September 12 2011
September 11 2011
Not sure how i missed this when it came out five years ago.
Former management consultant Matthew Stewart's witty and damning article on the state of Management Consulting and business school education reads like a synthesis of the ideas of Pfeffer, Mintzberg, and Bennis et al, but is actually the result of his own experience as partner in a management consulting business.
With a PhD in Philosophy from Oxford rather than the habitual Harvard MBA, his writing is a refreshing change from most business journalism.
February 12 2011
As reported in the fall, Millenium water, the second name for the briefly proud Olympic Village of the 2010 Winter Olympics, went bankrupt after 6 months of trying to sell itself as an overpriced luxury condo village.
This month, the former Olympic Village has been renamed yet again to the ridiculously parochial "The Village on False Creek" and will try once more to lure unwary buyers. Funny how marketers are convinced that all that's required to smooth away a debacle is a new name and brand statement.
They might want to try something else.
January 22 2011
John Perry Barlow recently tweeted a list of values he had written down when he turned 30. Miguel de Icaza collected and organized them.
They're all good: one that resonates right now...
Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.
January 05 2011
assuming you can believe an economic projection 40 (count em) years into the future....
HSBC admits that its economic projections are based on a "rather rosy scenario". Yet one thing seems clear. As superpowers of world food output, the US and Canada are sitting pretty
January 04 2011
Great post from Paul Graham, from Summer 2010, about the reasons for Yahoo's inexorable decline.
"In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture."
January 03 2011
Goldman and the Russian Investment Fund Digital Sky Technologies put $500 million in for 1% of FB.
Remarkable given that great swathes of passive users such as this writer do very little to justify that valuation.
November 18 2010
Like the expected death of a sick and elderly relative, the demise of Millenium Water in Vancouver---expected for months by many housing realists---is still a shock. Perhaps we secretly hoped that the laughable boosterism of the Vancouver Real Estate industry was somehow going to pull it through. RIP
November 16 2010
Bloomberg:
A majority of global investors predict Ireland will default on its sovereign debt, showing that weeks of efforts by the government of the onetime Celtic Tiger havent allayed concerns about its creditworthiness.
and from the Sunday Times
FEARS are mounting that Ireland could default on its soaring national debt pile, amid continuing worries about its troubled banking sector.
November 10 2010
Maps and Wave inventor Rasmussen talks about why he's decamping to Facebook. Not surprisingly, the ramp up of Google to a whopping 25,000 people is part of the problem. Although, Facebook, already at a headcount of 2000, can hardly be considered a startup.
October 20 2010
Steve is one of the best product guys in high tech, perhaps THE best ever, but he's no engineer. Combine that with a propensity to hyperbole and the result is periodic outbursts of ill-judged, misconstrued and reputationally-damaging silliness...
October 14 2010
For the last 100 years houses have primarily provided shelter and a hedge against inflation. It's only recently that they've become a widely used source of speculation and --- via home equity loans --- collateral for collosal household debt.
September 21 2010
"Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying."
Studs Terkel
September 14 2010
Talk about closing the door after the horse has bolted...
The Paris-based OECD, a club of wealthy nations that includes Canada and 32 other economies, suggested Ottawa could require home buyers to put up bigger down payments if they want their mortgages federally insured. The government could also consider forcing banks to disclose the sensitivity of their mortgage revenues to rate hikes.
September 05 2010
Finally, media stories are starting to confess what the data has been showing for more than two years. The Vancouver bubble is bursting. In fact the recent stimulus-induced bounce (a temporary reverse in the decline that was just getting started) has boosted the peak even higher, which makes looking over the precipice even more vertigo-inducing than it was two years ago.
Nice to see the usually smug Bob Rennie looking seasick for a change...
July 31 2010
From Paul Grahama's "Hackers and Painters" comes a wonderfully insightful essay about contribution and reward. In describing a startup as a place where individuals can be rewarded for their contribution, he identifies the biggest impediment to smart and/or ambitious people in bigger companies: that their contribution is averaged out with all the other dumb or unambitious folks.
According to Graham: to get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.
July 17 2010
July 01 2010
Clay Shirky on people power and "cognitive surplus"
June 08 2010
Track your personal or corporate brand's recognition, or perhaps ongoing besmirchment, with these useful tools
June 08 2010
"Our analysis depicts a coming generational transition in the housing market that will upset the historic balance of buyers and sellers. Residents in most states are net buyers of homes well into their 50s. The resulting upward pressure on demand by the large baby boom generation will soon peak, and after age 70 they will be net sellers in all except three states."