Disclaimers: This is not a new book, nor have I read it. I have read reviews of it, and am recommending its concept here, but can’t honestly recommend the book, not having read it. OK, that probably sounds awkward, but there you have it.
I found this review of the book The Art of War for Women: Sun Tzu’s Ancient Strategies and Wisdom for Winning at Work, which is a modern interpretation an application of the original The Ar Of War by Sun Tzu, now thousands of years old, yet still relevant. The reason I am promoting this book’s view of the original work is simple: It points out that The Art Of War is not just relevant to war. It is relevant in any situation where you are facing one or more parties with conflicting goals, or competing for the same resource. It could be at work, or dating, or politics, or even dealing with your relatives. It’s mostly about finding your strengths and the others’ weaknesses and using both to your advantage. It’s about looking for things in your environment that can help you. It’s about focus and balance.
Read on…
USA Today has this post in their blog: Dealer offers AK-47 with each new truck purchase. Well, they get a voucher for an AK-47. They still need to be legally allowed to get a rifle, and go through the waiting period (no loopholes that I can see), but this is some brilliant marketing. By the way, the civillian AK-47 is only semi-automatic, and not super-accurate.
Check out this YouTube video showing the Barbecook grill. This is ridiculous. I get poked fun at because I grill with gas (then again, I often grill three times a week, and in the dead of winter). But here you have a grill that uses coal, but the food’s never directly over the coals. I’m sorry, if the drippings aren’t hitting the heat source, and that flavor ending up back on the food, it ain’t grilling.
Slashdot brings us this article on Microsoft trying to invent the search engine. Again. Because what hotter name could you possibly think of for a search engine than “Bing”? Note that it’s Bing as in cherries, not Bling as in jewelry.
I did reply to the post with a Faulty Financial Comparison warning for comparing Microsoft’s net loss to Google’s gross profits
Update:
A later article on FastCompany filled in some more details. The big new functionality in Bing is that you don’t just tell it keywords to match linguistically with, you tell it the kind of thing you’re looking for (a business, a person, a service, a book,…) and it uses its “Decision Engine” to return pages on that kind of thing. I hope it’s either very good or very bad. Because if it’s sorta OK, it will get in the way of true Semantic Web work that can solve these problems right.
FastCompany was, until fairly recently, a really good monthly magazine focused on design, innovation, business accumen, and success and failure stories. It’s important to me to keep up on both technology and business (follow the bits with one eye, and the money with the other), and that magazine really rounded out my reading. Now they’re completely online, and a daily email gives me a small dose of the same brilliant stories and ideas. I certainly enjoyed the magazine, but I admit I’m very short on reading time these days.
Today’s post has an article on how the most creative people (determined by them, of course) generally don’t twitter or facebook or scrob or blog (though there are notable exceptions). The author’s theory is that it’s not the time involved that prevents them from publishing, but the lack of apparent ROI for doing so. They don’t see the value in it, and powerful busy people don’t do things that aren’t going to benefit them in some tangible way.
Louis Gray, a seasoned technology blogger, blames the “corporate” mentality. Even though it seems like everyone (read: Oprah) is talking about Twitter, he says, the service primarily caters to young people and early adopters. Ditto Flickr and Last.fm. Older, more experienced CEOs and CEO-types–many of whom populate our list–are more reluctant to play along, especially if they don’t see any significant ROI on their 140 character missives. “We saw the same thing happen with blogs,” Gray explains. “Big businesspeople aren’t just going to start sharing themselves on the Internet for no reason. They need to hear about these services from trusted third parties,” such as friends, family, analysts and PR consultants.
Read on…
I was heavily involved in semantic web, ontologies, and natural language processing in my last company. I was supposed to work on that in my current company. In other words, I’ve been following this stuff for a while. The realization I came to is that, while it would be cool if everyone added all this metadata to their content on the Internet, and the cylons could take care of complex tasks for us automatically, like “Book me a room in a hotel near the Hynes Convention Center next Friday through Sunday with one queen size bed, bill it to my Visa card, and send the confirmation email to my Blackberry”, it’s not going to happen. The simple truth is it’s a lot more work than most content creators think is worthwhile, and adding metadata to existing content is nigh impossible. Just to save some businessman about an hour poking around the Internet for hotel recommendations and booking a room. Read on…
This is by no means an all-inclusive list, bu t it’s pretty good. From businesspundit.com, 5 Ways Companies Breed Incompetence. We could probably triple this in a couple of minutes over a beer or four.
Maybe this will help, but you can’t be sure.