How @mezmerrett became a Twelebrity overnight

On the 24th of May 2011, Mez Merrett sent out a brilliant tweet:

If you prefer TWITTER over FB then please retweet, i'm trying to show @Jessmayporter how far one tweet can actually go, Thanks for helping

Mez has a hot avatar and bio, so does Jessika. The tweet is hot too: it's got the right words (please, trying, actually, Thanks, helping), the right emphasis (TWITTER, FB), and it's perfectly retweetable: 138 characters so the only quick way to RT it is Twitter old-style (or is that new-style now?): literally repeat as-is

The thick clueless layer of Fedex

(How FedEx FeXed me)

The picture is very appropriate: it is the cube grenade I ordered at Hugh MacLeod's @gapingvoid gallery
It shows company hierarchy as we know it: sociopaths on top, losers at the bottom, and a thick layer of clueless in between to protect the upper layer from the bottom one

I bought it because it will remind me of the division of powers, and I will hang it in the master bedroom, which also serves as my home office

Little could I have known that I'd encounter a multitude of cluelessness on getting the pic from there (US) to here (NL). This is its tale:

Have you had your Last Judgment Day yet?

Now Harold Camping's doom prediction has gone by and I finally have a moment to myself after two days of busy BBQ-ing and household activities, a long overdue post can be written

Doomsday. The Apocalypse. Last Judgment Day. The End of the World. They all belong to the same theme: you better do what I tell you or else...
They all neatly serve fear-based doctrines such as most of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam - (not) surprisingly all mono-theist religions claiming the one true faith, the one true god, and the one true punishment for not following their rules

Well, let me enlighten you: just as Resurrection applies to your own spiritual death and rebirth, Last Judgment Day applies to you right here, right now, and it's solely up to you to "have one"

Capgemini is rising to the occasion

It's May, the time for most "calendar-reporting companies" to release their annual reports. Capgemini is one of them.
Although the link to their 2010 Consolidated Financial statements on their investor page results in a 404, I managed to lay my hands on some partial reports in the meantime, giving me the figures for 2010

Skype - the mysterious money bubble

This morning I wrote this post already in one tweet:

2003: Skype founded. 2005: bought by eBay $2.5B (60m users). 2009: sold by eBay $2.8B (450m users). 2011: bought by MSFT $8B (700m users)

That was after a very quick 5 minute analysis of a few tweets, posts and web sites. Now I've finally found the time and want to dig in there a bit deeper - the graph in my head is so crooked that I have to get it out

Education - does it still ROI?

I promised Harold Jarche yesterday to follow up on his tweet on education

Will blog on that tomorrow > RT @hjarche "no one dares call higher education a bad investment" http://ur1.ca/44kmc

I studied Cultures and Languages of Latin-America at Leiden University from 1989-1995. Why? Because I didn't know what I wanted to do or become, had the brains to go to University and because it was more or less free. Back then, I got 670 guilders a month from the Dutch government for studying - let me label that scholarship although there are some vast differences with UK and US scholarship - although they share the fact that they're gratuitous. Tuition was somewhere around 1,400 guilders annually averaged out for the 6 years, and one could rent a room for 300-400 guilders

The best lazy way to iron your shirts

One of the best advantages of having your own blog is that you can talk about anything you want - well, almost anything perhaps

It's sunny outside, 34 C on my terrace, and me and my wife were doing the laundry and hanging everything out to dry. I really enjoy that exercise as I can't completely sit still when it's as hot at this, and the clothes retain the laundry smell and get that crispy touch that's lost in the dryer. E.g. the towels are stiff and a little rough even, I'd love to have fresh towels like that every day

Alas, that goes for my shirts too - they are wrinkled like a Sharpei

Perfect business cases for Social Business

Thanks to Oscar Berg for writing his No business case for Social Business

It's a good post and all true, although very few social media fans agreed with it - probably because it doesn't give them what they want.
As dark is the opposite of light, bad the opposite of good, and so on, I decided to write an opposite post, reversing all of Oscar's well made points. In theory, that should to perfect business cases for Social Business, shouldn't it?
Off we go - and thank you, Oscar

The apprentice- master model

Jon Reed made the following statement on Twitter:

Marin accused Deloitte of using project as "a trial-and-error training ground" for junior consultants. Panelists: please react #focuserprt

My answer: very common

Growth. How do you grow people from skill A to skill B? The eternal question. For we are struggling with that question in our personal lives as well: how do I grow myself from this stage onto the next? How do I become a superstar?
I'll leave the obvious pointers to those answers for now, if you're a regular visitor to this blog then you know where it's at

Too much Social Me-dia going on

Hat tip to Sameer Patel for the tweet that led me to this:

@lehawes Folks taking the Me in Social Me-dia too literally :)

I've noticed quite a bit of this lately. A few weeks ago, I unfollowed 20% of my follows because they either RT'ed themselves or their friends, and vice versa. Seeing a mediocre blog post being RT'ed 10 times makes me think - and weary. Seeing any blog post RT-ed by the same persons and vice versa makes me want to unfollow - so I did. Regardless of "who they were"