Written by The intelligence of any discussion diminishes with the square of the number of participants.
Adam Walinsky
Illegal and unconstitutional
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.
Henry Kissinger
New ideas
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein — it rejects it.
P. Medawar
Human mind
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity the rest is overhead for the operating system.
Anonymous
Income tax
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
Albert Einstein
Setting goals the right way
Joel Lee at Makeuseof wrote a nice article of 5 top pitfalls to avoid when setting goals.
The article is set on personal goals, but in some way applies also to setting goals for your people at corporate level.
My points follow:
- Setting goals that are not specific and not measurable: I definitely agree on this point. Though it can cost some time in taking the right measurement work and defining really significant goals, it’s definitely the point for having no discussions when you review the results. A number is not questionable, because is either reached or not. My suggestion for those using this principle for corporate objectives is not to have an on-off situation, rather to give progressive intervals that can help people have some degrees of freedom in reaching a goal.
- Setting unrealistic goals: this is another real point. Setting challenging goals is something that make people strive for obtaining them up to the last day of every year. Setting unrealistic goals works once, after which people do not believe anymore in goals you set
- Not arranging goals in priority: On a personal point of view, priority stands for the “order” in which you dedicate energy to reach the goals. On a business POV you should give a weight to each goal to give the people the emphasis on how much they should care for this objective
- Not planning how to reach goals: If you assign goals and do not have a clear vision on how to reach them, you can only expect to fail. And so either if you’re planning for yourself or for others, be sure to have a clear vision of how to reach your goals and be sure to help your resources to set a meaningful plan
- Not evaluating progress: if you don’t track you cannot react
This post as a comment also here
An open letter to Simon Calder
This blog is mainly devoted to tech and management.
But sometimes the Italian citizen I am proud to be comes out and cannot stay silent.
I see from a local news paper (corriere della sera) that a reporter from the Independent managed to book a trip over Costa Concordia after the wreck.
Mr. Calder,
The sinking of Costa Concordia is a pain it will be difficult to heal for us.
There where errors and we (as a country) are going to pay for them both on a moral (because the deads will remain as a mark for the next years) and economical point of view (because in this tough times money will be payed for all this problems caused).
We are a state that has in tourism and landscape one of our main entries, so this will cause for sure problems, suffering and loosing of jobs.
What I ask you is what you would like to demonstrate your booking and shooting toward Costa (that BTW is part of Carnival Group)?
I assume that there where quite more urgent problems to solve while you were playing with your keyboard trying to book your trip.
And where is the problem in having the booking system still up and running? Do this implies that someone stole your money, or in some way in next days someone will knock at your door giving back your money?
And again, what proves that you’ve been able to get your docs ready for the trip? Anything. There’s no tragedy in this, but is the kind of journalism that some people, at least me, do not want.
And what does mean that term “rogue captains”? I assume that those people are trained and (intelligent or stupid) the same way as other ship captains in the world.
Error occurs and is useful to learn from them.
All of this is only a speculation on a tragedy and that disgusts me more than being able to book a trip on a sunk ship or not having learned the rule of thumb of being more than 2 miles from the land.
I think that there’s a moment to inform (and that was done by all the reporters all over the world) and a moment to close the news and leave the space to human and professional pain.
The Heineken uncertainty principle
You can never be sure how many beers you had last night.
Anonymous drinker
Computer science
The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we’ve finished building it.
Anonymous
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