DrContrarian

We are presenting on "Brand Me" up on the Gold Coast next week, and is my wont, I have been doing some research. I came across a blog The Buzz Machine (click on the link above) - which does not have anything to do with branding per se, but made a very interesting observation. I quote from the blog: For young people, writes [Dov] Seidman, this means understanding that your reputation in life is going to get set in stone so much earlier. More and more of what you say or do or write will end up as a digital fingerprint that never gets erased. Our generation got to screw up and none of those screw-ups appeared on our first job résumés, which we got to write. For this generation, much of what they say, do or write will be preserved online forever. Before employers even read their résumés, they’ll Google them. If you are a parent, this is pretty important to communicate to your children. Now along with the talk about condoms, drugs and not getting into strangers' cars, you also...

Which is the preferred result? Tom Peters (http://www.tompeters.com/archives.php?date=200706) reckons it is innovation that rocks the world. I agree that it rocks, but he trades it off against the notion of 'Built to Last' - another seminal publication. I disagree with the master: Survival (lasting a long time) is the ultimate testament to ongoing ingenuity and innovation on a scale that might not rock the world but it sure beats the alternative. I am happy to settle for lasting a long time as opposed to rocking a short time. The one takes smarts and the other ... could possibly just be LUCK.

Core competency? Benchmark? Key issues? Sustainability? Ask any manager and they will explain what these words mean. To the uninitiated it is buzzwords. To the literati, it is a modern day plight that will destroy the English language. X wrote The Death of Language. Y wrote. Weaselwords. Hundreds and hundreds of pages devoted to slagging management-speak. Courses on Effective Business Writing will advise strongly against using technical jargon or made-up words. These courses, of course are always run by literary types, never business people an managers. (We are way too illiterate.) Funny that. And invariably they will also tell us that of the 800,000 ordinary (non-technical words) in the Oxford English Dictionary, the average person only uses about 8,000: that is one percent of the available words. The implication of course, ‘we’ know many more. It is then followed by a joke that you should not use ‘pulchritude’ when the word ‘beautiful’ would do. Ha ha. Their strateg...

As part of the research that I am doing on a book that I am writing, I get to interview some really successful entrepreneurs. Today I conducted an interview at which I actually got a perspective on a very old concept - delegation - that I had never thought of. (Those of you who know me well, will know how rarely that happens :-)) We spoke about that hoary old notion of working IN the business vs. working ON the business. We shared a contrarian view - but he basically saw it as delegation. Then he raised the idea that when you (owner/manager) delegate a task, you are giving away a problem, but the person to whom you are delegating receives trust and respect and stature. WOW! Think about that next time...

This is a first for me- I am just going to promote another website. The quotes below are from a manifesto called "The Hughtrain" - a play on the original Cluetrain. Quote 1: Why did I leave the big world of corporations and Amex cards... The big city is an anachronism. All those skyscrapers, architecturally impressive as they are, were built to house large, tightly controlled, centralized bureaucracies within a very small area of land, geographically near the other like-minded bureaucracies with whom they did business. You wanted to work for Corporation X? You had to buy a house within commuting distance to Corporation X ’ s Central HQ. Ninety percent of the people you needed to talk to on a daily basis were within an elevator ride of your desk. Amazing how dated something so recent can seem. Now e-mail and its spawn are the new elevators. Quote 2: Why did you start a Blog - one of those things that when you are in start-up mode, is important but not urgent. HOW TO HA...

Read an article the other day (somewhere) that the war for talent is hotting up (again?). It makes sense in Australia where unemployment is just on 4% - a 30-year low. Being a newly minted entrepreneur – in Aus at least – I wonder about that. How and where will I find good people? People who will care as much as I do about my customers? I care because I know very personally that they are the people who allow me to eat and look after my family. Can any employee care as much? As soon as you are an employee, the person who feeds you is the boss – one step removed from the customer, and employees will always act accordingly: please the boss before the customer – that is only human. Even when I consider myself as an (ex-) employee, I must be honest and say… ‘I guess not!’ As much as I considered myself to be a valuable employee (no comments required on this one, thanks) I still did not care as much as I care now. And it is only when you are the owner of your own business that you get tha...

I have had cause recently to contemplate what constitutes a toxic workplace – and in particular which factor is the biggest driver of creating such a workplace. There are many obvious contenders, but I’ll reference the front runners only: Highly politicised Politics (of the corporate kind) is often seen to be and made to be ‘bad’, but I think that it is a very good mechanism for keeping people on their toes and equipping them with the communications and observational skills necessary to progress in the corporate world. Being able to play the game is a skill needed when you are the CEO/ Chairman/ MD and you operate in a sphere where everything is the proverbial grey. What better training ground than middle management? Bureaucratic Also much despised is the overly bureaucratic environment, but again it should be - for any half-decent manager – a relative cinch to operate freely in that environment. Learning which rules to break and where to go in order to get things done actually ...