Discovered this article from the site of an interesting leadership analyst company - http://dilenschneider.com/
1. Project a sense of calm
2. Take early and decisive action (On personnel)
3. Ensure the information you get is accurate
4. Manage yourself first
More valuable is the report on major trends that is the published on this site and the current one is the 39th edition.
1. HOW YOU THINK IS EVERYTHING – Always be positive. Think success not failure. Beware of negative environment.
2. DECIDE UPON YOU TRUE DREAMS AND GOALS – Write down your specific goals and develop a plan to reach them.
3. TAKE ACTION – Goal are nothing without action. Don’t be afraid to get started. Just do it.
4. NEVER STOP LEARNING – Go back to school or read books. Get training and acquire skills.
5. BE PERSISTENT AND WORK HARD – Success is a marathon not a sprint. Never give up.
6. LEARN TO ANALYZE DETAILS – Get all the facts, all the inputs. Learn from your mistakes.
7. FOCUS YOUR TIME AND MONEY – Don’t let other people or things distract you.
8. DON’T BE AFRAID TO INNOVATE; BE DIFFERENT – Following the herd is a sure way to mediocrity.
9. DEAL AND COMMUNICATE WITH PEOPLE EFFECTIVELY – No person is an island. Learn to understand and motivate others.
10. BE HONEST AND DEPENDABLE; TAKE RESPONSIBILITY – Otherwise, Numbers 1-9 won’t matter.
1) Drive
2) Persuasion
3) Perception
4) Strong ego need to win
5) Respond to failure with optimism
6) Confidence in your own ability
7) Know what you inability will permit you to do (know your limitation)
8) Plan strategy and measure performance continually
9) Short term view when measuring performance and Long term view when measuring success
10) Final destination is clear, measurable, specific in time quality and quantity values
11) Immediately accurate and objectively urgent in all deliberations
12) Choose people to assist them with the strength they do not have to fill in the gaps
1. What am I trading?
2. What am I forfeiting?
3. What are the uncertainties?
4. What are the guarantees or penalties?
5. What are the terms?
6. What can cause failure?
7. Can I fully perform?
8. Can they fully perform?
9. What are the buffer?
10. What if we overestimate?
11. What if they overestimate?
12. Can cost expand?
13. Can percentages decreases?
14. Are there an exit points?
15. Are there any condition for mutual withdrawal?
16. Are there any outside influences?
17. Who exactly is in charge?
18. What are the ongoing obligation?
19. Are there any upper and lower limits?
20. Are the personalities concerned fully committed?
21 Are all points of concern, agreed, written, dated signed and noted.
I recently took on an website project as a means of putting together some of the side skills I am picking up, you know XHTML, CSS, PNG and other alphabet soup. However before you can build a professional site, it is important to start with planning. Here are the items I picked up on planning and come back for more as I go through the complete workflow.
Here are the steps in the planning phase.
Objective: Why are we building this site? Who is it for?
Competitive Analysis: Not just direct competition of the business, but also from a site design perspective who do we want to benchmark against.
User definition: Who is going to be using the site?
Sitemaps: what will people be doing when they get to the site?
--> Process Flow: What information is going to be provided?
--> User maps: How will it be accessed? How will it be displayed?
Elements common to all pages e.g. Footers, Logo and Call to Action
Wireframes
2 types of wireframes – planning wireframes (use PowerPoint or Visio); Graphic design wireframes (Photoshop PSD files)
Typography – Font, Color, Layout
Technology:
Static content – XHTML or Flash or Silverlight
Images – PNG, JPEG or GIF
Video Animation – Flash Silverlight
(Hosting for Video Animation is another issue you will have to deal with)
Downloadable files? – pdf or word
Database – MS-SQL, MySQL or XML/XLT
Scripting Language – JavaScript, ASP.Net, Java
Overall, remember the best tool is the one you know best.
OVERALL PROJECT WORKLOW (Based on what I know now :) )
Planning –> Resource gathering –> Building –> Testing –> Repeat.
It is truly the thought that counts, although this sounds like a cliché as is often the case it is true in my experience.
When I graduated from undergrad in 1998, I got cards three cards from people and I wasn’t expecting any. For context, I didn’t even want to go to my graduation, I missed my parents and I thought it wasn’t a big deal since I was sure I will be going to graduate school someday.
Lots of moves later, I have kept the cards and seeing them tonight my gratitude goes out again to these friends, Emet and Veronica Kflu, Dare and Ayo Owolabi and Aimee.
Thank you very much. From the bottom of my heart, thanks.
didn’t even have to get out of bed to see the fireworks from this year’s 4th of july :) Below is the shot I took right from the bedroom, titled “Fireworks from the Bedroom” ;)
Melodramatic? I know, but ..you are welcome, anyways.
This is the thing about using other peoples template. In my last update, I just realize that my template was broken by photobucket. why? I have no idea, but since I love changing templates anyways. I guess it is time to change my template again. Fun! Fun!! Fun!!!
[Without photobucket of course, I am moving to Flickr]
Happy 231st Anniversary America.
Watching the history channel today on the history of the revolution, one see that there are certain values that a foundational to America.
Individualism, freedom in many ways, of speech, thought and political association.
Do you know that Rhode Island to meet their quota of soldiers sent slaves? back people have been involved in every “American” war since the very beginning.
This is a great country on many levels and I am proud to be an American!
I am sure you are well aware of the popularity of twitter. Personally, the ability to link facebook updates to my twitter updates have made micro blogging even more powerful.
Hence, the implication is I am no longer blogging or updating this site, this is not true I am only just spending more time micro blogging, rather than blogging. The killerapp that I think will end this cycle is the ability to post a longer version of my micro blogs to blogger.
Since I am not going to do this myself, I am hoping someone else has done this.
I found 1 cents in on the floor at the gas station. I picked it up and never bothered looking for the owner. Is that bad? what does that say about me?
I can’t get the concept of “demonstrable value proposition” out of my mind. I wonder why?
Guess, I haven’t been blogging much because of facebook and twitter updates. And figuring out how to do both at one (selectively) is cool.
A good friend, Jessie Bolin is going to work in South Africa for five weeks as a member of the IBM’s Corporate Services Corp. A program she describes as being like the peace corps. She and a team of 12 IBM’ers from different parts of the world (US, UK, India, Australia, Germany, Japan, Finland and New Zealand) and different disciplines ( Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance and Communications) will be working with local non profits to address specific business issues.
Six other teams like this from the IBM Corporate Services Corp, will be working on similar projects in China, Philippines, Romania, Ghana, Vietnam and Brazil. The question is what are the gives and gets and the motivations in this awesome adventure.
From IBM’s perspective, the goal is to develop leadership skills while helping to address the world’s socio-economic issues. From the participants viewpoint, I would guess similar goals, while having fun, travelling and living in a foreign country and developing a global perspective of your company with other folks in the company.
For the countries and the non profit – the goal is getting world class talents to work on some of the really important challenges they are facing with probably severely limited resources.
This is a truly interesting adventure for Jessie, and I hope to follow her experience, you can too through her blog at: http://www.jessieinsouthafrica.blogspot.com/
My previous post made it clear, that I am struggling with the template for this page. This desire to figure out which template I am going to use, has actually been slowing me down.
Using this as a motivation to check the site metric, it is obvious that someone has been reading this pages. Let me apologize, it is only a question of time before this blog is reborn.
It will be worth the wait.
I have changed the template for this blog so many times, it is not funny. And the reason for all these changes? Trying to find the ideal template.
What I need to do is spend the time to learn how to work with blogger templates and make my own.
The only questions is, is this an efficient use of time. Maybe a better approach will be to take one that I like, for example this current one and modify it to fit my need.
Whatever happens, lookout for the changes…
The pundits are now saying the recovery is for real this time, so I suspect one more time the market if going to go down. However, I think it is time for me to start to think about the economy and recovery for myself, rather than believing what other folks think.
From what I know about economics, there is the time to look at the economic indicators, for oneself and see what they are actually doing rather than trusting the pundits.
As amateur economist, we must first identify the list of leading economic indicators and lagging economic indicators. And then choose the one we think we can believe in based on previous performance and availability of data. Finally, we should track this indicators.
List of Economic Indicators:
Tracking the direction of the indicators:
http://www.marketwatch.com/tools/marketsummary/calendars/economic.asp
http://www.irs.gov/publications/p519/index.html
If you believe in peak oil, what will you be doing now, from an investment perspective?
From the Singularity University site, future studies is in the purview of futurist while forecasting is in the realm of statisticians. The aim of higher education in this module is to cultivate the student’s exponential intuition.
For example faced with a situation like the evolving field of wireless electricity for example, student will be able to determine which of the competing approaches to electromagnetic induction i.e inductive coupling or radio-frequency harvesting or magnetically coupled resonance will win out in the commercial world.
Although SU mentions only futurist as lecturers, it is obvious that a simple need for exponential intuition in the case above include multiple variable that will require some statistics and even technological evaluation as well.Following the theme on the previous post about singularity University, I want to delve in to what are the subjects that will be taught to the future brainiacs that will be dominating our world or help invent our ways out of the current doldrums?
Theses are what the academics tracks are:
If you click on any of these links, it will take you to the schools’ page and the description of what is covered in each of these subjects. More importantly, the students will be at a graduate level, so one could expect them to already have the basics. This assumption is not true for the general masses that I hope an exposure to this very information could help to be more creative. While I am not assuming they know nothing (college degree or equivalent experience can be assumed), the issue is one of functional education versus a brad liberal not arts education. An education that is directed as creating future renaissance men and women, who can do research, innovate and move the world forward without the limitation of a specific curricula.
For this folks education is driven by interest and passion. What do you want to know? Why do you want to know it? Where to start? Start and see what other interesting question that leads you to…
A TechCrunch article about Singularity University arrested my attention today. What caught my eye about the university are the people involved which include Kurzweil (Inventor and Author) and Diamandis (X Prize), Myhrvold (Microsoft). Also the subjects that these smart people thinks hold the future of innovation and inventions i.e nanotechnology, biotechnology, genetics, computing etc.
The thesis of Singularity University seems to be that by exposing top tier graduate students to cutting edge information in these fields (at a cost of $25,000) they will be able to synthesize innovation.
However what went through my mind is can we expose a lot of people to this information using freely available information on the web and based on the wisdom of the crowd and self selection innovation will flow.
The idea of knowledge is not about what you know, but what you can do with what you know. This is something I will like to play around with. Stay tuned…
I am getting fed up with the quality of news and the subsequent analysis I get on TV. One of the things I expect when I watch TV is for the interviewers to ask insightful questions and to have mastered enough logic to call “experts” when they make illogical statements. Experts should be smarter than me and know enough to add insight to what I already know.
Personally, the bias in American news services towards events in the US (US centric view) is something that I have noticed since I started living in the states, however there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this as long as this is stated and acknowledged. What galls me is when the same media criticized the public for not having a world view. For example this is one (not all) of the criticism of the media for Sarah Palin.
Take late night comedy, Jay Leno for example most of the content is mindless drivel, but it is comedy so it is Ok. Until he makes fun of folks on the street who have no clue because they are fed information (not entertainment) by programs like Leno’s.
Or an a more serious platform, have you compared CNN vs. CNN International. The quality of the CNN International in terms of coverage and of course bias is so much better than the US flagship. I guess that is a reflection of the audience.
Anyways, this is America so no complain, each individual is responsible for what they consume for either entertainment or information and if you don’t like something do something about it. Hence I am shifting my news consumption to NPR and BBC World Service. Thanks to the web and podcast, you can now choose which news sources to consumer. [Of course, I will keep watching those old guys on 60 minutes.]