Mr 1% Spend
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Welcome to the shallow end of the corporate gene pool
“When we arrived, the staff knew we were a triage team called in to determine whether they should receive emergency surgery and a chance at life or a shot of morphine and a painless journey to oblivion.”
What an MBA program SHOULD teach
MBAs are wonderful things. They educate you in Mergers and Acquisitions, Finance, Remedial Accounting and a whole lot of other stuff. Sadly, they don’t teach you the two most critical theories in business, maybe because it would put all those revenue-generating MBA programmes out of business.
The customer is always right, except when we say they’re wrong!
When we last left Mr 1% Spend, he was asking some tough finance and tech accountability questions of bemused Sydney business manager “George” and his increasingly exasperated cohorts. Today, the story reaches its climax as the author questions whether spending $15,000 to upgrade Microsoft Office is the most intelligent use of company funds.
Cry Havoc! And let slip the dogs of technology (Pt 2)
He coughed, spluttered, back-pedalled and delivered amazing excuses: Credit this, debit that, liability something else, below the EBIT line over there, management fees somewhere else, intercompany loans and so on.
I could see George starting to waver so I asked a very simple question to by-pass the jargon and drivel and get us back to the point of the discussion:
Cry Havoc! And let slip the dogs of technology.
Are your technology suppliers and support providers advising you according to your best interests, or theirs?
Will Apple ever grow up and seize a chunk of the business market? Well not with that attitude!
I often get accused of bashing Microsoft and Oracle. In the interests of balance, here’s my message to Apple:
If you want to go after enterprise business, make it a priority. Don’t toss it out there if it’s something you only plan to pursue in between hacky sack sessions and iPhone love-ins.
For success, reality must take precedence over public relations
There are way too many people out there in business bullshitting to themselves, their staff and their customers.
The simple truth is that if you run your business like its amateur hour, no matter how much you want to fool yourself and your customers into thinking that you’re smart and good at what you do, eventually you will stumble and the truth will out.
Jamming a square tech peg in a round hole. There must be an app for that.
How often have you come across an idea that sounds really great, but, when it comes to the actual execution, it just doesn’t fly? These often involve the deployment of technology solutions dreamed up by non-technical people. Take the idea of putting an RFID chip in a passport…
Are Australian businesses subsidising dirt cheap copies of Windows 7 in China?
How do you justify the price of $120 per copy of Windows 7 Home Premium in China against the price of around $300 in Australia without saying rich countries are subsidising the cost of Windows in poor countries?
Grab it all. Own it all. Keep it all.
I don’t profess to know how things work in your business, but one situation I’ve come across in almost every place I’ve worked is that the ICT team don’t actually own the equipment for which they are accountable.
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Steve Ballmer vs Alan Greenspan. Product marketing 1985-style [VIDEO]
I’ve always been a little afraid of Steve Ballmer. This video doesn’t help. In 1985, on November 20, Microsoft released Windows 1.0. Steve Ballmer, ever the affable chap, stepped in front of the camera to sell this amazing new product.
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