5 Travel Lessons You Can Use at Home

If there is one thing I hope the Nomad Influencer achieves its this: to encourage you, the reader, take the experiences a nomad lifestyle can give you and apply it in your everyday life. It doesn’t matter what kind of a life you lead today, whether you have a family and the responsibilities that go with that, how old you are or how limited (or not) you may be economically. Life is about what you do with your time and that means choices. And that is the message Rolf Potts, the author of Vagabonding, gives in his post on Tim Ferriss’ blog this week.  It’s a wonderful read based on the experiences of a true nomad who has 5 amazing lessons about the art of travel well worth adopting in your everyday life. I hope you enjoy it and share your thoughts.

Are You Cut Out For A Career In Sales?

Like most people in business I spend a lot of time with sales people and/or selling myself. Often you don't think twice about the person in front of you who is showing you their product or explaining the benefits of their solution. You assume they are an authority on their product and focus on the questions that matter to you - will this address my problem? will it help me? can I/my company benefit from this. Of course you also assess whether the organization selling is right to become a partner to you and your organization, and often that starts with the quality of the relationship with the sales person in front of you. But once in a while I am stone cold surprised by the individual representing a company and its solution because they are just not an effective sales person. And it reflects poorly on their company, its products and its people.

The Apple iPad Haters Don't Get It

Am I the only one who just doesn’t understand the wave of criticism following Apple's introduction of the iPad? I mean the tsunami of criticism in the media about the long awaited Apple Tablet – that’s what it is – is just indicative of the ugly side of human beings. Call it free speech if you want, but its like mental therapy for haters. People just love to hate and the iPad seems to have given them the excuse to go after Apple, the symbol of what the modern day business should be.

Recruiting: The Problem With Resumes

Its been a grueling week of interviewing candidates. Lots of candidates. My client has a strategic initiative that requires a number of talented natural athletes with a mixture of skills and experience. The role doesn’t really exist today in the marketplace, although key components of it do in fairly established tactical functions in the manufacturing, automotive and aerospace industry. My client is in financial services.  What we are attempting is to elevate what is a traditionally tactical manufacturing role into a highly strategic relationship management position looking after some of the most critical parts of an organization at executive levels. Its pretty disruptive change internally, and highly difficult to find the right profiles externally. Forgive me for being vague, but client confidentiality comes first.

Pictures That Move

Sometimes pictures say it in a way no words can. This was a candidate for Picture of The Year in 2009. You decide.

The Best Company In The World To Work For

Fortune magazine released its annual list of “100 Best Companies To Work For” and there is a new king at the top of the list. North Carolina based software maker SAS tops the list this year with some impressive stats as well as some very unusual perks that no doubt make employee satisfaction a key component of why the company has made this list for the past 13 years and is now number 1. However, this begs the question what truly makes a company great to work for? We have all worked at good companies and bad companies at some point in our career. But only a few have worked at truly Great companies. What makes a company a great place to work?

The Worrying Trend of Faking Numbers

Earlier this month Stanford University Economics Professor Michael J. Boskin wrote an article on the Wall Street Journal called “Don’t Like the Numbers? Change ‘Em.”  In it he discussed how lately, politicians and scientists who don't like what their data show have simply taken to changing the numbers. They believe that their end - socialism, global climate regulation, health-care legislation, repudiating debt commitments, la gloire française - justifies throwing out even minimum standards of accuracy. He further highlights that it appears no numbers are immune: not GDP, not inflation, not budget, not job or cost estimates, and certainly not temperature. A CEO or CFO issuing such massaged numbers would land in jail, Mr. Boskin concludes. While Boskin’s article is really well written, it highlights a worrying trend of people of influence, be it elected officials, scientists or figures of authority, fudging the numbers to show balance and order in their domain.