Unconventional Thinking

Investing as a business

2010-02-05T06:13:00.001-08:00

Most people do not think of themselves as investors, but in truth we all are. We have a limited set of resources to invest albeit time or cash. And we hope to generate a maximum return from it.

Therefore thinking about it carefully, the same principles applicable to investing is applicable to all areas of our lives e.g. investing your time in your family – how do you maximize the return of that time. Say you have an hour to spend with your family, would you rather watch TV or do something memorable together? Thoughts?

Training for the Half Marathon

2010-02-04T19:17:00.001-08:00

Having looked at several training plans for the half marathon, I have locked on the one I am going to follow.

No more BS’ing around, if I am going to make this event, I need to kick it into high gear. And if you want to see what program I am following go here.

4 simple rules for management in the 21st Century

2009-11-22T13:43:00.001-08:00

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.

IBD’s 10 secret to success

2009-11-17T21:16:00.001-08:00

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.

12 Principles of Entrepreneurial Leadership – Peter J Daniels

2009-08-17T21:49:00.001-07:00

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

21 Principles of Negotiation by Peter J. Daniels

2009-08-04T23:27:00.001-07:00

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.

Planning an website project

2009-08-04T16:38:00.001-07:00

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’s the thought that counts

2009-07-07T22:25:00.001-07:00

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.

Sammamish 4th of July Fireworks

2009-07-05T01:03:00.001-07:00

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.

template change again

2009-07-04T21:21:00.001-07:00

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 4th of July

2009-07-04T21:10:00.001-07:00

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!

Micro blogging the end of blogging

2009-06-23T13:45:00.001-07:00

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.

Interesting things today…

2009-06-03T22:46:00.001-07:00

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.

Jessie in South Africa

2009-04-21T11:18:00.001-07:00

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/

Still working on the template

2009-04-07T21:27:00.001-07:00

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.

Template Diarrhea

2009-03-17T23:18:00.001-07:00

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…

economic indicators

2009-03-17T22:52:00.001-07:00

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:

http://www.investopedia.com/university/releases/

Tracking the direction of the indicators:

http://www.marketwatch.com/tools/marketsummary/calendars/economic.asp

http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/ecalendar/index.html

Interesting article on peak oil

2009-02-15T20:57:00.001-08:00

http://www.irs.gov/publications/p519/index.html

If you believe in peak oil, what will you be doing now, from an investment perspective?

Future Studies and Forecasting

2009-02-06T12:23:00.001-08:00

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.

Subjects for the future

2009-02-05T21:50:00.001-08:00

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:

Future Studies & Forecasting

Networks & Computing Systems

Biotechnology & Bioinformatics

Nanotechnology

Medicine, Neuroscience & Human Enhancement

AI, Robotics, & Cognitive Computing

Energy & Ecological Systems

Space & Physical Sciences

Policy, Law & Ethics

Finance & Entrepreneurship

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…

Singularity

2009-02-03T18:32:00.001-08:00

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…

News and Analysis

2009-01-16T15:25:00.001-08:00

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.]

Learning by Writing

2008-12-25T23:24:00.001-08:00

Recently I was presented with the opportunity to write a professional paper. And the person giving me this opportunity talked about learning by writing. That is, as you research and write about a subject, the more you know about that subject.

As a voracious reader, one thing I haven’t done a lot of is write about the things I am learning. So I think I should use this blog to do that.

However, that raises some interesting question, will anyone read the blog except you write with an authoritative position? The solution is to focus on the subject I already know a lot about and that I care deeply about.

In terms of subjects of interest, I will focus on entrepreneurship, technology (computing in particular) ecommerce (my current field of employment), economics and finance.

In terms of worldview and things that I care about, the focus will be on sustainability, spirituality (Christian worldview) and socio-economic development from the view of Nigeria in particular, and Africa and Third World countries in general.

Moving

2008-12-25T22:07:00.001-08:00

Well, I’m moving and consolidating. Bringing together all my digital content into an easily manageable whole. One way of doing that is putting everything out there.

The new location for blogs is – http://mcshola.blogspot.com

Windows Live is making this easier to do, and since I can sort of cross-post my blogger postings to Windows Live space and other things like flickr picture and twitter updates is now shown on Windows Live as well.

Ted Quote

2008-06-20T22:54:00.001-07:00

“Bombing for peace is like Fucking for Virginity”

“It is the agent of our imagination, who shapes who we are”

- Chris Abani in “Learning the stories of Africa”

Oh Yeah, I forgot

2007-08-25T02:18:00.000-07:00

Oh yes, I forgot I have this blog
where essentially I could play around
and get to write meaningless whatever
Maybe a prelude to things I really want to write
Or an obeservation of the interesting and the mundane
Or maybe a commentary on that, which has already been written

A long time ago, I started blogging on blogger and then I deleted it
Oh blimmey!

What's Next

2006-06-22T19:44:00.000-07:00

Well, I had hoped to get these blog off the ground, but I havent had the time.
Now, I am back - it may be slow but it will grow.
Here are some of the topics I plan to cover in the next few months:

Finance and Investment
Technology & Telecommunications
Personal Effectiveness
Politics
Philosophy
and Economics

However, today I want to talk about learning. We are all so bombarded with information these days everything from TV, Radio and the ubiquitous internet.
Also there are various theories of adult learning, however since we are no longer in school most adults outside of work hardly engage in conscious learning. All learning from the point when you don't have to learn then becomes incidental.
Reading newspapers and magazines, watching TVs etc. But as with most things you will not do it very effectively if you dont have a goal for doing what you do.

Why Blog?

2006-05-25T14:53:00.000-07:00

There are many reasons, why people blog. Some blog as a means to express themselvers, others to express thier opinions on varying issues , some blog to share their experitse, while others blog simply to be cool. For whatever reasons they blog the important thing is that people are communicating through this new medium called blog.

So why this blog? There are several reasons I decided to start blogging again. Again, because I have blogged before in fact I currently have several blogs out there. So why then am I starting another one. For me it is the idea of being mysterious of hiding in open view. Why I take no measure to hide who I am and who is writing, it takes some skill to put all my blogs together into one coherent whole, but herein lies the clue and the challenge. There is a link between all my blogs you just need to find it. And therein is the challenge.