At the start of the last blog I told the joke about the hot air balloonist and his ability to identify the person on the ground as an engineer. There is a second part to that joke. It goes as follows: The person below responded, “You must be in Management.” “I am,” repliedthe balloonist, “but...
Category: Entrepreneurship
The engineer and the balloonist
I always enjoyed the joke about the balloonist who was lost and lowered his balloon to a few feet off of the ground to ask a passer-by where he was. The reply was “Well, you are in a hot air balloon. You are hovering at approximately 30 feet, and you are between 40 – 41...
Can you spot an entrepreneur?
In a recent discussion someone bemoaned the lack of entrepreneurs in Turkey, quoting some mediocre percentage. On further investigation they were basing this on things such as patent registrations and high tech companies. What they appeared to mean was that there were not a plethora of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs! As someone who sees...
What price a Banksie!!
Banksie is, of course, the famous graffiti artist who has spent October as an artist in residence in the USA. He is also the man whose work is reckoned to be worth at least five figures. This week, as part of that residency, he had a stall erected by Central Park that used an old...
Let’s follow the garbage truck!
A story in the newspaper and an incident in town both contributed to my thoughts for this week’s blog. The story in the newspaper related to a mother who advocated starting to build their child’s CV from birth! Thus not only making sure that the child was enrolled for the best school, but also making...
Am I too old to run a business?
I make no secret of the fact that I am past the age of retirement but still working on new projects, writing blogs, proposals and books and continuing to take on speaking engagements. Indeed, my life is now the busiest it has ever been. And yet I am constantly asked either ‘are you retired’ or...
Too much information
I was sitting near to a couple of lifts waiting for my wife and I had the opportunity to observe people using the lifts for quite a time. Now, despite my advancing years, I have been pretty efficient when it comes to operation of the elevator. If I want to go up then I press...
The importance of skills
Recently a number of things have reminded me that we spend a disproportionate mount of time on qualifications and not enough on skills. I was reading an article in which employees were saying how people coming out of university were lacking in the skills they required of new applicants. This is despite 95% of students...
What is wrong with entrepreneurship?
Recently I was preparing a report and I put in it that the local university had 12,000 potential entrepreneurs. When the document was reviewed I was told that it was an arrogant and slightly over the top statement. Quite frankly, given that the report was supposedly on an entrepreneurship project, I was astounded at the...
Disabled or Differently Abled?
This week is United Nations International Day for Disabled Persons and I was busy getting ready to speak at an event on the day. The first thing that struck me was that we still refer to people as disabled because there is something different about them to the accepted norm of a human being. My...