I’m in New York and slowly melting, it’s so hot and humid. One of my refuges is my hotel room, and I’ve shot this short video to show you why I’m enjoying the experience here so much.

Today Scott Belsky’s new book hits the shelves: Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles between Vision and Reality. It gets to the heart of how to do more Great Work, and I’m a raving fan. Pick up a copy, and re-listen to our interview that I first posted in January 2010.

“It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.”
I love that statement. I know from my time teaching and consulting on innovation and creativity that actually having ideas, when you know how, is pretty easy. But actually executing ideas – ahh, that’s a different matter. Scott Belsky is the CEO and founder of Behance and what he stands for is making ideas happen. Behance operates the leading online platform for creative professionals – which means, helping creatives find a place to get together and to think about, how do we make our ideas happen? Scott and Behance also run the 99% Blog and the 99% Conference.

In this interview we talk about:

• Why looking to the short-term can be a powerful execution strategy
• How to overcome the tragedy that most ideas are born and lost in isolation
• And why ‘acting without conviction” is a handy strategy for keeping things going

You can follow Scott on Twitter@behance, on the Behance website and on the 99% Blog.

Listen to my interview with Scott Belsky

I’m a big fan of Matt May’s book, In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing. It speaks to my belief that design is an increasingly critical element of everything we do. Not just for those of us in the “creative” industries, but for all of us in all we do. With so much stuff everywhere – content is free – it is through design and elegance we find solutions and create value…and do Great Work.

Matt’s first award-winning book was called The Elegant Solution, and was written after many years advising Toyota on business design and helping build Toyota University. He now spends much of his time advising corporations on how to build in elegance and design into the work that they do.

In our conversation we talk about:

• The important difference between basic vanilla simplicity and elegant simplicity
• Why you need a “To Not Do” list
• How to find the sweet spot between your skills and the challenge at hand
• And what drives Tiger Woods to succeed. (Yes, we did this interview Before The Scandal)

You can follow Matt on Twitter at @MatthewEMay and at his website www.InPursuitOfElegance.com.

Listen to my interview with Matt May

Honest Tea is not your typical beverage company. Yes, they’re the biggest seller of organic tea drinks in the US. But more interesting for me is how they got there. This is one of those “blue ocean” stories where the founders asked themselves, “What do we need to do that’s different to stand out and flourish?” I’m lucky to be speaking to one of those founders today. Seth Goldman founded Honest Tea back in 1998 with Professor Barry Nalebuff of the Yale School of Management. And in the last ten years they’ve had nothing but success. They’ve had about a 66% annual compound growth, and in 2008, Coca Cola purchased a minority interest in the company so that they’re able to get better distribution around the country.

Seth graduated Harvard in ’87, the Yale School of Management in ’95, he won Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year for the Mid-Atlantic region, and was also running his company. He  founded Bethesda Green which is a local sustainability initiative helping convert grease waste from restaurants into biodiesel.

We talk about:

• Seth’s surprise to find himself an entrepreneur and a champion of sustainable business
• The basic calculation that allowed him to take the leap to begin Honest Tea
• The dynamic of his partnership with his co-founder – and why being so different is so important
• The impact on their reputation of selling part of the company to Coca-Cola as a feisty independant.

You can read more about the company at www.HonestTea.com and on Twitter at @honesttea

Listen to my interview with Seth Goldman

Jason Fried’s new book Rework comes out today, and I’m delighted that we managed to talk just a week ago in the lead up to its launch. Now here’s a quote to kick us off. It’s from Seth Godin, and he says (and I’m paraphrasing), “Make everything a project – and run it through 37Signals’ Basecamp.” Jason is the one of the founders of 37Signals. They design useful software to help people work better – connect with people, run projects, managing stuff. (I know, because I use it!)

And what’s cool is they haven’t done it by practising business as usual, but by practising business as unusual. In this interview Jason shares some of his successful and counter-intutive approaches to how to get stuff done. We talk about:

• The evolution of 37Signals – and why where you start is not where you finish
• The value of introducing “done enough” as a measure of success
• The problem with meetings – and what to do about it
• Why planning is highly overrated
• And a bunch more…

You can pick up the new book on Amazon , follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonFried, and learn more about 37 Signals’ products at their website.

Listen to my interview with Jason Fried

(And by the way, Jason’s surname is pronounced “Freed” – Apologies to Jason, and please ignore my mistake at the start of the interview!)