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Showing posts from June 24, 2007

Brand Me

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...

Innovation vs. Survival

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.

In defense of management jargon

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...