Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Leadership in the corporation

Anyone who has ever worked in a large corporation will recognise the familiar themes portrayed by Dilbert. Each character is recognisable to me for sure. I often think my approach to life it far to pragmatic for a large corporation - not too good at all the bull shit, perhaps one of the reasons why I left to join a smaller company.

One of the people that inspired me to make that move was John Peck. John is extraordinary. John is an outstanding exeutive coach, mentor, adventurer and motivational speaker amongst other things. Not many people have rowed accross the atlantic - John is one of them and he did it at the ripe old age of 59 after decades of outstanding personal and professional achievements.

My advice: If you company has too much Dilbert then it needs more JP to help straighten out the mess. Head on over to http://www.john-peck.com/ for the lowdown.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

WiFi - where will it all end

I want my bandwidth

In a previous life I worked for one of the world's largest telecoms companies, forever referred to as 'Telecom X'. It was while in one of the various roles I had there that I became involved in the wonderful world of WiFi hotspots. It was seen as a great idea by a few of the grand fromage of Telecom X and would be a key revenue opportunity and take the brand into new and exciting places etc. etc. There were a few dissenting voices naturally, along the lines of 'WiFi is crap' and 'WiFi is insecure but the power of corporate ego drove it through and today its one of the many internationally recognised WiFi hotspot services, available to anyone with a bit of cash and laptop. Great, wonderful, everyone is happy right? Well no, not happy actually.

You see there is a growing view among the bandwidth consumers of the world that WiFi should essentially be free - or at last free at the point of delivery. Exhibit 1 is Fon www.fon.com, the self proclaimed 'largest community WiFi network in the world' A grand title to be sure, interestingly its backed by some of the best known names of the Internet age, Skype and Google among them.

At my local pub you can get free WiFi with your burger and pint of beer, walk around any major city in the world and the public at large often have open networks just waiting for people to make better use of - how very kind of them but its sporadic at best, unreliable and the experience is inconsistent.

Naive consumers and generous landlords aside, why has Skype, Google and chums put 30Million USD into giving WiFi away for free to the world? It does not take a genius to see why and if I was Vodafone, T-Mobile, Cingular or any other major mobile operator I would be paying very careful attention to a little startup from Spain with some very ambitious friends.

Free (at the point of delivery) WiFi, free communications. Sign me up.

The Hub.