Once a ravine, now a ditch

I also discovered that Enron experimented with trading in weather and I’m not sure what they did, but its reminiscent of some ideas expressed in James Surowiecki’s “Wisdom of Crowds” where he explored the remarkable prescience of the University of Iowa’s Electronic Markets for the prediction of political events, most obviously elections but also other political futures. I read somewhere, during the last general election, that the most effective forecast for the result was the bookmaker’s odds, this must be very disappointing to the polling organisations, but it seems a financial interest sharpens the mind.  …

Enron: The smartest guys in the room

I returned to California again and while scrabbling to find a film I hadn’t seen, watched this documentary about the fall of Enron. (I’ve not seen it reviewed in Empire either, but that’s my fault; they gave it 5 stars. ) Well made, very informative, mixing interview with recorded material from both Enron’s corporate archives and the congressional investigating committees. The failings summed up by the ex-trader who states, the Enron tag line was “ask why?”, …

About ITV

I have been catching up on my reading over the last few days and was browsing the March copy of Management Today, in which Chris Allen, the CEO of ITV was interviewed. In the interview he boasted that ITV2 is now the most watched digital channel in the UK, eclipsing Sky One. Its an illustration that something other than channel is important. …

McKinsey on strategy, services and product

On my sun/oracle blog I wrote a note/précis of an issue of the McKinsey Quarterly. The keynote article, “Distortions & deceptions in strategic decisions” looks at the flawed human values often inserted into major business decisions. They quote a major acquisition decision taken by a dominant player and suggest that the major advocate of the merger wanted it for personal political gain. They look at ways in which these human factors can be brought into the open and evaluated in the decision making process. Despite identifying over-optimism as a frequent occurrence once a proposal has been made, the decision not to proceed is often taken in private and so collaborative decision making cannot neutralise these human shortcomings. One suggestion is to ask the proposer, what their next best proposal is. …

More soon to be ex-colleagues

Dave Jones ,one of Sun’s Client Solutions CTOs and occasional blogger, was over last week and we hooked up and went to a works party. It was thrown by a bunch of the volunteers for our UK redundancy programme which you may have read about in “The Register”, here… . It was surprisingly enjoyable. The company i.e. at the party just shows that sometimes management lose track of what they’re trying to do  …

Make it something interesting for a change

Is the Cluetrain Manifesto, “a spectre haunting the Internet?”  Some of it is very funny, some of it bloody obvious. Its only the retards that thought the ’80s would last forever and that Gordon Gecko was a philosopher that will find some of this hard or revolutionary – the fact it’s all in one place is very good though, and its clearly written in a language that “entrepreneurs” can get! …