Why we Need Scenario Planning

Kurt Goedel’s incompleteness theorem: Any set of axiomatic rules are either complete and inconsistent, or consistent and incomplete. [Thanks, Paul Dowding in a letter to the FT]

Kao Innovates with Music

John Kao talks about the “how” of innovation, and uses a piano to illustrate his points. Fantastic, use your whole brain! The video is here.

Found some great random generators for stories:

• Writer’s Plot Generator from Pantomime Pony: Funny stuff, nice and concise, yet fleshed out with a few strategically and sensibly placed adjectives

• Fantasy Plotter for fantasy… plots… from Manon at Serendipity: Short, sweet and straight to the point. Also includes names, characters, places, things, costumes, stories. Merci!

• Seventh Sanctum Generators for fantasy: A bit too random and Mad-Libby on the story generator, but a nice wealth of generators for every step of the way

The Facebook has just told me to help Judith Caloza Cuaresma find her friends.

***

I’m not sure I’ve come to terms with not having gone to visit her before I left for school. Maybe I thought she’d still be there when I got back to Manila over Christmas. Maybe she’d be in better shape – maybe we could chat and catch her up on all of the wonderful things I learned in my first few months of the MBA. Never mind that she wouldn’t be able to laugh the way she used to – maybe I could still tell her jokes.

I never got to.

In a previous post on interviews, I bullet-pointed some… pointers… from an article that I read about the dynamics of interviews. It was all well and good, but it seemed to me to be a bit contrived and too planned out. This is fine if that’s the way one operates, it gave me the same feeling I was getting when I was sending out applications willy-nilly a few months ago, before I sat down and had a talk with myself – I just didn’t feel it.

Other forums, other points of view.

• Gathering of Patriots to Bring About World Peace
• World Social Forum

Don’t get lost in the clouds.

Think about these potential pitfalls before you migrate your systems from the earth to the sky.

BOPpin’ away to the top.

• CGAP - Independent policy and research center that works to advance financial access to the BOP
• MicroCred Group – Creating and developing MFIs all over the world
• Blue Orchard – Microfinance investment managers

[while watching Bloomberg, 13h30 CET]

Google’s gobbling up gaggles of Deals – big ones – and will… deal… with “other” (read: regulatory) issues later.

From what the Department of International Mystery gathers in its… Intel*… on Google’s insides, the DIM wonders if Google’s not tempting fate by ignoring other “other” issues (read: operational capacity). Unless the big G puts its ability to scale its business up alongside the Deal frenzy, it may choke on its own feast.

A whole new world (ish).

The wisdom of Steve Blank from “Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups“. [Thanks, Frank at Small World Group and JustinTV.]

What’s the big idea(s)?

• You’re there as a startup peoples to ” search for a repeatable, scalable business model”.
• Search – Pivot – Execute
• “No business plan survives first contact with customers”

The UK chancellor has released a new hit single: “Rump Shake-Up”, featuring the Artist Formerly Known as FSA, the New CPMA on the Block and The King

This just in: Osborne has served the FSA a visceral slice [thanks, FT by email!].

5 Things:

• The prime cut will be reincarnated as a new Consumer Protection and Markets Authority responsible for bank regulation and policing
• The “rump part” gets slapped on the back of the BoE as prudential regulator, which will be called [insert name here]

Casting Call

Forecasting demand is apparently done in a sub-optimal manner in many quarters. According to Armstrong and Green (2010), the following should be avoided:

• Intuition
• Unstructured meetings
• Focus groups
• Data mining
• Complex methods

[Thanks, DPRM!]

It’s Dynamic! Boogie Woogie Oogie

Interviews progress – it’s a tale of reading and acting, reading and reacting. Five of the tips from Fred Ball that I liked [thanks, BNET]:

• Come prepared knowing your concrete achievements (quantifiable or not… e.g. “trophy wife”)
• Dress for success and enter with a mindset of respect
• Talk about what the interviewer wants to know, not what you want to talk about