[via @rgumente]

Tom Peters has his own blog!

Good and fresh inputs for innovation, renewal, rethinking. You can also find a lot of the Powerpoint presentations of Tom Peters. I find them…honestly awful from a visual point of view. I know, I know, that’s not the most important dimension, but anyway, this…. On the other side, I haven’t studied all the material but I already extracted some interesting refreshing thoughts:

Everything You Need to Know about “Strategy”

1. Do you have awesome Talent … everywhere? Do you push that Talent to pursue Audacious Quests?

2. Is your Talent Pool loaded with wonderfully peculiar people who others would call “problems”? And what about your Extended Community of customers, vendors et al?

3. Is your Board of Directors as exciting as your product offerings and does it have 50 percent (or at least one-third) Women Members?

4. Long-term, it’s a “Top-line World”: Is creating a “culture” that cherishes above all things Innovation and Entrepreneurship your primary aim? Remember: Innovation … not Imitation!

5. Are the Ultimate Rewards heaped upon those who exhibit an unswerving “Bias for Action”, to quote the co-authors of In Search of Excellence?

6. Do you routinely use hot, aspirational words-terms like Excellence and B.H.A.G. (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, per Jim Collins) and “Let’s make a dent in the Universe” (the Word according to Steve Jobs)? Is “Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes” your de facto or de jure motto?

7. Do you subscribe to Jerry Garcia’s dictum: “We do not merely want to be the best of the best, we want to be the only ones who do what we do”?

8. Do you elaborate on and enhance Jerry G’s dictum by adding, “We subscribe to ‘Best Sourcing’ and only want to associate with the ‘best of the best’”

9. Do you embrace the new technologies with child-like enthusiasm and a revolutionary’s zeal?

10. Do you “serve” and “satisfy” customers … or “go berserk” attempting to provide every customer with an “awesome experience” that does nothing less than transform the way she or he sees the world?

11. Do you understand … to your very marrow … that the two biggest under-served markets are Women and Boomers-Geezers? And that to “take advantage” of these two Monster “Trends” (FACTS OF LIFE) requires fundamental re-alignment of the enterprise?

12. Are your leaders accessible? Do they wear their passion on their sleeves? Does integrity ooze out of every pore of the enterprise? Is “We care” your implicit motto?

13. Do you understand Business Mantra #1 of the ’00s: DON’T TRY TO COMPETE WITH WAL*MART ON PRICE OR CHINA ON COST? (And if you get this last idea, then see the 12 above!)

The rest in the coming days!

Mercedes just launched the third release of its Mixed Tape compilation. I’ve already posted about it in August. Extract from the Mercedes-Benz Mixed Tape Newsletter:

Mixed Tape 03 is now online – brand new tracks from around the world!

Mixed Tape, the free music compilation by Mercedes-Benz, returns with its third instalment: until November 23rd 04 you can discover, download and enjoy 15 exceptional new tracks by international artists at http://www.mercedes-benz.com/mixedtape

This time, we are especially proud to present cult star Mocky who opens the compilation with his inspired “How Will I Know“.

In addition, we have tracked down many exciting new discoveries between Budapest, Los Angeles and Malmö: whether glamorous lounge sound (4 To The Bar), dynamic hip-hop (Sol Uprising), dreamy pop (Adria) or cool downbeat (The Tape) – once more Mixed Tape 03 assembles intelligent, cosmopolitan tracks from around the world.

After some days of “testing”, I’ve added a new great feed to my blogroll, the one of Dragos Novac, a Romanian entrepreneur. He is the CEO and co-founder of Krogos Software – a software development and offshoring services company located in Bucharest, Romania – and the blogger of @rgumente.

About While presently there are several Romanian internet discussion groups about themes comprehending business issues under diverse forms, @rgumente is the first blog from Romania about business and strategy. It is yet another voice in the space about what is happening in Romania, the way I see it.

Why business and strategy? Because every day I am observing or being involved in the business world both from Romania and from outside and I tend to have a strong opinion about what is going on. People I usually hang out with don’t really discuss about this stuff so here I am with @rgumente.

Why Romania? Because this is the place where I was born, where I always came back from my life journeys and where I am presently trying to make a living. Finally, because the business environment from this corner of the world presents several different perspectives quite interesting or scary, depending on the mood of the observer.

Dragos’ blog was just reviewed in the weekly Power Blog reviews from Small Business Trends. Great work and definitely another perspective!

We had a strategy session with some of my colleagues in an quite uncommon restaurant near Zürich – the Seerose restaurant. Uncommon because you can have a aperitif on a lake-pontoon (definitely too cold today…) and you are really eating “on the lake”, with a marvelous view. We saw the first snow on the Swiss alps.

I found some figures about the last Montreux Jazz Festival – quite impressive:

Some months ago, I had a very interesting discussion with two American friends, both moderated, one Republican and one Democrat, who both know very well a big part of the World, including some Arabian countries and Europe. Both very well educated (Harvard), and both speaking perfectly four languages. So, not really some “average” guys ;-) We discussed the link between the religion and the State in America during quite a long time . Both agreed that G. Bush is making a religion war against the Muslims in Irak and Pakistan, and that the other “normal well-known” arguments which are always mentionned (petrol, geopolitics) exist but aren’t so relevant. That was completely new for myself, I was a bit sceptic, as a *lot* of European friends I met the last time.

This was for me a kind of new light concerning the war in Irak.

With some distance, I must say their analysis is definitely interesting. In this field, I read a post of Pierre Carion about the pledge of Allegiance. If I understand well, this is a school flag-raising ceremony which takes place each week. Foxnews published an history of the Pledge of Allegiance and its different versions. The Pledge currently reads:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I find this idea of Pledge, as an integration “instrument”, ok. On the other side, as a French guy, I am surprised that the Pledge is containing such an explicit mention of *God*. What happens to all the Americans who are atheistic or who don’t care about religion? I have thought that, as in France, there is strong and clear separation between religion and the State. Questionable, no?

Pierre quoted also an extract from an interview between Robert Sherman, a reporter, and George Bush (the father ;-) in 1987:

RS: “What will you do to win the votes of Americans who are atheists?”

GB: “I guess I’m pretty weak in the atheist community. Faith in God is important to me.”

RS: “Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?”

GB: “No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”

RS: “Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?”

GB: “Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I’m just not very high on atheists.”

I found this input interesting with the light of my two American friends…

About one month after the version 1.7 of Sauce Reader, Synop launched an updated version of its great feed reader (first review, second one), which is available for free download (for personal use).

What’s new?

Along with many bug fixes, this release has one major new feature:

URL Feed support to monitor and store changes to any web page.

Using this feature, you can now monitor updates to any web page using Sauce Reader. Monitoring a URL for any changes, Sauce Reader will download a complete copy of the page for offline browsing (MHTML file). Use this feature to:

Keep a complete record of all versions of a web page over time.

Monitor infrequently changed pages that do not publish a feed.

Wow, it sounds interesting :-)

Another interesting article of the Knowledge@Wharton about the role of corporation in our society. The article is based on some inputs from a documentary film called The Corporation and the corresponding book – The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.

Both are an attempt to create a new definition of goals and responsibilities for the business world consistent with the realities of the 21st century. The key to this reappraisal is the concept of a "sustainable economy.

I don’t know the book and the movie, I found interesting that the authors point out that:

Acting to make Interface an entirely self-sustaining and ecologically responsible firm by 2020, [its founder and Chairman, Ray Anderson,] has guided his company to a record of remarkable achievement. In the July 19, 2004, issue of BusinessWeek, data supplied by Interface show that waste produced by the company has been reduced by 80%, water intake is down by 78%, emissions of greenhouse gases down by 46%, energy consumption cut by 31% and use of petroleum-based materials by 28%. The final figure is in some ways the most persuasive, detailing a total savings of $231 million. Ethics and profits are indeed compatible.

Great concrete example!

Source: A Critical Look at the Corporation’s Dominant Role in Society

Google’s Tribute to Ray Charles today. Ray was born on September 23 1930.

September 23, autumn is already here….

One way to “fight” against the autumn’s spirit, a good chimney fire! The first one since last winter.