It seems that the the coming week-end will be really cold and snowy.
On the other hand, I will fly to Moscow on Sunday morning to attend the first International Life&Pension; Insurance Conference. It will be not so cold (!) but more snowy. Let’s see. Btw, we received today our visas for Moscow, what a complicated process….
In Spring 2004, I published some posts about Corporate Entrepreneurship and, within this serie, some inputs and ideas of Jim Collins. In this post, I also talked about some of the Stockdale’s principles (eg: confronting the brutal facts), who is cited a lot of time by Jim.
I was very happy to find some of the Stockdale’s principles in a post of Marc Goldberg at the end of October (some delay…). And that Marc is also finding these inputs very useful :-)
- You are your bother keeper (the key to survival, self respect and happiness lies in submerging your individual instingts for self preservation in the greater common denominator of uniersal solidarity)
- Life is not fair
- Duty comes before defiance
- Compulsion and free will can coexist
- Every man can be more than he is.
- Freedom and absolute equality are a trade-off
- People do ont like to be programmed
- Living in harmonious and heaps is contrary to man’s nature (life only makes sense when an element of freedom is included in the mix)
- The self-discipline of stoicism has everyday applications.
- Moral responsibility cannot be escaped
Moralist who exhort men to be good abd thinker who elucidate what is good. This requires a clear idea of right and wrong and the integrity to stand behind your assessment of the situation. Teacher able to give those around him a sense of perspective and to set the moral, social, and motivational climate among his followers. Steward able to know character and heart to boots others and show them the way. Philosopher able to understand and explain the lack of moral economy in this universe.
And finally, what Marc wants to do with this stuff:
As an VC, investing in people driven tech businesses, and stuggling to identify and support technology leaders, those perspectives are very usefull, and will feed in all my discussions with CEOs and CxOs inside the various projects we are working on.
[via CICLOPS]
The Cassini-Huygens mission is again delivering some beautiful pictures. This time of Tethys, one of moon of Saturn (mean diameter: 1’060 km).
With this fabulous, full-disk mosaic, Cassini presents the best view yet of the south pole of Tethys.
The giant rift Ithaca Chasma cuts across the disk. Much of the topography seen here, including that of Ithaca Chasma, has a soft, muted appearance. It is clearly very old and has been heavily bombarded by impacts over time.
Many of the fresh-appearing craters (ones with crisp relief) exhibit unusually bright crater floors. The origin of the apparent brightness (or “albedo”) contrast is not known. It is possible that impacts punched through to a brighter layer underneath, or perhaps it is brighter because of different grain sizes or textures of the crater floor material in comparison to material along the crater walls and surrounding surface.
The moon’s high southern latitudes, seen here at bottom, were not imaged by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft during their flybys of Tethys 25 years ago.
The mosaic is composed of nine images taken during Cassini’s close flyby of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, 665 miles across) on September 24, 2005, during which the spacecraft passed approximately 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) above the moon’s surface.
I decided to open a new category DRINKS because I really have a very bad memory concerning the names, the good years and so on ;-)
For some days, I have already written one “drinks’ post” about a great grappa I received.
On last Friday evening, I had a good dinner at the Violettes, where I had the chance to enjoy a 1961 vintage Armagnac from Sempe. 44 years old, respect! One of the best Armagnac I ever tasted, a real happiness :-)
Founded in 1934, one of the oldest Armagnac estates…
Since 2002 our company has been a subsidiary of the Gerland group and enjoys all the advantages of a group entirely dedicated to vineyard production in Gers and the Landes.
We have a great stock of Armagnac, over 13,000 hectolitres of pure alcohol; we produce and age wines from Gascony and the Landes; we have modern distillat
1961: Very dry but with a sweetish, slightly floral nose; fruitcake, carrot cake, dry spices, leather, potpourri. Still some life ahead. Very good+.
Drink moderately and safely. Enjoy your alcohol.
[via SwissInfo]
Well done, Switzerland :-) It was tough but the results are here. Turkey, boooooo.
Football’s world governing body, Fifa, says it will open an investigation into alleged violence at the Turkey-Switzerland World Cup playoff match on Wednesday.
Fifa’s Swiss president, Sepp Blatter, said sanctions against Turkey could amount to the suspension of the Turkish federation or a ban from the 2010 World Cup.[…]
The two teams tied 4-4 on aggregate, but the Swiss advanced to next year’s World Cup in Germany on away goals.
After the final whistle in Istanbul, both teams raced from the field to escape angry fans. Swiss midfielder Benjamin Huggel was seen to kick a member of the Turkish coaching staff as he ran off the pitch before Turkish defender Alpay aimed a kick at Marco Streller.
Television footage then showed a melee breaking out in the tunnel on the way to the locker room involving several players.
Swiss defender Stephane Grichting was injured and hospitalised with a groin injury, according to the Swiss Football Association. The team doctor said that he is not expected to be able to play for a week at least.[…]
Turkey has already been warned and fined twice by Fifa because of its supporters’ behaviour during earlier qualification matches for next year’s World Cup.[…]
The Swiss said they were subjected to hostile treatment when they arrived in Istanbul on Monday, including being held up for several hours in passport control. Fans taunted the players and reportedly threw eggs and rocks at the team bus as it left the airport.
Again, a *great* post of Jeff Clavier concerning sales and marketing approach by Open Source companies, huge change in enterprise software business model.
Wow, I exactly missed this input in my analysis, really a must read. Thx Jeff.
- The problem is that the traditional enterprise software business model is broken. A rabid search for new customers and revenue growth has caused sales and marketing costs to spiral out of control. In fact, Rick Sherlund at Goldman Sachs estimates that in 2005 software companies will spend 82 percent of new license revenue on marketing and sales efforts. That’s up from 66 percent in 2000.
- The Open Source model turns the marketing problem on its head. Customers can look at, evaluate and review software without contacting the company that will sell it to them. […] The customer says, “I want something like that.” He locates the Open Source version of the product, downloads it and is using it before the company is involved. […] the Open Source solution, the CIO is happy with the software. But after using it for a while, begins to wish for documentation, a live-person to ask questions, a phone number for support, and so on. At that point, the customer calls the company saying, “I’ve been using your product for a year and now I need your help.”
- The Open Source model likely delivers at best a 50% cost advantage in R&D.; Most Open Source companies gain little community leverage developing the core of their application. R&D; community leverage tends to come from testing, bug fixes, and interface/integration code. On the other hand, the savings in sales & marketing could be closer to 75 percent. Without the need to pay for large up-front sales & marketing costs, the vendor doesn’t have to charge a new license fee up front. No more charging the customer to sell to them – the customers have to sell themselves – but they still come to the vendor for maintenance and support. And maintenance and support is how most software vendors make their living these days anyway.
- New license growth in enterprise software companies today is stagnating. By changing the revenue mix from primarily new licenses to primarily maintenance on already proven products, a typical enterprise software vendor’s top line would drop by 25 to 30 percent. But the decrease in price and increase in market size will enable growth in those previously unreachable markets, creating a vibrant and growing company that will eventual pass its former revenue numbers.
So, some news and updates concerning the coming conference Les Blogs 2.0 in Paris.
You can register here.
[via Tom Peters]
[…] Jack Welch was not the first CEO of GE, though to read Fortune in the ’90s one might have thought so. And Peter Drucker didn’t “invent” management. The Chinese probably did thousands of years ago—among other things, Sun Tzu’s roughly 2,500-year-old The Art of War is a full-blown “management” text. So, too, Machiavelli’s The Prince. And Frederick Taylor’s century-old The Principles of Scientific Management.
But Peter Drucker did arguably (1) “invent” modern management as we now think of it; (2) give the study and craft of management-as-profession credibility and visibility, even though biz schools like Harvard had been around for a long time; and (3) provide a (the first?) comprehensive toolkit-framework for addressing and even mastering the problems of emergent enterprise complexity.
And he did something else incredibly important: He popularized the study of-appreciation of modern management. Doubtless Mr Drucker would have been appalled to be described as a “popularizer”—after all, that was one of his abiding and biting criticisms of me. But the truth is that, though his consulting was carried out in the stratospheric confines of CEO-world, his books and articles were very comprehensible and accessible […]
Since about 3 years now, I am also drinking some grappa from time to time, which was absolutely not my preferred “digestif” – I like very much Cognac and Bas-Armagnac. We have to talk about these two beverages in the near future ;-)
I received a great grappa, have a look at the color! Although it titrates (correct word?) 42%, you haven’t got the touch of the strong alcohol, but just the fruit. Exceptional!
Drink moderately and safely. Enjoy your alcohol!
