It is official: John Chow has finally lost it. After his rant on removing the minimum wage, today he is argueing for a flat tax rate to free up the rich and complaining about not getting a 100% tax break and paying superannuation for his nanny. Good grief 
There are a lot of ill-informed right-wing fantasies that he might next indulge in. My pick for the Top 5 are:
- national service (AKA the draft) as a means to solve unemployment,
- forced removal of children from poor homes,
- Flouride as a government conspiracy in mind control,
- homosexuality as a curable disease, and
- forced sterility of convicted felons.
Anyone else care to guess what is next?
(PSST John: - just quietly… if you don’t want to pay a fair level of tax, move to Australia, mate, we look after business owners quite well here )
…not to them.
A comment from Jeri Merrell on my Blogging with a heart post made me think about how values-based activity relates to professional life. As I thought about it, I realised that consulting (like blogging) is something that you do for your clients, not to them.
The bottom line is this: no matter how many bonuses you get for bringing in new business, or writing killer IP, or finding new consultants, if you aren’t doing something of real value for your clients, then you are doing it to them not for them.
Guess which model is more sustainable and ultimately more rewarding?
Published at 23 July, 2007
in Life.
According to the Sunrise program (Australia) on Sunday 22 July, the dating game is changing here:
- Australians are marrying later in life,
- They are having children later, with a second or third child not coming along until the mother is in her late 30s/early 40s, and
- SLIMs (single low income males) are losing what attraction they had as marriage/family prospects.
This could mean that a fine Aussie tradition, the Bogan (AKA Westie, Booner, Hoon or Lout) could be a dying breed. They are the epitome of the SLIM ideal.
I cannot imagine an Australia without Bogans… a world without beat-up VK Commodore cars with home-made body kits and oversized tachometers, without Jim Beam labels in car windows, without obscene bumper stickers, without mullet haircuts, without Victoria Bitter, and without torn western shirts/tracksuit pants/Ugg boots. The demise of the Ugg boot alone could force a glut in the sheepskin industry (and New Zealand jokes aside, there is a limit to alternative uses for sheepskin).
I believe that we need a Bogan Preservation Society. If we cannot conserve these Aussie icons in the wild (in garden spots like Macquarie Fields) then they must be preserved in captivity.
I’m not sure how to structure the captive breeding program, or fund it, but I do know that something must be done. Otherwise we will one day have to answer to our grandchildren…
“Grandad, what’s a Bogan?”
Published at 23 July, 2007
in Life.
I suppose it had to happen - in the inevitable and continuing backlash against Bratz dolls and wider concerns about the sexual objectification of children - the other side of the argument now have their own range of action figures:
 I am not sure how I feel about the Messengers of Faith action figures. I believe that parents are allowed to raise their children in their own faith along with other cultural and moral guidance - I am not sure that dolls are an appropriate channel. What do you think?
Seth Godin thinks that online community organizer sounds like a good job to have in the future. He sees some desirable characteristics as:
It would help if that person understood technology, at least well enough to know what it could do. They would need to be able to write. But they also have to be able to seduce stragglers into joining the group in the first place, so they have to be able to understand a marketplace, do outbound selling and non-electronic communications. They have to be able to balance huge amounts of inbound correspondence without making people feel left out, and they have to be able to walk the fine line between rejecting trolls and alienating the good guys.
Tangler is looking for community managers at the moment. They define their needs as:
We need people to spend time to help other new users use the product and supporting new groups.
We are looking for two or three people to work three hours a day using our online application.
Looking for people who are:
- Friendly.
- Very good with writing English.
- Fun
- Helpful
- Confident on computers and using the Internet.
- Interested in a broad range of topics.
Are Seth and the Tangler guys talking about the same person? I think that they are, and I think that as social computing grows, there will be more job adverts like the Tangler one.
At last night’s Canberra IA Cocktail Hour discussion turned to Facebook invitations. Some of us get a lot of them, and sometimes we wonder how we know the inviter.
Penelope Trunk has the following advice for inviting people to LinkedIn. I’ve been a LinkedIn user for a while now - I can see the applicability of this to Facebook:
1. Don’t say yes to an invitation from a person you don’t really know.
LinkedIn works best as a way to leverage your professional circle of people you know well or know their work well. I love looking through my friends’ professional networks to get an idea of what introductions I could possibly get from a friend. My friend can say to her friend, “This is Penelope, you should get to know her because of x.� But this only works if my friend actually knows me and the other person well. Otherwise, I may as well make the introduction myself.
In that respect, your network on LinkedIn is really only as strong as your ties to the people in it. You will get more benefits from LinkedIn if you have a network of 30 people you know well than 300 people you don’t really know.
2. Don’t send invitations to people who don’t know you.
I feel like I kinda know Mike Arrington. I know I’d like to have dinner with him (does he ever stop blogging to have dinner?) I read his blog every day, and I know the type of connections he could offer me. But he doesn’t know me. Even if I have emailed him three times and posted ten comments on his blog, he doesn’t know who I am. He probably reads 400 emails and comments a day.
…5. Remind me how I know you.
Sometimes, I do actually know someone, but I communicate with so many different people every day, that I don’t remember. Yesterday I got an invitation that said, “It was great to do the podcast interview with you today� right before the standard LinkedIn invitation text. That was great. I knew exactly who the woman was and I connected. This also brings up another point, which is act immediately. The best invitations come right after you’ve made one, solid connection with a given person. For example, if you go back and forth in email six times, send an invitation that day.
What’s the easiest way to screw up a Facebook invitation? By getting it to run through your GMail or Outlook address book and inviting everyone you’ve ever emailed without thought. Chances are there are a lot of people that were CC recipients of mailing list responses from 12 months back that don’t know you from a bar of soap - you have no reason to invite these people to be Facebook friends, so don’t invite them.
Published at 18 July, 2007
in Rant.
Zern Liew has published a magnificent rant on what a hazardous business it is to be a consumer in the modern age, where economies of scale are causing us (and our pets) active harm.
I’m given to the odd rant or two, and I like to think that I can tell a good rant from bad. Zern has researched this one well. It is well worth a read.
Nick O’Neill writes that social networking is changing the way we recruit. As Nick indicates, there are recruiters active on Facebook - as well as those on Second Life and LinkedIn.
What does this actually mean? Does social networking just provide one more recruitment channel, or are their more fundamental changes?
A potential change is a growing recognition of the knowledge worker and their preference for burstworking. In an employee’s market, potential employers need to be aware of the needs of those they recruit so that they can attract the best.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that the people approached via social networking applications are more likely to be knowledge workers and therefore more likely to expect a non-process-centric work environment. And this means that they’ll be less satisfied in the average hierarchical organisation.
I suppose this begs the question: is social networking changing working life (and thence recruitment practices) or are the changing expectations of the growing number of knowledge workers allowing social networking to bloom? I suspect that the answer is a bit of both - and the next few years should be really interesting as the accelerating pace of change catches up with older, larger, slower organisations.
The photo says it all. Context is everything
How do you position yourself? How do you provide context?
…because you are supposed to be engaged. Fully engaged.
This is one of the things that I learnt from my SMSMT mentor Stephen Hall. Be fully present for the client, keeping in mind your obligations to the company, friends and family. Be an adult, get the job done. Over-deliver when you can, but ensure that you deliver.
No client wants to hear about how drunk you got last night - imagine going to a dentist or a heart specialist and hearing how unwell you are from alcohol abuse. All that most clients want is for you to get the job done - that said, it is easier to ask you back for another engagement if you are someone that they like doing business with. Being liked is part of the job.
Are you a consultant? Is there any of this stuff that doesn’t make perfect sense to you? If so, tell me about it.
Recent Comments