One of the things I learned a long time ago is to celebrate every single success. No matter how small the step, it’s one more step towards your objective. An example: Tonight I decided to run a 10k – spontaneously, just for fun, unintended. I had originally planned this milestone event for September, but I have some very good excuses for the delay. And despite the lack of training I thought tonight would be a good night and Sao Paulo is an attractive venue anyway. So what the heck.

Some 40 minutes later I was a bit disappointed at first, but while thinking about the result the analytic brains came to rescue. Compared to my last 10k,

• My time increased by a little less than 40%,
• My weight increased by nearly 75%,
• My age increased by 175%.

So taking these environmental conditions into account I feel I’ve achieved a terrific result. Actually I think I’ve done much better than last time. I’m also sure to be able to improve the result – was too dehydrated today. Though not sure if I’ll ever get to the sub-30 again, we’ll see.

But my key message here is about motivation: Nobody asked me to do this, there’s no incentive for doing it, and no reward for the result. It’s just me, wanting to do it. Or, as Ayrton Senna had conveyed it 1988: Success, it’s a mind game.

Maybe I’m really starting to get old now ….

“The biggest risk is the question you forgot to ask, because the danger is always something you don’t know.” (Wilbur Ross)

Having all the answers definitely doesn’t mean that you understand the subject matter. It only means that you haven’t been looking hard enough for people asking the right questions. Try again, fail better.

“This country doesn’t avoid problems. It solves them.” (Warren Buffett)

Sure, you have to pick your fights,but you also have to know what you stand for. And instead of looking backwards, and grieve, it seems to make much more sense ‘to boldly go where no one has gone before’.

“If you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman.” (The Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, a.k.a. TINA)

Being in business since three decades for getting things done I think I should have a word with The Right Honoureable. But the fact that I hesitate to gout on a limb does not prove her wrong. Especially not when observing the typical American loudmouth sales executive in action. By and large her point is well taken.

“Great feedback from the sales force on loss reports: We don’t suffer any losses. We only see postponed wins, or disengaged opportunities.” (Jeffrey Kahn).

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.” (Douglas Adams)

"There's one thing you're expected to do when you're in command: Command."(Admiral Chester Nimitz's advice to Admiral William Halsey) Had to think a lot about this quote when a friend provided me with feedback on my directs: "These are the people you want go to war with ..." Problem is that I am at war, since several years. Maybe I should demote myself, to Rear Admiral. "The horror. The horror." (Captain Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness)

“Market risk can hurt you, but liquidity risk can kill you.” (Rob Goldstein, BlackRock Solutions)

"Ale to the Chief" (Offshore Ale in Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard, today) I love America's spirit :-) "Live is simple. Sleep. Eat. Have fun." (On a t-shirt in my gym, yesterday). Yeah, as long as one doesn't deal with humans, or other strangely behaving alien creatures. Hale to the Master Chief.

Enlightening

 

Just noticed a cool new enhancement in Bing, when looking-up a company – check-out the screen shot below: I didn’t even search yet, I had just started entering the search term in IE8’s little helper field, when the company’s stock price popped-up. Pretty cool.

A few years ago my employer was heavily focusing on efficacy. I was struggling with that term back then, and at the same time had some bad feeling about this in my gut. But I never was ready to dig deeper for understanding why I was feeling bad about it. Until today, triggered by a piece in Fortune (“The Best Advice I ever Got” – Fortune, Vol. 160, July 2009). I thinks it’s a semantic flaw. Decades ago I was teached economic principles: Minimize resource consumption for achieving a given target, or achieve maximum results by utilizing the resources you’re given. Try to combine the two, minimizing resources and maximizing output at the same time for positioning yourself as a professional stupid – highly paid, admittedly.

Efficacy doesn’t take resource consumption into account. Increasing the efficacy of marketing campaigns is a good thing to do. But at the same time, somebody should monitor the cost related to such action. And that’s why I prefer “effectiveness” over “efficacy”. Yes, you should improve the efficacy of your action, but within the constraint that the resources you may invest are limited. Get the best bang for the buck.

Here’s the quote from Scott Sorbas, starting with the advice he had received early in his career, and to which I’m wholeheartedly subscribing to:

“’My advice to you is that you always serve the  best interest of your client. An industry will change in response to you, but it won’t do it willingly.’ ... If you’re really effective at what you do, 95% of the things said about you will be negative. Keep your head on straight, don’t get emotional, take the heat, and just make sure your clients are smiling.”

If you want to lead, you’ll need to accept this. Trust me: it’s true, and it’s going to be tough. Leadership is not a team sport.

"It's good to continue doing what you're doing. Buth there will be a time when you need to do what you want to do." (Dennis Quaid in 'The Rookie')

Happy 233rd anniversary. This document, not unanimously  approved by only nine of George III colonies, marks a milestone in modern history. The authoring group that supported Thomas Jefferson, mainly John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman, laid the foundation of what we know today as the U.S.A. The formal acceptance of this declaration by the continental congress, on July 4th, 1776, was later confirmed by the representatives of all thirteen colonies, starting with the signature of Massachusetts representative and congress president John Hancock. It redirected the trajectory of modern history.

Also good to see that New York, which originally abstained the declaration, now makes its French gift available to the public again today, thus renewing its endorsement of the declaration.

Earlier this week I had a nice conversation with some friends about the influence of different early American presidents (comparing Washington, Jefferson, Frankling and Lincoln), now I’m looking forward to visit Philadelphia to dig deeper into the archives. And I’m wondering how many millennia it will take Germany to expose – and embrace - its thousands of years of history before 1945.

RIP. Although I’m sure the digital natives don’t care much about the demise of this palaeo IT  service provider. “Compuwhat…”, as one of the commentaries stated.

Oh well, as somebody who has an 1200 bd acoustic coupler in his private museum, I shouldn’t throw any stones in the glass house: I didn’t even know that AOL still operates any of this stuff.

Compuserve shuts down - Boing Boing

Today my attention was caught by one of the most emotional obituaries I’ve ever read. Too bad if German is not your mother tongue because it’ll be unlikely that you’ll be able to capture the beauty of this announcement which was published in the ZEIT on June 18th.

Friederike-Maria Grashey died. So who was the fine lady? No idea. You’ll not find any traces of her in the cloud. Not in Bing, not in Google, not in Spezify, not in Yasni, not in Answers. She simply doesn’t exist in the virtual world.

And yet, she obviously not only existed in the real world but also had some impact on German history. I wonder if Tom Cruise ever heard of her while preparing for “Valkyrie”. The absence of information is even more astonishingly given the fact that there are nearly no digital traces to her husband, General Major Grashey, who was a former inspector general of the German Army (Bundeswehr). In the US, with that background, she certainly would have made the evening news.

The way I see it: This is just another example confirming the unreliability of digital information. Deep search? Forget it. Replacing human intellect with crawling agents? A joke. Semantic web? You’re kidding me. Trusting IT more than people was the root cause for the US’ second war with Iraq – they didn’t have any field agents, and technical intelligence was the only available alternative. That does not make any sense to me.

The good part of this story: Accidentally, when researching the lady, I found one of my older publications - also not visible in the mainstream net - which I had completely forgotten about. A funny coincidence.

To further stress my key point here: If you want reliable information, what exactly are you looking for? How trustworthy are your sources? How are you going to handle the issue of un-surfaced data? In ancient times we paid journalists for doing all this work, answering (most of) these questions. Michael Shermer had a good blog post and video about this issue: The Baloney Detection Kit.

Believing that the Internet is, or could be, a reliable source of information seems to be a stupid assumption in this context.

Here’s another example, published right aside above announcement: On June 19th, the public became aware of the death of Lord Ralf Dahrendorf (at least some people in Europe know who he was). But who was Ingo Dahrendorf? The WDR’s (one of the most important German radio and tv stations) former technical director the had died June 13th. Was he somehow related to Ralf?

I don’t know. Go figure out yourself. And then tell me about your experiences.

“You can always do what you should do if you’re willing to put in the time and energy to develop a new set of skills. If you only extend into places where your skill sets serve you, your skills will become outmoded.” (Jeff Bezos, Amazon)

Good advice. I wonder why so few people take it seriously and consequently accept responsibility for their own destiny. A few weeks ago I had blogged about a similar quote in a different context: “Sharks must move forward, or they’ll die”. Or, as Plato interpreted Heraclitus: “πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει”. People who assert that they do understand, but don’t walk as they talk, are a boring disappointment. One has to leave his comfort zone to grow, has to aspire to fail for being able to gain experience, has to act for being able to live.

“The Reader” is a good fit to this line of thought.

 

Rosenfest in Tübingen

Chrissy on Florida …

Had an interesting conversation with Christian Klein today. My opening question was: Where are diamond prices heading, according to WSJ they dropped significantly, so what’s happening on the market? His response was as expected: Price for top quality slightly increased, and will further increase in the near future, while mass market merchandise dropped significantly. A snap shot of the market: 1 ct top quality is 10k EUR, whereas similar merchandise from India is traded at 1.5k EUR, if at all. Larger top quality stones, 2ct and above, are currently not available on the market.

Christian also provided a solid analysis explaining this situation: The majority of mass market producers is operating with excessive capital leverage, and in order to serve their investors they need to sell at any price. Unfortunately demand has faltered, due to the impact of the worldwide economic conditions on consumer demand. Guess what happens when you map overcapacity with dropping demand? A side effect is that the producers stopped buying raw diamonds, and consequently mines were closed. But the closure of mines also caused a reduction of supply of high-quality raw diamonds. And guess what happens when you shorten supply while demand is stable? As a comparison: You may have lost up to 50% in the stock market, with your housing investments, or through “absolutely safe” bonds – and at the same time investors in diamonds gained 5% to 10%.  Not a bad deal.

But if you’re familiar with this market you know that there’s an underlying issue (actually more than one, but I’ll focus on the economical aspects): DeBeers has lost its monopoly. And they no longer make the market, determine the price. And because of their reduced influence, they also stopped investing into the marketing activities necessary for making the market. Why should they, if 50% of the market (their competitors) would benefit from their investment without them having a chance of any return? So they withdrew.

Now you have a complete disaster at the lower end of the market, and at the same time significant ROI on the upper side. And who’s educating prospects, potential buyers, investors? The media. Clueless. Without the background information necessary to understand this complex market.

We also discussed the question why the retail channel (jewelers) don’t step up. Simple answer: As long as they sell something they don’t care. Christian confirmed that his company receives a lot of complaints from end-user customers (with whom his company does not deal at all) about the lack of consulting when it comes to protecting their investment into diamonds. Once again, it’s information (knowledge) which determines success or failure.

This was a tremendous learning experience for me: Sometimes it’s useful to maintain a market ‘protected’. A monopoly sometimes does not only serve the interests of a single stake holder, but most of the time also serves the interest of a broader eco system. If the protection mechanism is removed, the whole eco system is at stake. And in tough economic times, as today, the whole market may be completely destroyed. Experts predict that most mid- and low-market producers will be wiped-out in the near future, that their retail channel will cease to exist, and that their financing banks will go belly-up. Does that sound familiar? I think it’s a good time for buying diamonds – no compromises 4C top quality.