Well, just 20 shopping days left until Christmas. But why wait until Christmas to treat yourself to a few freebies out there on the web. This week’s Friday Freebies include a webinar from one of my favorite people Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen fame, a great podcast with Steve Rendle of the North Face talking about sustainable materials, a Hubspot webinar on How to Market during a recession, a whole slew of videos from BusinessWeek.com, and a new website with tons of free documentary films. Let’s kick it off with an interview with Guy Kawasaki from Andrew Warner’s excellent Mixergy.com website:
I’ve never thought of myself as a natural speaker, but a few months ago, I had the opportunity to participate in an incredible coaching experiencing with some folks from Decker Communications in a class called Communicating to Influence. It really changed the way I see myself as a communicator now. After the class, I was fortunate enough to begin corresponding with Bert Decker. Bert was gracious enough to send me a copy of his newly updated book You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard. Based on my coaching experience, I couldn’t wait to read this book. I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, the book is in my Ten Best Books of 2008 list alongside other great authors like Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, and Malcolm Gladwell. Bert Decker definitely has earned his spot amongst these other luminaries.
There was an amazing interview on CNN recently with Haruka Nishimatsu, the CEO of JAL, Japan Airlines. The interview could have been a primer on how to be an ethical CEO who cares about his people and his company more than he cares about his own compensation. According to the report, when JAL slashed jobs and asked older employees to retire early, Nishimatsu cut every single one of his corporate perks, and then for three years running slashed his own pay. In 2007, he made about $90,000 U.S., less than what his pilots earn. In Japan, says Nishimatsu, there’s less of a pay gap between the top and the bottom. “We in Japan learned during the bubble economy that businesses who pursue money first fail. The business world has lost sight of this basic tenet of business ethics.”
In the 1950’s, Solomon Asch, conducted a series of experiments designed to understand the phenomenon we know as conformity. In his experiments, a group of participants were seated around a table and asked to examine a series of vertical lines. They were then asked to tell the group which vertical line, A, B, or C, matched the test line. The vertical line series looked very similar to these:
