Everybody knows (I suppose) the famous Easter Eggs, pieces of software that, especially in the 90’s, some witty developers placed well hidden into Office Suite best components.
W95 office programs were full of them, and most of us started to understand why W95 crashed so often and why it needs too much memory to run. Easter eggs were so secreted that was impossible to find them using your Excel as usual, like filling cells with numbers and doing calculation. One of them, the so called Flying Simulator, was inserted into Excel, but you can launch it only placing the cursor in a special cell (I300;H350 but I’m not sure), writing a sequence of numbers and parenthesis, transform it into another format and font, and then press Return…magically the grid revealed an old style 3D flying object, in a 3D world made of chops, and you flied into using the arrows buttons. It was immediately clear that the cunnings that made the job was so proud of it that decided to reveal their best performances to the world, starting to suggest how to enjoy the Eggs. It was a blameless joke, someone liked it, some other didn’t, and it was so well hidden that was impossible to find the game, the music, the animation, without a well detailed map.

Easter Eggs are still alive? Well, we can say that things are quite different today. In the past, it was very hard that an Egg appears without your explicit command; nowadays their heiresses are not as fun as the prior, but they could appear without your permission! Have you ever experienced the PowerPoint thrilling feature that closes your presentation whenever you digit a word in a text box and you did the last save about ten slides before and you’re in a hurry to deliver your job? It’s an Easter Egg, of course, but what differentiate it from the past is that you can activate it more easily! And what about the cut and paste into a Word doc, that changes your font, your bullets, the dimensions and takes out a smiley clip that asks “do you need any help?” It’s an Easter Egg too, very fun and easily discoverable, I’m sure that all of you already enjoyed it. Why programmers change their mood? They understand that some silly jokes aren’t powerful enough, so they put in place the master plan…have you ever think about Word, Excel and PowerPoint as some big, very big, very very big…

Why do I blog this?
What do you think that happened to my last PP presentation?

 

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It’s hard to define a “good” business card. It’s a matter of words, terms, they need to be right placed and right spelled in order to puzzle people about your role and personality…or not? Which is the mission of a business card? It’s hard to define a “good” business card, we said. Join us and play the game, you have five points of information to distribute on a piece of paper, and some other things to consider about shape and color of the ticket. Let’s enumerate the lot:

Company Name and Logo
Address and web site
Your Name
Your Job title
Your Phone number(s), email address(es), Skype, MSN etc.

 

all of it filled in a rectangular (classic) or square (why?) or circular (easy to roll) ticket, merged on a white or colored background and fastened on it in Arial Black, or Verdana if you’re innovative…(sigh).

The space left for your talent is pretty reduced, and often is limited to the Job Title. Don’t worry, it’s enough. If there are no constraints about the description and you’re free to use and abuse of current language, you’d generate monsters. Take a look to your weighty business card holder and select the best: I’ve got some good ones, like “Standard and Innovation Manager” (hmmm), or “Worldwide European Director” (he missed Regional, too), with no regards for the ones full of acronyms like “PRT DCB UTC Area Manager”. What about yours?

Why do I blog this?
The business card is the presentation layer in our interpersonal ISO/OSI stack, as the handshake could be the physical one (and so on, this could be the subject for another post). It means that it’d be clear and readable, and the encryption you use to arrange it needs to be not too strong. Otherwise, it seems that you’ve something to hide…

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Second Life Is Faster Than Real Life

After ?Commodities?, let?s start to analyze “Homesourcing”, another intriguing word linked to our daily experience as ?working human being? or ?whub?. (I?m going to trademark whub, it?s a mixture of sounds and looks like the name of a robot, a not so smart one but faithful enough). So, you whubs, how much of your salary are you ready to give up if your company gives you the opportunity to work at home? Let?s think about it.

It happened to everyone to be congested into a traffic jam on the way for your office, spending hours of your valuable time pushing on the clutch and thinking about the green fields of your past youth. You arrive 2 hours later and think that some of the time you spent in your cubicle could be spent at home, working at the same pace but probably in better conditions. New technologies could help us to be connected with our network, made of colleagues, customers, suppliers, directly from home. It?s called ?homework?, and it applies to every clerk who is free to spend his working time at home or in the office, normally without rules and enough freedom to choose, day by day, his final destination. He is the real manager of his time and job; normally it works on a project and looks after its final delivery, so who cares about his working position in the 3D space?

Homesourcing is a bit different, let?s Wiki help us:
?Homesourcing is a term that describes the hiring of people who work from their home instead of in an office or other business place.?

It?s from the beginning that you choose to spent your working life at home, there is no office for you, no desk, no coffee pots with friends or shared printers, your home is your battlefield. Several tasks are required to be homesourced, from the call center employees to sales, customer care to services, and a growing number of people are ready to pursue this career.
There are several advantages that derives from homesourcing, and it?s hard to identify wich is the best. We?re not talking about outsourcing, where companies rent people for a limited time frame and for specific projects, we?re talking about real employees, that take the opportunity to live their working lifes in a condition they like, and their loyalty is bigger than the average. Companies take advantages from increasing working performances, as some of them declared, and salary and taxes values could be influenced by the special situation consequent from homesourcing conditions.

As mentioned above, homework is not applicable to all the professions, especially if you change from spending time in the office to the home condition, because you probably lose your contacts and relations and feel neglected.

Homesourcing is like a philosophy of life, you exchange a standard working condition for a better one, or for something that is similar to your life style.

Why do I blog this?
Only to introduce the brand new word WHUB (I love it), but don’t be so sure…
(image courtesy of http://www.texasfreeway.com/)

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Commodization: this term indicates that phenomenon through which the increasing availability or the reduced degree of differentiation of a certain kind of product (service or job) transforms it into undifferentiated goods (the so called commodity), easily available. When a product (or your job) becomes a commodity, its market value goes down and down, and it starts a furious struggle between competitors, and your margins decrease rapidly – or even your bank account.
Famous examples of commodities are nowadays services like voice transmission, or hardware components like RAM chipset, or call center services, and so on.

Marketing specialists and economists are managing this concepts looking for new commodities coming to the horizon, and looking for trends that could obscure in a bunch of months some old profitable business.

One of the worst, of course, is the commodization of your job. Some brand new Indian firms are made on purpose to substitute, at a lower cost, some of our activities. Not only call centers, were people are specialized to answer you directly in a language that’s not so far from yours, but even lot of “first level” jobs could be done abroad, i.e. all of the stuff related to tax calculations for companies or single citizens, all jobs that not involve decisions or high level capacities but could waste your time and money in doing these.

One of the best I found is the virtual supporter that could serve as a clever assistant in doing PowerPoint slides or statistics or calculations that, frankly speaking, could bore you and distract you from the true goal of your profession.
It works especially for US towards India, due to the jetlag, so you ask for something Monday afternoon and on Tuesday morning you receive it well cooked. Your Pen Pal Friend could help you more than you think, working hard and with competences when you sleep or watch TV with your family.

Thousands of young professionals are ready to manage for substitution, but their experience is growing and they’re ready to expand their influence and give their competences, not only for the “first level” jobs. Fast way for communicate and transfer information from different countries could easy improve the advent of a new class of managers that, without moving from their territory and changing their habits, could rule the world. Are you sure about the uniqueness of your job, could it be done by a clone in Bangalore?

Why do I blog this?

Something to think about for the coming weekend…

(some of the words or ideas written here are taken from “The World is Flat”, written by T.L. Friedman) (The picture above is from http://www.gapingvoid.com/) (Thank you both)
 

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Homesourcing

There is a good post from the House of Innovation. I’d like to spent a few words about the start..:”Many businesses make the mistake of giving innovation projects to junior executives. It seems natural to hand innovation opportunities to enthusiastic and promising upstarts. But generally it is the experienced heavyweights who can overcome all the process and political obstacles that will occur.” I totally agree with, executives or not this principle could be applied to the daily working life. I know, I can see your smile when you’ll find my birth date, I’m a senior one. Please, stay tuned. Young people are full of energy, some of them, the smartest ones, often waste their power because their lack of experience. And this is not the only issue, sometimes they are misleaded by an old management or, better, by an old “senior management”. Don’t loose the opportunity, if your’re skilled enough to be considered a Senior one, to give them the chance to growth and to take care of their furtherance. On the other side, if you’re young enough and you want to improve, take a breath and sometimes listen and learn.

Why do I blog this?
Innovation and innovative thoughts are not only reserved for young or for old people, but is the process (the project) that leads an innovative idea to success that needs to be managed by your most senior and best people. “Don’t delegate it to lower level staff and hope for the best.”

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Innovation and Senior People
Don’t be tempted!
Communicating Innovation

I’m well impressed by colleagues, friends, people that find everything they stored, or received, or buy, or place somewhere at home, or in a folder…It derives from my untidiness, it’s not a fault but it’s like a trademark of my life, I can remember of a bulk of trousers and t-shirts over my bed (and mother’s shout), or piles of books over my desk, or minutes and minutes spent browsing into my “C:” space, looking for that special file that wasn’t in the right folder…
Have you ever seen nothing like this? As a consequence, I adore all the tools that could help me in putting everything in the right place or, better, to find out what I’m looking for. In my life, the best tool I choose is my wife, in order to partially solve the “messy room” problem (don’t worry; I love her and she knows the situation very well!). In my professional life I developed some strategies to limit the disorder, but my laptop was always out of control. Like a LIFO stack, only daily or Very Important Things remained on the surface, and layers and layers of pdf and ppt and doc went to fill all of the spaces. I decide to fight against this, basically for surviving, and started to face the Evil, the Desktop.
Following the simple instructions contained in this link, I collect some ideas to transform my Desktop in an empty space, but full of significance. It’s not a contradiction, if you start with an empty desktop, the empty space does not mean anything, but if you, until yesterday, put everything you receive, download, see, take from the camera, etc. etc., on the desktop, the empty space NOW means a lot. When I started this experience I was skeptic, I suppose it was like hide dust under the carpet, but after one month I’m sure it works, the desktop is clean, the mind is clean too, and I started to find a place for most of the files I’m working with. Are you married but the PC is still untidy? I suggest you to try.

Why do I blog this?
As usual, the post I wrote was another one…I wrote it on a piece of paper I found in the kitchen, maybe a not completed shopping-list, I’ve asked my wife about it and she started to shout about my untidiness…

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Virtual RAID5 On The Internet Using Free Tools And Services
TRIZ
Italian Apple Store Web Site

Somebody told me that there is a class of warning messages in your email client, related to the calendar application, that sounds like the one in the picture above. A message that appears subtly, unexpected, but only if you deserve it. It’s only a warning, and the aim is to bring people to think that something is going wrong. It happens when you put working hours in a weekend, or when the number of meetings in your daily schedule it’s more than…five (?!), or when you place an appointment in your birthday date after 1 P.M., and so on.
Do you like it? Do you think it’s useful? How many applications you know that need something like this, a “Behaviour Controller” that gives you an advice when you’re beyond the limit? Could be Powerpoint, when you put more that 5 lines in a slide? Or Excel, when you fit more than 100 (!!) columns in a table? Or Word, when the number of bu..sh.. you wrote is at a worrisome level. And in the case of IE (or Firefox or whatever you want)? B.C. could be great: “Hey dude!! what about stop with Technorati for today and take a look to some pretty things?”

Wake up boys, it’s only a dream, I write this post ’cause I’m looking for someone that can develop this applet and give it to the world of available applications, a plug-in that could be distribute for free, based on your attitude or on your nature (are you lazy? here is the B.C. for prompting you if your outlook schedule looks like Kalahari desert). Is there anyone capable?

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There’s a bit of innovation and innovative thought even in the ooo messages. What’s an ooo? Is our classical Out Of Office text, written in english (why?) even if you are in an Italian company, that appears immediately after you sent an email to a colleague. You don’t have time to say “how fast he answered!!” that you understand (and see) that your’re victim of an ooo (what do you think about o-cube?)
I started to collect them in a special folder, a group of specimen that you can divide in about three categories: “I’m not here, forget me”, “I’m not here, sorry, it’s my fault, please call me on my mobile, I love to be in touch with you even in holidays period etc. etc.” (the category name is too long but so it is), and the third one “this ooo is quite different and funny like no other, isn’t it?”, that probably is the worst. We can call these respectively forget, forgive and fun, so every ooo fits in a fff class. All of my ooo are in the first f class (forget me), I love it ’cause messages like “with limited or no access to my email” leave in the reader a strage sensation, a sort of envy, like “look at that guy, where is he now? Fiji? Tibet? Botswana??”
But where’s the innovation? A creative mind find a way to make ooo more appealing and out of the triple-f schemes, putting a photo, a curious link, a famous statement, nothing else, no messages or phone numbers, sure that a reply like this could suggest to the receiver that…sorry, no room for your message today!

Why do I blog this?

I’m travelling, and I remember that I forget to put my favourite ooo on…

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