Sunday, February 24, 2008

funeral management

Funeral requires a lot of management skills to pass through. High emotional involvement combined with high time pressure. Inspite of a limited procedures needed to be done, the stress level is incredibly high.

Just to survive, I used the following tricks:
1. To lower emotional pressure, I dove into physical labor - cooking (in Russia we have a tradition of funera repast, that is normally cooked at home), serving the food etc.
2. When somebody wanted to help me and at the same time started to anny with a phrase "we don't have enough time until..." the only way to limit the hysterics was to give the person some occupation, cause in the case of high emotional pressure there's no possibility to explain for the person to understand.
3. Just remember that this pressure is not endless, the time for pressure is limited wit a traditional set of funeral procedures.

Let my granddad's memory live on forever.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

selfactualization

Sorry for Russian, but this is my opinion about russian article from e-xecutive.ru.

Реально понравилась статья "Тайны корпоративного двора". Прежде всего тем, что поднят вопрос самоактуализации.

Обидно, что практикам не хватает более формального и системного подхода - в статье сформулирована проблема и показаны плохие примеры, мол, не справились, мол, не получилось. Есть пару-тройку намеков о том, что можно делать, но основы под это никакой не подведено. Замечаю за собой ту же слабость - лень формулировать, проверять на целостность и полноту теории. Нас долго пичкали статьями Портера. Я все удивлялась, мол, написал книгу, молодец, но потом еще двадцать пять лет объясняет ее в статьях. Теперь понятно - он постоянно ее тестирует на соответствие изменяющимся условиям. Подходит ли модель пяти сил для анализа интернет-бизнеса, почему сил именно пять, не пора ли ввести еще парочку, и тут же тестируются кандидаты. Но Портер - он этим и живет, преподает себе. А тут управленцы же.

Monday, February 4, 2008

wrongly perceived incompatibility

My dear friend is creating his reputation-building website as a tool to promote himself as a forex-trader and asset management specialist. Since I was working as an editor and corrector while making my product catalogues, he decided to trust me the proofreading.

And we had a great fight.

He wrote a text to optimize his website in searching systems. I proofread it as a reputation-building tool. I really beleive that all the texts should be written in a vivid manner to create with a reader the sense of sincereness and opennes. By saying "to create" I mean to give a clear message that the author is open and sincere.

The fight was severe. Until the very moment we both understood we can combine those two limitations we thought were uncompatible. I was re-creating some sentences and passages after he had given me hints about optimal sentence structure for search engine inquires.

Most of limitations and conditions are perceived as incompatible but they are not. If you change the requirements specification, you can find the best solution. Not compromise, but consensus.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

free+ or how to make money on add-ons

Seth Godin just gave a link to Kevin Kelly post "More than free" about eight ways of making something worth charging for.

He mentions the following:
1. Immediacy - get now or at least earlier than others.
2. Personalization - generic version is for free, customized one is not.
3. Interpretation - software, free, the manual, $10000.
4. Authentacity - how much are you ready to pay for a trueness certificate?
5. Accessibility - low access cost, how much are you ready to pay for it?
6. Embodiement - making services r intangible goods tangible.
7. Patronage - audiences want to pay the creators.
8. Findability - makeing money by helping the audience find works they love

I love the article.