Month: December 2005

Broken Meetings – now there's a surprise :-)

Raspberry

The MindJet blog has some interesting statistics today on how broken meetings are:

Our European sister office has conducted a study about meeting culture in European companies. The majority of the 800 business professionals surveyed were executives or senior managers. The results are somewhat alarming: Every other meeting is considered unproductive.

According to the study, 61% of the respondents said that meetings could be more efficient or are even a complete waste of time, and 71% saw great potential for optimising meetings if they were better prepared. 46% said that a more easily accessible display of complex information and tasks would help significantly to maximize the outcome of meetings. 61% of the respondents saw insufficient analysis of facts, and 57% pinpointed redundant and inefficient processes as the main reasons for hampering internal and external decision-making.

Moreover, a majority of respondents contended that existing knowledge would not be optimally utilized within their organization. More than half of the respondents referred to more flexible project planning, more transparent communications, and tighter project management as the three main factors needed to better harness team knowledge and increase productivity.

I wonder whether they differentiated the survey on the difference between face-to-face meetings and teleconferences. My experience would suggest that these numbers are even worse for teleconferences. I get invited to one particular set of meetings when it nearly always takes 20 minutes to get everyone on the call and get all of the technology sorted. The 20 mins is completely wasted. What makes it worse is that I know (because I’m also doing it) that most people are not focussed on the meeting at all.

Via The Office Weblog

Is bundling really the issue?

Beach

Microsoft Monitor today has an article about how bundling is still core to the Microsoft product strategy:

Bundling–and that’s a very unpopular word at Microsoft–is at the very core of the company’s current product strategy. Microsoft has always integrated technologies into Windows, and many bundled pieces brought consumers and businesses tremendous benefits. But as Microsoft’s dominance has grown, integration has been viewed by some regulators and trustbusters as an anti-competitive tactic, of Microsoft trying to leverage Windows into new markets or crush potential competitive threats to the operating system monopoly.

The issue I have with the Microsoft Monitor article is that it then goes on to link bundling with integration:

As integration increases, as Microsoft adds more features to Windows and Office that could eliminate existing revenue generating third-party products, I expect trustbusters to receive more complaints and so engage more investigations. I’m not alleging that Microsoft is overtly doing anything wrong. That determination is for the legal processes. I merely observe that with the focus of major antitrust cases against Microsoft being about bundling, at a time when the company is so focused on integration, more legal problems are likely than less.

For me, integration is a different issue to bundling. Bundling is when stuff is included and you may struggle to extract it. Integration is when things work together and deliver functionality to each other. I expect, even demand, Microsoft software (and any other vendor) to integrate. I don’t want to use an environment which has a set of silo application that don’t know each other exists. For me the real anti-trust issue is whether Microsoft does the integration in such a way that others are excluded, or whether bundling is done in such a way that it can’t be removed. I’m not sure that bundling is actually the right word for these issues though, I think that the right word is actually amalgamation. The issue being that capability is cemented into something, using up my resources without me wanting it, excluding me from using something else and not allowing me to remove it. But that is where I’m actually slightly schizophrenic, because I do want packages of capability, but I don’t want bloat, I want things delivered in easy to apply clumps, but I want choice. I want a full meal, but I also want pick-and-mix.

Perhaps the meal analogy is a good one. If the meal doesn’t include the right ingredients we don’t buy it. Sometimes we want full say over the ingredients, and pay for the privilege (a-la-carte); sometimes we want cheap and fast and just don’t eat the bits we don’t like (gherkins in burgers) sometimes we want something in the middle. It’s  a balancing act. We always want a fully cooked meal (integration), we want a reasonable amount of food (bundling), we don’t want a whole weeks food in one go (amalgamation). I’m probably pushing the analogy beyond breaking point here, but sometimes that’s fun.

Microsoft’s challenge, therefore, is to achieve integration and bundling at a level that doesn’t result in wholesale amalgamation.

Count Your Blessings #41 – Having a Living Redeemer

Lancaster Canal

‘Living Redeemer’ – “What kind of language is that? What is Graham going on about today?”

Give me 30 seconds and let me explain.

It’s actually not that difficult a thing to understand.

I hope all of us understand the ‘living’ part, but what about this ‘redeemer’ part. All of us have received a voucher or a token in our time – “50p of your next purchase of smelly stuff that you don’t really need”, “£10 Book Token”. When we take advantage of these offers we call it redeeming. It make sense, then, that the person who is doing the redeeming is a redeemer. So putting the two things back together we get a person who redeems things who is alive. But what does that mean to me? What difference does it make to my life?

As a Christian I believe that Jesus is my Living Redeemer. In other words I believe that Jesus has handed in the token and redeemed the offer on my life. This is no ‘spend a load to get completely irrelevant and worthless in return’ offer though; this is the real deal. Jesus did indeed pay a huge price. When He died on the cross He paid with His life in the most horrible way. The reward for this price was my life, and the life of millions of other believers.

What does it mean to have a life that has been bought and payed for? Does that make me a slave? No, amazingly it makes me a son; a son of God. Son’s have rights, but they also have responsibilities. As a son of God the rights are fabulous, I get access to the Father. There isn’t anything like enough room to fully explain what that means here, I may write more about it another time, actually I could probably write forever and still have things to say. To explain a little though I have a Father who knows and understands; I have a Father who can and does; I have a Father who gives me freedom; I have a Father who is infinite grace; I have a father who loves me. Compared to this the responsibilities are small; they are simple to share the love that is given, that’s all. Part of my reason for writing is to share some of the love with you.

You are our Father. Abraham and Israel are long dead. They wouldn’t know us from Adam. But you’re our living Father, our Redeemer, famous from eternity!

Isaiah 63:16 (The Message)