Atlas Matters

I’m just getting ready for eTech http://en.oreilly.com/et2008/public/content/home next week and ran across the following from my friend Tony Karrer

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2006/09/be-insanely-great-professional.html

Secret to Being an Insanely Great Conference Attendee =>

Find Your Good Questions

Tony is spot on, how many times do we do the standard introduction, what do you, this is what I do, great we should trade cards now, oh, oh good, now I’ll make sure and email/call you in the future…

HOW ABOUT SOME GREAT QUESTIONS:

1. What is the most interesting thing you have seen presented/learned at this conference? Why?

2. What tech/biz tools are you have great success with right now?

3. What other conferences do you attend? Why?

4. So what would you be doing if you were not do what you just told me about? What are you really passionate about?

If you have other suggestions I’ll try them next week.

Joel on software often has some great thoughts. This particular article really resonated with me.

How Hard Could It Be?: Lessons I Learned in the Army

A general’s pep talk taught me that a leader can’t lose sight of what it means to be a grunt.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080301/how-hard-could-it-be-lessons-i-learned-in-the-army.html?partner=fogcreek

I also severed in the military, but here in the US. You could almost always tell an office that has first been enlisted. These officers related better to the realities, challenges and B.S. that enlisted men had to deal with on a daily basis.

That didn’t mean that those officers were softer or didn’t get the job done, but they often connected with the troops and motivated the grunts to higher performance. There are some lessons here for founders, CEOs and natural leaders in the start-up world!

Just registered with Kiva today, one of several micro-loan organizations.

It really felt good to contribute to someone that is trying to grow their way out of poverty, I know more about who they are and what they are trying to acomplish. I can track and see the results of my investment. I’ve contributed in the past to the usual suspects (large charities) and I always had questions about the use of funds, how much really made it to the target – check out Kiva and/or Microloans, Microcredit.

You might be giving in the future!

Wikipedia states, ”

This article is specific to small loans. For financial services to the poor see Microfinance. For small payments see Micropayment.

Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to the unemployed, to poor entrepreneurs and to others living in poverty who are not considered bankable. These individuals lack collateral, steady employment and a verifiable credit history and therefore cannot meet even the most minimal qualifications to gain access to traditional credit. Microcredit is a part of microfinance, which is the provision of a wider range of financial services to the very poor.

Microcredit is a financial innovation which originated in Bangladesh where it has successfully enabled extremely impoverished people to engage in self-employment projects that allow them to generate an income and, in many cases, begin to build wealth and exit poverty. Due to the success of microcredit, many in the traditional banking industry have begun to realize that these microcredit borrowers should more correctly be categorized as pre-bankable; thus, microcredit is increasingly gaining credibility in the mainstream finance industry and many traditional large finance organizations are contemplating microcredit projects as a source of future growth. Although almost everyone in larger development organizations discounted the likelihood of success of microcredit when it was begun in its modern incarnation as pilot projects with ACCION and Muhammad Yunus in the mid-1970s, the United Nations declared 2005 the International Year of Microcredit.”

Learn more – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcredit

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