One of my favorite business “journalists” - Stanley Bing - has a great post about how the fall out on Wall Street is really just karma.
You know - I have to agree. We’ve watched businesses rise and fall at the whims of these guys, who cared more about their bottom lines than the success of the businesses. It’s because of them a quarter point of share price is more valuable than 1000 jobs.
I’m currently reading “Supercrunchers
So - wow - a whole summer with no posting. I suppose you could say I’ve been busy, but really, I’ve just been lazy. You can only do so much before something falls off - and this blog was it.
I’m working on several projects at the moment - not the least of which is still pushing to get HHOD off the ground. I pursuit of that, I’ve moved back to working completely from home, cutting down my hours at the agency significantly. This has allowed me to focus more on my clients, as well as new projects to enhance my personal life and hopefully help fund HHOD.
I’ve been looking in to a lot of personal development tactics to go along with this - and I can honestly say, over the last 6 weeks, my overall level of happiness and productivity has skyrocketed.
I’m also currently shopping for some sort of fitness program to get back into the swing of things - since I moved, I’ve been lax in hitting the gym. Thankfully, I haven’t put any of the weight I lost back on, but I doubt very seriously if I could hit the sidewalk and cruise through a 4 mile run like I could have 4 months ago.
I’ll try my best to keep things posted here - lots of stuff going on to offer my completely unqualified opinion on 
One of the curses of the corporate world is the meeting. When executed correctly, they are vital to getting things done. When executed poorly, they are a burden and take time away from productive work - as well as cause frustration and discontent among the masses.
Thanks to some great career gurus like Dave Lorenzo - I’ve got some tips for making meetings work for you. A fair warning though, it’s tougher to implement than you’d think.
1) MOST IMPORTANT - Have a desired outcome for the meeting. A deliverable. A reason for spending an hour in the conference room. It could be a list of questions you want answered, sign off on a project, etc….if you’re meeting over something you could just as easily pass around in an email, don’t waste everyone’s time. (I’m looking at you, weekly staff meeting)
2)Be Prepared - Every time I’m in a meeting with someone that has to be brought up to speed, I want to smack them. If I called the meeting, I sent you the materials in advance. If you called the meeting, you should have asked for information in advance. And, if you called the meeting just to get up to speed, God help you.
3)Be courteous, and know it’s ok to say no. Never schedule a meeting just because someone doesn’t have time marked off in Outlook. People that do that are the reason I keep 70% of my time marked off anyway - even if I have nothing going on. Ask first - schedule second. Give me a day’s notice, so I can get up to speed (see #2). And, realize, I may say no. The most liberating moment of my life was the day I said - “I don’t think this really justifies a meeting, can you just send an email, and we’ll discuss if there are any further questions” - that saved about 8 man hours of time.
That’s all for now folks - here’s to making meetings shorter, more efficient, and fewer in number!
This post is inspired by Seth Godin’s “Alphabetical Order is Obsolete” Post a couple weeks back (sorry, sorry, I can only get through my aggregator every so often).
Anyway, he makes some pretty awesome observations about how senseless the alphabetical system is for some applications…..
Your address book is in alphabetical order, right? Why? If you want to look someone up, type the name in. Alpha is least useful way to browse 4,000 names in an address book. I want them sorted by recency of contact, or in tickler-file order.
It’s a difficult concept for many people to grasp, simply because it’s been hammered in as THE default ordering system (sharing it’s reign with Numerical…) since we were little kids. It caught on because, simply, we weren’t looking for the best way to order things…we were just looking for A way to order things. So, the default catches hold and we are stuck with it…until someone smarter than me rifts really hard and figures out a better way to do it. (I’m looking at you - Dewey Decimal System)
Now, I can manage libraries sticking to alphabetical order, and my address book search is good enough (thanks 37signals!) so that I don’t need it to change. But, you can correlate the seemingly senseless adoption of alphabetical order as “The Way” to the adoption of Google’s Search Results as the end-all-be-all for ordering what you’re looking for on the Internet. If you’re looking for specific information, a specific product, or a certain web page - what you generally get is 1MM+ nonsensical results.
Don’t believe me? There are 3.2MM results for a search for “Polynomials” - from a Wikipedia entry (not bad), to some worksheets, a glossary page, and a couple practice tests. Of course, I was looking for information about Integrals, but Google didn’t know that. So, they pushed back results to me that were relevant…by their standards anyway. (the Title Tags, Content, and Inbound Anchor text matched my query…the domain was old enough, and was registered for the next 4 years) Granted, these results weren’t useful to me, but they were ‘relevant’.
That’s my problem - if we rely on a system that, while the best one out there, is still not even close to good - we are missing out on the greatest learning opportunity in history. There is a great deal of information out there that we only have access to if we’re willing to dig, dig, dig through pages of SERPS. What we’re working on at HHOD is a way to give you back results that aren’t relevant to you. They will be USEFUL to you.
Relevant or Useful. Which set of results would you rather have?
I can’t help but love the fact that I can read the New York Times, in its entirety, for free online.
I’m not sure how I just noticed this, other than it’s probably because I get most of my news from CNN.com and Google News (and I don’t think “Newspaper” very often) - so it never occurred to me to check it out. I had a friend mention it to me in a meeting, and now I’m hooked. It came up because we were talking about how the “old school” PR guys in his corporate communications department didn’t like doing online press releases because they wanted to be “all about reporters.”
It should be noted that, while the company has done several notable things, the last major press coverage it got involved the President (of the USA, not the company) - so, I think it’s safe to conclude that faxing things to reporters doesn’t really work anymore. And hasn’t for years. (unless it’s a take out menu - then it probably works)
My main question there is, “Where do these guys think reporters are getting their news?”
Here’s another link to the Gmail Blog.
Folks - you can now synch your Google Calendar with your Outlook Calendar.
My life has officially changed. Now, if they could just make it where I could synch my date book with Google Calendar. A USB planner anyone?
So, I tried to set up a Facebook Ad last night. Several things went wrong, which happens. My problem is how things get handled, and how the entire process goes down.
Maybe I should have titled this - “Facebook Ads User Experience - Worse than Overture Was”
Step one - I want to remove the old credit card from when I was running an ad for a client (pretty miserable failure, by the way, cheap but uneffective). I can’t….why? Apparently I have a payment pending. Of course, I haven’t run the ad since December, but there is still something pending. Whatever.
I figure I’ll step around this little hiccup by adding in my card, and making that my primary card. I added in my credit card, but after looking around some, couldn’t find how to make it my primary card. Great.
So, I set up my new ad - get an image, set up the landing page - submit…and - nothing. No confirmation, no notifications, nothing. Ugh. I figure it’s going through an approval process, so I patiently wait till this morning.
I log in - nothing. No new ad campaign running. I finally stumble my way into the payment methods interface - and figure out I have to click the “?” to make my card the primary card. Turns out, that card was “unverified” because I typed in the number incorrectly. The issue with that - IF I HADN’T STUMBLED ACROSS THAT, I’D HAVE NEVER KNOWN!!!!!!
What kind of shoddy UI designer lets something HUGE like that get through? If the credit card number is wrong, tell somebody. Thank goodness this wasn’t some amazingly time-sensitive project I was working on.
End Rant.
Alternate Title: Calcanis and I actually agree on this one.
I was especially excited to read Jason’s Blog today (although he is taking a bit of heat) - as I am one that is neck deep in startup life (except when I’m neck deep in agency strategy or consulting) - and he makes some really good points in his previous post, How to Save Money at a Startup.
There are a few points I’m iffy on (like, I think you can make a case for PC’s saving you money as well - guess it depends on your personality type). However, there are some that are absolutely brilliant, and I’d like to add a bit of my flavor to each of those:
Buy Second Monitors for Everyone - HECK YES! Go one better - by HUGE extra monitors for everyone. Especially for your coders. I can’t tell you how much time I save having an email window, browser window, and “work” window (DreamWeaver, Photoshop, etc….) open. Plus, I’m just happier.
Cheap Tables, Expensive Chairs - Really good point here. I figured this out for my home office long ago. Currently, we have pretty nice versions of both, but the deal on the desks was silly. Thanks to Sam’s Club Closeout sales!
Use Google Email - this is a no-brainer. However, depending on your host, you can do xyz@yourdomain.com on the cheap as well. Thanks to Gmail - you can connect the two pretty easily. Avoid exchange server at all costs.
Avoid People that don’t love their work - originally, this was fire people that don’t love their work - but if you’re doing your job, you shouldn’t have hired them in the first place. Around here, we keep a pretty strict time line - people don’t stay too late or work too much on weekends - or at least they are expected not to. Most of them still do. Because we love what we’re doing.
Stay away from meetings - a recurring theme. Meetings typically are a gigantic waste of time, unless there is some sort of deliverable coming out at the end. If you’re just meeting to talk about what you’re doing - you’re wasting everyone’s time. If you’re meeting to go over a report - you’re wasting time, stuff like that can be discussed over IM. If you’ve hired smart people who love their work, they should be able to move forward without too much hand-holding. In short- you need less talking, more doing.
Go over there to read the rest - I actually have to get to work!
Here’s a link to some cool things that you can do with gmail. I especially like the thought of adding the plus to my address…i.e. scottrandolph+work@gmail.com. Then, I use that address to sign up for work related newsletters, and have those filter into the right place upon arrival in my inbox.
“The danger is that housing prices continue to tumble and accelerate, people’s ability to pull out equity will evaporate, and you’ll see a serious downturn in consumption.”
This from Dean Baker - chief economist at the center for economic policy.
My translation: “People no longer have access to money they don’t really have - so they won’t buy a bunch of crap they can’t afford, and put their house up as collateral. They may actually have to live within their means - which will destroy the profits of banks and huge corporations”
Or - the economy will keep getting worse, because people will stop doing the stupid things that got us here in the first place.
You are currently browsing the Reading, Writing, and General Geekery weblog archives for the 'Business' category.
Comments(1)
