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A mentor of mine once told me, “if you have trouble solving a problem, try innovating from the opposite direction.” Jimi Hendrix clearly understood this concept well. Being left handed, he was initially confounded by the lack of available left-handed Fender Stratocaster guitars. His solution was ing…

Do the names Linda Keith and Chas Chandler ring a bell? Well, without their influence, we may have never heard of Jim Hendrix. In May 1966, Keith ran into the then-obscure Hendrix playing at the Cheetah club in New York.  “He was astonishing – the moods he could bring to music, his charisma, h…

Like most “overnight” sensations, Jimi Hendrix was not an immediate success. He burst onto the American music scene at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, after a fascinating series of events first turned him into a superstar in the U.K. So much of what happened to Hendrix parallels the global r…

One of the most enduring characters introduced in 1960’ television vas the venerable “Mr. Spock” of Star Trek fame. Leonard Nimoy played Spock after having only modest acting success before being cast as the half-human, half-Vulcan in 1964. Among the many attributes Spock had, two relate to the mode…

Sitting in traffic the other day, I tuned off my Peter Frampton Spotify channel and started to listen to New York area local AM radio. The president of a mortgage business came on in an advertisement. He ended his pitch with the tag line “I promise you the best service humanly possible”. This caught…

It has been more than a year since I started using Cisco Spark. And it has been a year of learning and changing how I work with my team…and I’m still learning. My focus and passion at Cisco is customer-care technology. I’m always thinking about how to apply new collaboration technologies to customer…

Drummer Bernard Purdie has played on over four thousand recordings in his fifty-year career. The self-proclaimed “Hitmaker”, he has recorded with Steely Dan, B.B. King, Hall and Oates, Miles Davis, and Louis Armstrong among many others. Included in his many contributions to music is his famous half-…

Tonight I’m heading out for a huge slice of nostalgia. I’m going to see 1980s pop group Simple Minds. No doubt there’ll be much reminiscing and swaying of hands to classics like “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” This year Cisco has been celebrating its 30th birthday. Another recent addition to t…

Due to a middle school crush, I became a fan of Elton John during the most prolific point in his career, releasing a series of records I still enjoy today. Always looking to impress, I’d listen to the albums again and again looking to memorize the lyrics if the chance for a sing-along ever presented…