“This is scary. It’s really scary to turn down most (the average) of what comes your way and hold out for the remarkable opportunities. Scary to quit your job at an average company doing average work just because you know that if you stay, you’ll end up just like them. Scary to go way out on an edge and intentionally make what you do unattractive to some.”
Which is why it’s such a great opportunity.
-Seth Godin
[via]
The Final lecture on Business Strategy was tonight. All up, an interesting topic, and I am left with really one takeaway
“How do you create and capture value?”
This seems to be the essence of business strategy, and everything else falls out of this single point. Mindmaps to follow.
Two things are important dietary wise when you are working 50 hrs and studying 15 a week
Breakfast and coffee.
Two great blogs seem to nail it.
The breakfast blog : All the best breakfasts around melbourne
Melbourne Coffee Review : Reviews of coffee in and around melbourne
Brilliant
So Google has released the Google Pack
Which seems to follow the strategy of trying to increase their economies of scope, and hedge against future uncertainty. $400 a share is just crazy, when you consider that they aren’t comparatively really different to where Alta Vista was in the late 90’s in a lot of ways. And that search engine technology comes and goes, and the Internet is just filled with uncertainty.
Two applications that come part of the Google Pack: Norton Antivirus 2005 and Real Player.
These are two of the nastiest, dirtiest, invasive applications you could hope for. Effectively they can cripple a computer just by having them installed. Tonight in Business Strategy we spoke about Joint Ventures and Alliances and how most of the time they fail. Especially when there is incentive for either party to cheat. Google is simply buying an option. Real Player is doing what it has always done, and that is invade people’s computer and infect itself with its invasiveness.
Like the parasitic tick, its trying to attach itself to your operating system…
Every new CEO wants to make his mark. Especially a young CEO, he usually wants to grow the company into a Southwest or a GE or something even bigger. What then if that corporation is also protected by not having to be accountable to shareholders, and furthermore customers and employees don’t stand to benefit from any increase in scope?
No-one benefits except the CEO and the board. And if the attempt to effect organisational change fails, and the company board is remotely intelligent, then he loses as well.
The bottom line goal for every CEO. Make employees feel valued and they will ensure contribution to bottom line profits. But first and foremost, simply don’t fuck the company up.
Afl.com.au has been a bad web site for a long, long time. I remember when it first released in the late 90’s it was an illustration in web site design courses of how not to use java. Very little has changed in 8 years. Some bright spark on their development team worked out that maybe Flash could be a better option. Good choice. The news section finally works.
Unfortunately, for some bizarre reason, a java applet still loads, which slows down the page and corrupts the user experience. Most web designers worked out that java simply isnt a good choice for client side applications, and is best suited for server side applications. Flash and now AJAX are much better choices. The afl.com.au team seem to have missed the boat.
In addition, I challenge anyone to find out where the broadcast guide section is. I would have thought this was a commonly used area of the site (when is the footy on the telly?). I could be wrong. But I wonder if they looked at the logs to see where people were visiting before designing their site.
Applets went out in the late 90’s with the dot com crash…get with it AFL…hire some real designers
