Employers always say they want employees who are bold, creative, self-directed, take initiative, and aren’t afraid to speak up. But what they really want are worker droids. Read more about this and other Top Management Lies, thanks to Kathy Sierra.
Disturbing the Store
My vote for “Prank of the Month” (well, last month) goes to the New York-based Improv Everywhere crew for flooding a Best Buy department store with around 80 people dressed almost like their staff.
The full report on this prank shows how the store management couldn’t cope — they didn’t like it, and people get nervous when confronted with something “different”.
It’s also interesting reading the comments on Bruce Schneier’s write-up of this event, where so many commenters fail to see the difference between a “threat to the store” and a “threat to the perceived authority of the store managers”.
Podcasting Conversation
For some reason I’m having a conversation about the evolution of podcasting in Zhasper’s blog.
I look like David Trimble
Apparently I look like David Trimble (pictured right), the Northern Ireland politician and joint winner of the 1998 Nobel Peace prize. Well, 67% like him anyway, according to face recognition website MyHeritage.com.
Here’s the deal. You give them your photo, they match it against their database of celebrities and pick the closest. And in return, they get to test their face recognition software — and along the way build up a database of over a million faces (so far) matched to names and email addresses and family connections. Neat eh?
A not a single privacy concern, not one. Because their privacy policy includes the magic words saying that they’re firmly committed to protecting your privacy. So it must be true.
I also look 61% like actor Anthony Hopkins, 56% like American poet Ezra Pound, and 55% like actors Annette Bening (should I frock up now?) and Hugh Grant (should he frock up now?).
And 53% like Boris Karloff, which doesn’t thrill me at all.
Easter Requires Permission
I’ll post the explanation of this photograph at the end of Easter. Meanwhile, just think about the implications.
The Long Tail of Small Business
Whenever we see “business” depicted on the news, we see images of office buildings, factories, coal mines… And yet of the 3 million active registered businesses in Australia, fully 72 percent don’t have any employees.
The median business is actually a single man or woman — likely to be a sole trader because sole traders are the most common form of businesses (39%), followed by proprietary limited companies (26%).