hooray! – how to be happy in business.

(via swissmiss)

iPhone will catch up in the business segment

The iPhone is in my opinion still a fancy, glossy, slick device which properly fulfil basic daily needs like making phone calls, sending text messages, listening to music or do some  surfing etc. Which is fine for residential customers. Nevertheless, iPhone lacks of some essential features compared to devices from Nokia or SonyEricsson, to say the least – not to think about push technology. Now a survey made by ChangeWave, however, shows some interesting facts about company’s device plans for the future. It seems that Apple’s iPhone will be close on BlackBerry’s heels ; )

Apple will soon take the second place slot in business smartphone ranking, according to ChangeWave, with 11 percent of respondents saying their companies plan to purchase iPhones.

Read the full article here.

Meeting creatures

This entry of randsinrepose made me smile. I bookmarked it with Google Notebook a while ago… So these are the typically creatures in a meeting:

The Anchor
Slogan: “It’s all about me”

The Anchor is the big cheese. This is the person that everyone is talking to and this the person who will decide on whatever needs deciding. When this person talks, everyone in the meeting is listening.

Meetings are power struggles between those who want something and those who don’t want to give it to them. If you’re walking into a meeting and you need something, your first job is to identify this person. This person is the reason the meeting is happening and if you don’t know who they are, you’re missing essential subtext. It’s actually pretty easy. Just wait for someone to say something controversial and see who everyone looks at.

There are two major things to be wary of with your Anchor. First, make sure they know their job. For standing meetings with the usual suspects, the role is obvious, but for one-time meetings, you can’t assume The Anchor knows it’s all about them. A clear agenda which anoints The Anchor right out the gate is the best way to make sure everyone knows who the decision maker is.

Second, you’ve got to know what to do when there is no Anchor present. You’re fifteen minutes in and you know the Sr. VP who is actually going to help here is not present. Sure, there are eight other people here that sure like to talk, but the best move is a reschedule. You’re wasting time.

Laptop Larry
Slogan: “Pardon me, what?”

Larry is easy to identify. He’s got his portable in front of him. That’s him right there. If the portable isn’t somehow not enough, just look for lots of intense nodding from Larry… that’s him not listening.

Larry pisses me off. He goes to regularly scheduled meetings that he knows are going to be 75% irrelevant to him, so he brings his portable so he can work. Turns out he doesn’t work because he’s spending half his time half-listening to the meeting proceedings. Go read that last sentence again. He’s not working and he’s not really listening which means he is actually a net negative when it comes to productivity.

Ask Larry to put his portable away. I mean it. If you can’t vivaciously participate in a meeting you were invited to, you should not be there. “Rands Rands Rands… I take notes on my portable.” No, you don’t. You take notes and when I use some proper noun you don’t recognize, you surf Wikipedia. If notes must be taken, designate one person to do it, I want you asking me what the proper noun is… not consulting Wikipedia.

A useful meeting is not a speech; it’s a debate. If I’m up there flapping my lips and you disagree or don’t understand, I don’t want you to nod, I want you to yell at me.

Business Cards

The fact that I am currently applying for a job prompts for the first blog entry: Business Cards. I have thought that it would be a good idea to create a business card, although I think that it is kind of odd to have a business card without a company on it… However, “dailypoetics” has an awesome collection of very creative business cards. Here are some examples:

The whole set on flickr >>