Clarke Ching - More Chilli Please

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ...

My daughters love lions and we often play "oh no, there's a lion in the car", which involves lots of GRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring from the back seat.

So last week my wife and I took the two of them - Aisling, who turns five very soon, and Alice, who's just over two - to the local safari park. 

We got there early, while the place was still quiet, and we were lucky to park in a nice spot right in amongst the lions. The two kiddies were both sitting on my wife's lap in the front seat and were very excited when a big male lion walked straight in front of the car and brushed his tail across the bonnet.  We couldn't help but laugh when the beast then peed all across the front of the car, marking his territory I guess.  The kids weren't scare at all.

Things suddenly turned bad , though, when two female lions started gently fighting with each other. 

Alice said "I'm scawered." My wife tried to console her but she turned to me, sitting in the drivers seat, reached her arms across towards me and said "Dad. I scawered!". I reached across and picked her up, saying, "it's okay Alice, Mum and Dad will look after you".  She sat down on my lap but still looked anxious. 

Then she decided to take things into her own hands.  She slid down off my lap and sat between my legs, from where  she grabbed hold of the steering wheel and said in her very assertive, two-year-old voice, "I drive home now".

Using skypein as a Voice recorder

I'm an ideas man.  I have lots of ideas.  I've done several personality tests - including the delightful online and free test from peoplemaps - which tell me that having lots of ideas is ingrained in my personality. 

Notice here that I'm talking about quantity, not necessarily quality. 

Quality aside, it can sometimes be difficult "managing" all these ideas.  I've tried emailing them to myself but that doesn't seem to work. I've tried taking notes in a diary but that really doesn't work.  There's something about writing them down which doesn't work for me.

Anyway ... here's an idea I've just had that I hope will help me with my superfluity of ideas:

• I just ordered a skypein telephone number which I can quickly call from my mobile when I have an idea.
• The number goes straight to voice mail.
• I record the idea
• I pick the voice recordings up later in the day when I am online with skype on.
• If the ideas still makes sense then good.

As with all my ideas I don't know if it'll work, but it only costs me £10 to rent the number for 3 months which is a lot cheaper than a separate voice recorder unit - which I'd probably lose - and a lot easier than trying to figure out how to work the voice recorder which is apparently built into my mobile.

We'll see how it goes.

Ebert gave me an idea

Q: Is there some website, say, where I can rate 5 or 10 movies then click a button and it tells me which movie reviewer I am most compatible with? 

This is very selfish of me, I know, but when movie reviewer Roger Ebert got sick last year I was really worried that he may have been forced to give up writing reviews and I would miss out.   Over the last half-dozen years or so, I've become very reliant on Mr Ebert's reviews.  I read them to decide whether I'll go to a movie or not and I read them after I've been to help me understand the movie.  If he says a movie is a 4 out of 4 then I know I'll enjoy it, even if other reviewers only give it a 2 out of 4.  I've only been lead astray by Mr Ebert once that I can recall - some stupid movie with Jennifer Lopez, I think - and when I reread the review I realized that if I'd read the review properly then I wouldn't have gone to the movie.

You'd think that all reviewers would give similar ratings but they don't.  Take a look at the reviews that Google has collected for the movie Rendition and you'll see that the average rating is currently 3.1 out of 5, based on 12 reviews, with most of the scores being a 2 or a 3.  But Ebert gave the movie a 5 - and I loved that movie! 

Average rating

3.1 / 5
Based on 12 review

So ... Ebert gave me an idea. 

I'm guessing that not everyone likes Eberts reviews but I do. 

Is it possible that everyone has a "most compatible reviewer" and mine just happens to be Ebert? 

If Ebert got run over by a bus ... how would I got about finding his replacement. 

Is there some website, say, where I can rate 5 or 10 movies then click a button and it tells me which movie reviewer I am most compatible with?  If not, how hard would it be to build a website like that?  I know that most of the necessary raw data is available via Google movie searches. 

Strategy and the Fat Smoker

I am currently reading (one of my favorite business thinkers), David Maister's, new book Strategy and the Fat Smoker.  [Did I get the apostrophes right there?]

The book has got almost nothing literally to do with fat people who smoke, apart from David's confession that until a recent health crisis he was a fat smoker.  He's recently lost weight and given up smoking as a result.  The book is about why people don't make changes even though they know they should - something every parent, manager and consultant will appreciate.  The book is full of great ideas.  I'm just over half way through the book and I've had several "ah ha" moments already.  If you've read any of David's other books then you'll lap this one up too.

The weirdest thing about this book is that since I've listened to all of David's podcasts and videocasts, I actually hear David's voice in my head as I read.  I've never experienced that before and it's kind of off-putting. 

Now, don't take the following as a negative comment because it isn't: I feel a little awkward writing this blog entry, because David sent me a review copy and I hate to write anything negative about someone-who-I-admire-so-much's work ... but to be honest, I'm struggling to finish the book.  That's a reflection on me, much more than on the book: this is the sort of book I'd normally demolish by listening to it as an audio book, rather than siting and reading.  I've found that I have a huge appetite for reading but I'm a painfully slow reader; audio books have been my savior.

I do hope that The Fat Smoker sells enough to warrant an audio book.  In fact, since this book is already self published, I'm really hoping that David self-publishes an audio book version too.  His podcasts are very high quality - I think he could pull it off.

Update: David's just emailed to say that he will soon be publishing an audio book.

Two delightful & useful business novels

I love learning through stories, especially business novels which give me time to sink into someone else's world.

Here are two business novels which I've recently read and enjoyed. 

1.  The Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly is a short business novel about a company which reduces its absenteeism hugely and increases its staff's satisfaction by helping its staff discover then achieve their dreams.  Despite my "business speak" synopsis this is a moving and powerful book.  I read it in just a few hours, I buy into the ideas (in fact, I try to live the ideas to a certain extent), and I love how Kelly managed to make his case both emotionally and in business terms.  Very nice book.  Worth every penny. 
   
   [Oh, and if you google the author and are put off by his religious writing, don't be.]
   
2. Never Mind the Sizzle...Where's the Sausage: Branding based on substance not spin by David Taylor is about a pragmatic sorta guy who cuts through all the marketing hype to rescue a sausage company and learns all about branding based on the sausage rather than the sizzle.  Again, my synopsis doesn't do this book justice.  I'm becoming increasingly interested in marketing (it's the one thing we software people really, really, really suck at and distrust) and this book is one of the best introductions to marketing / branding / selling I've ever read.  The author shows us a pragmatic approach to marketing and wraps it up in an enjoyable story.  He's written a couple of text books and I'm going to sample at least one of them shortly.  And, just like The Dream Manager, it's an easy read. 
   
   [Take a look at David Taylor's weblog too: http://wheresthesausage.typepad.com/my_weblog/]

Cake

Here's a quick question, or two.  No trick. 

Can you tell me the false assumption under the statement "you can't have your cake and eat it too?".

If you are a TOC person can you draw the conflict?

Non-zero-sumness - very important concept

If there's one thing I hope that people take away from my book it is the concept of non-zero-sumness.  It's the concept of seeking AND solutions rather than OR solutions.  It's the concept of thinking win-win and even win-win-win.  It's why we should "make the problem bigger" so that we can make everyone win - thinking of US, rather than THEM and US. It's the most valuable lesson I've learned from the theory of constraints.

If I've cut and pasted correctly then at the bottom of this post you should see a talk by author Robert Wright where he

... explains “non-zero-sumness,” a game-theory term describing how players with linked fortunes tend to cooperate for mutual benefit. This dynamic has guided our biological and cultural evolution, he says -- but our unwillingness to understand one another, as in the clash between the Muslim world and the West, will lead to all of us losing the “game.” Once we recognize that life is a non-zero-sum game, in which we all must cooperate to succeed, it will force us to see that moral progress — a move toward empathy — is our only hope.

If I've not cut and pasted properly, then click here.

TOCThinkers.com blog - Q&A's

1) Bill Dettmer has recently published a new TOC book "The Logical Thinking Process" which is a significant rewrite of his earlier book "Goldratt's Theory of Constraints" (the book where I learnt most of my TP basics).  I think it is a significant improvement and an important text.

I've published the first few questions and answers of an ongoing interview with Bill to the tocthinkers.com blog

http://www.tocthinkers.com/qa_bill_dettmer/index.html

2) John Ricketts' new book about TOC in service industries will shortly be available from amazon.com.  I've published a few Q&A's with John on the tocthinkers.com blog too:

http://www.tocthinkers.com/qa_john_ricketts/index.html

Two stories

I've just got to share these two blogs, each about a different news story:

• The first is from the qi news blog and it's about a poor west African boy who travels to America to get a new anus.  Although at first it seems amusing, the story is quite moving  - especially the mother's quote: ""I don't even know what to say today. Most of the time I tell them, I don't have anything to give you people, but I'm grateful to you people for what you did for me."
  
• The second is about drunken indian elephants (despite getting plastered and electrocuted, they still remember their drunken antics).  I adore Scott Adam's for sharing his sense of humour with us for free.

My Glasses

I've noticed that when I am at work working on my PC I tend to take my glasses off and put them on my desk. I'm short-sighted so I can still see my screen. I think I do it because my eyes get tired due to not blinking while I work on the computer or perhaps it is because I don't change my focus much, in whcih case I should probably keep my glasses on and force myself to look out the window more often. Who knows?

Anyway, the weird thing is that I've noticed that if a conversation starts then I can't hear people so well until I put my glassess back on. I suppose that it is because I can't see other people's lips move as they talk.

I had no idea that I was lip-reading but I can't think of another explaination.

.oOo. Sent from my BlackBerry www.ClarkeChing.com +44(0)7920114893