Category: Business

Posted on 07.07.10

Mightybytes goes Green! Part 1: What?!

by Travis Chandler

Tim, our fearless leader, is often coming up with ideas to improve our business. When he suggested recently that our company go green, we all cheered.

Perhaps referring to him as fearless is a tad extreme. When I say he's fearless I mean he doesn't fear irrational things, like, oh, cake. He fears no cake. But he does have rational fears, about things like, say, we humans screwing up our environment so badly that poor ol' Mother Earth can't fix herself back up again. And we, his employees, share that fear.

"But what's the first step in going green?" I asked in a trembling, afraid-of-new-things kind of way.

"Take a look at the 'eco-Andersonville Sustainable Business Certification Program Worksheet'" he boomed in a commanding baritone. Baritonally commanded, I did so. Once finished printing the sizable document I shook my fist at the heavens, suddenly realizing the irony of printing out on mashed-up trees a document specifically dedicated to reducing the amount of things we print out on mashed-up trees. Damn. Karma-wise, I deserved to be chopped up into cubes and scattered about the roots of a young sapling as fertilizer.

Posted on 07.02.10

What Gets You Motivated?

by Tim Frick

In Drive, Daniel H. Pink digs deep to discover what really motivates us in our personal and professional lives.

Do you wake up every day and get excited about the idea of going to work? If not, have I got a book for you. In his follow up to A Whole New Mind, Daniel H. Pink explores the many facets of things that motivate us on professional and personal levels. Using the tenets of a phenomena he calls Motivation 3.0, in which our desire to learn, make choices, and achieve supersedes any sort of 'carrot and stick' rewards-based system, Pink offers many rich examples of companies and individuals who have aligned their lives, businesses and culture around these principles to great success.

Posted on 06.29.10

Highlights of Sustainable Agriculture in the Media and Film

by Stacy

‘Industrial agriculture as it exists today is a ticking time bomb that has placed human and environmental health in great jeopardy. The sustainable food movement is transforming both public opinion and the food industry.'

As part of  Andersonville Green Week, Free from Harm, an educational and advocacy resource, is staging a multimedia event: Highlights of Sustainable Agriculture in the Media and Film—a montage of footage ‘from some of the leading films and non profits of our time, including Dirt The Movie, Fresh The Movie, Farm Sanctuary, celebrated authors Michael Pollan and David Kirby, as well as Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute, to name a few.’

Posted on 06.28.10

Office Transformations: From Workplace to Playspace by Pamela Meyer

by Tim Frick

A detailed roadmap for engendering creativity and engagement into your business.

Being creative on the fly is tough. To sustain that creativity over years for a wide variety of clients who may or may not share your vision is even tougher. Every artist wrestles with the concept of art vs. commerce and in many cases the two are often mutually exclusive. At Mightybytes, we constantly struggle with balancing the needs of project timelines and budgets while still devising great creative solutions on demand. Every creative firm worth their salt does (if they tell you otherwise, they're lying). Engaging in extracurricular creative activities—brewing beer, playing in rock bands, doing improv and enrolling in writing workshops, to name a few—gives us a leg up, but ultimately this struggle is an ongoing challenge that is especially difficult in trying economic times. This conundrum is both how we thrive and one of the company's biggest continuous tests.

It is with this in mind that I read Pamela Meyer's book From Workplace to Playspace: Innovating, Learning, and Changing through Dynamic Engagement. 

Posted on 05.30.10

The Power of Pull: David Siegel’s Semantic Future

by Tim Frick

David Siegel's book Pull outlines a semantic future that is equally Orwellian and utopian.

I've been wrestling with the semantic web for a while, trying to figure out specifically what it meant for Mightybytes and what it could do for our customers. Focal Press suggested I include information on semantic search in Return on Engagement and that provided the impetus for me to really wrap my head around its admittedly sometimes esoteric concepts. As part of this process, I purchased numerous books on the topic, many of which read like a dissertation and typically put me to sleep after just a few pages (admittedly, most of them were never finished). None put semantic web concepts into as much relevant context as Pull by David Siegel.