“In my career I’ve found that “thinking outside box” works better if I know whats “inside the box”. In Music( as in life) we need to understand our pertinent history …and moving on is so much easier once we know where we ’ve been” - Dave Grusin ( Award winning Musician and Jazz composer )

One of my friends who visited NY recently had gone to Empire state building and he bought a pamphlet. It contained an advertisement urging Empire state building visitors to carry a cell phone type device which would contain a 30 minute overview of all the aspects that one gets to see from the top of the building. It costs about 6 Dollars. Its cleverly positioned at various places that atleast , i guess, 25% of the visitors would take up the audio tour instead of merely viewing from the top of the building.

TRADER JOE’s ADVENTURE Small stores which are generally one-sixth of the size of regular supermarket In-store layouts that are difficult to navigate Insufficient Parking Inconvenient Locations No National Brands, eliminating the use of manufacturer coupons Limited variety of 2000 to 2500 products - 10% of consumers find their typical local supermarket No emphasis on sales or promotions

Via Fortune : “We grew so fast and could never keep up,” admits Friendster president Kent Lindstrom. “Our page-load times were 20 to 30 seconds when MySpace’s were two or three seconds.” Secondly, Friendster management sanitized its site - much to Anderson’s delight. “They had no room for fakesters,” Anderson says. “If a dog or a city or an idea had a page, they would delete it. Could anything better have happened to us?

Was reading an article written about incentives by Steven Levitt( Freakonomics fame) . He says a lot of people enter very risky and sometimes even dangerous professions because they believe in making the same / equivalent money which the previous generation has made. Cockaine drug dealing profession is such a dangerous profession that foot soldiers have an annual death rate of 7% ( 0.5% is the annual death rate of people who fight Iraq war ).