Categories
Business Words Work

Strategy, Tactics

These terms are used and misused quite a lot in my life atm: planning business direction at work and spend too much time watching board game videos on Youtube at home. The misuse is mostly when they’re used interchangeably and there are plenty of pithy aphorisms to explain the difference like:

Strategy is undertaken before the battle. Tactics are implemented during battle.

Or:

Strategy is the what. Tactics is the how.

But by far my favourite way to think about it takes me back to the early noughties when the only time I/we would use the word tactical was in reference to ‘going tactical’:

If the strategic aim on a night out was to make it to Sugar for the £1 pound vodbulls and I was too pissed too early I’d go for a tactical chunder to help sober me up.

Categories
Business Me Work

What are you afraid of?

You wind up taking work that at the end of the day you’re not proud of and over time that will eat your soul.

Great talk by Jim Coudal about how they moving from client work to your own projects, or to put it another way:

You know that idea you have? Do it now. Not in 6 months. Don’t squeeze it in at the end of the day. Treat it like it’s a paying client: give it the resource it needs, meet the deadlines.

Also don’t worry about failing. Some of Jim’s (as it turned out) not-so-great ideas in this talk are wonderful.

Categories
Business

Presentation tips from General Dodonna

What if the Rebel Alliance had used Powerpoint during the Death Star briefing?

deathstar

Amusing as the image is the article does make a fair point: if your presentation is you reading out the words on your slides I don’t need both you and the slide, I’m quite capable of reading.

Categories
Business

How much you should be paid

The BBC commissioned research from ComRes about what the public believes 15 different professions should pay.

Those people surveyed were not told what the real pay levels were in those professions.

Note, it’s what these professions *should* pay not what people think they do pay.

According to the survey the public think that Premiership Footballers should be the highest earners in the country (though they should only earn about £1000 a day rather than the four and half they currently earn on average).

Depressing much?

(BBC News)

Categories
Business

We are a Fortune 500 Company, not a Lemonade Stand

comic

(via Laughing Squid)

Categories
Business

Rent a White Guy

And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image–particularly, the image of connection–that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face…”

Already got me a suit, looks like all I need is a ticket to Beijing…

(via Boing Boing)