Please - no more!
If I have to read one more article about the looming crisis facing the world economy as Boomers prepare to retire, I think I will scream! None of us need reminding about this fact anymore (although many businesses need to wake up to it - which is exactly what TomorrowToday.biz helps many to achieve) - but the Internet seems obsessed with the fact this month! Similarly, there is an overabundance of articles on the looming pension crisis and the sale of retirement properties and so forth. But is this all that is to be said about Boomers these days? Not good for their self-esteem, I’m sure. So it’s no surprise that, according to WQOW 18 in Chippewa Valley, drug counsellors are increasingly treating Boomer Meth-addicts! If there is nothing left to say about a whole generation other than their retirement plans, it must be getting very dull indeed. Women in Canada, apparently, are trying to buck the trend by working longer than their husbands. And in Japan, some women are waiting until their Boomer husbands retire before going out to get their own job! Things are not so simple as it seems at first…
Continue reading ‘GenerationWatch – May 06′
Introduction
Some people think that there are patterns in existence that can be re-used between various disciplines like Physics, Religion and Business. This article explores the similarity of thought between several domains and tries to see how understanding in one area can help understanding in other areas.
Entropy in Physics
In physics, the concept of Entropy can have the following meanings: the degree of chaos, or disorder, in a system; or the amount of useable energy in a system. All physical systems tend towards states of least order, or maximum chaos. That is why eggs break, but can never spontaneously un-break, and why when a glass of water spills, it runs into a flat puddle and does not sit on the floor in a glass-shaped globule.
Continue reading ‘Thoughts on Entropy, Voltage and Learning’
While you were sleeping in the early hours of this morning an event that only happens every one thousand years happened. And while you probably weren’t aware of it, you were there.
A little after midnight the time and date stamp was: 01:02:03 04/05/06
Kewl. It’s not going to happen till 3006. But you you were there!
This is a great article from Fast Company. How many times have you heard “people are our greatest asset” when in fact management has no idea of what that means, evidenced by their actions. To quote the article “Paul LaFontaine left Bertelsmann Music Group in March 1997 to advise other businesspeople about radical honesty. He has lots of work to do.” “There are as many lies in business as there are people in business,” he says. Here are his nominees for the five most common lies:
- “People are our most important Asset”
- “This was a rational decision”
- “We judge people by their performance”
- “This is business, it isnt personal”
- “The customer comes first”
For more detail on why these are lies, go to the FC website here A good article…
I have no research to back this up, but I reckon we’ll soon be seeing the death of World Cup competitions … with the first being the soccer world cup. With the success of club competitions such as the EUFA Champions League, where the best clubs in Europe compete, loyalty is shifting from allegiance to one’s country towards the club one chooses to support. Some clubs even enjoy estimated supporter stats of roughly 43 million … or more. The thing about clubs is that they have no borders, they are brands. Loyalty is changing. We are seeing that one no longer need to originate from, or have some tenious link to a geographic region to be a supporter of that team. Sure, clashes between countries still draw millions and one’s nationality still rouses fueds of old. However, the power held within one’s nationality is not as potent as it was in days before global connectivity and globalisation.
Here is a great article on newspapers. Worldwide, the newspaper industry is in such a complete state of denial that it is almost tragic. Enough of them are having a few successes with some of what they are currently trying for them to think that the digital age is going to bypass them. Most of them don’t realise that the readership is ageing and will soon literally die, and then it will all be over. To do scenario planning with newspapers is a sad affair.
I do think that there are things that can be done, and link ends with digital media that make sense (more than simply putting content online, whether free or subscriber only). But it’s going to take those people in charge of the industry to wake up and smell the coffee before anything meaningful can happen.
The short piece below appeared in the April 17, 2006 BusinessWeek. Click here for the original article.
There are almost 1,500 daily papers in the U.S., so the gathering of publishers at this year’s Newspaper Association of America annual conference — held Apr. 2-4 in Chicago — looked a lot like America. An America of local monopolists, that is: overwhelmingly white, male, late-middle-aged, and predisposed to wear suits on Sunday, even when traveling. They gathered to hear, once again, that the whole problem is that they are no longer monopolists.
Continue reading ‘Life Among The Dinosaurs’
What will it mean when boomers start to retire? What will the impact be when the boomers liquidate their assets that sit on Stock Exchanges around the world and use this to fund their retirement over the next 5 - 10 years? The systemic effect is massive, and frightening at the same time. People are living longer and re-tyrement is one option, but how will the world cope with this. For some interesting comments, take a look at the Business Week article here.
Removing the obstacles to working and living creatively, productively and energetically.
On December 1 1955 a forty two year old African American woman was ordered to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to white passengers. When she had paid for her ticket, her seat was not in the “whites only� section of the bus, but as the bus had filled with white passengers, the driver had moved the demarcation sign further back, placing her squarely outside of the rows of seats reserved for “people of colour.� Then he told her, and four other people, to move. Three of them obeyed, but Rosa Parks refused. After a warning the driver called the police and Parks was arrested. This small act of defiance resulted in a human rights movement that changed the face of the United States and impacted the whole world. And it sounded a call to a young minister, who was relatively new in town, named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The driver’s request was not new. Many black passengers, including Rosa Parks, had heard similar orders in the past and complied. But that day something changed. For a long time Parks had believed that segregation was both unjust and destructive. She was involved with organisations working to get laws and practices changed. But, somehow that day her belief moved to a new place. She started about these issues in a deeper, more intense way, and it motivated her to a new, effective action. In a word, this quiet, timid woman discovered . (Read more about the challenging and fascinating story of Rosa Parks at Wikipedia here.)
Continue reading ‘Broken Windows – The Death of Passion’
On the whole I’m not a big fan of team building. I think that it’s lost it’s way during it’s life time and meandered into events that were more about the experience than the team. Enter the ‘Spy Game‘. I can’t tell you much about it. I can’t give it a rating or advise you on whether or not it’ll add value to your team. But having read about it, it’s the kind of experience I’d like to participate in. If not just to experience the inventiveness of those who put it together.
I couldn’t find a link to a site about it directly, but I did check the ‘Go Game‘ out, which is apparently it’s baby brother.
If you noticed a post a week or two ago (Where in the world is Wally) then you’ll know that I had a brief trip to Japan last week. In fact it was so brief that I spent more time travelling there and back than I did in Japan. The flight was around 26 hours going there and 28 hours coming back. Wild.
I had some thoughts around my experience and observations while I was there. This then, is the begining of a multi-thread post on those thoughts.
As part of my preperation I contacted all the people I knew who’d been to Japan (or thought of going to Japan) to ask them what I should know before I go. I also visited my local book store and picked up two books on Japan. Both written for travellers to Japan from a different culture. Amazingly I managed to find someone who had a contact in the South African embassy in Tokyo. I figured it couldn’t hurt to have the name and number of a person like that. You never know the amount of trouble you’re capable of getting into, and having the name of someone who has influence to get you out can never hurt. Ever.
Continue reading ‘Japan - Cherry Blossoms’
it’s just that I cannot understand, nor see it, right now.
I’ve just come out of a forced 2-week sabbatical as a result of my system-board kicking the bucket on my Hewlett-Packard notebook. 14 days it has taken for HP, nay I lie, ICSS to fix it for me. HP, like many companies, outsources servicing and repairs to 3rd parties.
Clearly there must be a financial and logistical reason for this … but at what cost to the comsumer? I believe that the motivation to actually care for a customers problem is distilled in the process of outsourcing core functions such as servicing and repairs.
Continue reading ‘There must be a rationale behind out-sourcing …’
I’m sitting at a coffee station at one of my clients’ head office, catching up on emails before I present in 10 min. I would’ve been half an hour early but I waited 20 minutes outside the gate for the visitor parkade to empty out. There is a dire shortage of parking space at the office, causing a backlog of frustrated customers and vendors at the entrance. Not ideal. What surprised me though, is that it is clearly not a new problem. They even have a nice stand-alone metallic sign that explains “Customer Parking Full”. Nice.
Why do we go to so much effort to explain a problem when we could try find ways to solve it?
I find it incredible that they’ve gone to great lengths to help their employees make efficient use the coffee vending machine by means of a colour-coded flowchart (see image), but parking remains a head ache.
Where do you concentrate your efforts? How often do we try to neutralise problems instead of solving them?
I am sure many of us have wished at times that we could have the “whole Internet” on our hard drives. Of course we know its impossible, the Internet in 2003 weighed in at approx 90 million gigs, a little more than most hard drives. So, to solve this problem, a company called webaroo has come up with a solution. The solution keeps a snapshot of useful info on your hard disk so that you can still search for info even offline. Obviously you wont get as many results as Google, but how many of us actually go to page 49 on a Google search anyway. An interesting service, so take a look at webaroo or to read more, read the New Scientis article here
I found a fairly decent and short reflection on ZD-Net around Apple turning 30 years old. It takes a very brief look at Apple and Steve Jobs’ influence, and non-influence over the 30 years.
“I think Apple would be more of an ordinary company without him–it would be much less audacious, daring and artistic,” Hertzfeld said.
One day I’d like to find something read about the rest of the Apple people. Surely it’s not been a Steve Jobs lone crusade? There must have been others?
Apple is one of those stories that inspires us. Mostly for me because it’s a story of resilience. A company that seemed down and out, that got back up again. Not only did it get back up, but it stepped smack into the domain of the entertainment world and has, along with all the downloaders out there, forced the industry to re-look at it’s business model.
In a sign of just how dramatically Apple’s fortunes have improved, the company’s music business has become the subject of antitrust concerns because of its overwhelmingly dominant position.
And it’s a story that doesn’t end there. From somewhere to nowhere back to somewhere… where to now? We watch, we listen, we learn…….
And while the iPod continues to dominate, rivals hope to head off Apple at the next technology pass. The company’s hold on the music player market appears to be strong, though others see a potential opening as music gets more closely wedded to the cell phone or perhaps to some other kind of handheld computing or entertainment device.
When we brought TomorrowToday.biz to life, we agreed to see ourselves as an international business. We knew there was no reason on the planet that a company grown out of South Africa couldn’t add value to organisations all over the world. Every now and then we have moments like this week, when we step back briefly and stand a little amazed that we’re doing it…
Toward the end of this week, Keith will be in Shanghai, China; Graeme in Melborne, Australia; and Barrie in Tokyo, Japan. Add to that the 35 odd people in South Africa, the UK and Hawaii, and it’s week worth smiling at : ) ‘Keep Walking’
If you’re a FireFox browser user then you might be interested in this list of ‘top rated extensions’ from C-Net. If you’re anything like me, then you end up with a fair amount of extensions loaded, you don’t know if they’re useful, and you haven’t a clue if there are some doing what others are doing, and hence wasting resource on your machine.
Here’s a handy list of ‘must haves’ to consider.
I had an argument with my mom on the weekend. My parents have recently stepped up the technology ladder by purchasing a digital camera (yes, I know what you’re thinking … “late uptake”). Anyway, my mom expressed disgust at how much the camera cost, and shared how she believes film is a better option. As the debate raged on, we entered into the realm of general technological advancement in recent years and the impact the advancement has had on kids.
My mom has a belief that the kids of today are impatient, lazy, intolerant and too heavily entrenched in a culture of instant gratification. This is not a unique belief, many Boomers would chorus in agreement. As an Xer (who she was aprtly referring to!) I shot back defesnively “But we’re not to blame, it was your generation who created the world we grew up in. Why should we be patient when we have never needed to be patient?” I rattled off examples such as fast food, email, cell phones and PC games that supported my argument.
As I engage more with generational theory, I begin to wonder who is responsible for “bridging the gap”? When we as the forerunners of a generational movement steam ahead in creating the world we want to live in, do we give much thought to the tpye of world we’ll be creating for our kids. Will we be aforded the privilege of writing off the values our kids adopt, when it is our actions now that will indrectly create the environment for the development of those values.
Any thoughts you’d like to add (especially from the parents amongst us)?
If you’ve tried to book a South African Airways ticket online this week, then you like me, have discovered that it’s not working. I’ve not been able to get past the first page to see available flights. So you call their call centre. Very rarely does the call get answered, and when it does, you aren’t helped there either because they’re working on the same system you are, so you’re transfered to ‘central reservations’. The tickets are booked but it means standing in the ticket line at the airport to pay, so the ticket can be issued.
So why is their website down you ask? I asked…. and it’s because they’re ‘upgrading it’. The upgrade is taking all week. Well all of this week anyway. I wonder if they’ll still be doing it next week? I’m no software implementation guru, but from the little I do know, you don’t ever, no never, kill your primary customer facing system, especially when it’s a major source of income for a ’system upgrade’. It’s called suicide.
Please note that we have implemented extensive changes on our site.
Due to this, you may experience intermittent problems when enquiring on availability and fares.
These problems are being addressed urgently and should be resolved shortly. If you do experience such problems, please contact your local SAA call centre to complete you booking.
We thank you for your patience.
The flysaa.com team
From my perspective the past 2 years has been a comedy of complete stuff ups from SAA. It really does seem like they’re determined to close themselves down. I did a quick search on this blog for posts about SAA, and the headings say it all (June 2005 to today)
Continue reading ‘Determined to go out of business, all on their own’
?ic@TomorrowToday.biz is a blog that faciltates discussion about two predominant, important themes:
1. Thoughts and musings about the emerging Connection Economy
2. Rants about SA cricket. Ok, more specifically, Graeme’s rants about Jacques Kallis. And now mine, about Barry richards.
Amongst a vast array of sideline hobbies and activities that keep me busy, absolute obsessed cricket fanaticism takes precedence. Which is why you’ll understand that Sunday’s incredible, fantasy-like battle between our boys and the fine lads of Australia Fair had my synapses frayed.
Continue reading ‘A rant: Sport is about money’
Following the carnage of Sunday’s final ODI cricket match, the truth is slipping out.Here’s how we really won that match…
Continue reading ‘The truth…’
In a desperate attempt to curb the ever-increasing digital download problem the Music Industry faces, one indie label has opted to appeal to the inherent good nature of mankind - with a love letter. Read the full story at Boing Boing.
Please excuse me for being completely parochial and using this forum to eulogise my country’s cricket team. Unbelievable!! There’s no other way to describe it. Today, at the Wanderers, the records have tumbled - the biggest of those was the previous highest innings total in a 50 over game. Sri Lanka had set that in 1995 - it was 398. See the match summary here.
Australia won the toss, chose to bat, and scored a mammoth 434-4. South Africa hunted it down, beating that score with one ball to spare. Without doubt or fear of contradiction, the greatest single day’s cricket in history! I’m still grinning from ear to ear!!!
Well done, the Proteas. Now, go and win the Test match series.
Continue reading ‘Unbelievable’
Today I sit as a judge at the Gauteng contest of the annual Anglo American Sowetan Young Communicators Award. Hosted at the Apartheid Musuem, 30 years since the Soweto uprising on June 16th 1976, young talented speakers have come from English 2nd Language schools to battle it out for a spot at the National Final in June. As a 26-year old white male, it is my first visit to the museum and the first time I have heard participants of the 1976 riots speak publically. Murphy Morobe, one of the convicted organisers of the uprising spoke of his experiences in Soweto some 30 years ago.
Continue reading ‘30 years on …’
Earlier today, the 1000th entry was posted on this blog. Aiden Choles, a regular contributor and member of the TomorrowToday team, was the one who did it.
A big thanks to all the contributors up to now. This blog is truly something to be proud of.
Recent Comments