Travels etc.

Meetings are important part of the business activity. Our basic need to communicate is topped by necessity to deliver meaningful results at workplace. As usual though reality is not as rosy as the ideal that many of us trying to achieve with meetings. What is a good work-related pastime for one is at the same moment a time wasting and useless activity to another. This contradiction is coming from a few factors (among other things): 1.     Core difference in perception of meetings between different levels of workplace hierarchy or among committee/board members 2.     Meeting audiences and agendas 3.     Involvement and focus level of participants during the meetings Therefore usually instead of being an effective business or private processing tool, meetings become the opposite. There is an opportunity to adjust existing practices to meet new expectations of the work related activities to be more productive and fun....

We all have probably seen on the Web pictures which may look like the following: It implies that if someone quotes to a customer low (or lower than average, I presume) price for the services or products it necessary means low/lower quality of the services or products provided. This is very interesting assumption and I had a short conversation a while ago on Twitter with another SharePoint specialist about it: Original Bjørn's article should be here http://t.co/36brwYq4Kf A study in Journal of Consumer Research http://www.jstor.org/userimages/ContentEditor/1351717003127/DevalRelease.pdf in regards to the subject clearly shows: '" Consumers rarely have complete information and use various strategies to fill the gaps in their knowledge as they consider and choose products. One of these strategies involves using naive theories : informal, common sense, explanations that consumers use to make sense of their environment. For example, consumers may believe th...

Review of employee performance or enquiry about it is necessary. It is important from the business process perspective. However usually some critical items are missing from the picture: a) Clear metrics of performance; b) Communicating to the employees what is their career path or responsibility-compensation evolution; c) Information about necessary skills or competencies the employee is missing to reach potential role within organisation. At my first ever interview with a huge multinational software company in 2001 when I just finished university as a Software Engineer, one of the questions I still remember was "How many lines of code have you ever written?" I didn't know exactly and estimated it as approximately 10,000. The interview was unsuccessful, but I presume not only because of that reason. If I had this question at an interview again I'd reply to an interviewer with a proposal like "Would you also like to know how many lines of code I delet...

It’s hard to underestimate importance of planning. It is (or should be) integral part of any conscious activity that requires more than 1 step and implies a target. Especially when we deal with complex processes of various kinds. Contemporary prejudice about planning is that it’s only relevant to big projects like construction, IT, space exploration, military operations, massive production etc. However any activity that involves setting up a goal and steps to achieve it requires planning. Why is it necessary? Because we need to: 1. Estimate approximate date/time to reach the goal 2. Understand what/who is required to achieve the goal 3. Measure success or failure 4. Review and adjust the plan if needed. So planning may help not only at work, but also in personal life which will in turn positively influence our so-called work-life balance. Planning should only serve one purpose – reaching as close as possible to the target. Very often this idea is being overlooked and burie...

Situation Coal in Africa: An opportunity is available to invest in a coal mine in West Virginia. The mine’s value is less than in past years because of actual and anticipated restrictions on coal-fired power generation in the United States. However, the mine has a chance to sell its coal on contract to a public utility in West Africa. The utility is working through the World Bank for financing to build a number of coal-fired power plants. If they obtain World Bank financing, then a customer for the coal mine is assured, at least for the duration of the contracts. The power plants will employ the best current technology for burning coal, which exceeds all current air quality standards for the region. However, the power plants will not be designed to attempt carbon capture. The area of Africa the plants will serve suffers from extreme energy poverty, with some of the lowest per capita energy consumption in the world. Overview of the Region West Africa is the westernmost reg...

According to the British Petroleum Statistical Review of World Energy, 2013 , global coal reserves declined in the decade ending 2012: Figure 1. Proved coal reserves . Proved reserves of coal are generally taken to be those quantities that geological and engineering information indicates with reasonable certainly can be recovered in the future from known deposits under existing economic and operating conditions. If we look at supply and demand factors in the decline, we can see that: a) Coal price has grown significantly in the decade ending 2012 1 :   Figure 2.  Prices in US Dollars per tonne . b) Coal consumption has also grown significantly worldwide 2 : Figure 3. Coal consumption by region . c) The price of substitutes (i.e. Natural Gas) has also grown. Not so in North America though, but if we look at the world trend it is growing 3 : Figure 4. Natural gas prices . Therefore if the rule of supply and demand worked we would see increase i...

Have recently started the course  Global Energy Business  from  University of Colorado . It was interesting to see from credible sources that almost third part of all the energy supply is wasted to "distribution and conversion losses"!

Today have got a hold of iWork for iCloud beta . I use MS SkyDrive and Docs for Facebook for online documents editing at the moment. So I decided to give iWorks for iCloud a quick try. Started with Numbers:  Browser is not fully supported: Checked, need Chrome 27 for full support I guess: However it still works: Tried to "Share", but received a message that iCloud Mail isn't set up: Does it mean that I can only share the link in an email? Tried uploading the working Excel spreadsheet: Drag-n-dropped: Here we go: Looks mostly fine, but got some formatting issue: Then tried Pages: Same message about the browser: $525,000?! Nice and clean interface: Tried some typing and found some minor issues: Have just installed Google Chrome 27 . Going to use iWorks for iCloud for some time to try it's features. Looks nice.

Don't know exactly why, but when someone introduces himself or herself to me as "aspiring social entrepreneur" my first opinion - this person is just useless in terms of doing any real business together. Of course this perception may not be correct in some cases. I think that's because of several factors: 1. When someone says "I work in engineering (construction, law, education, government, marketing, IT, farming, manufacturing, dosomethingreal)" you can say that at least you see what skills and subject area knowledge you could leverage as a team to build something or to work on some initiative or project. It also shows credibility of the person, because it at least gives us an idea of what we could do exactly together as a team. Of course other wonderful skills and capabilities may be uncovered during the collaboration, but if initially there is a team of only people who call themselves "entrepreneurs" - nothing is going to work and we w...