I’m back….

Whew, things have been a bit busy of late. So, I am now going to get more disciplined about puttg articles up gain, so keep on coming over. I will start in earnest next week and will be putting at least one article together each day, maybe two. Thanks for your patience….

Jozi Photomarathon – 24 Feb 2007

This past weekend I took part in the johannesburg photomarathon. Basically a bunch of photographers were let loose in JHB city and had to take 1 photo of a given theme. Twelve themes were given over the day and each photographer had to hand in a total of twelve photos. Not so easy, the themes were obscure and made you think, they gave us things like “alien” or “mother city” or “running with scissors”. The obvious temptation was to be literal, but i went for a more arty or expressive approach. I will be uploading the pics shortly, so take a look at my flickr pics on the left and you will see them. Also you can visit www.photographysa.com for more info. There will be an exhibition and a prizegiving on the 15th March, I will post more details as they come.

The New year!

Well, 2007 is here. I trust that many of you will have a very blessed and exciting new year and that it will be a great year. As for me, this year can only be better than last year. Last year was a very tough year for me personally, but I am trusting that this year wil be better. Hopefully I will put more posts up this year too, so keep on visiting.

Green Cars – A solution to the Taxi pollution

I have felt that we have a very unique opportunity in South Africa. The opportunity is this, we dont really have any public transport to speak of, short of the taxi’s that we all love to hate. The bus system is useless for most and we have no subway at all (I know Gautrain is coming, but I will believe it when I see it) So what is the solution? Well maybe the solution is about putting electric taxi’s on the road. I read an article the other day where a company was using electric cars in London. This has become a huge success in the congested capital, but it got me thinking, what if we used these electric cars as Taxi’s? I think if the Taxi fare were reasonable and the taxis were plentiful enough, many business people would use them to commute to work and back or even to get to and from meetings in the day, rather than fight the traffic and spend a wasted hour in the car. At least if you are in a taxi, you can read, fine tune the presentation, listen to the latest news, whatever. There must be a business case here somewhere, let me know your thoughts!!

Leadership – Madiba Style

I guess its a cliche now, but we all know Neslon Mandela in many ways embodies leadership and is one of the greatest leaders of our time, not only in South Africa, but worldwide. I recently finished reading a book by his personal bodyguard, Rory Steyn which tells about the many behind the scenes incidents that characterised Madibas time as President of SA. Some stories are quite funny, some are quite poignant, but mostly the anecdotes and stories tell of the depth of conviction that Nelson Mandela has to be a great leader. Having read the abridged version of his autobiography “A Long Walk To Freedom” and now having read this book “One Step Behind Mandela” a few things come to light about his leadership style and what made him a great leader. These are in no particular order and are simply my observations of a great man:

• Humility: Nelson Mandela it seems never became big headed about his position and always was surprised at how people revered him. He fully understood his shortfalls, he knew himself and knew his strengths and weaknesses.
• People: He loves people, in his words “people come first” and he lived this out daily in the people he met whether they were heads of state or the cleaning staff of the hotel he was staying in, apparently he alwasy made a point of greeting as many people as possible, no matter what their position in life. He used to tell his bodyguards “smile as you push the people away”
• Keeping it real: He was never too proud or arrogant to do the basic things in life. Even on his International visits and staying in Buckingham Palace, he always made his own bed. He never left that for the staff to do.
• Sense of humour: He apparently has a great sense of humour and most importantly is able to laugh at himself. He often jokes with those he meets and has a very disarming ability to lighten the situation with laughter
• Values: He has held to some core values, things like honesty, openess and ethics run high on his chart. According to Steyn, if you have lied to Madiba and he finds out, thats it, he never trusts you again
• Forgiveness: He has an amazing capacity to forgive. Consider that he was in prison for 27 years, many of those years on Robben Island and yet he came out and brought a message of hope, reconciliation and peace…amazing!
• Having fun: He loved what he did and still does, he therefore made sure he had fun and wasnt always in favour of protocol i.e. his dress code, the now famous Madiba shirts did not go down too well initially with his advisors. He was also known to give his bodyguards “the slip” from time to time and would find this quite funny when he managed to get it right, even though it could have been highly dangerous in some cases.
• Consistency: According to his staff and bodyguards he was almost always the same. He was congenial, friendly and a true gentleman to everyone.

There is much more, but for me these are the things I picked out. I hope this doesnt come across as a “suck up” to Nelson Mandela, I just feel that as South Africans we have much to be proud of and one of those things is one of our greatest sons…Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. Thank you “Tata” for showing some of the western world how things should be done, African or Madiba Style!

Organisational DNA – its what your company is made of!

Thats right, its the thing that makes your company tick, its what makes you unique and waht makes you the same, like human DNA, organisational DNA is unique, but in some cases make things the same. As humans, we all look alike (mostly, we have two arms, two legs etc) but there are such specific differences that tell us apart. The same is true in companies, or is it? Many companies tend to “clone” competitors. They tend to copy their market and guess what, dolly is reborn in the coporate world. So how does a company change this pattern. Well, they need to take a long hard look at their DNA, organisational DNA that is! In a great article from strategy+business this methaphor is discussed in detail, but to give you some insights, the article states that there are 4 areas that companies need to focus on to change their DNA. They are as follows:

• Decision Rights: How and by whom are decisions made in your company and who truly makes them, ESPECIALLY those decisions that go beyond the org chart
• Information: What metrics are used to measure your organisation? How is activity coordinated? how is knowledge transferred?
• Motivators: What objectives, incentives and career alternatives do people have?
• Strucutre: What organisation model does you company follow?

Seems simple right and guess what, it is! But get this wrong and you may wind up needing glasses to see the future of your organisation.

Do pictures work?

In the business that I am part of (www.artstorm.biz) we believe that picutres make a huge difference. Why? Well becuase you can see at a glance what would take ten pages of text to explain. If someone asks for directions to your house, do you write an essay or draw them a map? In most cases you will draw a map from the nearest point that they recognise. To further illustrate this point, there is a trend growing in the US that more and more information is being generated in graphical format. Take a look at this link to see the US petrol price in graphical format, pity we dont have pricing competition here, but in the US, this kind of picture can literally save millions.Also, take a lokn at worldmapper and see how the world morphs based on things like population, births and so on. So, do pictures work, absolutely, we just need to use them more!

The five greatest lies in business

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. 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…

New book size PC

Microsoft has been tight lipped for some time about its latest offering in the PC realm. They finally took the wraps off this week and presented the latest PC offering at CeBIT. The computer is calld the ultra mobile PC, why you may ask. Well it is about the size of a paperback novel but runs full version windows XP. Weighing about 1 -1.5 kg, the 1-inch thick device sports a 7-inch touch-sensitive screen that responds to a stylus or the tap of a finger.

Device looks great, and it is expected to retail in the US for between 600 and 1000 US$, so it could feasibly be under R 8000.00 locally. What about the specs you ask, well it will have up to a 60 gig hard drive and battery power of up to 2.5 hours…it is being pushed as a replacement for lugging a laptop around. Note to self, must get one of these soonest, for more info, take a look at some of these websites and be careful not to drool on your keyboard!!

http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS3801638897.html

Six jobs that wont be around in 2016

In an article from Fast Company, they have cited six jobs that they think wont exist in 2016. Well, their list is interesting, but lets just think about this for a minute. How many jobs that were critical at the turn of the century, dont exist today. Much money and time is spent on getting people trained up to do these jobs and a decade or two later, all is lost. Think of what air travel did to the railways and sea travel, think of what home theatres are doing to Movie theatres and by 2016,will we still be going to movies? Maybe we can run a list on this blog of which jobs we think will be redundant by 2016.

So, the FC list is interesting, I have put it below, but click on the link to see the FC article:

http://www.fastcompany.com/subscr/103/open_fast50-jobs.html?partner=rss

Gatekeepers
TV schedulers, A&R guys, Wall Street researchers, cool hunters. As punishment, now it’s our turn to ram stuff down your throats. Hope you like Bon Jovi!

Bloggers
Pay someone to write snarky comments? Do you think we’re getting paid for this?

Advertising creatives
Talented amateurs making ads for fun and posting them online seem to be better at your job than you are. Bonus: No more “whither the 30-second spot” whining.

Auto mechanics
As cars run on software, the grease monkey will need a makeover.

U.S. high-tech jobs
But software engineers can always get a job down at the garage.

Indian call-center operators
American customer service is rescued from oxymoron status as companies realize that being nice to the people with the money is the only way to win.