Strategy equals success
I am not a Machead by any circumstance, but Apple happens to do some great things. The strategy and foresight that comes out of Steve Jobs and Co. is brilliant. Apple garners billions of PR impressions and buzz with every announcement they make (and all the rumors that surround future product announcements). While that is fantastic for them, it really doesn’t change the products themselves. From iPods to MacBooks and the AppleTV, though the buzz drives sales it does not have any effect on the products themselves. The product development begins years ahead of the announcement, all attached to a very tight, well thought out, company vision and product road map. (more…)
Stuff _____ people like
If you haven’t caught wind of this new blog trend, then you must continue reading.
It all started with “Stuff White People Like” — a rather brilliant idea for a blog/site, if you ask me. The site’s about us page explains the site as follows:
This is a scientific approach to highlight and explain stuff white people like. They are pretty predictable.
Not only well though out and verbose (or not), it surely possesses stopping power — almost as much as Overheard in __. As you can expect, the site has caused quite a stir online and offline, with the site gaining free PR from tons of outlets (now including myself). Now there have been a bunch of copycats as well as bloggers listing potential expansions to the idea. (more…)
Me, a travel agent
<Begin frustration> To put it bluntly, I had a rather crappy week of work. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mind the 4 days work week (well 3.5 days for me since I went in after Linds left on Tuesday), but what I did just sucked.
As part of a workshop I am planning in Barcelona at the end on April, I spent the week booking hotels and planning the event. I wouldn’t have minded this if I had started planning from the beginning — I would have been down with it 5 weeks ago. Rather a colleague of mine had been in charge of booking everything and we can just say that he never finished it, so it fell onto my plate.
It is so inefficient for me to have to spend a week of my time planning hotels and conference space, when it literally could have been done 5 weeks ago and in much less time. I also found out that on the European teams, not only do I have to plan the bookings, I have to essentially “hand-hold” everyone to make sure they book their flights, hotels rooms, the proper number of nights, how they are getting from the airport to the hotel, etc. No one likes to travel without the proper information, but it seems ridiculous, this level of guidance. </End Frustration>
Lindsay’s visit - Monday (4 of 4)
Linds did a great write-up of our weekend in Hamburg so no reason for me to be original. Here are some excerpts from her ‘diary’…
Today (Monday) was a pretty emotional day. We woke up early and took an hour train ride from Hamburg to Cella and then a 15 minute taxi ride to Bergen-Belsen. Bergen-Belsen for those of you who don’t know because I didn’t know anything about it, was the concentration camp where Anne Frank, and sister died after they were found in hiding. Originally Bergen-Belsen was started as a POW camp where the Soviets were held. Here they experienced horrible conditions, basically no food and no showers but worked menial jobs for eventually a small wage. Once the war started getting worse and was taking longer than the Nazi’s wanted, Bergen-Belsen became a concentration camp in 1941. This was considered an exchange camp. It meant that “VIPs” were held here and were traded for Nazi soldiers that were captured. However, as time went on, it became more of a typical concentration camp. Many Jews from Auschwitz were transported here and many people from Bergen-Belsen were transported to Auschwitz. These 2 camps apparently had a “good relationship.” Approximately 52,000 Jews were killed here before its liberation on April 15th, 1945, one day before Pesach. This was an extremely eerie experience.
After a quiet train ride back to Hamburg, Adam and I went straight to dinner and then just got back a little while ago. I packed up my stuff so that tomorrow morning we can go out and maybe do something quickly before I have to catch my flight.
