Posts filed under 'News'

The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives

… nice article forwarded via LinkedIn. See http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/02/the-seven-habits-of-spectacularly-unsuccessful-executives/.

By referring to research done by Prof. Sydney Finkelstein, Eric Jackson argues for the following seven habits that CEOs of unsuccessful companies did have

  1. Habit # 1: They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment: “Pride will have a fall”, one could say.
  2. Habit #2: They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests: this one is interesting, as one would have expected that the more one identifies with one’s company, the better it is. The danger apparently is that a “private empire” mentality may take place.
  3. Habit #3: They think they have all the answers: the danger here IMHO is more obvious: one would not listen to other opinions or perspectives.
  4. Habit #4: They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them: you loose excellent people in your team …
  5. Habit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image … and focus too much on the media.
  6. Habit #6: They underestimate obstacles: that is an interesting one again. Because, if you are too cautious or cowardly that’s no good either …
  7. Habit #7: They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past: this may be a classic …

IMHO the difficulty with all of these it that to some degree we want CEOs to have these habits. The tricky thing is to have sufficient but not to much of these properties. The question is how to measure …

Add comment January 6th, 2012

Some figures and realtime displays on the world’s population: we are 7 Billion people!

By the end of October 2011, the earth’s population was estimated to reach 7 Billion people. There were some amazing data and figures communicated with this – artificial – border that had been passed:

  • per second, there is an increase by 2.5 people, that is 150 per minute, 9.000 per hour and 216 every day – the error-rate is apparently up to 5 %
  • there is quite a number of countries/areas where there exists no official statistics. So areas are being flown over with airplanes and estimates are made; or, from the number of cattle, the number of people in a certain area is inferred.

And I came across two pretty nice live counters/tools:
One is a live counter available at http://www.umrechnung.org/weltbevoelkerung-aktuelle-momentane/weltbevoelkerungs-zaehler.htm:

live counter of the world's population.

The other one is breathingearth.net:

Breathing-earth

and a truly impressive animation!

Add comment November 2nd, 2011

FYI: New Booklet on the “Geoweb”

Karl Rehrl and myself have edited an issue in HMD – Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik on Geoweb.

So what is this issue about? Increasingly, we are using the Web to answer questions about the “where”: where is the nearest pub? And what’s the shortest path to it? What activities can I do at my holiday location? These and many other location-based issues are addressed by state-of-the-art Web applications. And this special issue of HMD tells you how to engineer Geoweb applications.

Add comment January 31st, 2011

German Encyclopedia on Information Systems

The 2nd edition of Oldenbourg’s Oldenbourg Verlag has been published (it is German only).

Good overview, very much from an information systems’ perspective (and not so much from a computer science point of view. Anyway, well done …

Add comment February 23rd, 2009

Salzburg Research passes ISO 9001:2000 audit

ISO 9001:2000 is an international standard that has its origins in assessing suppliers for technical systems. Salzburg Research today successfully passed the audit (by TÜV Österreich). 

I believe that the following three main points argue for a quality management system:

  1. With a QM-System you define rules about processes and interactions; also, these rules are the same throughout the organisation
  2. Knowledge is embedded within an organisation (we all know that this is only possible to a limited degree, but anyway)
  3. Finally, it is a documentation to the outside world (both customers as well as owner) that Salzburg Research is standing for quality 

On the negative side there is – obviously – some overhead in necessary documentation and also, you may loose some degrees of freedom/individuality.

3 comments December 2nd, 2008

Lange Nacht der Forschung – Researchers’ Night 2008

Lange Nacht der ForschungBeginning with sunset (16:39) and lasting until midnight, the researchers’ night 2008 took place, also at Salzburg Research. All over Austria some 240.000 people participated (Der Standard, Salzburger Nachrichten, Landeskorrespondenz).

At Salzburg Research we had an immense amount of people coming to see some applications of our research work (tagIT – a Geo-tagging application; tourguide – a project about pedestrian navigation; a traffic control centre; and finally, a project showing the use of sensors using SunSPOTs). The response was truly positive!

Most amazing to me was that even at 11:30pm we had people coming and wanting to see our demos. We do not expect such a huge interest (overall there were some 300+ unique visitors).

Pictures are available here:

2 comments November 9th, 2008

Digital Leben

… a new Series by logo from ORF Ö1ORF Ö1 Radio from Monday to Thursday about living in a digital world. Very practical discussion, e.g. about storing/backing up your data (photos from the last holidays), about security, eSport, social networking, etc. …

Available as PodCast on http://oe1.orf.at/podcast/ – highly recommended. I am looking forward to podcasts on navigating, finding the closest (and cleanest) loo (e.g. www.mizpee.eu), rules for filtering e-mails (and how to practically deal with huge amounts of information in general), being locked in in your e-car, …

Add comment September 2nd, 2008

Three Years European Charter for Researchers

On March 11, 2005, the European Charter for Researchers has been signed. Three years later, doktorat.at has asked some people about their experiences and/if something has changed.

See http://doktorat.at/Neuigkeiten/3_Jahre_Charta_fuer_Forscher_-_Die_Bilanz.html

  • The science fund, for instance, changed its age limits from biological limits to academic limits, i.e., instead of “not older than 35″ to “PhD plus 10 years of experience”
  • Another important point is a clear structure for (efficient) support of PhD students. I think the ReMeSe Seminar fits into this category.
  • Finally, the commission thinks about a “label” for the Charter. An excellent idea!

Add comment March 18th, 2008

Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

… a special issue of HMD. See HMD special issue cover image on enterprise content management.

ECM can be seen as a technical infrastructure (tools, methods, …) for managing an organisation’s content assets.

2 comments December 28th, 2007

Kaust – King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

KAUST logo

On the homepage it says that KAUST will offer “uncommon freedom for pursuit of scholarship” to lecturers.

Add comment November 19th, 2007

Previous Posts


Tag Cloud

Categories

Calendar

February 2012
M T W T F S S
« Jan    
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
272829