I can’t remember how I got there, but once I had started listening, my short cyber journey was forced out of the way by a massive invasion of 70’s and 80’s South African TV memories.
Mary Anne, your site (Pumamouse) made my day, and possibly everyone else who clicks through from here.
You gotta go…. NOW!
Excuse me for one last Sony post, but this is a beeooot.
A friend mailed me today (sorry if I got in first, couldn’t resist) to say that his mom had forwarded him a ‘Boycott Sony’ e-mail. His comment was wonderful:
Even my mother is getting this stuff… Sony is dead, when my mother starts checking them out…
A suggestion to Telkom – give people free usage of phones and internet based on how much they’ve been messed around by our Proudly South African company (well, they ARE the BEST fixed-line operator in South Africa…). After Typepad’s lack of good service during the last few weeks (Mike told me this morning that Missing Link were having Typepad problems) they’ve done exactly that.
To all our non-South African readers, I apologise in advance for airing this dirty laundry in front of you. But, spending a lot of time in South Africa, means that I need to take the context of this country seriously.
In SA, we have only one fixed line telecomms provider, Telkom. They are making excessive profits. They charge more than ANY OTHER telecomms provider ON THE PLANET, and given the importance of telecomms to the national economy, they are holding back economic growth. That in itself would be indefensible, but now they’re treating their customers badly – even insulting us.
Next year, the long awaited second national operator (SNO) will finally open doors for business. I can imagine that Telkom are going to be seriously surprised at how much bad feeling exists towards them when people literally flock to the new company – JUST ON PRINCIPLE. Let’s hope the SNO brings real competition, and unlike Cell C (the third cellphone company) which simply joined the pigs at the trough and provided no real competition for price.
The lesson for everyone else works itself out in a company like Microsoft. As soon as we have a viable alternative to Windows, many of us will switch ON PRINCIPLE. A monopoly can screw you, and then when their monopoly is coming to an end, start to pretend to love their customers. But customers have LONG memories.
Back to Telkom. To read a great article about them at MarketingWeb, click here, or read it below.
Technorati Tags: Business, Telecommunications, Telkom
Following up a post on ?ic about Sony over the weekend, here are some of today’s posts on various sites.
* Wired News – Boycott Sony
After weeks of criticism, Sony has finally agreed to temporarily stand down on an abusive and likely illegal copy restriction practice. Hold the applause.
* News.com – Sony’s CD scheme backfires
Record label’s rootkit-like copy protection comes under more fire, as businesses consider banning CDs with it from office computers because of the security risk they pose.
* BoingBoing – Sony anti-customer technology roundup and time-line
Since Hallowe’en, we’ve been posting the details about he revelations relating to Sony’s DRM systems, which show jaw-dropping contempt for their customers, for copyright law, for fair trading and for the public interest.
* News.com – Sony’s new name, to some: ‘Sory’
Sony’s precipitous fall from grace in the last few years is beginning to feel like a Greek tragedy.
Nuf Sed
We had another ‘human get together’ tonight for the Think Sync!community tonight. The group decided to explore what connections really translate into, from a value perspective, in an emerging world in which connections are becoming critical. There’s still no agreement as to how we’ll go about it? That’s the next ‘task’ for the group. It should be an interesting journey as we find ways to involve people in a broader geographical context.
Why on earth would you ever want to mess with anyone who feels this strongly about cheating? Click here!
This past weekend, the SALT was finally launched. SALT is the South African Large Telescope, based at Sutherland. It is the southern hemisphere’s largest optical telescope, and has some of the best further technical abilities of any telescope on the planet. Astronomers are going gaga about it. It will be able to see things never before seen by humans.
What caught my attention in the report over the weekend was this quote by one of lead astronomers: “We work all night, and in the morning we emerge into the infinity of the Karoo, populated only by a couple of springbok and one or two trees. It’s so silent, you don’t even hear an echo. You can lose your sense of balance here. It’s only when you’re in such a silent place that you realise how much of our sense of balance comes from sound.”
And someone else: “The unique feature of astronomy is its mixture of science and wonder; of heart and mind. As human beings we need to keep realising and appreciating the fascination of nature. Too many children are growing up in places that are so polluted that they never experience the poetry of the stars and the wonder of what is out there.”
As an aside, there are now plans for an 18-hole golf course and golf estate in the nearby town of Sutherland. Is nothing sacred?
Technorati Tags: astronomy
How does a company who so often has been on the cutting edge of innovation and known for delighting their customers with some of the most amazing gizmos and gadgets get it so wrong? Personally I think they’ve moved a bunch of accountants and lawyers into their R&D labs and some of the crazies and hackers out.
We all know the media world is in crisis. People downloading their stuff all over the place, ripping, burning, copying, sending, and in the eyes of the media mogules, doing anything but buy their stuff. So they start to panic and freak out, and find new ways to do things (kudos to you for getting off your large, very wealthy butts). But instead of being the innovative and creative people we thought they were, many of them have chosen the route of criminalising their customers and potential customers. It’s beeeoootiful isn’t it.
Here are two new editions to this unfolding drama:
… Continue Reading
Thanks Dave Fuller for uploading (transporting) Dr Seuss onto the Star Trek Enterprise…
Picard : Sigma Indri, that’s the star,
So, Data, please, how far? How far?
Data: Our ship can get there very fast
But still the trip will last and last
We’ll have two days til we arrive
But can the Indrans there survive?
Picard: LaForge, please give us factor nine.
LaForge: But, sir, the engines are offline!
Picard: Offline! But why? I want to go!
Please make it so, please make it so!
Riker: But sir, if Geordi says we can’t,
We can’t, we mustn’t, and we shan’t,
The danger here is far too great!
Picard: But surely we must not be late!
Troi: I’m sensing anger and great ire.
Computer: Alert! Alert! The ship’s on fire!
Picard: The ship’s on fire? How could this be?
Who lit the fire?
Click here for the full script
Sad day,
The world’s most influential business guru, Peter Drucker, passed away 11 Nov 2005.
Read about it on the Washington Post.
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Imagine this…
You’re a manager in a large corporate, and you’re working on an important project. You assess your current team, and you realise that you’re a little short of some skills, and the team is not quite as balanced as should be. It could also do with a little bit more diversity. So, using your company’s latest web-based staffing software, you go online and enter a request for two additional staff members to provide 20 hours a week of input to your team. You are able to select from a wide variety of fields – either specifying a particular selection, or deciding which criteria are not important.
You may be able to specify some of the following: age, gender, culture, language, country of origin, current country of residence (for multinationals), personality profile (Maybe Meyers-Briggs MBTI, or Enneagram type, for example), leadership style (based on agreed profiles), team style (e.g. Belbin), skills and talent themes (e.g. Markus Buckingham’s ‘Now Discover Your Strengths‘ and Gallup’s StrengthQuest profile), expert knowledge and subject expertise, etc.
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Today, TomorrowToday.biz hosted a blogging seminar. To be honest, it went further than blogs to social software.
Newbie (to TmTd and presenting), Mike Stopforth did a great job. So did the old lads, Barrie and Graeme (if I say so myself). “And a fun time was had by all”. Some of the legends of SA blogging were there, too.
Check out the real time blog we created during the seminar: http://bloggingseminar2005.blogspot.com/
So you think you are a futurist huh? Keep up on these readings and you will stay ahead of the game.
http://www.gizmag.com is a blog about emerging technologies, gadgets and gizmos.
Don’t miss this article on how chat rooms lead to new innovation and jobs. The world has changed! Open sourcing and networking are taking innovation to new heights…
Great article on Gen Y…I pray someone in America who is holding the reigns can hear this article loud and clear:
Generation Y: They’ve arrived at work with a new attitude
By Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY
They’re young, smart, brash. They may wear flip-flops to the office or listen to iPods at their desk. They want to work, but they don’t want work to be their life.
This is Generation Y, a force of as many as 70 million, and the first wave is just now embarking on their careers — taking their place in an increasingly multigenerational workplace.
Get ready, because this generation — whose members have not yet hit 30 — is different from any that have come before, according to researchers and authors such as Bruce Tulgan, a founder of New Haven, Conn.-based RainmakerThinking, which studies the lives of young people.
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Consulting: If You’re Not Part of the Solution, There’s Good Money to Be Made Prolonging the Problem
Meetings: None of Us Is as Dumb as All of Us
These are some of the blurbs in the posters that Despair Inc. are promoting in their Radical Demotivation campaign. In challenging the motivation industry, the trio of Justin and Jef Sewell, and E. Lawrence Kersten are challenging the noble employee myth so that we can realise just what our company’s problem is (US!) and just how we can let them know about it!. From the horse’s mouth:
“Look,” Kersten says, “obviously some people can be highly fulfilled by their jobs. Doctors, for example: It seems like saving lives would be highly fulfilling. Building bridges, building businesses — a lot of careers can fulfill a person’s inherent passion. But I don’t know how passionate you can be about processing paper. The point is that most people should work to make money. They shouldn’t expect a company to make them happy. A company can be friendly and good, but it can’t really make you happy. At the same time, it shouldn’t insult you. It shouldn’t say, ‘We’re a family and have values,’ and then act like Enron.”
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This week I wrote about how CEO evaluation is not geared enough towards talent attraction, development and utilisation. Read it here – Chicken or Egg. Talent or Profit?. So, in keeping an eye out for CEO evaluation content I found an article in the October 26 FinWeek that profiles the role of succession planning as a key criteria for CEOs.
The core of the article is about how CEOs should be focussed on succession planning, which then has an impact on developing internal candidates, which then in turn results in spotting talent. Shoprite CEO Whitey Basson said something interesting,
But we must expect to train more than we lose …
This approach is most unlike most CEOs views. Often the excuse leaders use when faced with BYT’s leaving their employ is this, “Why should we throw ourselves at a sinking ship?” Perhaps Basson’s view is more of what need if we’d like to create envirnments in which our talent will choose to stay with us?
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We’re holding a blogging seminar on the 10th November (this Thursday) at Hackle Brooke Estate, Hyde Park. There are still one or two available seats, so if you are keen to attend drop me an email. The cost is R 500 per person.
Dr. Graeme Codrington, Barrie Bramley and I will examine the business case for blogging, unpack the impact of social software on the way we work and cite real case studies and examples showing how blogging can be used practically as a marketing tool, R & D tool, collaborative workspace, customer feedback mechanism, etc.
Hope to see you there!
Tagging is the practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords (Wikipedia). Tags are descriptors that individuals assign to Web “objects”. Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos, and links with any tag that makes sense to them. These tags get collected in one space, with their assigned objects (posts, bookmarks, photo’s), and can be searched, shared and resourced.
Bloggers use tags to categorise their posts using tools like Fintan’s Technorati Tag Generator, which automatically generates the necessary HTML code for tags that are listed on Technorati’s tag page (Technorati is a blog search engine). You’ll need to follow the instructions on Technorati to get an account, claim your blog and insert code into your template in order to facilitate the transfer of information between you and the search engine. It is a lot easier than it sounds… 
Other Web users searching via Technorati’s tag facility for all blog posts on leadership, for example, will automatically pick up on your post or posts categorised with ‘leadership’.
Flickr is an web-based photo-sharing application that allows you to upload your personal pics, or any pic you find online, for free, and assign tags to them for easy reference and sharing.
Maybe you like being super-connected to all that’s going on here. In which case, why not subscribe to our comments feed? I’ve just updated it so that each entry not only contains the comment, but also the title of the post the comment was made on (our most requested feature for the comments feed as it makes for much better readability).
Scenario: you’re a Windows user who buys a new cd distributed by Sony. To play the cd you *have* to install Sony’s software (the cd works fine on Mac or Linux) – and an extra programme called a rootkit which hides itself from your system and doesn’t let you make more than 3 copies of the music. Good for Sony, bad for you, because they neglect to mention anywhere in the license agreement about the rootkit (which essentially has a signature like a virus). What’s more, you can’t uninstall it. And if you delete the files it installs on your systems you mess up Windows.
Mark Russinovich – who discovered the rootkit on his machine – details this on his blog. And he’s mad with Sony. As are the many people who left comments at his site.
Why did Sony do this? Perhaps they weren’t aware that people wouldn’t want hidden software installed on their computer without permission. Perhaps they didn’t know this was the case (the software wasn’t developed in-house – they used a contractor who specialises in Digital Rights Management). But the impression they give is simply that they don’t care if they infringe other’s rights as long as they’re protecting their own. Not the way you want to treat your customers.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Rocket Racing League (see the original entry here). I got so excited about the concept, that I didn’t really think through its implications, and kicked myself when reading the latest Forbes magazine – someone else did it before me.
So, no need to repeat what Rich Karlgaard said in his excellent article, “Why We Need Goofy Contests“. If you’re interested in innovation, however, you MUST read this article.
In TomorrowToday’s “Innovation UnManagement” framework, we argue that innovation can only occur in a company that has three specific emphases:
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Today, your office headquarters could be an impressive office block, your humble study or the local deli. Because the modern office environment has changed (and continues to transform even while you read this), new work opportunities have arisen. Together with these opportunities several prerequisite changes have come to the forefront; changes which are essential if we are to ensure a successful outcome for both the worker and employer in the new millennium. Trying to play by the ‚old rules‛ will not work or be much fun in the 21st-century office where men and women will face challenges that others before them never even contemplated.
But what has wrought this change of which I speak? Technology. The world changes as fast as technology advances. It is technology that enables us to understand the global picture in an instant. It is technology that keeps us informed on the minute, every minute. The hour does not dictate when we will hear about an important or catastrophic event. We do not rely on traditional media any longer to report an incident on the radio or evening news. We can search for breaking news on the Internet ourselves, or receive important information on our cell in the form of text, voice or picture.
For the past four years TmTd have been invited to participate in the Asia Pacific Leadership Program (APLP) hosted by the East West Center and based in Honolulu. Recently Keith was asked to write something to the participants on how best to write ‘leadership reflections’ � something that is required of the participants throughout the programme. This article is an adaptation of the memo that Keith wrote to APLP.
The war
A CEO’s performance is generally measured on two things: share price and shareholder value. This is the plight of a business leader in a capitalist society, and most of his/her time is dedicated to these criteria. However there is a pain that is pulling business leaders away from their focus on these criteria: that of the Talent War. This is not surprising because running a business on capitalist notions does very little in keeping your brightest young talent – except make them jealous! Soon, share price and shareholder ROI will be meaningless unless a CEO is able to be a Talent Manager; a leader who fields, grows and retains the best young talent. And so a CEO, and his/her Board, should really reconsider the fervor with which they throw themselves to the capitalist dream. My hunch is that the business that will succeed in today and tomorrow’s world is developing a greater interest in an environment where our brightest talent acknowledge their readiness to leave us, and choose to stay, rather than an all-out offense on short term profit and the bottom line. My stance is this: if you build it (the environment for bright young talent), they (share price, shareholder value) will come.
First published in Convergence Journal, Vol 6 no 4 (South Africa), November 2005, www.axius.co.za
It has been nearly 10 years since Francis Fukuyama published his work ‚Trust‛ discussing the possibility that high levels of social trust, especially the kind of social trust that comes out of Confucian societies, will be requisite to prosper economically in the 21st century. After reading Fukuyama’s work, one can’t help but speculate that he was in large part trying to prepare his audience for the economic culture that is currently propelling many parts of East Asia to economic success. Social trust based on familial ties and kinship is nothing new, yet, the method with which Confucian societies are finding success by making use of those ties is certainly surprising, and at times inspiring. Confucian culture that is dominant in many parts of East Asia is teaching the world something about economic success and the way in which relationships can be utilized to bolster that success.
This article was first published in ‘Your Child’ magazine, September 2005
Children are not merely young versions of their parents. This may seem an obvious statement, yet many parents make the mistake of under-estimating the generation gap that exists between them and their children.
Lately I’ve been wondering if we are using our “voices” as much as we should be. (Or in the right ways?) There is so much “communication” happening these days (what with blogging, texting, emailing etc) … but how much of it is being heard?
Maybe it’s just my experience over these past few weeks that’s coloured my outlook on this …
I was catching my daily train through to Waterloo a few weeks back and thanks to the ever increasing “signal failures” we were being pushed and shoved onto trains like cattle. (Actually, had we been cattle there probably would have been animal rights groups all over the story!)
Instead everyone just stood there smelling the armpits of the person next to them. (seriously). And I thought to myself “Is no one going to do anything about this?” So I wrote a letter to the editor of one of London’s daily papers …
I know that it’s not going to change things overnight (or even at all) … but I thought that if I don’t speak up on this issue then how will anyone know that there is a problem?
… Continue Reading
In doing research for a feature article on “Cool Hunters”, I cam across a white paper on “Understanding Youth:. What Works and Doesn’t Work When Researching and Marketing to Young Audiences”, by By John Geraci, Peter Silsbee, Sarah Fauth, and Jennifer Campbell (2000). Although 5 years old (so don’t rely on the stats), its still an excellent read for anyone involved in connecting with young consumers.
The “do’s and don’ts” are great.
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I’m not talking about the glib friendships companies try to encourage by inviting their customers to be friends or fans on Facebook, but rather intimate and deep relationships that come from having a vested interest in the people that make their business possible. I recently came across a study by Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson [...]
I spend a large part of my year in conversation with managers working hard to try and understand today’s younger workforce. The pain they’re feeling is palpable. The evidence of change is overwhelming. Making the necessary changes, at times, seems impossible. The hope is that the challenges are being interrogated and slowly but surely acted [...]
Everyone agrees that something must be done about executive pay. One of the major contentious issues emerging out of the financial crisis is the way that senior executives and manager, especially in the financial industries, are remunerated. These days, executive pay often seems to be unrelated to the company’s performance, and in many [...]
For years banks and credit card companies have held a strangle hold over the movement of money and charged exorbitant rates for doing so. Now this is changing and fast.
Michale Ivey the founder of Twitpay has devised a system, using code that PayPal made available to him, that allows people to make payments [...]
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