#Work

Really liked this article (dead link) by Lifehacker’s ex-hacker-in-chief Gina Trapani on her personal business model. Basically, it’s never always about the money (unless you’re a very shallow person). Primarily about freelancing, it has a nice framework for how to split your time between the benjamins and the other important things.

How she developed it her business model:

1. List of people you admire in business (and why)
2. List of people you enjoyed working with (and why)
3. Big Question: What do you want to accomplish ?

It distills to a 30/30/30/10 business model which is interesting. I’m hoping she updates this post at some point in the future with a followup telling us how the reality tracked to the ideal and what sort of tough decisions she might have made looking at that pie chart.

I love it when entrepreneurs discuss what went well and what didn’t with their startup. 10 lessons from a failed startup is a public service to everyone who is thinking of going out there on their own, so kudos to the guys from PlayCafe for being open, transparent and honest. I disagree with those people who think there is nothing to learn from failure, and anyone telling you about mistakes you can avoid is helping you out.

DHH (of Ruby on Rails fame) at Startup School (dead link). He did a very similar presentation at FOWA Dublin when I was there this year, but this is a nicer, refined version with him side by side with his slides.

I loved his comment about there being “not enough people trying to make a nice Italian restaurant in the webspace.”

Obviously, nothing earth shattering in here, but it’s wise to keep it in mind in an environment where everyone is trying to hit one over the fence a la facebook, youtube and twitter.

Another great HBR article by P&Gs CEO on what the four essential tasks of the CEO are. Kind of interesting as I agree there are specific things which only the CEO is in a unique position to do, much the same way that corporate headquarters end up being uniquely positioned to do things the individual offices can’t.

1. Defining the Meaningful Outside
2. Deciding What Business You Are In
3. Balancing the Present and Future
4. Shaping Values and Standards

In a sense, I’d almost paraphrase them as dividing into

Interesting presentation from MySQL Conf 09 on open source adoption and the use of open source Business Intelligence tools.

BI is about getting stuff out. Everything else is about getting stuff in. Transaction processing is a commodity, analysis is not. And really, the problem with most organizations (including my own current one) is being able to use their information, not capture it.

The problem is that DW and BI tools, at least commercially, are really expensive. My last company spent about $250k just getting their reporting and OLAP suite sorted (pricey BOBJE in case you were wondering). So, the business case upside for open source BI is huge.

OK, as more than casual readers know, I’m a huge fan of Warren Buffet. Not only do I try and invest like him, but I think he’s very sharp beyond being an astute and wiley investor. Great, but very long interview with him here on the Warren Buffett CNBC Interview :

“… you only find out who’s been swimming naked when the tide goes out. Well, we found out that Wall Street has been kind of a nudist beach.”

From former colleague, Corey: post on the third approach to attracting the best talent you possibly can.

He’s got a point. It certainly is the number one thing that’s driven me to work at the places I’ve worked at. Those I’ve enjoyed the most, sweated the most for, and contributed the greatest to…

Oh, and I should mention, Core tells me they’re hiring , and well, if he’s working there, you do get to deal with atomic monster wrangler number one, which is kinda cool (not to mention, their obvious lack of criminal record background checks… ;-) ).

{{ figure src="/images/farm3/2197/2530505174_3173eb55d1_m.png" title=“The State of the World’s Human Rights 2008” }} )

Well, couple of bumps getting it out the front door, as well as having to deal with a killer 6am launch time to coordinate the global media strategy, but the mighty mighty AI web team managed in the wee hours of the morning and well in time for the first of or media blitz interviews with CNN.

Amnesty International (disclaimer: who I work for), has just released their 2007 Annual Report which outlines the state of the world’s human rights.

Available in five languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic).

Lotta stuff going on in the world that people don’t know enough about, or even worse, are doing nothing about when they do know about it.

One thing I’m finding a little difficult since I’m used to develop enterprise wide interoperability options for large organizations and companies is that scaling down to very small workgroups is much harder than it seems in terms of getting them to collaborate but still stick to standards that will allow the group to grow over time.

I mentioned the other week about chucking MediaWiki in favour of the much, much more stripped and simple Dokuwiki for my non-tech-savvy and predominantly dial up enabled political organization here in the Okanagan. That was a major coup. It’s scary how suddenly even luddites are using it. I love the fact they are though. I feel it’s made the whole group much more productive. Oh yes, and free – important for a group on an IT budget of zero.