Promise not to promise...

It is kind of disaster to promise. Everybody in daily life asks you promise or to answer to their questions. Since you have not read all book you do not have all answers. But, people are really waiting for your answer. What to do?

Of course, you should not lie and if you said I try to solve it, I will think about it. Then, everybody thinks aha great now I have shared my responsibility and now ball is on the opposite site. Yeah, great but, will this bring any results?

It actually depends... If person really overloaded one, and people who have positions most of the time are over over over loaded. Then, there is not much chance that they will deliver the results that you are expect from them.

Here works two alternatives, you put as much pressure as you can and get your result. You get another choice which is just forget about it, go outside and have a nice day :)

Tired? Bored? Sick??

YEAH!!! I am already at the edge of all these nice world... But let us stop and look back... So what???

Yeah, we have strived to get here for years and now we feel that this place is not ours? Strange is not it?

Escape? Where? Should look for alternatives? Got!!! But, who guarantees that this alternative would be worst one?

Nice questions... Still looking for answers :)

For people who we know

I just saw a petition for my friends. Please sign if you can... Here is it.

How to go???

Our life is a way to go. We can run it, walk and/or jump. But, most important is to know where to go. After solving this issue, we will face another. How to go???

Despite the fact that this question may sound very basic, in nature it is the most complex issue that modern business face. Let me use a sample to illustrate the situation.

When you are travelling from certain point to another you may reach your target by guidance or you may reach it by asking to people. Another choice is trying to reach this distance by just trying on yourself even may be asking sometimes. Even these two samples are very similar the basic attitude in modern business is just reaching the point that you want and need with the help of consultants.

Despite the fact that this way looks as an easy one it is not easy to understand who sells what and how competent they are. Here, you may use again consultants to evalute consultants :))))) Strange is not it??? Even if the answer is yes, that is how our rational world is working...

Why to work???

Strange... Do I need to work??? If yes, then why??? Question everything, does not really mean just, asking question. It means try to understand the reasons behind decisions and behavior.

In this perspective, trying to answer to the question I will go back to Maslow's hierarchy. Even, it is too classic. We get security, socialize and realize our ambitions.

Then, comes the question when to leave/quit the job and start the new one. Back to Maslow, when you will loose all attributes of the hierarchy. Or may be when you feel that this hierarchy disappears.

But, in reality perception of danger in human is too different from the hierarchy. Small interview makes me clear that people may quit their job just because you said something wrong. But, then where to put Maslow's concept.

Even, if I am not psychological professional I get understand that it is important to divide decisions taken under the emotional pressure or let us say irrational decisions and rational ones. Rational ones are those which you take only after evaluation and deep analysis of situation. Irrational you take just because someone was too bad to you. Or you just fed up with the situation. Solution here is, just taking a vacation.

Same as in boxing, you get time out just to analyse situation. Get you focus back and then return to the fight.

Unfortunately, most people see work environment as an arena. Some shows their beauty, others power etc. It is even strange that people do not want (now I consider management as a part of society and refer to them as to people)to understand that in a company we have common goal. That goal is not to eliminate someone, it is the company targets which will guarantee our job security.

Yes, I get my reply nobody cares about us, management just gets their money and bonuses. But, where is sustainable growth. In modern world, it is impossible to do something and then to hide it. Somewhere, someone will bring this issue up and somebody will lose her reputation.

That is the point. Understand why you are working? How you own targets are related to the company targets? Understand can you change you targets if they are against of company? If not where you can go? And then, just do it...

Things that you can...

Modern companies or let us say modern companies in emerging world is thinking of how to control and have more control. This control approach creates a real complexity over the management system and as it is obvious we behave rationally in the irrational way. But, trying to control we just kill our business. Create complexity and as result revenues go down and nobody can understand where is the problem...

Problem is with us... We carry it on our back from year to year. We feed it it, we grow it and then find out that we have an enemy which we call our problem. And our problem is complexity which comes from the truth...It is really simple we just do not believe in each other. It is possible to say we just do not believe that we can give somebody certain task and s/he will not cheat us...

Yeah, this lead us to hire people whom we know, who are referenced... People who have been graduated from the same school, country, region, etc as we are. But, we are still unsure... Some people hire even their relatives and then get the same result on cheating.

What we can do... Strange but very simple... Do not expect too much... Explain as simple as you can... Trust to person as much as you can... Share your benefit with people as much as you can...

And we believe if you would make as well as you can you will solve your problems!!!

In search of excellence: how to bind competitive advantages of academia with industry

Since for more than 5 years I am sitting in position of the splits. I am doing academic and industry work, or let me put it correctly, trying to do these both works. I had always questions and discussions about what is the ideal way of combining these two areas. Some people already may object that it is impossible...They will be right! But there are people who is doing something like this, then it is possible for people who understands origins of the industry and academy...

I think it is a bit early for me to say something about it and hence, I would like to present you an interesting view that I have found at HBR Academia vs. Industry: The Difference Is in the Punctuation Marks. According to it authors the most important is to understand the punctuation marks.

For me, it is most important to put it into the right places in the life to form an adequate story :)

My regards...

The way to solve problems :)

Sounds strange it is really hard to provide universal receipt for every situation... But, recently coming across the I Want You to Apologize article at HBR I reminded myself the old truth. The solution of problem comes from the recognition of it. If person can not see or easy understand that there is a problem s/he will never cope with it. Ignoring does not mean solving problem, we have to find our emotional power to accept problem, think about it, avoid future mistakes...

As author Peter says, sometimes all that we need is to say I am sorry, I did not intend to it. What can I do to correct it? That is the key to the solution. It is hard to accept but seems that we were looking for a key in a different place. That is normal as a human being we do not want to push ourselves into the hard situations and being irrational rationals pointing and emphasizing the easiest solution...and at the end this easy solution does not provide any return :) We just waste our energy, emotions, nerves and other resources.

Should we rethink every step? Let's being more rational :)

My first steps...

Two days were more like running around, lectures, meetings, corrections, posts, letters all were too urgent and too much important. Today, since all gone away I had a change to read more and actually I have not gone too far. I just read my emails from Linkedin and what I have discovered in Rod Kings post in Strategy Professionals Network:

"...Here are the “8 Blue Ocean Actions for Business and Life:”

1. Own less.
2. Acquire less.
3. Participate in fewer stages of the VALUE CHAIN.
4. Have fewer PRODUCTS.
5. Have fewer CUSTOMERS.
6. Have fewer SUPPLIERS.
7. Have fewer EMPLOYEES.
8. Get more NON-CUSTOMERS.

Using the paradigm of Blue Ocean Strategy, the first seven habits fall under the action of “Reduce” while the eighth falls under “Raise.” These 8 habits indicate that there may be *generic* blue ocean actions or tactics for traveling to the Blue Ocean..."

May 1

I have no idea where I came to Wired website, probably it was Harvard's site but I explored very interesting things in the article - "The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time" which are:

"... Inspired (or perhaps a bit scared) by the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) project, Asustek—Quanta's archrival in Taiwan and the world's seventh-largest notebook maker—began crafting its own inexpensive, low-performance computer. It, too, would be built cheaply using Linux, flash memory, and a tiny 7-inch screen. It had no DVD drive and wasn't potent enough to run programs like Photoshop. Indeed, Asustek intended it mainly just for checking email and surfing the Web. Their customers, they figured, would be children, seniors, and the emerging middle class in India or China who can't afford a full $1,000 laptop.

What happened was something entirely different. When Asustek launched the Eee PC in fall 2007, it sold out the entire 350,000-unit inventory in a few months. Eee PCs weren't bought by people in poor countries but by middle-class consumers in western Europe and the US, people who wanted a second laptop to carry in a handbag for peeking at YouTube or Facebook wherever they were. Soon the major PC brands—Dell, HP, Lenovo—were scrambling to catch up; by fall 2008, nearly every US computermaker had rushed a teensy $400 netbook to market.

All of which is, when you think about it, incredibly weird. Netbooks violate all the laws of the computer hardware business. Traditionally, development trickles down from the high end to the mass market. PC makers target early adopters with new, ultrapowerful features. Years later, those innovations spread to lower-end models...

...It turns out that about 95 percent of what I do on a computer can now be accomplished through a browser. I use it for updating Twitter and Facebook and for blogging. Meebo.com lets me log into several instant-messaging accounts simultaneously. Last.fm gives me tunes, and webmail does the email. I use Google Docs for word processing, and if I need to record video, I can do it directly from webcam to YouTube. Come to think of it, because none of my documents reside on the netbook, I'm not sure I even need the trash can.

Netbooks have ended the performance wars. It used to be that when you went to an electronics store to buy a computer, you picked the most powerful one you could afford. Because, who knew? Maybe someday you'd need to play a cutting-edge videogame or edit your masterpiece indie flick. For 15 years, the PC industry obliged our what-if paranoia by pushing performance. Intel and AMD tossed out blisteringly fast chips, hard drives went on a terabyte gallop, RAM exploded, and high-end graphics cards let you play Blu-ray movies on your sprawling 17-inch laptop screen. That dream machine could do almost anything.

But here's the catch: Most of the time, we do almost nothing. Our most common tasks—email, Web surfing, watching streamed videos—require very little processing power. Only a few people, like graphic designers and hardcore gamers, actually need heavy-duty hardware. For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems...

..."But what about Photoshop?" It's the standard retort from those who dismiss netbooks as children's toys. Sure, a dinky 1.6-GHz chip and Linux are fine for email and silly things like YouTube. But what about when you need to do some real computing, like sophisticated photo editing? The cloud won't help you there, kid.

In the narrowest sense, this is true: A really powerful application like Adobe Photoshop demands a much faster processor. But consider my experience: This spring, after my regular Windows XP laptop began crashing twice a day, I reformatted the hard drive. As I went about reinstalling my software, I couldn't find my Photoshop disc. I forgot about it—until a week later, when I was blogging and needed to tweak a photo. Frustrated, I went online and discovered FotoFlexer, one of several free Web-based editing tools. I uploaded my picture, and in about one minute I'd cropped it, deepened the color saturation, and sharpened it.

I haven't used Photoshop since.

Keep in mind that I like Photoshop. I'm not doing this to make any geeky ideological point about how bleeding-edge I am or how much I hate paying for boxed software. It's simply that the hassle of finding my Photoshop disc now exceeds the ease of using FotoFlexer. The code for working with the browser-based app is a mere 900 KB, and "to the average user, that comes down really fast," as Sharam Shirazi, CEO of Arbor Labs, which created it, points out to me.

My Photoshop experience is just one example of how the software industry is changing. It used to be that coders were forced to produce bloatware with endless features because they had to guess what customers might want to do. But if you design a piece of software that lives in the cloud, you know what your customers are doing—you can watch them in real time. Shirazi's firm discovered that FotoFlexer users rarely do fancy editing; the most frequently used features are tools for drawing text and scribbles on pictures. Or consider the Writely app, which eventually became the word processor part of Google Docs: When Sam Schillace first put it online, he found to his surprise that what users wanted most was a way to let several people edit a document together...

...Netbooks are so cheap, they're reshaping the fundamental economics of the PC business. Last October, British mobile-phone carrier Vodafone offered its customers a new deal: If they signed a two-year contract for high-speed wireless data, Vodafone would give them a Dell Mini 9 netbook. That isn't quite the same as getting a free computer; after all, Vodafone bills users $1,800 on that two-year contract, so it can afford to throw in the netbook. (In December, RadioShack offered a similar deal: a $99 Acer Aspire netbook for anyone who signed up for two years of AT&T's 3G service.)

What these deals signal is that computers are developing the same economics as mobile phones. Hardware is becoming a commodity. It's difficult to charge for. What's really valuable—what people will pay through the nose for—is the ability to communicate.

So netbooks have sent a sort of hot-cold shudder through the computer industry. Sure, it's great to have an exploding new product category. But this is a category in which it's incredibly hard to make a dime: At $300, a netbook sells for barely more than the sum of its parts—and sometimes less. "The profit margins on these things are nonexistent," chuckles Paul Goldenberg, managing director of Digital Gadgets, which created a line of netbooks under the Sylvania brand. "Everyone is saying 'We're losing money now, but we'll make it up on volume, right?'"...

...Netbooks could drive production of even crazily cheaper, lighter-weight computers. "If everything you're doing is online, then the netbook becomes a screen with a radio chip. So why do you need a motherboard?" OLPC designer Mary Lou Jepsen says. "Especially if you want the batteries to last. Why not just make it a screen and a really cheap $2 to $5 radio chip?" The cloud is also probably going to get powerful in ways that now seem like fantasy. AMD is working on an experimental 3-D graphics server farm that would run high-end videogames, squirting a stream out to portable devices so you could play even the most outrageously lush games without a fancy onboard processor. Patrick Moorehead, AMD's vice president of marketing, recalls that in 2007 gamers had to buy special powerful desktop machines loaded with RAM and $600 graphics cards to play Crysis: "Now imagine you've got servers running Crysis and streaming it to an iPhone or a netbook, sending just the vectors that let you navigate the game."

Because this is the future of hardware. For a few users who need a high-performance device, PC makers will offer ever-more-blisteringly fast, water-cooled boxes with screens the size of your living room—at $2,000 a pop. For everyone else—lawyers looking for something to do on the train, women desperate for something that fits in their handbag—netbooks will dominate. It's the rise of the very small machines..."

Interesting isn't it???

The new way

Since it is officially declared that modern people are sick with the modern sickness which is called something like partial attention... Which means, person simultaneously may read something, do another thing and could not concentrate on none of each, I decided to start a topic and periodically add lines to it, until I became bored with it.

Cause every day I learn a new thing or do something new but, could not put everything here, since some are commercial issue and others are personal :)

But anyway, I decided to change a format slightly and see what will happen...

Time resource or tool?

Time a metaphor which we put behind every task that we want to implement. Yeah, want to implement not always done but is considered with the will to do. Therefore, we start to put deadlines and put ourselves into the frame-stress. Actually, the frame that we put for us is not the same frame for others.

Hence, when priorities of different people are different we have to count not on our priorities but, on priorities of others. It is not a news or whatsoever it is truth that ignored by us most of the time.

We just do not count or consider the bad alternatives as we did not consider world financial crisis.

But it may and actually had come :)

Most of the time we just put deadlines and used them as a tool to achieve certain goals. During these activities we totally ignore that it is resource and some people whom we really on may be lack of it. This resource comes from moral and spiritual mind of him/her and we should never ignore this factor. We have to take into consideration that things can change rapidly and be ready to adapt to this change.

In other words, we have to be ready to switch the criteria of time from tool as a deadline into the resource which may not be available when we want just to have it...

Time to change!

Perfect time to change! Why? Of course because of crisis. We used to consume more, we were unsatisfied, we were unhappy and now it is time to reassess our values, elements in our value chain. And of course start to act...

We should take out our ideas, thought which we have put into the shelves due to economic growth and good work opportunities. Now, we have to invest in ourselves. Perfect time to calculate self ROI and put the personal target.

Go ahead!!!

Truth about Marketing???

Today I read an interesting message in the article of John Quelch in HBR, here is citation: "...First, marketing is not a profession. Second, marketing is not a science..." For more click here

It is a bit hard to accept but, sometimes it seems that we must admit some true facts...

Hulu: point where strategy means a lot!

I am not sure that you have heard about the HULU. I have neither till have not read Economist article . It became obvious that this company applied slightly different, but generally the same idea as YouTube. Hulu just used some tools like Blue Ocean Strategy to differentiate itself from the rivals.

According to the Economist this company became successful with the implementing of this strategy and already holds its niche. Amazing, even in the market where everything seems to be full you may find a corner for yourself. As GooGle love to point it, seems that our world get sick with the lack of time and receiving lot of information. It is a bit hard for me now, to remember how they call it up but, the general meaning was that people will pay you to get what exactly they want and companies will pay you to provide what their customers want to watch even it may be free at the same place. Some kind of disorder... Yeah but, who said that we have an order in our life. We just trying to have it :)

Even seeds may bring you opportunity...

I had an exiting opportunity to read the article of McKinsey with the Chief Economist of Google. I liked one of his major points that in today's knowledge based - world of information it is important to understand analyse and select the information that we need to deal with.

Really, in daily life we had lots of information to read to analyse and most of the time by digging in the wrong destination we may found water instead of oil/gas that we were looking for.

Hence, Mr.Varian point out that if the "sexiest job of 90's was computer engineering" the future is for statics. Because only this people, will assist enterprises to combine, study, select and formulate the information that they will need. He mentioned that this profession will be one of the demanding in business world. I will totally agree with him, it is even now...

Concerning the fact that most of people in business do not want to deal with the math, they want just result and are very to get into the calculation this means that I should go and repeat my statistics :))))

Mak.az...

Things may change and it seems that I found a new place where I will write. At least I get an offer...
I am not sure how long will it continue but, it seems that my pauses on blog may continue and even prolong. From February I will be mostly available (I hope) @ www.mak.az.

Regards,

Me

Beyond Reengineering performed by Michael Hammer

I recently had a chance to finish Mr.Hammers' book Beyond Reengineering. It was pleasant activity that I had during the vacation. Reading the book I had an insight that this book is a bit far from nowadays organizations where people, even managers and owners come to spend their time and concentrate on daily operational activities. Hence, I decided to check the date of publication. And when I saw 1996, I was a bit shocked...

Later, I had a chance to read comments on a book and understand that not everything is so bad and we are still not following any organization. It is just author who is visionary consultant who described the model of future organizations. Yeap, elements of his description are currently implementing but, not all. It is nearly impossible to leave staff without the functional and administrative responsibilities chart and provide them process oriented organizations chart which provided Mr. Hammer. They will just get lost in it. Since they found lost of blank areas on it.

However, today I read that Mr.Hammer died at his 60 in 2008. Sad...