Bruce’s Blog

My friend Allan Engelhardt was featured in a recent piece in Database Marketing magazine. Having spoken to him, it sounds like he’s got some neat technology to help Vodafone and others upsell to people with well timed and relevant offers. It seems to work a treat!

The great value of inbound over outbound, Engelhardt stresses, is that the initiative is coming
from the caller, who as a consequence is in the mood to talk and do business. When intelligently directed, the take-up on offers is inevitably vastly greater than when they are not. “It’s very targeted: you don’t spam people, and you don’t get into a situation of
giving them exactly the same offer every two months:’ he says.

You can download the article from here.

An interesting survey on the European Cup, UEFA Cup and other aspects of European Football

http://www.uefa.com/uefa/Survey/index.htmx

Some links to entries I’ve seen recently;

Passion, People and Principles
Looks at consultancy and finding the right level of insight and analysis that clients will (hopefully) get (or not!)

Scrapping the annual budget
Some ideas and success stories around moving to quarterly planning and budgetting cycles, as opposed to the traditional annual budget

Salary Compression
Ideas for new forms of remuneration and recent competitive pressures in various labour markets

Some amazing pictures from Ros Cannell. Here’s a sample but do visit her Flickr page

A very moving post by Lisa Haneberg. My deepest sympathies are with her and I sincerely recommend reading her thoughts…

Life is Short

David Maister highlighted a piece from the Economist in which the forumla for Goldman Sachs success comes from their ability to recognise and act on the fact that team work, values and related intangibles are very hard to do but do drive success

Goldman does not preach different philosophies than most other businesss would preach - commitments to client servoice, teamwork, being a place for the best and the brightest -it just has THE DISCIPLINE and the COURAGE to achieve consistently higher standards on those principles, with fewer compromises.

I wonder how many people would see Goldman, or their own organisation in such a light, or even if Goldman do?

Rob captures the essence of many, many business books

If you have read this blog for a while, you have probably heard me mention that I read business books primarily for the small kernel of truth you find inside. I have about 15-20 books that I think are excellent, and another 20 that are pretty good overall. The rest are like “One Minute Manager” or “Good to Great,” they have a few things worth pulling out of them but people treat them as business gospel when at best they are mediocre half truths.

This is another attempt at blogging I think this this the third time I have blogged. Originally I used Bloxsom and then I used Wordpress 1.2. This is now version 2.02, so we’ll see how well I get on this time!