Meertn

Sometimes I think the field of management/success/leadership is nothing more than a confusion of correlation for causation. For example, I blogged recently that "passion" isn't so much a cause of success as a result of success, and it grows as the success grows. Success can make anyone passionate about what they are doing. When the experts say we need passion to be successful, that's mostly bullshit. What you need is energy, talent, hard work, a reasonable plan, and lots of luck.

Company culture is another area that I think the experts get backwards. The common belief is that you need a good company culture to create success. But isn't it more likely that companies with awesome employees get both a good culture and success at the same time? A good corporate culture is a byproduct of doing everything right; it's not the cause of success as much as the outcome. Success improves culture more than a good culture can cause success.

And how about that charisma thing? That's important, right? Everyone says so. Look at Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison. Those guys have plenty of charisma so it must be important to success, we assume. But let me tell you what causes charisma: success.

I'm in a unique position to judge the success=charisma hypothesis because I slip in and out of famousness all day long. Cartoonists aren't normally recognized, and when I walk into a room as a "normal" I exhibit no charisma whatsoever. I might even be absorbing some charisma that is already in the atmosphere. But when I enter a room at an event where people are expecting me in my capacity as a semi-famous cartoonist, suddenly I appear to have some charisma. I feel like Moses in a room full of water. Trust me when I say that if Steve Jobs had not been successful so young, he'd be known as the lying asshole who needs a shower, not the guy with the reality distortion field. Charisma is bullshit.

Today I was reading an expert's opinion that companies get better results when managers learn to avoid micromanaging employees. But how do we know those non-micromanaging managers get better results? Wouldn't it also be true that wherever you have the most highly capable employees - the ones most likely to create success - you have a boss who knows he can back off the micromanaging? One would expect more micromanaging in companies with untalented employees. So how do you know what causes what?

Consider the thousands of different books on management/success/leadership. If any of this were real science, all managers would learn the same half-dozen secrets to success and go on to great things. The reality of the business world is more like infinite monkeys with typewriters. Sooner or later a monkey with an ass pimple will type something that makes sense and every management expert in the world will attribute the success to the ass pimple.

How about the idea that every hourly wage slave should "act like an entrepreneur"?  How do you think that would play out with Apple's 50,000 employees? The unsexy reality is that everyone in the company can't be creative risk-takers. Someone has to actually work. My guess is that Apple would fall apart if more than 5% of its employees acted like entrepreneurs. And maybe the tipping point is only 2%. Entrepreneurs are disruptive, rule-breaking risk-takers. A little bit of that goes a long way.

I first noticed the questionable claims of management experts back in the nineties, when it was fashionable to explain a company's success by its generous employee benefits. The quaint idea of the time was that treating employees like kings and queens would free their creative energies to create massive profits. The boring reality is that companies that are successful have the resources to be generous to employees and so they do. The best way a CEO can justify an obscene pay package is by treating employees generously. To put this in another way, have you ever seen a corporate turnaround that was caused primarily by improving employee benefits?

The fields of management/success/leadership are a lot like the finance industry in the sense that much of it is based on confusing correlation and chance with causation. We humans like to feel as if we understand and control our environments. We don't like to think of ourselves as helpless leaves blowing in the wind of chance. So we clutch at any ridiculous explanation of how things work.

My view is that success happens when you have a coincidence of talent, resources, and timing. One can explain the existence of successful serial entrepreneurs by the fact that once successful they gain resources, credibility, extra talent, contacts, and the opportunity to live someplace such as Silicon Valley where opportunities fall out of trees.  You would expect that group of people to get lucky more often than someone just starting out.

Dilbert came to fame in the nineties when the working world was experiencing an unprecedented "bubble" of management bullshit. Every time a new business book became a best seller, middle managers across the globe scurried to buy a copy and started spewing its jargon. Eventually the sale of business books dropped off when, I assume, people realized there couldn't really be 10,000 different sure-fire formulas for success.

But lately I've been feeling another bullshit bubble forming in the world. And I don't mean only the financial markets, which are sketchy for lots of reasons. It's just a feeling, but it seems to me that the management/success/leadership bullshit bubble is once again reaching full inflation.

Are you feeling the bubble too, or is it just me?

Submitted by: futurejp

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Raadsleden van de gemeente Haren hebben met verbazing gereageerd op het opstappen van VVD-burgemeester Bats. Alle fracties zeiden na afloop van de raadsvergadering dat ze nog achter de burgemeester stonden. Ze noemen het vertrek jammer en onnodig.

Volgens VVD-fractievoorzitter Terpstra is Haren een goede burgemeester kwijt. "Dit is veroorzaakt door een stel idioten dat rotzooi heeft lopen schoppen", zegt Terpstra.

"U bent onze burgemeester, het raakt me ten diepste", reageerde PvdA-fractievoorzitter Sprenger. Ook de fractievoorzitter van het CDA reageerde geschokt. "Het debat wordt zo wel uit onze handen geslagen", aldus CDA'er Valkema.

Meer dan 32 uur heeft eventingamazone Merel Blom met haar vrachtwagen stilgestaan op de A1 in Frankrijk. "Ongelofelijk hè", zucht ze. "Een beetje Middeleeuwenachtig."

Blom is met vier paarden en een klein team op de terugweg naar Nederland. Ze heeft in het weekend aan een dressuurwedstrijd meegedaan. "We zijn zondagavond vertrokken, maar na twaalf uur boven Parijs gestrand. We hadden hulpdiensten verwacht zoals je in Nederland zou hebben, maar in Frankrijk werkt het toch iets anders. Geen hulp, geen informatie."

Stapvoets

Blom en haar drie medepassagiers hadden voer en water voor één dag. "Ik had dit echt niet zien aankomen." 's Nachts viel de accu uit. Het was -7, maar het voelde kouder, zegt ze. "De paarden stonden in het donker en hadden dorst en honger." Uitzicht op hulp was er niet. "Het leger kwam wel langs, maar richting Parijs. Het duurde eindeloos."

Uiteindelijk heeft de amazone haar brommer van de vrachtwagen gehaald en is ze over de snelweg op zoek naar hulp gegaan. Bij een kippenboer kreeg ze stro en water voor de paarden. Ook hielp haar oproep voor hulp op sociale media zijn vruchten af. "Sportpaarden moeten bewegen, anders worden ze ziek. Mensen met een stal in de buurt kwamen speciaal naar ons toe om met de paarden te wandelen."

Inmiddels rijdt Blom stapvoets naar Amsterdam. "Of dat goed blijft gaan weet ik niet, ik durf niets meer te zeggen over de Franse overheid en wegen schoonhouden."

Adding DRM to the HTML standard will have far-reaching effects, incompatible with the W3C's most important policies

After Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee's keynote talk at SXSW, he answered a question about the controversial plan to add DRM to next version of HTML. HTML 5, a standard currently under debate at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the latest battleground in the long-running war over the design of general-purpose computers. Berners-Lee defended the proposition, and claimed that without it, more of the Web would be locked up in un-searchable, unlinkable formats like Flash.

Some in the entertainment industry have long harboured fantasies about redesigning computers to disobey their owners, as part of a profit-maximisation strategy that depends on being able to charge you piecemeal for the right to use the files on your hard-drive.

Most famously, the industry convinced DVD manufacturers to add restrictions to players to prevent you from buying a DVD in one part of the world for use in another part of the world. For this to work, DVD players had to be designed so that they hid which programs were running on them – so that DVD-player-owners wouldn't just kill the "verify region" program. The players also had to be designed to hide files from their owners, so that users couldn't just find the file with the DVD-decryption key in it and use it to unlock the DVD using a different player – one that didn't check for region compliance.

Two important questions emerge from this historical example: first, did it work; and second, why on Earth did the manufacturers ever agree to this? Both of these questions are important to ask here.

Did region restrictions work? Not at all. After all, hiding files and processes inside of a computer that the "bad guy" can actually carry away with him to a lab or work-room is a fool's errand. If Berners-Lee believes that adding secrets to Web browsers that computer owners won't be able to access will somehow enable the marketplaces that the entertainment industry says it needs for its new business models, he's mistaken.

More importantly: why did manufacturers agree to add restrictions to their hardware? Region-coding is an anti-feature, a "product" no one is looking to buy. You can't sell more DVD players with a sticker that says, "Now, with region restrictions!"

Patent pitfalls

Put simply, because the industry ginned up a legal requirement to add DRM to DVD players. When DRM bodies gather, they seek to identify a piece of "hook IP" – usually a patent. If there's some patent thrown into the process for decoding a file-format, then the patent can be used as a "hook" for licence terms that can be used to bind manufacturers.

In other words, if a patent (or patents) can be included in the decoding system for DVDs, you can threaten manufacturers with patent-violation suits unless they take out a licence. Patent licences are administered by a licensing authority (LA), which creates a standard set of terms for licensing. These terms always include a list of features that the manufacturers may not implement (for example, you may not add a "save to hard drive" feature to a DVD player); and a list of anti-features that manufacturers must implement (for example, you must add a "check for region" component to players).

Additionally, all DRM licence agreements come with a set of "robustness" rules that require manufacturers to design their equipment so that owners can't see what they're doing or modify them. That's to prevent device owners from reconfiguring their property to do forbidden things ("save to disk"), or ignore mandatory things ("check for regions").

Adding DRM to the HTML standard will have far-reaching effects that are incompatible with the W3C's most important policies, and with Berners-Lee's deeply held principles.

For example, the W3C has led the world's standards bodies in insisting that its standards are not encumbered by patents. Where W3C members hold patents that cover some part of a standard, they must promise to license them to all comers without burdensome conditions. But DRM requires patents or other licensable elements, for the sole purpose of adding burdensome conditions to browsers.

The first of these conditions – "robustness" against end-user modification – is a blanket ban on all free/open source software (free/open source software, by definition, can be modified by its users). That means that the two most popular browser technologies on the Web – WebKit (used in Chrome and Safari) and Gecko (used in Firefox and related browsers) – would be legally prohibited from implementing whatever "standard" the W3C emerges.

Copy catch

What's more, DRM is wholly ineffective at preventing copying. I suspect Berners-Lee knows this. When geeks downplay fears over DRM, they often say things like: "Well, I can get around it, and anyway, they'll come to their senses soon enough, since it doesn't work, right?" Whenever Berners-Lee tells the story of the Web's inception, he stresses that he was able to invent the Web without getting any permission. He uses this as a parable to explain the importance of an open and neutral Internet. But what he fails to understand is that DRM's entire purpose is to require permission to innovate.

For limiting copying is only the superficial reason for adding DRM to a technology. DRM fails completely at preventing copying, but it is brilliant at preventing innovation. That's because DRM is backstopped by anti-circumvention laws like the notorious US Digital Millennium
Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) and the EU Copyright Directive of 2002 (EUCD), both of which make it a crime to compromise DRM, even if you're not breaking any other laws. Effectively, this means that you have to get permission from a DRM licensing authority to add any features, since all new features require removing DRM, and the DRM license terms prohibit adding any features not in the original agreement, and omitting any of the mandatory restrictions featured in that agreement.

Compare DVDs to CDs. CDs had no DRM, so it was legal to invent technologies like the iPod and iTunes, which ripped, transcoded and copied music for personal uses. DVDs featured DRM, so it was illegal to add any features to them, and in the nearly 20 years since they were introduced, no legal technologies have been introduced to the market that do what iTunes and the iPod did in 2001. One company tried to ship a primitive DVD hard-drive jukebox and got sued out of that line of business. 20 years of DVDs, zero innovations. Now, DRM has not stopped people from making illegal copies of DVDs (obviously!), but it has entirely prevented any innovative legal products from entering the market for two decades, with no end in sight.

Penny pinching

This is the regime that the W3C stands to add to the Web, and that Berners-Lee has endorsed with his remarks. A regime where every improvement is seen as an opportunity to erect a toll booth. A Web built on the urinary tract infection business model: rather than getting your innovation in a healthy gush, every new feature must come in a painfully squeezed dribble, a few pennies if you want to link in directly to a specific timecode on the video; a few pennies more if you want to embed a link from the video to a web page, more if you want to move a video to another device or timeshift it, and so on.

As the leading standards-setting body for the Web, the W3C has an enormous, sacred and significant trust. The future of the Web is the future of the world, because everything we do today involves the net and everything we'll do tomorrow will require it. Now it proposes to sell out that trust, on the grounds that Big Content will lock up its "content" in Flash if it doesn't get a veto over Web-innovation. That threat is a familiar one: the big studios promised to boycott US digital TV unless it got mandatory DRM. The US courts denied them this boon, and yet, digital TV continues (if only Ofcom and the BBC had heeded this example before they sold Britain out to the US studios on our own high-def digital TV standards).

Flash is already an also-ran. As Berners-Lee himself will tell you, the presence of open platforms where innovation requires no permission is the best way to entice the world to your door. The open Web creates and supplies so much value that everyone has come to it – leaving behind the controlled, Flash-like environs of AOL and other failed systems. The big studios need the Web more than the Web needs big studios.

The W3C has a duty to send the DRM-peddlers packing, just as the US courts did in the case of digital TV. There is no market for DRM, no public purpose served by granting a veto to unaccountable, shortsighted media giants who dream of a world where your mouse rings a cash-register with every click and disruption is something that happens to other people, not them.

De verkoop van Android-tablets zal dit jaar groter zijn dan die van de iPad van Apple. Dat zegt onderzoeksbureau IDC.

IDC verwacht dat er dit jaar 191 miljoen tabletcomputers verkocht worden. Daarvan zal 46 procent een iPad of iPad mini zijn en 48,8 procent tablets met het besturingssysteem Android van Google. Android-tablets worden gemaakt door verschillende fabrikanten, zoals Samsung, Asus en Amazon.

Populariteit

Vorig jaar had Apple met zijn tablets een marktaandeel van 51 procent en Android 42 procent.

De helft van de apparaten die dit kwartaal worden verkocht, hebben een klein formaat, zegt IDC. De schermen van de mini's zijn kleiner dan 8 inch (20 cm). Gebruikers vinden deze uitvoeringen vaak handiger.

Het onderzoeksbureau verwacht dat het marktaandeel van zowel Apple als Android de komende jaren iets zal zakken door de opkomst van Windows-tablets. IDC denkt dat deze apparaten niet verder komen dan een marktaandeel van 7,4 procent in 2017.

Een filiaal van McDonalds in Winterswijk is vanavond even gesloten geweest vanwege een dreiging met antrax. Een vrouw meldde zich aan de balie van de McDonalds met een briefje waarin stond dat zij besmet was met miltvuur.

Het personeel nam de dreiging serieus en belde de politie. Agenten konden de vrouw aanhouden. Een woordvoerder zegt dat de vrouw, van een jaar of zestig, een verwarde indruk maakte.

Het pand van de McDonalds in Winterswijk is weer vrijgegeven. Bezoekers en personeel hebben volgens de politie geen gevaar gelopen.

De presidentsverkiezingen in Kenia zijn toch weer gewelddadig verlopen. In de kuststrook pleegden gewapende rebellen aanslagen op politiebureaus, waarbij 19 mensen om het leven kwamen. De rebellen willen van het gebied langs de kust een eigen land maken.

In Garissa, bij de grens met Somalië, bestormden gewapende mannen twee stembureaus en namen die in. Of ze mensen hebben gegijzeld is onduidelijk, maar ze hebben wel alle stembiljetten in handen.

Lange rijen

Overal in Kenia stonden lange rijen bij de stembureaus. De stemlokalen zijn later gesloten om iedereen te kunnen laten stemmen. Inmiddels worden de stemmen geteld.

Het is voor het eerst dat de Kenianen weer een president kunnen kiezen sinds de verkiezingen van december 2007, die uitmondden in een gewelddadige strijd tussen de aanhangers van de winnaar en de verliezer.

De huidige presidentskandidaten, premier Odinga en vicepremier Kenyatta, hebben het geweld veroordeeld.