Outliers: Outrageously Talented or Just Plain Lucky?

Malcolm Gladwell is a master storyteller; he leads readers down winding yellow brick roads and provides them with insight into the mystifying and foresight into their future. He explains those “simple truths” about life and society usually kept secret by Sociologists in a way that your average Joe can understand and embrace them. It is little wonder Time Magazine named Malcolm Gladwell one of their 100 Most Influential People in 2005.

He helped us examine the tiny things or the “levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable” in The Tipping Point and he explored the power of the trained mind to make split second decisions in Blink. In Outliers, Gladwell irrevocably proves that there iS no magic apple you bite into to obtain success. Success is a beautiful balance of nature, nurture and a little bit of luck…. Combine those three things with the 10,000 hours Gladwell insists you need to obtain “expert status” and it looks like an insurmountable hill to climb.

Through various case studies and real stories (which this gal loves!) he highlights the “hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunists and cultural legacies” underlie that magical thing we call success. Is Gladwell content with these circumstances to remain the status quo? No, he is not.

Gladwell insists that “to build a better world, we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success-the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents in history-that provides oppotunities to all.”

Outliers is DEFINITELY on our Schipul Suggested reading list!

Have you read Outliers but haven’ quite gotten your Gladwell fill? Join us Wendesday for “An Audience with Malcolm Gladwell” brought to you by the Greater Houston Partnership. We’ll be at the Hilton America’s Houston at 11:30 am! We hope you can make it out!!

Check out my personal blog for more MagsMac ramblings on Outliers. I am fascinated!

Schipul welcomes JJ Lassberg to the team!

Our team is growing with a great new hire! We are incredibly pleased to welcome JJ Lassberg to our Production Team.  JJ is a seasoned Web geek and designer with 10 years of experience in Web site development.  She’ll be working closely with clients using Tendenci as a project manager, software support guru and all-around all-star developer.

We are very happy to welcome such a strong team player to our Schipul family.   JJ shares not only our love of all that is Web marketing, but our company values and passion for online communication and connectivity as well.

Prior to becoming a Schipulite, JJ was co-owner of True Light Resources (www.truelightresources.com), a Web site and creative design studio in Houston and a company that we work with closely on a regular basis.  Welcome to the team JJ!  It’s great to have you as our latest New Guy 🙂

Happy Thanksgiving from the Schipulites!!

Happy Thanksgiving from the Schipul crew!!   We have so many blessings to count this year and wish you a beautiful holiday with your family!   Here are a few things we are thankful for this year:

  1. The Interwebs
  2. Our ridiculously cool clients
  3. Family, Friends and co-workers  
  4. Twitter  (check us out @schipul and @tendenci)
  5. Flickr
  6. Reliable awesome online news sources
  7. Numbered lists
  8. Our daily noms
  9. Servers that keep us rocking out online
  10. Organizations like NetSquared that keep us centered and connected
  11. The Houston Community – Arts, Technology and everyone else
    1. Caroline Collective
    2. Houston Arts Alliance
    3. Houston Zoo
    4. Children’s Museum of Houston

Schipulite Brian LeBlanc

Brian Leblanc
Brian LeBlanc (beefcake)

This post is about our good friend Brian LeBlanc.   He’s an awesome developer that came to us in hopes of learning more about web development/marketing.

I’m not going to highlight all the niceties of Brian LeBlanc, this post is merely to tell him and the rest of the world that we appreciate his time here and are more than proud of his direction and future endeavors.

To learn more about the great LeBlanc, give him a visit.
http://www.brian-leblanc.com/

Why so hard to go Green?

We know a lot of companies are into the whole green thing these days, and why not?   It’s awesome for the environment.   We at Schipul are a bunch of “green folks” at home, but are finding it hard to get things started in the office.   We’ve decided to take our recycling issues to the interwebs and outline our journey to a greener office right here!   Please feel free to leave suggestions in the comment box.

Here are some of the biggest issues we’re facing:

Our building does not offer recycling at this time… and apparently we are the only tenants interested in said recycling.   We would gladly pay for this service and contract it ourselves, but we’d really like to start something building-wide so the movement is bigger than just Schipul.   Thankfully, our building is working on the recycling issue with us and we will head up the coalition.

How exactly should we go about recycling paper when so many of the paper we get rid of needs to be shredded because of “sensitive information?”   We could shred the paper and then recycle it, but a lot of recycling companies won’t pick up shredded paper.   There are quite a few companies that will come out to the office and actually shred your paper for you (then recycle it), so that is a solution we’re thinking about too.

Getting everyone involved in the recycling issue could be tough too.   Yes, everyone says they’re green, but in the office it’s too easy to throw that coke can in the trash or waste countless sheets of paper on a test print.   This cool article by the California Integrated Waste Management Board suggests managers must be involved from the get go so that is something else we are exploring.

These are just our initial observations and it’s almost a given we’ll encounter more stumbling blocks along the way, which you can read about here!

In the mean time, here are some cool resources to help you go green:

  1. The Green Houston part of visithoustontexas.com has a lot of cool info on whats green in our city
  2. California Integrated Waste Management Board has a bunch of cool tips and how-to guides
  3. MCNBC has a whole area of their site dedicated to going green and it’s updated constantly
  4. The National Geographic’s “The Green Guide” offers everything from green traveling tips to an awesome assortment of green blogs
  5. “Turning Houston Green” is a blog dedicated to helping Houston Homeowners stay green

(Thank you VS for the awesome Flickr Photo!!)

And the construction is almost complete!

If you have visited the Schipul office in the last five months, you’ve probably noticed all the construction around here.   Thanks to an office flood in early March we have been tiptoeing around torn up walls and tape but FINALLY we are almost back to our old selves.

(Insert collective sigh of relief here…)

In typical Schipul fashion, we took this lemon of a situation and added some sugar.     When the rebuilding began we decided to convert five offices into seven; which gives us more room to serve our awesome clients.

Thanks again for being with us through it all guys!