Sep 14, 2009 | Uncategorized
Most people spend a lot of time polishing their CV’s, particularly whe they are on the lookout for an alternative role. However, how relevent is the paper CV in the age of the cyber-presence?
The first thing a prospective employer will do is google you, and hopefully the photos from “that” party 5 years ago have disappeared. The second thing they will do, if it is a position of some importance, will be to find someone who knows you, or has interacted with you, perhaps using Linked-in, or one of the other many networks that exist. Alternatively, if there is no record of you, anywhere, that is just as damming for a senior role carrying the responsability to articulate a position for your employer, or a point of view.
Your CV these days is a an ongoing project, something you have to work on continuously, not a once every 3 or 4 years “polish” to the written record of your activities.
By the time a prospective employer considers the paper CV seriously, the fix is in, “articulated” by your presence in the cyber mediums now available. Of course, fewer and fewer positions are now filled at senior levels by an ad, followed by a resume submission process. Now the head-hunters do the research and give you a call towards the end of the process, to determine your level of interest in a role you had not heard about.
Sep 10, 2009 | Change, Management, Uncategorized
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, used a graph 40 years ago to predict the rate of growth in IT capacity by stating his belief that the number of transistors that could be put onto a chip would double every two years.
He was talking about computing power, a long way from the environmental debates raging around us currently.
On the radio a day or two ago, I heard a credible source observe that he was astonished to note the rate of carbon being released to the atmosphere was roughly double estimations made just a couple of years ago.
This comment brought to mind Moore’s law, and started me wondering if it perhaps applied to the climate change debate. A recent Newsweek article also observed the rates of carbon emissions were well up on estimates, and that the rates were increasing, significantly because the rate of change was feeding on itself, creating a sort of multiplier effect, Moore’s law at work.
The unedifying sight of Australia’s two political parties taking opposite sides of the debate, simply because that was their allocated role, and apparently refusing to allow the facts to get in the way of a good argument smacks of Monty Python, not the serious debate that is required to start to address the scientific, commercial and social issues surrounding reality, or otherwise, of human induced climate change.
If Moore’s law holds true in the rate of release of carbon into the atmosphere, and the release of carbon is indeed a cause of global warming, we will need to move very quickly indeed to prevent, or perhaps at best mitigate, a catastrophe.
Sep 7, 2009 | Uncategorized
Reacting to something takes little thought, it is easy.
Responding to something is harder, it takes thought and usually some resources
Initiating is really hard, it requires you to be prepared to be wrong! This is always hard, as it often leads to questions that invoke the power of hindsight in the questioner, and if he/she is your boss, what then?.
This simple thought, “what will the boss say if it is wrong?” is enough to stop 95% of people from initiating anything, and some of those who do grasp the nettle, do get fired. Not comfortable.
As Thomas Watson, the founder and first chairman of IBM said, “The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate” so initiate something today, despite the risk, it will make your day!
Aug 9, 2009 | Uncategorized
There is a growing trend, perhaps driven by the difficult times for management to set very big goals, the “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” proposed by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their book “Built to last”, and hope to create the focus necessary to achieve the BHAG outcome.
Often however, the opposite appears to occur, as those in the organization charged with the execution of the plans simply do not believe the objectives are achievable.
Sometimes this is just that the objective is divorced from the reality of the competitive environment, sometimes it is simply a failure of leadership to recognise and allocate the necessary resources, but most often, the BHAG is just wishful management thinking that takes the place of the hard analysis and challenging leadership that goes with out of the box development.
The lesson is to develop audacious goals within a framework of communication and consultation in the business to develop the buy-in from the operating level people and then, a Big Hairy Audacious Goal can be a hugely motivating factor, and has a chance of being achieved.
Jun 28, 2009 | Uncategorized
No secret in being right, just be prepared to be wrong, and be prepared to accept the responsibility for being wrong, then learn from it.
Thomas Watson Sr was spectacularly wrong when he said “there is a market for perhaps 6-8 computers in the world”, but IBM went on to create the industry, ride the wave, and then reinvent itself after almost dying, and today is still a dominating presence.
Orville Wright in 1900 said “not in a 100 years will man fly”, got that wrong by 99 years, and Bill Gates dismissed the internet before recognising the mistake and radically changing Microsoft’s strategy virtually overnight, and accepting in a memo to all Microsoft employees he had made a mistake, and asking them to join him in fixing it.
When you are prepared to take a considered chance, you will get some wrong, and people forget, you will get some right, and nobody notices, and you will get a few spectacularly right, and everybody thinks you are enormously smart, and perhaps a bit lucky.
May 8, 2009 | Marketing, Uncategorized
In a recent blog I mused about the business model of the newspaper industry, wondering if it could survive , given the inroads of the web. It is also reasonable to ask if the e-paper can survive without the paper version.
How hard wired is the behavior that leads to people relating to the paper version, and is there a mid point like Amazons Kindle?
The brands that the e-papers are seeking to leverage are all the result of the old version, none have so far made anything of a dent in the task of building a newspaper brand in cyberspace.
I think this tells us something about the manner in which humans like to relate to brands, preferable if they are physical in some way, the impact of a tactile experience with a product imprints the brand better than an “e-experience” alone
