Oct

31

Corporate America vs Entrepreneurship

Filed Under Career | Leave a Comment

I came across this article, Why do you work so hard?, from SFGate.com. The article is targeted toward anyone who is over-worked in their corporate job and questioning why and how that happened to them. Why are they in a job with excessive hours and workload? Why are they stuck with in unsatisfactory career which is causing negative effects on their personal life?

This article forces you to think about your career and what you are willing to sacrifice if any changes need to be made. How do you come to that decision to make a drastic career change? It depends how bad your current situation is. Certain types of commitments obviously make it harder and riskier for someone to make any sudden career changes. Here is some good advice from the article:

It is not for everyone. It implies incredibly difficult choices and arranging your life in certain ways and giving up certain luxuries and many, many people seemed locked down and immovable and all done with exploring new options in life, far too deeply entrenched in debts and family obligations and work to ever see such unique light again. Maybe you know such people. Maybe you are such people.

But sometimes people do take those risks and suffer the career loses for the greater good of their personal life.

Not long ago, the CEO of one of the largest and most powerful international real estate firms in the nation quit his job. Stepped down. Not, as you might imagine, for retirement and not to play more golf and not to travel the world staying only in Four Seasons suites, but to work on rebuilding his relationship with his estranged wife.

The way we think about our careers needs to change. Entrepreneurship is not taught enough in today’s society therefore many people don’t know what their other options are besides Corporate America.

We always think such lives are for others and never for ourselves, something people with huge chunks of cash reserves or huge hunks of time or huge gobs of wildly ambitious talent can do. It is never for us. And truly, this mind-set is the national plague, a fate worse than death.

Because of this, very few people break from the norm and go on to do great things in business. We need to learn from the people that do and keep educating ourselves to make better career choices.

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Oct

28

Incongruities in Business

Filed Under Innovation | 2 Comments

In Peter Drucker’s book “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”, Chapter 4 is dedicated to incongruities. He defines an incongruity as a discrepancy, a dissonance, between what is and what “ought” to be, or between what is and what everybody assumes it to be. In regards to business, an incongruity is a symptom of an opportunity to innovate.

In the book, he goes on to provide some good examples of incongruities in business and how they were resolved. He ends the Chapter by stating:

The incongruity within a process, its rhythm or its logic, is not a very subtle matter. Users (or customers) are always aware of it. What is lacking, however is someone willing to listen, somebody who takes it seriously what everyone proclaims: That the purpose of a product or a service is to satisfy the customer. If this axiom is accepted and acted upon, using incongruity as an opportunity for innovation becomes fairly easy-and highly effective.

The only limitation is most incongruities are identifiable to people only on the inside of a certain industry or service, and someone on the outside will not even be aware of it. It is up to an entrepreneur to identify it and take action in coming up with a solution to exploit the incongruity.

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Oct

27

Leopard missing hard drive bug

Filed Under Apple | 4 Comments

Many people (including myself) may have panicked a little when Leopard did not recognize their internal hard drive. It will, however, locate an external hard drive if you have one connected. There should be no reason to use disk utility or resort to a clean install if this happens to you.

After doing some research on the Apple support forums, I found a simple suggestion and solution in this discussion: just wait. It took my computer a few minutes before my hard drive appeared grayed out and then a minute later I was able to select it. Other people have reported it took up to 15 minutes for their hard drive to appear. It should not make any difference whether you have Disk Utility open or not.

Forum member ‘fancontrol’ explains what is most likely happening:

When Leopard checks for available installation volumes it does a quick check to find out if the file system is dirty/clean. If the file system is dirty than Leopard does a full file system-check on that volume. This process is running in the background and makes the volume disappear. The file system check can take up to 20 minutes depending on the size, speed and number of files on your drive. Once the file system check is finished, the volume should reappear. As it turns out the file system check on Leopard works different than on Tiger.

Apple should really have included a progress bar when the check is running (rather than doing it in the background) and letting the user know what is going on.

I definitely agree, a progress bar would have been smart. My total install took over an hour and went very smooth otherwise. I did the default upgrade and everything was exactly as I had left it in Tiger which was very comforting.

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