marginally subversive

An Honest Question...

From Inquirer.Net on a Fil-Am winning international jazz competition.

WE’RE glad to hear from The Jazz Society of the Philippines, USA that a Filipino-American, Jon Irabagon, has just won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition.

Jon, said to be the first Filipino to win this competition that is ranked no. 1 in the world in terms of prestige, won a $20,000 scholarship and a record contract with Concord Music Group, one of the leading jazz labels in the US.

Raised in Chicago, Jon has been playing the saxophone since he was eight years old. He cinched his historic victory at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. We can’t wait to watch the new FilAm pride — he will perform at the 4th Annual Filipino-American Jazz Festival at the Catalina Bar & Grill, also in Hollywood, on December 27

This is an honest question: If you hold an American passport - but have parents who were born and raised in the Philippines but had become citizens of the US, are you still a Filipino?  Would you still consider yourself a Filipino?

just a bit of an advice to advertisers...

I am no digital implementation planning expert.  But here's one tip: Relate the content of your banner to the landing page.

I just clicked on a banner of an insurance company (and I rarely click a banner!).  Why?  I was interested in their offerings.  I have been seeing their ads on press and business mags.  And I saw them on one of the portals I frequent. 

Guess where I landed?

The homepage. 

Now isn't that a natural thing to do?

No.  Because the ad itself says "we can help you... here's how".  The home page for me is a repository of information that consumers can return to when they need to.  Follow through your promise:  the homepage does NOT answer the question "here's how".  It just says "we've got a homepage".

If you promise your audiences that if they click through an ad, that means they're interested - and that they have been made interested by your message.  The least you could do is get them to a site that actually relates back to whatever your message was.  Not the homepage.

So are we really ready for the downturn?

I just finished some 'runs' (i.e., data processing) on the data that we have gathered from a poll of about 400 Sg respondents about their views about the next 6 months.  I would say we got some interesting results.  It's - for lack of a better term - interesting.  One may look at it and say "conflicting viewpoints" - but further analysis actually indicate that it all makes sense.

Anyway, if you're interested about what I am talking about, just ping me or leave a comment and I'll get you the stuff as soon as they are out.  I am still writing and writing and writing - whilst at the same time churning stats and tables and conducting tests.

Reality checks though...  This is a presentation from Sequoia Cap which VentureBeat.Com called "RIP: Good Times".  I honestly don't know much about finance - I am still studying my basics after having realized that I can't those frigging numbers - and I don't know much about macroeconomics, having focused on micro an behavioral economics in my electives in college.  So I really can't agree or disagree in indeed, it is "RIP" to good times.

Have a read through the presentation:

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: depression recession)

 

Here are my thoughts:

• As I have said, I don't know much about economics.  But all I can say is there seems to be a lot of evidence cropping to suggest that we're in bad shape - regardless of where we are.
  
• The supposed benefits of globalization and global economies are still there - BUT so are the risks and the threats of globalization.  Friedman was right - the world is flat - and the thing is, with 'flatness' comes a faster 'negative contagion'.
  
• This is perhaps already apparent in all the things that have been said and done about the crisis: but we're talking about a system here.  It's not a "US problem" - it's not even "just a subprime" problem.  It's a systemic problem - that will require a solution that is integrated and isn't piecemeal.
  
  (Michael Porter, author of Competitive Strategy, has a great article on the latest issue of BusinessWeek.Com on economic strategies - and why the US needs one.  Worth a read for all CEOs and strategists.)
  
• The last slide is the real killer slide: GET REAL or GO HOME.  We need to acknolwedge that there is a mess.  The funny thing is, there are still camps of people who think that "this too shall pass".  Yes, in the long run, it will.  But Keynes said "In the long run, we'll all be dead!"
  
• In the mean-time, however, we need to placate the markets and the consumers.  The thing that really fuels all these is our humanity.  Our fears.  That instead of "things are going to be better tomorrow", it's "things are getting worse tomorrow..." 
  
  Now that's really being "Polyannaish" of me - but that's the only way to get out of the downward spiral: reinstill confidence in the market.  Reinstill confidence in the consumer.
  
  Easier said than done - considering that even banks don't trust each other - and the effectiveness of the bailout the Feds and the Treasury of the US have initiated is being questioned.
  
  But that's the only way to get out of this mess.

So is anybody immune?  How much longer will it take?  Will we still be in this rut next year?  And more importantly, will we still have our jobs?

Well, we'll see.

Phil Tiongson says AMEN to Seth Godin!

Seth Godin captures my thoughts on this blog, Be careful of who you work for.

How many job offers with good pay have you turned down in your lifetime? How many clients? Compare that to how many times you've been rejected. That's totally out of whack.

Great marketing involves having a great product, and not every job (or every client) is worth your time or attention or love.

If you want to become the kind of person that any company would kill to have as an employee, you need to be the kind of employee that's really picky about who you align with.

AMEN!

So what did you initiate today?

Seth's Godin writes about reacting, responding and initiating in his blog.

Most knowledge workers spend their day doing one of three things:

React (badly) to external situations
Respond (well) to external inputs
Initiate new events or ideas

If I were to review my day's sent-mail folder and the conversations I have had on the telephone, it would all be in response to a request.  Some reasonable - and within my locus of control.  Some are outside my circle of influence - and that's OK.  That means, it's not mine to worry about.

According to Seth Godin, the third - initiating new ideas or events - are to be done in the quiet.  When the mind is perhaps in a less reactive, less-responding mode.  And it is probably true: one can't start something remarkable unless one takes a step back - breathe - and just chill.

At least for me, I get my best ideas whilst walking to and from lunch.  When I am away from my desk and good old PC.  The hypotheses and the questions and the potential answers and techniques all come rushing through as soon as I leave the office for a break.

And the things that I initiated today?  Hmmm.  A proposal for a business dev project (which took me half a day to compose).  An RFP to at least three suppliers.  Another RFP and brief to another partner.  And a one-pager summary of something that I have been working hard on.

Will these initiatives still be there tomorrow?  I don't know.  Things change.  Time flies.  And tomorrow - either I will react or I will respond to the situations.

But one thing's for sure - there's more where those came from.

If only I could take a step back and chill.

Sarah Palin gets pranked... apparently!

I picked this up on the net.  From YouTube,Sarah Palin gets pranked.  With a few more days before the US elections...

It's scary stuff, though, how connected we all are.  IMAGINE!