Tag Archives: TED.com

20 Excellent Online TED Talks

Business Education, Creativity, ,

TED — stands for Technology, Education, and Design — is a great resource. They recently posted their top 20 most watched talks. This is a great resource. I’m happy to see that I’ve already posted, previously, several of these on this blog. And this is a great list. 

  1. Sir Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity (2006): 13,409,417 views
  2. Jill Bolte Taylor‘s stroke of insight (2008): 10,409,851
  3. Pranav Mistry on the thrilling potential of SixthSense (2009): 9,223,263
  4. David Gallo‘s underwater astonishments (2007): 7,879,541
  5. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense (2009): 7,467,580
  6. Tony Robbins asks Why we do what we do (2006): 6,879,488
  7. Simon Sinek on how great leaders inspire action (2010): 6,050,294
  8. Steve Jobs on how to live before you die (2005): 5,444,022
  9. Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen (2006): 4,966,643
  10. Brene Brown talks about the power of vulnerability (2010): 4,763,038
  11. Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation (2009): 4,706,241
  12. Arthur Benjamin does mathemagic (2005): 4,658,425
  13. Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing your genius (2009): 4,538,037
  14. Dan Gilbert asks: Why are we happy? (2004): 4,269,082
  15. Stephen Hawking asks big questions about the universe (2008): 4,153,105
  16. Jeff Han demos his breakthrough multi-touchscreen (2006): 3,891,251
  17. Johnny Lee shows Wii Remote hacks for educators (2008): 3,869,417
  18. Keith Barry does brain magic (2004): 3,847,893
  19. Mary Roach 10 things you didn’t know about orgasm (2009): 3,810,630
  20. Vijay Kumar demos robots that fly like birds (2012): 3,535,340

I post about education and particularly business education on this blog. A great TED talk is sometimes about business, often about thoughts and leadership, also about creativity, always about presentations and speaking, and always real education. 

Go Ahead: Disagree. I dare you.

Back to Fundamentals, Business Mistakes,

This one had me from the moment I saw the title: Dare to Disagree. I clicked, watched, and I love it.

Good disagreement is central to progress. She illustrates (sometimes counterintuitively) how the best partners aren’t echo chambers — and how great research teams, relationships and businesses allow people to deeply disagree.

I’ve seen this for years in starting, growing and running a business. It’s vital. Do yourself a favor. Take 12 minutes to watch Margaret Heffernan in this TED talk. She starts with a real story, and gets into the nuts and bolts of making disagreement work for you.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

If you don’t see this video here, you can click here to link to the original on TED.com

Will Success Spoil Ted.com?

Presentation skills, , , ,

I’ve watched dozens of TED talks online and never seen a bad one.

TED stands for Technology, Education, and Design. It started in 1984. Since 1990 it was located in a conference center outside of Monterrey CA. Since 2001 it’s been curated mainly by Chris Anderson.

Most TED conferences were amazing. I’ve never been, but what I’ve seen is a collection of excellent presentations about compelling ideas and information delivered by the best and the brightest in the world. If you’ve been reading this blog you’ve seen TED talks off and on. Since I first discovered the online TED talks at TED.com I’ve been back to that well regularly. And what I’ve found has been consistent highest quality of thought, communication, and, specifically, presentations.

For more than a dozen of my favorites, from previous posts on this blog, use this link.

So far, so good. Can anybody blame TED for wanting to branch out and expand? Not me. TED is now branching out to TEDx talks that are way less exclusive. Look around for TEDx on the web and you’ll see the TEDx talks popping up everywhere. Here’s what TED says about TEDx:

Created in the spirit of TED’s mission, “ideas worth spreading,” the TEDx program is designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level. TEDx events are fully planned and coordinated independently, on a community-by-community basis.

In theory that’s great, but what if the end result is that TED talk no longer means guarantee of high quality? I hope the TED tradition continues. But here’s the concern I have:  Does that mean dilution of quality? A lower bar? More people presenting to more people on more subjects in many more locations?

TED says that 231 TEDx conferences were held last month.

And meanwhile, just to make that a bit more real, this morning I clicked a TEDx link in my email to end up with this disappointing result:

5 Good Posts for Friday July 1

Blogs and blogging, Weblogs, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I need your help: Can you suggest a way to give a theme and a title to a series of Friday posts listing good posts and recommended links I’ve seen from the last week? My title here is too dull. I’m not nearly good enough at titles.

I don’t want to do this every Friday, but this is the fifth time since April 1, so I’m thinking maybe I should make it a repeated theme, with a cool title. Except I don’t have the title.

  • My absolute favorite this week is Megan Berry’s post on Mashable called 7 Tips for Better Twitter Chats. It’s a very good short piece on the step-by-step details of doing a twitter chat. Megan’s marketing manager at Klout (and yes, one of my daughters).
  • Shashi Bellamkonda of Network Solutions, alias the swami of social media, posted 6 Ways to Improve Your Online Content on the Amex OPEN Forum. Shashi knows. He practices what he preaches.
  • The SBA (U.S. Small Business Administration) has an excellent short piece explaining why you need a business plan on SBA.gov. It’s not a blog post published this week, but SBA.gov tweeted it this week, which caught my attention.
  • Fred Cavazza, Why a Facebook Page is Not Enough forbes.com. I caught this one thanks to Becky McRay mentioning it on twitter.
  • The TED blog posted The 20 most-watched TED Talks (so far). How can you resist this best-of-the-best list from the amazing collection at TED.Com. Trivia question answer: TED stands for technology, education, and design.
  • (Aside: yes, I know, this is the sixth, but I can’t resist) Steve King had some fascinating demographics in his Comparing Small Business Owners and High-Growth Entrepreneurs on Small Biz Labs. 

The Beauty Of Data Visualization

Personal Productivity, Writing, , , , ,

I really like business charts. I think I always have. I’ve been in the business of communicating about numbers for a long time. And here is a master of it. David McCandless, a British journalist, also calls himself “a data detective,” and we see why in his Ted talk shown here, The Beauty Of Data Visualization.

This is spectacular thinking. Watch for his visual patterns of fear, of global spending, even of relationships breaking up.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

If for any reason you can’t see this here, you can click here for the source on the TED.com site.

Robert Sapolsky: the Uniqueness of Humans

Reflections, , ,

I’m so happy to see that the TED site, by far my favorite collection of online talks (I’ve posted several of them on this blog before), picked up this Robert Sapolsky talk. If you don’t see it here, or if you want to watch it in a higher quality HD mode, you can click here for the link to the YouTube source.  The TED talk user ratings call this “informative inspiring fascinating.”

This talk is fascinating. Dr. Sapolsky, the author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, makes a set of amazing “contrast and compare” points about how we are remarkably similar to a lot of other animals in much of our behavior, but — and believe me, this part is going to make you think — different. His talk is fun, entertaining, and important.

By a stroke of good fortune, I was there at Stanford Univeristy to see this talk when he delivered it (actually last June, although the site says September). I wanted to share it then, and was reminded of it today, when I saw it among the new talks on the TED site.