French-sounding growl and then John Lennon asked him to purify and rework it into a song for Rubber Soul. However, in his collaboration with various people for the final version, McCartney stuck to the ‘frenchness’ of the tune. Interestingly enough, when Lennon got it he based it on Nina Simone’s recording of I Put a Spell on You, which shares resemblance to the “sont des mots qui vont tres bien ensembe”. It seems he had been influenced by the latter which he was listening to the previous night. Two mythical songs.

I Put a Spell on You a on Last.fm, and Michelle

Open innovation

Today I found myself again reading about open innovation. One of the underlying principles of this is that in a world of widely distributed knowledge, it’s pretty hard, inefficient and expensive for companies to simply rely on their own research for innovative purposes. Therefore the suggestion is to spin-off, share, license, joint-venture or any variation therein to acquire innovative practises from others and also open your own for others to figure out how your company and theirs could benefit together. It’s a structurally collaborative path to value creation.

Closed innovation in turn goes like this: a company only uses it’s internal knowledge and research and is not open to uses and learnings form others. Quite uncool these days though it was the paradigm before World War II.

I find the premises of open innovation quite enticing ( – inspite of potential headaches to Legal Counsel…?) and I hereby list some of the thinking that governs the model:

Not all the smart people work for us. We need to work with smart people inside and outside our company

External R&D can create significant value; internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value

We don’t have to originate the research to profit from it

Building a better business model is better than getting to market first

We should profit from others’ use of our innovation process, and we should buy others’ intellectual property (IP) whenever it advances our own business model

Youthful Turkey

In 2007 some 70% of Turkish citizens where under the age of 30 and almost 26% were under the age of 14. This is fascinating for a person coming from an aging country like mine. In 2008 the population of Spain under 29 is a bit less than 40%.