Wavelength USA. Some stimulus to whet your appetite!
Wavelength USA is one of our two annual study tours to the USA. Wavelength USA gives our participants unique opportunities to get inside some of America’s most pioneering and successful businesses and into the heart of the digital revolution in Silicon Valley.
Here we have gathered links to content relevant to Wavelength USA. Some are specific to the companies we are visiting, other stuff is more general analysis and commentary about the Valley and innovation. We don’t agree with everything collated here but we hope there is plenty to whet your appetite and give you some meaningful context and provocation for our adventures on Wavelength USA. Enjoy!
ON OUR HOSTS
Southwest Airlines Herb Kelleher is the legendary founder of the airline. Here he is in a lighthearted but revealing interview with some of his insights on leadership and service.
This Bloomberg article highlights the simple fundamentals Southwest adopt which keeps them as the No.1 domestic airline in the US.
We will be meeting Dave Ridley at Southwest. Here is a short video of him at a Wavelength gig last year on how every leader should be a CEO – a Chief Encouragement Officer.
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company “The same message everywhere, every day” Here is a great article on the fundamentals of achieving world class service.
Great article on Google X, Moonshot Thinking, unlearning traditional approaches to creativity and how to fail quickly.
Alberto Savoia will be talking to us about ‘pretotyping’ with us at Google’s mission control in Mountain View. Here is an article he wrote on ‘entrepreneurial innovation at Google’.
IDEO
CEO Tim Brown – who we will meet in Palo Alto – on moving from ‘design’ to ‘design thinking’ and, in this excellent TED Talk, urging designers to think much bigger and deal with problems which really matter. He references Aravind in India and one of our USA participants, Dr Aravind Srinivasan, is from this amazing social business in India so make sure you find out more from him during our week together.
Reid Hoffman, co-founder and Silicon Valley’s best connected man, reflects here on the start up days of his world-beating company.
Andreesen Horowitz
We are spending our last day of Wavelength USA at the Menlo Park HQ, at this hottest of venture capitalist firms. Here is a short video interview with the two founders on why they set up the business and why they are different.
Silicon Valley
This is a very engaging lecture by Steve Blank on the ‘secret history’ of the Valley, its roots in military research and the Cold War, and how the unique mix of government money, entrepreneurialism, and academia created the foundations of today’s tech scene. Well worth finding the hour to watch it (perhaps put it on your desktop and watch it on your flight).
“Silicon Valley is starting to feel a little less exuberant these days…” Read more here.
Why companies are not start ups: companies looking to be innovative face a conundrum: every policy and procedure that makes them efficient execution machines, stifles innovation. Read more here.
San Francisco is awash with tech money. Yet this city of innovation is also a place where you have to step over the homeless to buy a $20 artisan coffee. Read about it here.
This is a short video from participants of this year’s World Economic Forum discussing why digitisation and disruptive innovation is so important and how it now impacts all sectors of business as well as our personal lives.
Safe travels and see you soon.
Liam and Adrian
P.S. One last thing, here is a fascinating Ted Talk on how to listen better.
Want to know more about our USA study tours? Click here to find out more about where we are going in 2014 and how to join us.