Here is a realisation of last three days. Innovation is obsolete and waste of your time, focus and productivity. Farmers didn’t invent tractor. They were busy farming. Tractor brought huge leap in the productivity. Focus on invention, how to do things differently and better. You can not make it better improving on a current level. You have to invent and make it to the whole new level. That’s hard.
There is a huge difference between IT person a developer and a business person a developer. A developer (IT educated, computer science etc…) lives in models, math, algorithms, develops and writes a lot of “perfect” code, right to the specification! He uses first, second, third framework on top of one another. He does things because they are supposed to be done that way…
A business person, a developer educated on a business school has completely different approach, he is lazy to write a lot of code. He uses just one framework. He plans, he analyses and than he writes 80% less of the code than computer science person. Instead of doing things “the supposed way” he challenges dogmas and finds different approach.
I know some IT people, they talk bullshit. I can not stand some of them. You meet such a geek and he will tell you how exciting that piece of code is. I know some business people, they are right to the core. How to do it the most efficient and easiest way, how to do less. Well it saves money doesn’t it? They will tell you how exiting is that they manage to set-up e-shop in a few days, how exciting is the outcome and how much they saved that way.
What is the fundamental difference? Business people even though they may not know the Pareto principle they employ it and behave by it naturally. That is that 20% of causes results in 80% of effects roughly. So business educated developers focus on those 20% of functionality to develop which provides the highest 80% value. Computer science educated developers focus on 100% and they waste 80% of their attention to unimportant bullshit providing just 20% of value.
The drawback? You never get 100% from a business educated developer. The benefit? You get what will fulfill most of your needs, costs less and it is highly manageable in the future.
Did you get it? Big advice to all computer science developers: Your work will suck unless you focus on those 20% providing 80% of outcome. And advice for you? Why do you need 100% anyway. I am sure you will be much better off with a business educated web developer than with a computer science developer, because they can provide that cumulative magic.
Now when I told you golden rule of business educated developers, I am going to kill you :).
I am happy business minded web developer and if you need agile web development you can still hire me.
Economical growth doesn’t always transfer into social or human growth. Excellent talk from Geoff Mulgan with notion of social entrepreneurship.
One more time I am angry on a bank. I opened Passport account last year with HSBC UK. It was perfect as the account would automatically close after one year if I will not decide to prolong it. Good opt-in feature. But now HSBC decided to change the contract, so my account will automatically prolong until I decide to close it. They changed their services from opt-in to opt-out and locked me inside.
Now staying in Slovakia I have difficulty to close the account. Not to mention that there is £6 monthly charge.
HSBC sucks. Never open a bank account with this bank. Loyds TSB will give you current account free of charge.
I am looking forward to future encounters with banks cheating on me. This will never stop. I wish you fast death greedy banking institutions. Good luck financial crisis, you are doing good job hitting the right ones.
If you study abroad or work abroad and travel back to your home town regularly you may observe something interesting. People are very different. I do not mean it just culturally, but rather that they have different needs and wants and different perception of life, success and everything.
I study in Brno and travel regularly home to north east slovakia. During my studies I spent a lot of time studying abroad. Always when I came back to Brno I experienced some kind of culture shock. Even now when I go home from my university town, I experience slight culture shock.
By living in the new environment you are alienating yourself from that old one. Than when you come back you suddenly miss the new environment to which you have adapted. People you know lived through different experiences than you did over the year you were abroad.
When I go home to north east slovakia I have to become suddenly used to jealous gossips about neighbors in the village, and reality TV shows which are popular in Slovakia and everybody is talking about while I haven’t seen any episode and I am not even eager to waste time watching it. On the other-side suddenly nobody knows what The Apprentice is. It seems like there is nothing to talk about. Even though you speak the language it is hard to find common language and common topic to speak about.
People tend to search like minded people. I can tell that in the cities people tend to be more open-minded than in the villages. There is also huge difference between different working environments. Universities, international corporations or local companies each have distinct cultural traits.
So this way I start to think about “social clusters”. In today’s mobilised world people can move to locations which will best fulfill their personality and give them opportunities for future development. Such a clusters of certain mindsets can boost productivity. This however creates big cultural differences not just between countries but even between regions in the same country.
Ok enough. Too much thinking. But what I am curious to find out are the answer to few questions. Is it better to adapt yourself to the environment in which you are? Or to move to the environment which best fits your personality? Is it wrong to have a differed mindset than most people in the environment you are currently in?
Time for more thinking 
President of Google’s EMEA operations talks about changes which are happening and their pace. Predictions are hard to make, but important decisions needs to be done now. Broadband access went from a nice to have, to a must have. People use Internet mostly for search, chat and entertainment. Community sites become very popular which rises interesting question: Is the content going to be in the center and communities will form around it, or community will form the center and people will find likewise communities to discuss relevant content? He concludes that the biggest brands in the last ten years were developed on the basis of product performance. People demand quality products. Most of these products were free to a consumer and there was a community side to it. I finish with two questions, which I seek answers to. What is the impact of the internet on traditional (4P) marketing? What are the relevant marketing strategies if the product is free?
Interesting talk about extraction of value from real people and real companies producing goods and services, to rather holdings, financial corporations creating myths around products. Companies which don’t make anything but rather become names on debt.
Douglas Rushkoff raises interesting question about our current economy. As money were created to hold value in the age of scarcity, they don’t work well in present age based on abundance. It is free to distribute stuff across the Internet. That’s why scarcity based lending banking model doesn’t work.
“They were so stupid, they bought shares of their own ponzi schemes”. Douglas Rushkoff talking about banks. If you have so much money created where are you going to put them?
If you like this talk, you will also enjoy Hacking the Economy article.
Until now I was just listening to stupid information about recession from the media. Nobody who had clue or give serious proposal came across. Media are just repeating one another, same and same again. Today I came across first realistic view of the recession cause and proposal at the same time. Duncan Bannatyne, Scottish entrepreneur and Dragon’s Den investor has probably more clue than most of others.
He believes that the problem was caused by the banks lending to each other. They borrow from each other and instead of it, they give each other security packages, which are less of the value than what the borrowing was.
He aligned it to supermarkets. If the supermarkets were lending each other fruit and vegetables and one was in trouble, they all would be in trouble at the same time.
The solution would be to stop banks letting each other, instead borrowing money from the central bank. If such self contained bank went bust, the rest could buy pickings. Same way as when a supermarket goes bust.
This woul also decrease money wasting across the system - people that take bonuses from moving same money around the system. Eventually there could be much more money available for the business or individuals in need of credit.
Out of every £1 spent by British shoppers 17p goes to online retailers. That is amazing statistics published buy The Guardian. Online sales are up 38% over the first six months of this year. Bottom and top of the market seems to be performing best.
This show is featuring three businessmen. Cushion maker, kitchen seller and air conditioning device innovator. Shows obstacles, benefits and adventure of doing business in China. However these guys seem sometimes rude and clueless to me, they are definitely clever. There is something on China, one billion people, huge market potential, cheap labour. But, I think learning chinese is hard. Language is a gate to hearts and minds of people. This way you will always need to count on joint ventures, local business partners who I think will never treat european businessman the same way as the local chinese one.
