Ideeahs

Every December 31 or January 1 I remember a Garfield cartoon strip. The fat cat opens an eye while still lying comfortably in his bed. He reaches out to feel the air surrounding him between his thumb, index and middle fingers and utters......."Feels the same." Thanks to everyone for having read my Ideeahs in 2009. All the best. May 2010 be completely different, exciting and bring adventure to all of us. Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!

We in the rich worlds have everything we need. We may not have what we want....but we have what we need. Of course we know this, yet we often forget it and become fooled into thinking that our wants are actually needs. In the book I am currently reading, All Marketers are Liars (Tell Stories), Seth Godin makes this point and states that the job of marketers has gotten much more complicated as all our needs have been filled. The trick is to somehow turn this want into a need. Not easy as most consumers are not even listening to the marketers' stories (lies) anymore! Today we went to Costco to stock on some food (a need). I left there a little disturbed by the scene, by my own purchases and actions. Why? We got to the store at 10:00 - opening hour. Already the place was packed. The crowds filled the side aisles and we all had difficulty navigating our SUV sized carts around each other. Seriously, it was insanity. I have often found Costco to be a particularly draining plac

I need to blow off some steam.... "Unprecedented", "an important breakthrough", "a start", "we can call Copenhagen a success" Only in politics can a twelve day meeting produce so little. Our power hungry, protectionist, narrow-minded, lobby-swayed, short-term thinking, elected (though often not) officials have once again excelled at doing so very little and, in their constant fear of annoying some powerful groups, have managed to annoy mostly everyone no matter what their shade of green. No vision, no clarity, no outside the box thinking. Only in politics can an agreement that has no measurable items, tangible results, numerics or timelines with commitments be considered a success. Only in politics can vagueness in time, in dollars, in quality be considered an important breakthrough. Sadly this is NOT unprecedented. At least Kyoto, in its failure, had a number associated with it! Now we have zippo. Let me know what you think about what you h

My last entry was about the amount of water we consume. The water tax bill that spurred that particular entry had another interesting piece of information which I feel a need to talk about. I found out that the town of Beaconsfield charges its residents $1 per 1000 litres of water consumption. I don't know about you but I find this absurd. In comparison I pay about $1 a litre for gasoline. I pay about $2.20 a litre for organic milk. Bottled water sets me back about $2.00 (and that is for a 500 ml bottle). Compare all of that to one tenth of a penny per litre ($0.001). I also doubt that it costs the city only $1 to deliver 1000 litres to me. Clearly the incentive for people in Beaconsfield to consume less water is not going to come from a financial impact. The town will have to rely on some enlightened and aware citizens that look at their consumption in thousands of litres and, like me, decide that they want to try and make a dent. If Beaconsfield does indeed want to make a

The house that we moved into this autumn has a water metre installed. A few weeks back we received the water tax bill for the previous year. It showed that the previous owners had consumed 406 cubic metres of water over a 403 day period of time. So slightly more than 1 cubic metre a day. Not being able to relate to cubic metres as a unit of measure I converted this to litres. I was flabbergasted to see that this converted to 406,000 litres - 1007 litres of water per day! I couldn't believe it. My gosh. The nice thing about a metre is that it puts a value in your face. It tells you, directly and immediately, how much water you are using and how much it is costing you. In the 64 days since the last reading the metre has registered another 40 cubic metres of water consumption - 625 litres a day. The good news is that this is considerably lower but says little for sake of comparison yet. The last 64 days have not included any lawn watering. We did change a defective flappe

This came to me this evening, listening to Full of Grace by Sarah McLachlan. A memory of my seventeen years in that most beautiful, natural, powerful of places - Vancouver, the south coast of British Columbia, the Gulf Islands, Vancouver Island. Forever in me because of moments like the one I describe below. A cool December evening. The sun has already been shining on the other side of the planet for five hours. The temperature has dropped to a few degrees above zero. It is overcast, the clouds are low. The mist, the forming fog still a few hundred metres off the surface. It is dark. The fine drizzle hits my windblown face. It feels even colder, here, standing at the bow of the Spirit of British Columbia. My MEC jacket's hood is tightly wrapped around my cheeks and brow. My glasses are speckled with droplets. For the most part I am alone. A few passengers walk by not wanting to stand in the weather. I have decided to spend my time here....alone. I close my eyes and ta

I was thinking about my career this evening. For most of my twenty-one years there my upper management team was able to keep me motivated. They had the tools at their disposal and the ability to use them. For my hard work I was well rewarded with faster than average salary increases, awards, invitations to conferences, stock options, promotions. I was moved to Toronto and back to Vancouver, I was trained. All of this made me want to bust my ass and I believed in the company. I did well, I was respected and therefore I was happy. Then it all changed. The tools were still there, described in the various HR manuals, but my upper management team could no longer use them. All that was left to motivate me were kind words. I knew that there was nothing more that they could do, as my own hands were tied with my employees, but it began to eat away at me. Why should I bust my ass and not be rewarded? How much can one look within for motivation? Let's be frank....most of us do not

Those neutral, peaceful, boring, cow-herding, chocolate-loving, clock-making Swiss have annoyed the majority of the world. Of course, you could argue that the Swiss are free to do whatever the heck they want within their country....fair enough. But I disagree....not in this interconnected, global world. If you go back to the days of nation states and empires, where heinous behaviour was deemed a part of the world we lived in, maybe...but not today. Minarets, in the minds of those chocolate eating bankers, are sure signs of the radical Islam and the dangers that go along with it. Those towers, which rise above mosques, are meant to show followers where the mosques are and used for the calls to prayer. Hmmm.....this vaguely sounds familiar. Catholic churches generally were the tallest building in the cities they were built in so that followers could easily identify the building and so that those bells could ring and be heard...to announce a call to prayer! Nothing evil about that.