Monday, December 20, 2010
That's all well and good but who's picking up the tab...
Friday, October 29, 2010
Same infrastructure different application...
Friday, October 1, 2010
Simples!
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Pushing water uphill with a rake?
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Two wheels good, more wheels bad
Friday, August 6, 2010
It doesn't matter what you say...
- Social media is a fad.
- It's about controlling the message.
- Employees will goof off.
- Social Media is a time waster.
- Social media has no business purpose.
- Employees can't be trusted.
- Don't cave into the demands of the millennials.
- Your teams already share knowledge effectively.
- You'll get viruses.
- Your competition isn't using it, so why should you?
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Field of dreams...
Monday, July 19, 2010
Nascent thought about roles in learning
Friday, July 9, 2010
Size of UK market for employer L&D
Monday, June 28, 2010
"Learnings" from football
Friday, June 18, 2010
Spare the rod, spoil the child?
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
New learning, old learning
Search and 'find' skills | To find the right information when it's needed |
Critical thinking skills | To extract meaning and significance |
Creative thinking skills | To generate new ideas about, and ways of, using the information |
Analytical skills | To visualise, articulate and solve complex problems and concepts, and make decisions that make sense based on the available information |
Networking skills | To identify and build relationships with others who are potential sources of knowledge and expertise, within and outside the organisation |
People skills | To build trust and productive relationships that are mutually beneficial for information sharing |
Logic | To apply reason and argument to extract meaning and significance |
A solid understanding of research methodology | To validate data and the underlying assumptions on which information and knowledge is based |
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Am I the dinosaur or the meteorite salesman
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Too busy to think
Friday, April 30, 2010
Dangerous territory... politics
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
And stay awake because it will all change tomorrow...
Monday, March 29, 2010
Motivation...
"What happened?
The results were “amazing,” says Goldstein. Employees in the Personal Benefit and Control groups secured the same number of pledges and raised the same amount of money as they had before the intervention.
But people in the Task Significance Group, the ones who read about what their work accomplished and how it affected the world, “earned more than twice the number of weekly pledges (from an average of 9 to an average of 23) and more than twice the amount of weekly donation money (from an average of $1,288 to an average of $3,130).”
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Moore of the same... or something else entirely
I was at a think tank/discussion forum yesterday where I learned that Intel are currently claiming a 2% advance per month in processing speed. To those who are interested, if you compound this rate you get a doubling of processing speed every 36 months or so.
Moore's law originally said 24 months but it is still pretty impressive that close to exponential growth has been maintained since he introduced the concept in 1965.
The gentleman who shared the information with me also claimed that this will lead to better decision making as more data can be processed more quickly. But I wonder whether more data actually means "better decisions" or rather bigger decisions which in turn means more risk.
Which suggests that the next crash will be even bigger the last....!
Monday, March 15, 2010
When you're ready...
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Maths from scratch
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Relativity
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Still haven't got it
I like RSS. I like the fact that I can make time to read things that I am interested in without extraneous noise.
Occasionally I'll spot something go by on the Twitter Gadget on my iGoogle home page and follow the link. But generally I go to Reader first. I like the more considered pieces rather than the instantaneous.
I will accept that Twitter is good for asking questions that are not answered by search engines.
Maybe it's me. But Twitter just strikes me as too needy...
Friday, January 29, 2010
How not to run a bank
"I should like to tell you a little story to underline the importance of professional standards in banking that is a little closer to home than you might expect.
I want to tell you about my great-great-grandfather, George.
From the early 19th century the Greenways were bankers in Warwick. Although initially very successful, the bank was taken over by my great-great-great-uncle Kelynge Greenway after the death of his father. Under the terms of his father's will, £25,000 in capital was removed from the bank leaving just seven pounds to the remaining partners. That the bank survived the withdrawal of £25k at all, is a testament to its strength up to this point. What happened next is an object lesson in how NOT to run a bank.
Kelynge asked his brothers, Thomas (a Colonel in the army), George (a solicitor and my great-great- grandfather) and Charles (an architect) to join him in the bank. Now, you would have thought that with only seven pounds to their name, they would take the opportunity to recapitalise the bank.
But no, they decided instead to run the bank with NO CAPITAL WHATSOEVER! According to the British Banking History Society in December 1886 of the banks £278,000 of assets, £210,000 were the partners' overdrawn accounts and this included extensive tramway speculation (grandpa George was also the Chairman of the Magdeburg Tramway Company).
The bank failed on September 6th 1887 after their agents in London, Glynns, refused to honour their cheques and the trial of the partners began on October 27th. George was sentenced to five years' penal servitude and Kelynge to 12 months' hard labour, Thomas escaped sentence due to his "almost complete ignorance of banking" and Charles had died five years previously.
My grandfather Walter told me that his father Cate (who had been 11 at the time of the crash) never spoke of the affair. One can only speculate on the impact it would have had on a young boy but he overcame it, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the army, serving in India and China ultimately winning the DSO at Gallipoli. Indeed you will be glad to hear, my family has steered clear of banking since; sticking almost exclusively to the things it knows about namely teaching and the military.
I think it is safe to say that neither George, Thomas or Charles knew of the canons of lending; still less of how to properly assess credit risk. It is clear they knew absolutely nothing of best practice in capital ratios.
I think it is also safe to say that my family knows the fundamental importance of professional standards in banking.
Mark Twain once said, "History never repeats itself but it often rhymes". I don't think you need me to point out the parallels between my ancestors' short-comings as bankers and the factors which contributed to our current economic situation.
There is a wealth of knowledge in the path to Chartered Banker and knowledge is, I believe, the only long term way to profit. I hope it is a path that you join us on."
I thought I'd share this here as it was only through working with CIOBS that I found out about this element of my family history.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Objectives
1. To simplify wherever possible
2. To have fun. Or more specifically, since I don't think one can simply will happiness to exist, to try not to miss opportunities for enjoyment
That latter one sent me on an enjoyable five minute diversion. I was sure that there is a Samuel Johnson quote about happiness along the lines of, "Any plan for merriment seems doomed by its own nature". I eventually found it as:
"Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme for merriment."
But not before I had throughly enjoyed his wit and 'resolved' (eek) to try and read more of him.