Huttonise history

So does this mean that some people are not entirely convinced that Hutton got it right?

Sumnatra Ghoshal and purposeful action

I went over to Leeds University Business School last night to see a lecture by Prof Sumantra Ghohsal of London Business School (and Harvard Business School and MIT and so on and so on…) - it was part of the AIM research programme which some of the LUBS faculty are involved in.

If he’s typical of the LBS and Harvard and MIT faculty, I can see why their MBA courses cost so much. The subject of the lecture was ‘Developing a bias for action’, which doesn’t sound like the most wildly exciting of subjects - but in actual fact it was fascinating stuff. Deceptively simple, which made it very easy to find yourself thinking “yup, that’s a bit like me” when given an example of why most managers actually actively avoid making decision and taking action. His style of lecturing was far more energetic than I’d become used to on the MBA, so he managed to keep my attention for the whole 90 minutes.

I made a load of very rough notes during the lecture - there were quite a few diagrams, so I’ll probably end up scanning those. In the meantime, a bullet-point summary:

Eight lessons of purposeful action

* Only 10% of managers take purposeful action
* Business is the central hazard to purposeful action
* Purposeful action requires active management of demands, choices and constraints
* Willpower, not motivation, drives purposeful action
* The foremost task of leaders is to engage their own willpower
* Willpower is not a personality trait
* Organisational energy drives collective action
* To unleash purposeful action in an organisation, leaders need to do some very different things

Goose poo

Living next to the river, getting rid of stale bread has never been a problem.

The resident population of greylag geese that live on the Ouse get fed so often that they’re practically tame - if you don’t mind the risk of a swift peck, they’ll take the bread right out of your hands.

The downside of feeding semi-tame geese is that they’re quite happy to wander up to you and coat your shoes in goose excrement - and nasty, slimy, green, smelly, gunky stuff it is too…

Testing textile…

Just amended the template tags, so here goes:

*strong*
_emphasis_
**bold**
__italics__
++bigger++
–smaller–
^superscript^
~subscript~

A footnote[1]

“A shorthand link”:http://www.timzilla.net
(c)
(r)
(tm)

* one
* two
* three

|a|b|c|
|1|12|123|

fn1. Here it is

The difference that a week or so makes…

This was taken just over a week ago, when the River Ouse has reached its highest point for about four years.

This, on the other hand, was taken this morning. By my reckoning, that’s a difference of about 15 feet…

Strategic management exam - resources

I’m still getting googled for ’strategic management exam’, which makes me wonder how many soon-to-be-MBAs are hitting these pages in the hope of finding something useful.

I’m not sure whether this lot will count as useful, but here goes. It’s based on the semester two Strategic Management core module run by this gentleman as part of the full-time MBA at Leeds Uni Business School. His module is based around two core texts - de Wit & Mayer’s Strategy - Process, Content, Context and Hill & Jones’ Strategic Management: An integrated approach, so that’s what these documents take as their starting point.

The Strategy Planning Model attempts to pull together a complete overview of the strategic planning process, while the other Strategy model tries to pull together all the various models and views and show how they inter-relate. Points being the things that won prizes, the idea was to come up with a set of models that would a) be possible to remember in the stress of the exam room and b) act as a way of building up an essay answer that could tie together various models in a comparative way and so gain as much credit as possible. They’re not designed as last-minute cramming aids - if there’s one thing I learned on the MBA it’s that it’s a course where last-minute cramming doesn’t work.

For what it’s worth, this approach seemed to work - those of us who worked together on these models got high marks (I haven’t got my grading sheet to hand, but from memory I think I picked up a low-80s mark, which anecdotally at least was pretty good for the cohort) How much sense they’ll make out of context, I’m not sure, but if in doubt email me, and I’ll try to explain.

There’s also a lot more where this came on that covers other modules - Operations Management in particular, so if the name Nigel Slack rings any bells, ping me an email and the OM models can be yours.

Windows updating

Just spent a happy half-hour (actually, make that two hours) updating yet more critical security patches on two Windows 2000 servers that I have the (dubious) pleasure of looking after. 11MB of downloads and two reboots each. This software has more bugs than the average anthill…

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should

Prize tit of the week award goes to Rob Enderle and his Ferrari-branded Acer laptop:

One impressive piece of execution is that when you fire the machine up it plays a WAV file of a Ferrari race car revving its engine. That alone is worth the relatively low $1,899 price of admission… Even when I’m in a meeting, I don’t turn the sound off because of the unbridled envy that seems to show up in the eyes of my, granted mostly male, co-attendees. So far no one has complained.

That, Rob, is because they’re desperately trying to stifle their laughter at what a micro-penised plonker you are…

(via Slashdot, and if you think I was being harsh about him, you should read what they say…)

Vengence shall be mine, oh yes…

Thanks to Robert Price, who’s put me onto ICTIS, the OFCOM of the premium rate number industry. I wonder if their switchboard blocks outbound 0898 calls…?

Amazingly enough for a regulator (compared to OFTEL at least, I was always left with the distinct impression that their website was something of a reluctant concession to the 20th century), their website is slick enough to have a “log a complaint online” page.

Complaint duly logged, I am now sitting back and await retribution to rain down and smiteth ye sinners…

Mobile spam redux

A few days ago I mentioned getting some rather plausible-sounding SMS spam that tried to persuade me to call a premium-rate number. It arrived again yesterday, only this time there was a sender’s number attached:

From +44 777 720 4204
You are being contacted by our dating service by someone you know! To find out who it is, call from a landline 090 5000 0071. PoBox45W2TG150P

Does this mean that as there’s a sender number, it’s possible to trace? How and who would do it? Does the maximum penalty for SMS spam run to having one’s genitalia nailed to a base station antenna? Am I in fact over-reacting to something that I could simply delete…?