Business Lessons from sucessful entrepreneurs and business leaders: LunchLearning.com

Reading time: 3 - 4 minutes

Video Time: 41 minutes 49 seconds

We’ll be wrapping up this week with a look at a somebody who, like some of this week’s predecessors, took on a serious subject and transformed it through humor. However, this time, instead of operating through print has his medium, we’ll be looking at somebody who works visually and aurally, delivering the bitter punchline with practiced poise. Jon Stewart, somewhere between a comedian, satirist, politico and reporter, is, in many ways, as powerful a representative of the news as traditional outlets like CNN.

What exactly did one man do to achieve such clout? He did something so extraordinarily simple that it hardly seems like anything noteworthy: he reached an entirely new segment of the population. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart features a nightly viewership of over one million individuals, many of which utilize the show as their primary source of news and, even more tellingly, did not watch news programs of any kind before. Despite it being a comedy program, the show is widely regarded to be as valid as many other sources of news.

Despite its appearance, the success of The Daily Show is largely about noticing an untapped market and the discovery of exactly what that market wants. The blend of wit and news, wrapped in a thick layer of truthiness (as popularized by Stewart’s contemporary, Stephen Colbert) was viewed as a respite from traditional news media outlets that were perceived as grim, packed with fluff, biased and often downright misleading. However, regardless of what studies show and proponents claim, Stewart tries to hammer home that he is not a journalist and his show is not real news. In either case, people love him and the show is an unequivocal success.

The following video is a biographical sketch of Jon Stewart, actually the second host of The Daily Show, but the one that introduced its current political leanings and brought it to stardom. While the easiest way to understand the draw, and hence the marketing insight, of The Daily Show would be to watch it in the company of individuals in the younger generation, an exploration of the man, and what put him there, is second best.

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Reading time: 2 - 4 minutes

Video Time: 53 minutes 55 seconds

This week our topic is humor, and what better way to start it off than with The Onion (@TheOnion on Twitter), a news organization founded on this very principle. In this video, Sean Mills, former president of The Onion, appears on Authors@Google to promote the book Our Dumb World: The Onion’s Atlas of the Planet Earth, 73rd Edition.

First, a little history about The Onion. Two students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Christopher Johnson and Tim Keck, founded The Onion in 1988, and sold it a year later to Scott Dikkers and Peter Haise. Initially, The Onion was successful only in college towns and cities near Madison. Slowly The Onion branched out, starting a website in 1996, and in 2001 moving its headquarters to New York City. In 2007, “The Onion News Network” was created, which is a web video portion of the site that parodies the 24-hour news networks.

Sean Mills begins his talk with a parody and satire-filled presentation of what The Onion is really about, including the past, present, and future of The Onion. Mills shows us that, time and again, The Onion has been there to report all the important breaking news. Mills also shows clips from “The Onion News Network,” and gives us a taste of their new morning show, “Today Now!” The last fifteen minutes of the video includes a question and answer portion, so if you want to skip some of the humor and get a little more insight into the specifics of the business, by all means skip ahead.

So sit back, be ready to laugh, and Happy Learning!

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Reading time: 3 - 5 minutes

Total Video Time: 22 minutes 25 seconds

Games tend to exist in a single state. Board games exist in reference to the board, sports take place on a given field or arena and video games exist in an enclosed virtual domain. With the advances in technology however, there have been developments in creating games, if they can still be rightly termed, that break through these boundaries. Alternate, or Augmented Reality Games (ARGs) utilize a number of platforms to develop immersiveness and to blend the boundaries of reality and fiction.

ARGs exist for a wide variety of purposes. They have been used to advertise, generate buzz, be a stand-alone game or even educate and push an agenda. However, what defines them is the blending of the real world and artificial world with no clear distinction. To achieve this, “hacked” websites, buried treasure, things washed up on the surf, to shadowy individuals and user contributions are utilized.

While a respectable number of ARGs have been developed, there are four particular landmarks: The Beast, produced in conjunction with the Stephen Spielberg movie A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Perplex City, I Love Bees, developed to market the video game Halo 2, and World Without Oil. The Beast was the first major successful ARG, attracting three million individuals around the world to participate through emails, websites, faxes and phone calls. I Love Bees followed a similar, but far more complex path, inviting its participants to solve puzzles as well as further develop the narrative of a digital intelligence stranded on Earth. World Without Oil is regarded as the first serious ARG, utilizing user submissions to describe a, well, world with rapidly diminishing oil supplies to liven its narrative.

This video series follows the observations of Naomi Alderman, the lead writer for Perplex City, one of the first major ARGs designed to operate independently without external funding. While it was only moderately successful in achieving its goals, much of its structure is now part of the standard for ARGs. In a world where company interaction becomes an increasingly important element in marketing, ARGs are a step far beyond that of Facebook groups and Twitter feeds.

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Reading time: 3 - 5 minutes

Video Time: 38 minutes 6 seconds

Today, I want to focus on Sid Meier, the Director of Creative Development for Firaxis Games. Sid realized the potential video games have for teaching and capitalized on it. In the video Sid presents Civilization, a game he helped create, as an example of how games can be used to educate. In Civilization the player jumps into the role of all powerful leader and gets to decide how he or she wants to build a society. You start the game as a small settler town, but by the end of the game you could be colonizing space. As your society grows throughout the ages, you begin to compete for resources from neighboring nations. How you choose to interact with these nations determines whether you’re an enlightened pacifist society, a war mongering nation, or anything in between. The game essentially becomes a giant economic and history lesson that lets you see if you have what it takes to create an empire that can withstand the test of time.

Sid presents how he took his video games from just being pure entertainment to a rewarding learning experience. He begins his lecture by stating that people don’t like to be taught, but they like learning. Sounds like a contradiction, right? Well, he’s right in the sense that people are not always receptive to being told what to do or how to do it. Sometimes the best way to learn is to do it for yourself and video games give the player the opportunity to do just that. When something, like history, can’t tangibly be manipulated video games can be an excellent learning tool. Sid talks about the importance of choice when it comes to cultivating a desire to learn. Everyone learns differently and Sid shows how presenting information in various ways allows people find a learning style best suited for them. He also believes that to engage an audience, the mode in which the information is presented should be entertaining. No one is going to learn anything if they’re not paying attention.

So how is this relevant to the business world and not just students? It’s easy if you think of it in terms of on the job training. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had my fair share of training meetings where the trainer droned on and on about a topic and the only thing I learned was that I could draw a really cool fire breathing dinosaur. The techniques Sid uses to create a more rewarding educational experience for his gaming audience can be applied to creating more effective and dynamic training sessions.

Training doesn’t necessarily have to involve a video game. Training can take the fundamental aspects of learning that Sid mentions and use them to present the information in a way that is appealing to the audience, creates an interactive environment, and allows the trainees to learn at their own pace. I hope you enjoy the presentation.

Happy learning and Game On!

Reading time: 2 - 2 minutes

Video Time: 27 minutes 59 seconds

It’s Friday, so we’re going to keep it short and sweet today. . .and have a little fun with today’s speaker: Tim Brown, CEO of “innovation and design” firm IDEO.

Watch how easily he engages this audience through participation, visualization and quick attempts at creativity.

This lecture is great fun, and will definitely have you thinking of things you can do in your own workplace to get folks inspired toward more creativity. Which, by the way, is ALWAYS a good thing.

Reading time: 2 - 2 minutes

Video Time: varies

It’s Labor Day today in the U.S., so in the spirit of taking a break, we’re skipping our normally scheduled program in favor of sending along a few instructions about how to pack for your next business or pleasure trip from two of my favorite masters of travel: Tim Ferriss (@tferriss on Twitter) and Rick Steves (@ricksteves on Twitter)! Check out how much Tim can fit in one bag!