When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. I first heard this quote when dealing with performance measurement and remuneration structures for senior management. In that scenario, the danger is that you get exactly what you measure rather than the good behaviours related to or driven by the metrics chosen.…
Apparently, it was Benjamin Franklin who said “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Without going into a detailed analysis of whether death is certain, and whether there are tax-haven countries with sufficiently low taxes to stretch the point a little, I have some comments to make on…
Like it or not, MS Word is the most ubiquitous document-creation application out there. There are many other great (many would argue better and certainly cheaper) products as well, but for the moment most of you know Word. Although my point is that you probably don’t. If you use Word for creating documents of more…
Ok, so the title will only make sense within the context of Blizzard’s hugely popular (and financially successful) World of Warcraft. WoW is, very simply, a multiplayer online game (and by multiplayer we’re not talking of 4 players here, but rather millions of players around the world) where players interact with other players and the…
This is a different sort of post, but given the huge impacts the recent (and not so recent) events all over the Middle East have on people’s lives, countries’ economies and business decisions, it is worthwhile to recognise the very real problems that exist in these markets. A few photos of the damage and tension…
I mostly use MySQL for ad hoc analytical work for specific projects – the sort of work where Microsoft’s Access product just doesn’t cut it because of the size of the data-sets involved. However, this is really just the tip of the ice-berg for MySQL, which powers a large proportion (I don’t really have any…
President Thabo Mbeki made reference to the adverse affect that volatility of the South African Rand has had on South Africa’s export manufacturers. I’ve posted quite a bit about hedging recently, but it seems that the issues just won’t go away. Volatility hurts planning capabilities. Hedging can restrict the impact of volatility for certain durations.…
David Maister’s blog has an interesting post about the pricing and promotion strategy for a small home-based business. In this case, it’s a pre-school looking for a pricing and promotion strategy. As always, David Maister has some useful suggestions and no doubt his wealth of readers will add some real gold in terms of suggestions…
