I like to make the most of my work trips around the country, and evidently my editor at O’Reilly, Colleen Wheeler, likes me to do that as well. So while I was returning from a presentation on The Doodle Revolution, she asked me to interview on Martini Hour with she and her co-host, Deke McClelland, the author of, oh I don’t know, 99 books on the Adobe Creative Suite. Because the show was called “Martini Hour,” it was not in my vocabulary to say no. So we all took our shoes off and proceeded to have a lively conversation about visual thinking, the importance of the doodle, innovation in the workplace using design thinking, and how much I thought the two of them should be in love because they got along so well. Oh, and of course, we also discussed our forthcoming book, GameStorming, which is a playbook for explaining why and how you can get your hands dirty at work using visual thinking to solve business problems. To hear the audio, click: MartiniHour-075-128Kbps. But first, pour yourself a dirty martini.

I was planning to write up a description of Foo Camp 2010 myself, but I decided to be more time-savvy and just use the content from Wikipedia, below. Suffice it to say that it was an honor to be invited and a pleasure to present The Doodle Revolution to such a stellar audience. Some highlights from my experience include (as I mentioned), presenting on the topic above, bonding with author Scott Berkun who, seemingly impossibly, is even more likable in person, meeting June Cohen, Executive Producer of the TED Conference and finally, drinking bourbon with my editor, Colleen Wheeler who – poor thing – was probably relying on bourbon to get her through the last edits of Gamestorming, which comes out in July. Colleen, you are amazing. I will send a non-alcoholic present your way very soon.

FYI, reader, Foo Camp is an annual hacker unconference hosted by publisher O’Reilly Media. O’Reilly describes it as “the wiki of conferences”, where the program is developed by the attendees at the event, using big whiteboard schedule templates that can be rewritten or overwritten by attendees to optimize the schedule. The goal of the event is to reach out to new people who will increase the company’s intelligence about new technologies, and to create opportunities for cross-fertilization between people and technologies that are on the O’Reilly radar. Some have described it as a meta-birds-of-a-feather session, that gets smart people together to discuss technology issues. [Added by Sunni:] During the event, people camp out in actual tents – not something I expected to do in the desert heat of Sebastopol, CA. But for this crowd, it ended up being worth it. Thank you, O’Reilly, for being a publisher that defies tradition and instead focuses on innovation. Nice work.

Dell recently did a very impressive thing: they invited influential bloggers who had ranted about their products and services online to come to their headquarters and have a real conversation about what they’re doing wrong and how they can do it better. It’s not easy to get feedback on things that matter the most to us – and these “ranters” didn’t mince words – but it says a lot about the dedication of Dell’s team to figuring out who the company should be in the future and how they can best serve their customers. The event lasted 2 days, and they did get relief from the initial barrage of critiques when they hosted people on the second day who were actually happy with Dell. But I’m seeing many more of these interactive, face-to-face, collaborative sessions because of the rapid shift to the “social” marketplace. Businesses have to be responsive to stay alive…and that includes my own.

Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art left an indelible impression on me (and many others I’m sure), so I decided to memorialize some of the lessons in a visual format. Both visuals were done by hand in one sitting, with calligraphy pens, no white-out and no first-try pencil marks. On occasion I would forget to breathe because I was trying to be so still. The first graphic visualizes principles from the first section of Pressfield’s book about what Resistance is and what forms it can take. The second graphic references how we, as aspiring artists or anything else, can defeat Resistance – by going Pro. I absolutely cherished the process of creating these because the principles are universal and timeless and because we all need a swift kick in the pants from time to time. This is the first of many visual book summaries I plan to do – all of them on books that have meaning and practical application in my life. Enjoy.

I was absolutely impressed with the Zappos Insights Bootcamp. It’s a 2-day workshop designed to expose people to their famous culture – the values that drive it and the people and policies that keep it growing. I was so impressed, in fact, that I’ll write another blog post soon showing the video with interviews from some participants. The images above were the four 32-square-foot murals I created for the group while they were in the workshop. Tony Hsieh, the CEO, and Alfred Lin, the CFO, made presentations during the session and I think people were a little bit starstruck. The Zappos guys have officially reached celebrity status, but they remain humble. One principle I took away from the session (among many) was that hubris gets you nowhere, quickly. More to come.