Steve Shu's Blog
For My Diary: eBay Impairs Its Skype And Pays Founders
Close to two years ago eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion. Today I read the news that the synergies are not playing out (surprise, surprise) and eBay will take charges of $1.4 billion, most of which is attributed to the acquisition writedown. From Bloomberg.com:
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Delaying Decisions As Opposed To Being Indecisive
My family's vacation was marked by an incident that led to my first 911 call in my life. I have reflected upon this incident for many days with a mixture of thankfulness for the safety of my family (and others on the boat) and personal anguish that I could not have done more.
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For My Blog Diary: Whirlwind Notes On Blogs In 2007
For a snapshot of what I am sensing in 2007:
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University of Chicago MBA Applicants Must Submit Powerpoint Charts
From an article at OrlandoSentinel.com:
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McKinsey Says Companies Are Wary Of Web 2.0
See the article over at BusinessWeek. Hat tip to Steve Rubel who comments, "The enterprise is afraid of letting go of the command and control structure."
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An Illustration Of Where Clients Look To Management Consultants For Value-Add: Quantitative Analysis and Polish
I've seen a number of posts around the internet that question the value of management consultants and really beg the question of in what situations can consultants add value better than managers within a company. Rather than answer that broad question, I thought that I would take an opportunity to illustrate an area where I have seen a lot of clients get value and where they would have struggled to structure the analysis given the resources they had available. The gap area is quantitative analysis.
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Article On Wealth, Income, and IQ
Folks may have seen this already, but I saw this article in The Times while on assignment in London last week. My very loose takeaways at the time were that that IQ and income are somewhat correlated but that IQ and wealth are not (may need to check out links below and trace academic paper[s] to find the precise statistical findings). Also interesting was this piece of text from The Times article:
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On "Busyness" In An Increasingly Global And Technology-Oriented World
It's results that matter - not activities.
That statement encapsulates a "widely-held" management perspective that managers should evaluate workers based on the effectiveness of output produced and not by how much they are working. But is it such a widely-held belief? Dr. Andrew McAfee writes in an older post (and in the context of E2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, etc.):
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Professional Services and Consulting Sales
Ford Harding has some of the best sales books I have ever seen for those in professional services and consulting. I find that many other books in the marketplace focus either too much on product-oriented businesses or sales attitude to the exclusion of understanding why certain sales and marketing processes work for some business situations but not for others.
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Thoughts On Job Changes And Job Interviews
There are many variations on interviewing people, but practically across all methods I have used whether case study or more traditional "walk me through your resume" style, I find myself examining two areas very closely. I don't know if they match up with other interviewers' experiences, but in any case here are the two areas:
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