Dec 30, 2009 | Leadership, Marketing, Uncategorized
Business is basically simple, it is people that generate the complications and distractions, and us that allow the distractions that make it complicated.
The simple rule: spend less than you have coming in, and work like hell to bring it in.
Now the economic sun appears to be coming up again ion Australia, don’t relax, don’t listen to the hustlers who promise the world without a hope of delivering, listen to your loyal customers, understand their needs, service the daylights out of them, look for ways to do everything you do better, and have a great 2010.
Dec 29, 2009 | Uncategorized
Christmas is a great opportunity to contact people you have not had a reason to contact for a while.
Old friends, former colleagues, former clients, those who share an experience or passion and people you just like.
In this world of electronic communication, when you take the time, and make the effort to make that one to one human contact, it is always welcomed. Always.
We are so used to impersonal and mass communication that when one arrives that is personal, warm, and not asking for something other than a bit of your time to say Hi, we warm to it, and the person making it.
This is the human side of Christmas, what makes it worth while, irrespective of your beliefs.
Dec 24, 2009 | Uncategorized
It is Christmas day, so I wish the best for 2010 to the dedicated few and the black dog who dip into this blog on a regular basis.
I hope that what I write touches a nerve, brings a grimace, stirrs a laugh, or motivates some action. The worst outcome is that it gets no reaction at all.
2009 was an “interesting” year in the sense of the old Chinese proverb, hopefully 2010 will be a touch easier, but with difficulty comes opportunity for those who are able to see past the hubris of the status quo, and have the drive to be different, engaging, and daring.
Merry Christmas, and thanks for caring.
Allen Roberts
Sep 30, 2009 | Leadership, Management, Uncategorized
Right? Probably wrong 90% of the time.
Superficial logic says when there are lots of people looking for jobs, it should be easy to find one to do yours, this may be true, but is it the right person for the job???.
A colleague of mine is looking for drivers, there should be plenty around in a downturn, but there are very few to whom he chooses to give the keys of his very expensive trucks, carrying perishable loads. When he finds a good one, the price has not gone down, but his costs in finding him have gone way up, as the volume of unsuitable applicants that need to be culled has increased.
Good times or bad, the greatest challenge is finding the right employee, not the cost of the exercise.
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.
