It has been a super-busy month. My ideas-file is filling up with stuff waiting to make it onto this blog. Oh well, such is life. More thoughts and posts are coming when I get to them. Promise.

Here’s a question for you: would you like to see (selected) blog posts in Mandarin?

I notice that quite a few of you are reading this blog from …

When a sandwich de-sandwiches itself on contact, is it still a sandwich?

I am not at all adverse to generous sandwich fillings. But when it no longer holds together, when you can no longer hold it without it spilling its guts, when you cannot cut into it without extruding all the filling, the whole affair becomes a usability problem.

And it is also false advertising to boot. I contend …

People working finance get to hang out and live in palatial glass towers.

Artists, musicians, and creative types work and live in hovels.

The in-between people – marketing departments and advertising – lived in palatial converted warehouses.

(I have no idea where this leads to. Please share your thoughts.)

… about living life with more enjoyment and less pain.

Quote from a TED Talk by John Maeda: Simplicity patterns. Worth listening to.

Thanks to Jany Chau for the link.

I had a council rubbish collection day last month. I threw out two PCs, a pile of SCSI storage devices and a scanner (leftovers from my mi$$pent Apple days).

I almost threw out my 100Mb ZIP drive. But at the last minute decided to see if it will work with my current Thinkpad (via an Adaptec SCSI PCMCIA card). It did, and I spent the next …

I am sitting in a cafe in the middle of Singapore, catching up on emails and writing. SingTel provides free wifi city-wide. And people do use it. About 25% of the patrons of this cafe are currently on their laptops. And they seemto hang around and buy drinks, as I am doing.

But Sydney can’t get its act together. Too hard, too expensive, says the state government. …

I have been travelling around China for the past 10 days or so with friends. Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjing – the three largest cities in China.

Today is the first opportunity I had to be by myself for a few hours. Not walking around looking at things, not engaging with my friends or the locals, not seeing something amazing, or eating great food.

I realised that it has been a …

[Written on 8 April]

I am writing this from the top deck of Singapore Airline’s A380 on my way from Sydney to Singapore. It has been an extremely busy few weeks since Easter, hence the sporadic blog posts. I shall attempt to catch up over the next four weeks.

My plan is to spend some time in Singapore talking business with associates and friends. Plus a couple of weeks getting …

As businesses develop and grow (and I mean this in the larger sense beyond simply size and profits) over time, their strategic needs change. This is a rough diagram that sums up my thinking thus far on the matter. Click on the image to get a PDF version where you can actually read the text.

I am using this to clarify (for myself) how …

My friend Christina Jayne Duncan said in an email:

“The heart core of the issue is the only way!”

“Heart core” immediately made me think of “hard core” (mind out of the gutter please, just for the duration of this post).

So much of the conventional business world is about the hard core stuff – we are business MEN and must therefore must only make hard core MANLY “rational” decisions; we …