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Computer Weekly published a very interesting article this week: “PAC reveals its exasperation at endless public IT failures.” There is a copy here.

If you worry that your cv is just a jumble of words that no-one can make sense of, take a look at this.

If you are interested in trying this yourself. Paste your CV into the window on http://www.wordle.net/create and press go.

There are some phrases that have almost become business clichés  to a point where they lose any agreed meaning. In this context “Change” is right up there alongside “Rightsizing” and “Business Process Re-engineering”. An ex colleague of mine put together a bit of a rant about change (and using Dilbert  cartoons in presentations) challenging the need for change managers.

Choosing a systems implementer is often not a straightforward decision. You are entrusting your organisation to another company with at best conflicting objectives and at worst a strategy that is the polar opposite of yours. Potentially your people will be impacted, your processes changed and your ability to keep doing business challenged.

Growing companies suffer from growing pains, just like children. There is a point in the lifecycle of most companies where the goals go from being simple personally orientated, e .g. “to not be poor”, or “to be able to retire at 45” to being team orientated e.g. “biggest supplier of plumbing equipment in the Swindon area”, or “increase number of customers by 50% each year”.

There is almost as much rubbish talked about goal setting as there is about wine, and as with a bad wine the urge to spit inevitably follows many company planning sessions. Take this quote for instance.

Research in the August 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review revealed that businesses average only 63% of the results they target in their strategies.

Every sales and marketing course I have ever taken has the phrase “People buy from people” somewhere in the first 15 minutes. Which explain the runaway success of Amazon, Ebay and Waterstones online to name but three. The phrase is utterly and completely wrong. People only buy from people once they have exhausted every other avenue of avoiding face to face contact. As a sweeping generalisation businesses often prefer to deploy disinterested, slovenly, poor communicators as their public facing representative so the success of the online world isn’t surprising.