Resources for a Teenager – ‘Economics’

The fourth in a series of posts detailing those resources I’m finding useful on my own particular (life) journey.

Meta

I did Economics A Level, back in the mists of time.

Since then I’ve done a Psychology degree and an MBA.

Humans are not rational actors seeking to maximise their economic utility.

We’re meat bags, and (too) often meat puppets. Let’s treat each other – and our Selves – on the basis of that insight. I.e. with understanding, compassion, and a pinch of salt!

The List

The rationale

• Predictably Irrational – i.e. humans are irrational, but in predictable ways
• The Lean Startup – a business passion of mine, and a means to experiment your way to success. Has turned business failure into something valuable – if in the context of continual learning
• Business Model Generation – essential complement to The Lean Startup. When I first read it, half way through I thought: “this is McKinsey quality material”. Not sure if McKinsey knows a great deal about this domain though… #discuss
• On the basis of reading Moneyball(and watching the film), I am a huge Michael Lewis fan. His lighthearted style turns non-fiction subjects into page-turners. A pleasure and an indulgence to read his work

To read:

• Nudge - the book that started the Behavioural Economics movement, and brought groundedness to stale academic debate
• Liar’s Poker – Wall Street excess and nuttiness
• Flash Boys – the operations (or not) of high-frequency financial trading
• The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World – shining a fond light into the professional collaboration of Amos Tversky & Danny Kahneman. This will be a reward for doing something special ;D
• The Big Short – Michael’s treatment of one of the pivotal moments of this century so far
• The English Constitution – Walter Bagehot’s take on the UK’s unwritten constitution
• Lombard Street - according to Wikipedia: "Bagehot was one of the first writers to describe and explain the world of international and corporate finance, banking, and money in understandable language"
• The Madness of Crowds – definitely not rational economics actions, surely undercutting efficient market theory…?
• The Smartest Guys in the Room: epic folly, cynical pyramid schemes, and still on my shelf. The Enron story and the subsequent collapse. Whistleblowers everywhere - 

The Task

Let’s learn how to empower ourselves to make the best decisions possible, and de-mystify the jargon and de-fang the prognosticators – based on our own experiments!

Students everywhere: take control of your own learning in this domain, bring it to life with stuff more readily intelligible, and become passionate about such as important topic.

Feedback

Any thoughts, additions, amendments – whatever – please add in respectful and constructive comments below. Thank you!

Goodreads

I endeavour to record what I’m reading via my profile on Goodreads.

Separating work and pleasure (blogs)

Thanks to those of you who voted on the poll regarding whether I should separate out my postings on work and my home life.

Photo credit to wageslaves

The vote was overwhelmingly in favour of creating a work blog [thank you, 2 voters!], and therefore I have done so, here. I have also put a note underneath the blog header, just in case anyone doesn't see this post...

I will continue to post here about the divergent and the unexpected. I was going to say the posts would be less frequent, but I'm not sure that's possible! ;-D

Technorati Tags: business,common sense,enjoyable,experiment,technology,ideas,what's next,web 2.0,social media

Business and Personal posts in the same blog?

Folks, I need some advice please.

Up ‘til now I’ve been using Wellbanked as a personal equivalent of Speakers' Corner.

Given that I have left Fujitsu, it’s natural that I should use this blog to publicise the new direction in my working life.

The downside to this is the confusion created by having posts about personal issues cheek-by-jowl with work ones – prospective Customers / Employers might be put off by this!

So, I am looking for feedback on my thoughts so far:

• Leave my blog as it is – i.e. keep posting on various topics
• Try and separate out work and personal posts through the use of metadata or tags in some way
• Set up a separate blog for work issues and cross-link etc.
• Port to another platform – e.g. Wordpress
• Set up a website and embed this blog into it

If I was to start a work blog, I need help cooking up a name – the domain I bought appears to be too close to an existing Company. Doh!

I’ve done a quick Google search, but although the answer may be obvious, I’m a bit stumped, and need a bit of crowdsourcing love.

Hopefully you should find a poll running alongside this post – please also leave a comment if you can bear it!

Technorati Tags: blogger,wordpress,wellbanked,business,personal,advice,feedback

Zingthing - facilitation tool

Yesterday I went to a demo of Zingthing, a tool to help workshop facilitators bring together the input from workshop participants.

Carol and Catherine - good people from CPCR - gave Kate & Caroline (from The Bridge Club), and myself a keyboard each and we were able to test-drive it.

"The Zingthing 3.0 software is a specialised meeting system to support organisation-wide knowledge creation, fast implementation of new expert decision or learning processes, cultural change and accelerated innovation." - Max Dumais.

Max gives an excellent intro, so I won't re-hash a description here.

Apparently it is good for brainstorming, and also collecting the input from multiple break-out groups.

In our view, it would be great to help participants feel really involved in proceedings, and also allow shy folk get their voice heard.

CPCR are offering to bring their kit and expertise to a conference near you, for a fee.

n.b. It's not the same as the Backchannel, as described:

• Here by Roo Reynolds
  
• Here in Wikipedia
  
• This is a tool to help create a backchannel - BackNoise (referenced by Wikipedia article)

Technorati Tags: collaboration,community,useful,tools,meetings,software

My skills as a Business Consultant

A quick bulleted list to give readers an idea of what I have to offer:

Consultancy skills

• Business Change: deep understanding of how to combine people, process, and technology to achieve business outcomes—with the emphasis on people
• Business consultancy: Strategic and technical IT consultancy from a programme viewpoint; business / process analysis and design; report writing and presentation delivery
• Benefits management: Experience of Fujitsu’s Benefits Realisation methodology, which focuses on business outcomes, and creates network of activities to assure delivery of business benefits
• Business networking: active business school Alumnus and business networker (online and face-to-face).
• Project delivery: architecture and design; technology selection; team-worker and leader
• Project management: project planning and basic financials; awareness of PRINCE 2 methodology

Business Understanding

• IT Strategy and Governance; Peer collaboration, Financial Services regulation; Corporate Performance Management.; Virtualisation; Enterprise Application Integration & Web Services, Business Process Management, Virtual Worlds; IT Architecture; J2EE and Application Servers

Technical

• Internet protocols and infrastructure; Collaboration platforms and online communities; Windows Operating Systems (MCSE 1999); Database Systems; Gadgets of all kinds

Grasp of Business and Technology Marketspace

• Through reading The Economist; McKinsey Quarterly, Harvard Business Review; subscription to various Industry Sector and Technology newsletters and blogs

Props to Hugh Macleod

Technorati Tags: business,technology,consulting,skills,benefits,return on investment

Business Consultant for hire

I leave Fujitsu today, i.e. at the end of September. I am striking out on my own, and plan to do contracting work in the North East of England. Hopefully this will be a springboard to more varied projects – reflecting my interests in cutting-edge collaborative tools and virtual worlds etc.

In putting together my leaving note to Fujitsu colleagues (and the associated mailing list), I was able to reflect on all the fantastic people I have worked with, in nearly 10 years with Fujitsu. Also, that I genuinely believe Fujitsu has been an excellent employer and good place to work.

Those ten years have given me a great foundation to help Customers maximise their return on their Technology investments. In practical terms, this means helping them:

• Exploit existing collaboration tools and infrastructure
• Understand impact of consumerization and Web 2.0 on Customers and other stakeholders
• Create a successful blend of infrastructure, using established collaboration / information management tools and leading edge ones
• Understand technology’s impact on People, and create programme of change to manage this impact and maximise Return on Investment
• Make informed decisions about which tools / trends match needs of organisation - don't just go with the flow

I’ve worked for Fujitsu with a number of large Government Departments, and a mixture of Private and Public Sector bodies.

More details at http://www.linkedin.com/in/justinguysouter.


Props to Laughing Squid / Scott Beale, Ariel Waldman and, of course, to Hugh Macleod

Technorati Tags: work,business,success,technology,consultancy,advice,web 2.0,NE England

Microsoft vs. Yahoo! My tuppence

A quick contribution to the debate.

I grew up on, and with, Microsoft. I have only come to Open Source through Firefox, and lately, Ubuntu.

I use tools from Google; from Microsoft; from Yahoo!; and others. I don't use a Mac, nor an iPhone: I'm still on XP (although I started on a Sinclair ZX81).

I understand the anti-trust issues that Microsoft has been faced with over the years, and have a reasonably good grasp of both sides.

I admire Google, and am happy to use their fantastic search and free tools.

I used to admire Yahoo! Their taxonomy was always useful, although I've come to rely on search.

z

My take is that Yahoo! is going down the plughole, and Jerry Yang's tenure as CEO has been a disaster.

Although I respect where Tim O'Reilly is coming from, I'm with Michael Arrington on this one.

Although I suspect that the time has passed for the Microsoft deal, I hope Carl Icahn is successful with his boardroom coup at the AGM in early August.

z

I believe in competition, level playing fields, regulation. I'm often wrong, but I believe Google needs strong competition to keep it on its toes.

I'm hoping there's enough of Yahoo! for Microsoft to salvage and create the competition we all need - it's better than regulation...

Thanks to the Guardian team for their coverage on this.

Technorati Tags: adverts,business,search,google,innovation,microsoft,yahoo!

Google Advert trial

This post summarises learnings from a free trial for Google Adwords. I'm experimenting with it to generate traffic for this blog. It's been an interesting learning experience.

I subscribe to Information Age, an computer-related technology magazine. In a recent mailing, I also received a marketing flyer from Google, featuring a company called Wriggly wrigglers - you may also have seen it if you're in the UK.

The freebie part was a £30 voucher, so I thought I'd have a go. The time limit is the end of June '08, so thought I should get cracking.

I've gone some fairly idiosyncratic posts on here, e.g.: Locked In syndrome, Mobile Cranes, choosing adverts, Psychology experiments. I thought they be a good way of reaching a specific audience. Besides, these are things I'm interested in.

So lessons learned so far:

• I've done a general ad and two specific ones (Zimbardo & Milgram, Locked In syndrome)
• When you sign up, you start with Starter edition
• This is probably only good for setting up your account
• Otherwise, Starter edition, you want Standard - no price difference apparently - this is the comparison
• With the Starter edition, you can run variations of the same ad, but I wanted to run ads on different keywords, so you *have* to upgrade to get this functionality.
• You can choose "bundles" of Countries
• Basically, I've chosen English-speaking countries from around the World, with some Scandinavian ones (and Spain, I like Spain)
• I've got it running for a month, although need to check regularly - you have to give them a way of payment (they want to wean you and hope you forget you're paying)
• The "cost per click" is supposedly optimised by Google - but quite a lot of my keywords seemed not to be active because of 1p minimum Google has chosen
• It's one Campaign - multiple ad groups (i.e. ads for different posts
• The usability is actually pretty good, decent tools
• A fat pipe would be nice, saves lag between pages when you're setting everything up (although you can download software to do things offline)
• Demographics
• You can target 10 year cohorts (e.g. 0-17 years)
• Site and Category Exclusion
• You can choose to be excluded from various sites / pages, e.g. "Death & Tragedy"
• Also certain page types - e.g. Parked domains
• There was a £5 "Activation fee", so I've only got £25 to spend
• There seems to be a daily cap on spending
• "I already have a Google Analytics account. Please link it to this AdWords account"
• Nice, already have the Analytics code on my blog, I can link automatically to it, and Google joins it all up. :-D

One other thing - I've linked to my original "Diving Bell & the Butterfly" post, so I've updated that to give links to posts 2 & 3...

I'll report back about how I get on!

The limits of Web 2.0

Apologies if you've seen this from me via Twitter.

I wanted to replay it via a blog post because, behind the humour, I believe there's an important point here.

My sense it that we'll go through the Gartner Hype Cycle with various aspects of Web 2.0, and with Web 2.0 itself.

However, I reckon that whether you call it Wikinomics, Enterprise 2.0, Peer Collaboration, or vanilla Web 2.0, [I hope] we'll punch through to the "Slope of Englightenment" without too much of the froth.

My take is that it's down to us, working in the Technology sphere, to help others understand the concept, refuse to oversell things, and focus on organisational value. Our credibility, dented by past excesses, depends on everyone keeping their feet on the ground.

Oh, and developing the necessary upper body strength. Buwha-haha!