Posts tagged as:

Kurt Vonnegut

How Kurt Vonnegut defined social media:
connection precedes communication*

by Bill on February 26, 2010

There are loads of books and gazillions of web sites and blogs on social media. You could spend the rest of your life reading about it – the data, the theories, the what-have-you. But if you really want to understand social media you can cut to the chase and read just one guy: Kurt Vonnegut. [...]

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Fifteen books that come to mind

by Bill on August 10, 2009

I did one of those meme things on Facebook and thought, “Why not post them on the blog too?” The list is simply the fifteen books I’ve read that have stuck with me, which I take as the ones that immediately come to mind. Here they are: Dhalgren – Samuel R. Delany The Sot-weed Factor [...]

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You don’t need an MBA, you need OCD

by Bill on June 17, 2009

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. – Kurt Vonnegut It amazes me that so many organizations don’t understand branding. They think branding is their logo, their TV ads, mailouts and handshakes for the cameras. Your brand is everything associated with you. Like the [...]

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Art, people and personal brands

by Bill on April 5, 2009

People are like art in a number of ways. I’m currently thinking of one way in particular. (Please forgive the pseudo-egghead moment and indulge me.) A work of art exists in three states simultaneously. What the artist perceives it to be What it objectively is What people other than the artist perceive it to be [...]

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Kurt Vonnegut on books

by Bill on July 19, 2008

From his book Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut on books: At the time of their invention, books were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, albeit fabricated from scarcely modified substances found in forest and field and animals, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their [...]

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Impressions – who exactly are you?

by Bill on June 26, 2005

In the introduction to his novel Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut says something to the effect of, “You are what you pretend to be. So you better pretend to be something good.” I was thinking about this as I read Creating a Positive Professional Image (which I found through What Do People REALLY Think? on the [...]

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