Ken Wilson has a little write-up on the Where’s My Bailout? series package we’re using right now at NewSpring. I did very hands-off creative direction on this one and the video guys ran with it, origami-awesomely.

The war for talent is still ongoing. There is and will be for some time, a shortage of leadership talent as a result of the baby boomers leaving the workforce. There will be plenty of “bodies” available, but that doesn’t equate to talent. Cutting back on development efforts to grow your own leaders will leave you at the mercy of the market when the economy picks back up. You will end up paying more for outside talent instead of developing your bench strength now.
— Tom Peters, excerpted from this blog post

There’s a time for bringing in outside talent. A time when you need a franchise player who will shake things up and be pivotal. Someone to build teams around. And there’s a time when you have to suck it up, realize there’s no easy button to fix your internal woes, and you need to develop the people you have in expectation that they’ll be the ones to see you through.

Your job may very well be to know which time it is right now.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
— Eleanor Roosevelt

1. Slept for 12 hours
2. Perused faithful reader Danielle Hartland’s notes from our comm/web strategy breakout
3. Watched Reality Bites, an episode of Heroes, and a hat trick of The West Wing
4. Read through Ken Wilson‘s notes from his video/motion graphics breakout
5. Agreed to teach at the Dirt Conference in November

Everyone’s outfits are black. Joes. Cobra. Heroes. Villains. All black. Kind of hard to tell each other apart in battle when YOU’RE ALL WEARING THE SAME OUTFIT.

In approximately 8 hours, a few thousand people will begin sleepily arriving at NewSpring Church for our annual Unleash Conference, a one-day gathering designed to challenge, encourage, and motivate church leaders.

I’ve been busy getting that day-of site up and running, along with prepping two speaking gigs—one on Communications & Web Strategy with my partner in comm Suzanne Swift, and superquick 10 minute soapbox on Cultivating a Creative Workplace Culture. I just used a stopwatch to time myself on the soapbox spiel, and it’ll be down to the wire.

You can tune in to the main sessions on the day-of page starting at 9:00am EST; we’ll be stretching Mogulus‘ limits on free streaming. The soapbox sessions might be streamed, too, along with some other Atrium antics.

I’m excited. For now, sleep.

Robot Abe Lincoln & Zombie Andrew Jackson. What more do you need to know? (via Yewknee)

Some people fancy themselves as being “creative”, or ”creative-types” because they have a lot of ideas. Cool. You have ideas. So does my 3 year old. That doesn’t make you creative. An idea without implementation isn’t creation. It’s imagination. By definition, being creative requires that you create something.
— Steven Furtick

Web hosting provider Media Temple on the anatomy of their much-touted, much-plagued-with-downtime grid storage platform, including all the gory details of last weekend’s major service outage. I’m glad they seem to know their stuff, and are working to fix the issues with the 1st generation of technology for the GS, but by 06/09 when they expect it to all be fixed, any sites I/we host with them will be hosted elsewhere.

Bring a foreign film and stay
I might not like it but I may
find something
to hinge on.

While I’m running in circles like the stars
so tired of slipping through your arms
and fading like war torn stars & bars
capsizing.

Take your overcoat and go.
I might not like it but I don’t
want you
to catch cold

from running in circles like the stars
so tired of slipping through your heart
still flying like war torn stars & bars
I’m over
running in circles like the stars
constantly ripping through your heart
and fading like war torn stars & bars.
Start over.

Bring a foreign film and stay
I might not like it but I may…

Let’s get it all out at once: the stellar title sequence from Watchmen, the characters as a Saturday morning cartoon, and the amazingly-edited Hitler finds out about new Watchmen ending.

Sometimes, ffffound!’s recommendations are way off. And then sometimes I find myself saying “Why YES! I do love a boxy paper cutout of the Norse God of Thunder Thor.”

1. Ben Harper
2. Slayer
3. Guster
4. Ben Folds
5. Iron & Wine

We can all nerd out together: Daft Punk is scoring Tron 2.

Excellence and size are fundamentally incompatible.
— Robert Townsend

I can’t decide if Skittles is brilliant for this or not.