Ideeahs

Over the last week I have been wondering about what we learn and how we make use of this knowledge in our lives.  Much of my thoughts have centred on whether our approach to education is in fact giving us the knowledge we need in our daily lives.  Are we really gaining knowledge?  Are we simply being told how to accomplish a given task?  Are we being educated on the possible conclusions or just the one conclusion of the lesson - the educator's conclusion?  In other words are we learning to come to our own conclusions?  Are we able to, with what we are being taught, to really make the material our own, to synthesize it and to assimilate it into a true understanding?  To take all of this data and understand.  To come up with our own way and our own conclusion.  Are we always being asked to conform?  Do we need conformity? I have had many such conversations at work over the last days and, coincidentally, I came across some TED Talks by Si...

In "The Long Tail" Chris Anderson describes how, in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, markets for many goods were turned on their heads. What I have been experiencing for the last seven days supports his premise. If this continues for months (or rather, and hopefully, years!) I will have proved the theory. My gut tells me I will. My readers know by now that I have published my first book - " Avoiding the Blues ". I did not know what to expect. Yes, I imagined that mostly I'd be selling to people I know. But what started happening in the last two days has suddenly awakened me to the amazing possibility of the world we live in. Strangers have started buying. In his book Chris talks about how, with the cost of inventory having dropped to zero for most media (music, video, written word), online retailers can now offer immense catalogues of media to consumers around the world. No longer are we limited to choosing from the narrow selection...

Walmart is big. They have influence. Their 2009 revenues were $405 billion. They employ over two million employees. Their influence over the purchasing decisions of North Americans is large. Consequently, their corporate announcements often make the news. The positive ones around business greening have gotten good press. One that springs to mind was when they announced an initiative to reduce the amount of packaging in the goods they sell. They created a packaging scorecard for their suppliers. By sensitizing their supply chain to the issue of packaging Walmart can make a big difference. So when it decided to lower prices on soda pop in the United States it, in my opinion, used its clout in a negative way. Twenty-four cans of pop now cost $5 - though as low as $3.77 in some US markets. That is 15¢ per can. Not surprisingly pop flew off store shelves during the Memorial Day long weekend in the United States. With this action Walmart indirectly contributed to the health ...

I went grocery shopping today at the local Loblaws supermarket. I have been going to that market since October when we moved into this neighbourhood. After eight months of visiting this store and pushing my cart up and down the aisles I noticed something that I had noticed before. I looked down at my two hands grasping the handle of the shopping cart and saw a warning label. Yep, a warning label. It said something along these lines: Customer warning. Caution, the cart you are now driving handles differently from regular carts. It is wider. Please be careful. OK then, some comments: 1) since the aisles at Loblaws are North-American sized it would seem that driving SUV sized food carts should be manageable. 2) if you can't drive a shopping cart around you should not have driven your car to Loblaws to start off with. 3) is this message meant to be cover-your-ass lawyer speak? "I will sue your behind if I so much as get nicked by some crazed cart driver." 4...

Over the last few years I have often heard how expensive extracting oil from the Alberta oil sands was both in terms of dollars and energy use.  An article in the April issue of GEO magazine really hit the point home for me.  I had never spent the time to read about what was happening in northern Alberta and, now that I have, I just do not understand why we are allowing this work to go on. Some numbers: -The boreal forest that has been zoned for the work is one quarter the size of France. -To get to the oily sand you need to dig an average of 50 metres below the surface. -So you need to deforest 141,000 square kilometres. -It costs $25-$35 to produce a barrel of oil here.  On the North Sea and in Saudi Arabia the costs per barrel are $15 and $5 respectively. -Between 2 and 4 tons of sands are required to produce a single barrel. -It takes the equivalent of two barrels of conventional oil to produce one barrel of oil sands oil. -It takes 300,000 cubic metres of ...

After some procrastination we have finally put up a "no-flyers" sticker on our mailbox.  We had been thinking about doing this for many months and had just not gotten around to it.  Thursday we decided we had to....and soon.  The reason is that the companies that distribute these annoying flyers have completely lost their minds.  Two examples in photographs below. The first, above, was a bag loaded with a bunch of flyers for food shops, supermarkets, fast food joints, perfume.  Crap we never look at.  But what really got me was that the company that prints and distributes these bags of dung, Transcontinental, is actually trying to spin this service as green.   "Green looks good on your door - bag biodegradable, flyers recyclable".  I find that to be almost the last straw in pathetic marketing.  No wonder Transcontinental is the sixth largest printer in North America.  Look at all the crap they deliver to who knows how many houses in...

This is the story of a man who had a knack to make dinner at his restaurant memorable - Shafeen Jamal. His family owned a restaurant in Vancouver called Rubina Tandoori - or simply, The Rubina - on Kingsway just west of Victoria, on the south side of the road. My wife and I accidentally fell upon this restaurant one evening in 1994 or 1995. We were on our way home after a long day at work and we were hungry. We didn't know too many restaurants on Kingsway and, when we saw the red neon sign for Rubina,  we parked and decided to give it a go. Many Indian restaurants in Vancouver are very plain looking from the out and inside.  As we entered The Rubina we wondered whether we had made a mistake.  Luckily, we were immediately greeted and the point of no return had been passed.  Walking out now was not an option.  We hesitatingly walked in and were seated in the dimly lit dining room at the back of the restaurant. Sitar-heavy tunes and fragrances from the kit...

The ash cloud that Eyjafjallajökull has spewed over Europe has brought about all the expected behaviours.  "Gordon Brown under pressure to get Britain flying" screams our The Times.  What a ridiculous headline.  Yep, it is up to him isn't it? First you have the regulatory bodies, the arms of elected governments.  They have taken the cautious approach of banning almost all flights since they do not really know what the consequences of flying through an ash cloud are.  Erring on the side caution they have determined that jumbo jets filled with 300+ people should not be flying.  After all the job of a government is to protect its citizenry. Understandable. Airlines, over the last twenty-four hours have also started to take make their voices heard.  We have heard about flights through the ash cloud with airline CEOs on board.  Somehow the fact that the CEO is onboard is meant to alleviate all our fears.  The bottom line for the airlines is n...

In this day and age where people are looking for quick and easy ways to make hiring decisions certifications are becoming more important. I know because I am out there trying to find a job. -You don't have Project Management Institute (PMI) Certification? -No I do not but I have managed teams that are twenty or more in size, and indirectly been responsible for projects involving sixty or more. I have been responsible for creating and managing project plans, reporting on milestones and for managing risks. I have created dashboards, I have reported to steering committees and internal audit teams. I have been responsible to a budget, to a schedule and to specific service levels and deliverables. I have managed stakeholders and third parties. -But we are looking for someone with PMI Certification. -You don't have ITIL certification? -No I do not but I have managed teams that have delivered service and support to customers around the world. I have been responsible for managing...

How important must a message be if its sender takes the time to print it in colour on a glossy piece of paper, insert it into a plastic bag and then, to boot, have it hand delivered to your front door? I would think very. I am not talking about a publi-sac with adverts and flyers from twenty different businesses. No...I mean one advert, one bag. Mazekia Kitchen, a kitchen renovation joint clearly thinks its message is important. But clearly it is not important enough for them to target it. Rather they dropped off one of these plastic bags at every house in our neighbourhood. Foolish waste of money don't you think? I am thinking there are more effective ways reach your target. Time to rethink the advertising campaign, especially in this day and age where people go and get information for themselves rather than wait for it to arrive. Our kitchen was renovated, by the previous owners of our house, two or three years ago. Whomever approved the budget for this must not have thou...

I was received a tele -marketing call today from The Montreal Gazette. They wanted me to subscribe and asked me a few questions. Do you ever read The Gazette? No. Never, not even a few times? No. Are you interested in subscribing? Uh....no. Not even for $5.99 a month? No. Two months ago they tried to give it to me for free and I told them I was not interested. Now they think I will pay money to subscribe? They should track the responses they are getting from customers so that they do not waste money paying people to call on prospects that have little chance of subscribing and becoming new customers. Focus on those that haven't said no to you already! Better yet...stop trying to increase market share in the printed paper world which is disappearing. It is not a very good long-term strategy to spend money on a disappearing market. Focus on new media and ways to make money online. Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!

Getting masses to move is not easy. Succeeding in getting politicians to agree is hard work. In both cases it takes a lot of lobbying, of meeting, of convincing, of debating. There is a lot of misinformation that is spread and many exaggerations that are made. Success means that you need to have enough people who are open-minded enough, accepting enough, to change their opinion and swallow their foolish pride to admit they may just have been wrong. Today is World Water Day. Saturday at 8:30 PM Earth Hour will be celebrated. A mere day and hour to try and convince more of the masses that they need to make a difference. Does it really matter and do these events make a difference? Of course, action for a day or an hour has no real direct impact on the issues being raised. By turning your lights off for an hour, tapping yourself on the back and then going back to having your 1000 watts of ceiling pot lights turned on at all times you are not going to make a difference. Centuries ag...

I am going to let Dan Barber spread his Ideeah today. All I want to say is, folks, love your food and think about where it comes from, what it tastes like (or could taste like) and what its impact on reaching your plate is. I love what Dan calls today's agribusiness model - a business in liquidation. He's absolutely right. Watch and listen please. Dan Barber: How I fell in love with a fish | Video on TED.com Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!

Diversity in employees is one of the keys to success in business. I would argue one of the most important ones. By diversity I don't just mean the ones that are typically used by corporations such as sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability. I also mean different social backgrounds and work experiences. People from different industries but having worked in similar functions. Where are you from? Country, city, rural, urban, developed or developing world? Where have you worked? What industries, roles? What have you learned? What are your ideas and views on such and such ? What are your hobbies? What do you read? What music do you enjoy? What are you handicaps? Blind? Deaf? How does this affect your being? What about your ethnicity? Do you feel that you are a minority? Do you care? If so, how has it affected your life? What new ideas do you have to solve a particular problem? What perspectives have all of these items given you? It takes a hiring manager that ...

A decade ago I swore that I would never buy another piece of IKEA furniture. I don't remember the precise details but it had something to do with a missing part or, maybe, a broken part, and having to wait at the returns and customer service desk at the Montreal IKEA store. Arrgh. Frustrating. When we moved into this house last autumn we had a lack of furniture and window furnishings. So we decided to hit IKEA again. Those first few months improved my impression of the company. The quality seemed to be improved and for the price it was good value. Well the good run started changing course around Christmas and, today, it reversed completely. We have waited for the last two and a half months for the Edland dressing table to be in stock. Finally last week it appeared in the Toronto and Ottawa stores and we thought that it would finally appear in Montreal this week. No such luck. So we decided to drive the one hour and forty-five minutes to the Ottawa store today. Yes we did...

Almost every day I am kindly reminded by Bell Canada that telecom companies are terrible at communications. Examples: For the last little while I have been receiving at least two letters a week from Bell. They all come from the same VP and are all trying to upsell me new services or, worse, sell me services to which I already subscribe. I was told that I would have two months of free movie channels when I subscribed. Instead I was charged $13 a month for a movie package I never asked for. I asked, three months ago, to have my paper bill cancelled. I get the online version but still get the paper version. The fact that my internet and telephone service monthly rates both increased a month after I subscribed. Then there is the example I mentioned two weeks ago in this entry. When I lived in Vancouver and had to deal with Telus it was not any better. I wonder, what is it that makes telecommunication companies so terrible at communications? I have some ideas. Their business has grow...

Having been a hiring manager for eight years I know the difficulties. There are many unknowns. I mean how well can you get to know someone over two or three interviews, background checks and reference checks? Obviously the references are stacked in the candidate's favour. Obviously the candidate is on their best behaviour (generally!). So how does one decide? Ultimately, for me, it was a gut feeling. Most times I was right but I did make mistakes. One of the challenges is filtering candidates. I could not, for example, possibly interview all eight hundred candidates I received for the ten new grad positions I had to fill. So I needed easy filters. A grade point below a B and you were out. No summer or co-op work terms and you were out. Any spelling mistakes? Yes? Out! A CV that is not well organised (this is subjective)....out! And so on. So I ended up with a stack of CVs of interview worthy candidates. Fifty were interviewed and ten were hired. Yep, it is a toug...

I spent eighteen minutes, Wednesday, February 10, on the phone with a nice woman sitting in Kitchener, Ontario at a Bell Canada call centre. I wanted to order the five free Bell TV HD Olympic Channels that are being advertised quite extensively on the bell.ca website. Enjoy all the great action on HD - free! But you need to call to order the channels. So I did. February 10 was the first day you could call to order the channels which start airing on the 12th, the first day of the 2010 Games. So I called. I tried to use the IVR and the telephone keypad...to no avail as there was no event code that I could enter. So the system transferred me to an attendant. "We are experiencing higher than normal call volumes today" (isn't that always the case?). After some nice pleasantries regarding weather.... -Can you please give me the event code? -There is no code sorry. Just the channel number. -What is that start time of the event? -There is no time. It just says February...

As I wrote the title of this entry I started singing the ABBA tune. This is not about my love for someone though. I am looking for a job. The best way to get a job is not to just complete online applications and send them into the bit bucket of some HR department. You will just end up in some dehumanizing database that nets down your life experience to some key words that can be searched on. Rather you need to make contact with people in the organization. Reach out, just like in sales, to people you know and make cold calls to some you do not know. I have been doing a fair bit of this and have come to a few conclusions. 1) Too busy. In my last job I received more than 100 emails a day. On top of all the other interruptions (phone calls, instant messaging, walk-ins) and my busy schedule of meetings (sometimes triple booked, often double booked) I rarely got to all of them on the day they came in. 2) There is a person at the other end. When an email comes from someone that they...

News is coming out about a cyber -attack last December that focused on the Gmail accounts of a few human-rights activists in China. When Google launched their . cn site in 2006 it was quite broadly bashed for giving in to Chinese government demands to censor certain sites out of search results. Google argues that it found that giving the Chinese broader access to web content than they had ever had before still merited the censorship. Fair enough. China needs to part of any global companies strategy (did you read that China has now taken over the United States in another market? The market for cars.) You simply can't call yourself global and ignore a market of 1.1 billion. Having said that Google seems to be rethinking their strategy towards China and I must say that I am very proud of what they are doing. Bottom line is that they want to work out a way to remove all censorship from their . cn site. If an agreement can't be worked out with Chinese authorities they are ...