No, not a comment on the denizens of the beach at Clacton-upon-Sea on the August bank holiday, but an observation on the essential difference between the two great television competitions of our time: Lord Sugar’s ‘The Apprentice’ versus Gregg ‘n John’s ‘Masterchef’. As an aside, surely it would be better for a man named sugar [...]
By Ben | February 9, 2011
As always, McKinsey Quarterly is on the money when it comes to analysing business trends. In this issue, an insightful piece examines the way that knowledge workers carry out their tasks and discusses to what extent it is possible to establish defined processes for such employees to follow; essentially it is asking: should knowledge workers [...]
We all know that most consumer parcel delivery companies are pretty disdainful of their customers (recipients and retailers). However my latest encounter with City Link shows them plunging to new depths. I’ll tell you the tale in a moment, but first why write about it here? I’ve long cared passionately about customer service, which in [...]
Here at GazetMe Towers we’ve been working hard all summer to improve the service that we bring to our users. Some of these changes have been steadily taking place in the background - i.e. you may not have noticed a direct change in the way that GazetMe works, but there have been lots of little [...]
Last night I finished watching the excellent BBC series The Virtual Revolution presented by Dr Aleks Krotoski. It served as a very useful reminder of how much our lives have been changed by technology in an incredibly short space of time. Dr Krotoski had access to a host of major individuals from Tim Berners-Lee (a [...]
By Ben | January 13, 2010
As a follow-up to my recent post about Prof Charles Handy here, I was interested to come across this article in the Times last week that highlights the many entirely new jobs that will be created this century. As my wife reminded me recently, most of the jobs that will employ our children’s generation probably [...]
By Ben | December 15, 2009
As it is GazetMe’s purpose to enable our users to track their many achievements, here at GazetMe Towers we thought we’d start an occasional series of reports highlighting notable achievements by individuals across the country.
First up then we celebrate the achievements of Clare Robertson. Now fans of Woolworths and residents of Dorchester may already be familiar [...]
By Ben | November 14, 2009
More good writing from the Economist, this time about the notion of building a portfolio career. For anyone who hasn’t come across the idea before, having a portfolio career is about freelancing to use the best of your competencies, possibly for a range of clients, but possibly also for just one or two. It is [...]
By Ben | November 5, 2009
A very good analysis of the shortcomings of public sector involvement in promoting entrepreneurship and venture capital in this week’s Schumpeter column in the Economist. Interestingly (but perhaps not that surprising) it is Israel which emerges as the most successful promoter of such initiatives:
“The Israeli government’s venture-capital fund, which was founded in 1992 with $100m [...]
By Ben | November 4, 2009
Attention software developers (and Microsoft that means you in particular): why is it that you feel you have to display every bit of functionality on screen every time we use your apps?
I’ve been thinking alot about functionality, information overload, and the notion of ‘rusting’ about which I blogged recently. To my mind, the classic Google [...]
