Cancelled: SFU New Media Workshops

I’m disappointed to announce that the SFU New Media Workshops have been cancelled. Monique has the full story on So Misguided.

The presentation I was scheduled to give, Getting the Money to Flow, could be available to anyone else interested in discussing how e-business works and how to make business work on the web. Get in touch with me if you’re interested at the Work Industries contact page.

Posted by James Sherrett | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • News • Personal
Permalink

Book Expo Canada Report: Writers to Readers Conference

ED: This is the first guest post of the Work Industries blog. Our guest writer is Kiley Turner, who attended the Book Expo Canada conference in Toronto, June 8th and 9th, 2006. Kiley’s bio can be found at the end of the post.

Conferences can be among the dullest events out there. But once in a while, a conference comes together in a way that is truly exciting—reinforcing ideas you might have been contemplating, jumpstarting thoughts that were percolating, and introducing new ideas that stimulate your whole outlook. I attended such a conference earlier this month in Toronto. It was called Writers to Readers: Linking the Content Creators to the End Users, and it was organized by Humber’s School of Creative & Performing Arts.

I am not a techie, and I tend to steer clear of Web talk in general, simply because I feel so dumb compared to my peers in this regard. But I work in the publishing industry as a consultant, and I’ve known for a while that I had to find a way to get more comfortable in the world of the Web, since it is drastically affecting the way content is produced, distributed, and consumed. Every business has been affected by the Web, and publishing is no exception.

I entered the conference sessions tentatively, poised to feel like an imposter as I knew the Web was a focal point of the conference. Luckily for me, the brilliant Michael Cader (founder and publisher of publishersmarketplace.com) was the first speaker, and despite his command of Web business concepts and strategies, he initially had trouble making his presentation flow from his computer to the presentation screen. What an icebreaker! His jokes and self-deprecation put me at ease, and gave me the right frame of mind to perk my ears attentively to the rest of his speech. And to the next presenter’s speech. And the next. And what do you know? I soaked it up. The speakers had fascinating insights, and they communicated them in a way that I could understand, be excited by, and absorb.

What’s more, I was not the only attendee who was so engrossed and eager to learn in the various sessions of the conference. It seemed like everyone was getting things they needed, though the things they valued might not have been the same as mine, if you know what I mean. At one point in a breakout discussion session led by the spunky, congenial, and damn-smart Carol Fitzgerald (co-founder and president of The Book Report Network, among other ventures), a woman beside me stood up to speak only to say to Carol (for all of us), “You are AMAZING!” That’s the sort of vibe that pulsed throughout the day of sessions.

Kevin Smokler (author of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, and a leading thinker on Web culture) was another standout speaker; he sprinkled humour throughout his presentations, loosening up the audience and really making his points stick.

As you can see, I could go on and on. But instead, I’ll just say that the conference gave me great ideas, and perhaps more importantly (and not coincidentally), confidence. I will never be a techie, but I do now feel excited to weave the Web into my thinking, my strategies, and my world. Perhaps that was the main thing I took away: you don’t have to be a techie to use the Web to your advantage, and to have fun doing it.

What follows are the rough notes I took from Micheal Cader’s and Kevin Smokler’s morning presentations. I didn’t take notes when attending Carol Fitzgerald’s session for writers and other creators, but I will be following up on her through research and attention to her sites from now on.

The notes will be particularly relevant to those involved in the publishing industry, but their essence also applies to anyone else marketing on the Web.

Of course (as if I need to tell you!) my notes are subjective—I paraphrase and sometimes interpret what was actually said. To really delve into what Kevin and Michael have to say, read their work and track them through the Web.

Finally, this is my first-ever blog post! Whoo-hoo! (You gotta start somewhere …).

k.

Rough Notes on Writers to Readers Sessions

Speaker: Michael Cader

• Of the success of his trade media-targeted Publishers’ Lunch — he doesn’t pretend to be objective — it’s his opinion, and obviously people are interested in this as demonstrated by the site’s popularity. He says, “There’s nothing like someone you trust telling you to check this or that out.” [i.e., COMPELLING].
• Most publishers’ websites are catalogues—not geared to the electronic world.
• Challenge: How to take what you do in print and represent it well online—which may involve some transforming and definitely different thinking.
• The objective is CONTENT MASTERY—think about content, not just books. Most publishers just focus on THE BOOK.
• We have to think of what else we know that we can tell readers—move out of the covers of the book. [k: think laterally—think of all the associations that might be interesting—if you have a book about salmon fishing, put salmon recipes up on your site! Put a Guinness Book of World Record’s stat on the biggest salmon ever measured … Put a link to a great short story about fishing, etc. Not to mention an excerpt from the book, and every review you can find.]
• Publishers just keep repeating same two-paragraph marketing copy up beside a picture of the book jacket.
• Think of the Web as a platform for everything neat you have to say—unlock the expertise in your publishing house.
• When you think about publishing an author, think about how many readers he/she can bring in—expect this of your author.
• At the same time, publishers need to develop their own platforms.
• USE the Web itself to sell—and to develop community.
• We’re in Web 2.0, for anyone who hasn’t heard.
• Web is EVERYTHING—though it’s still mostly based on reading.
• Information wants to MOVE (RSS).
• Publishers need to create feeds, and also bring in other info to their sites.
• Content is PARTICIPATORY, both in its creation and its consumption.
• Blogs are “Printing Press of the Modern Age.”
• The Web is a place of ENGAGEMENT with your market.
• Voices of authority are now individuals, not institutions. This informs the VOICE you need for talking online (conversational).
• Grab bloggers’ stuff and feature it—provide comments fields.
• You want your website to say EVERYTHING—express your passion.
• Create a VIRAL effect. The link is the currency of the Web.
• If you send a press release, provide the link. Put your source material up there (e.g., pre-sales material).
• [k: My business, Turner-Riggs Workspace, is constructing a new website, so we don’t have a link just now, but I’ll post it when we do. In the meantime, it is sort of disconcerting to see Turner-Riggs in black and not blue! Not for long.]

Speaker: Kevin Smokler

• Branding is the creation of an immediate emotional association in the reader’s mind re: a book or author.
• Trust, consistency, and belonging—these are key to successful branding. Trust is the most important of the three.
• Branding is not top-down. Rather, it involves EMPOWERING readers to belong and participate. You HAVE to let conversation happen—conversation infuses the brand.
• You [publisher] have to be the locus of branding through your website. This is not necessarily expensive, but it does take time.
• Branding is not soul-less. It is where we are in today’s publishing world. Branding now is holistic—it is also a reinvention of our industry.
• This is a challenge, but also an opportunity.
• We are living in a time where PEOPLE—consumers, are in charge of what they do.
• Consumers have large appetites and little time—“culture debt.” 100,000,000 cultural distractions.
• This is the time of the “curatorial me”—participating, interacting, judging, engaging.
• “We are about 10 years away from consumers having their own printing presses.” [k: like a fax machine …?].
• There are vast options for consumers, and little trust—almost an automatic distrust of institutions.
• Strong branding in the 21st century will focus on building trust, provoking engagement, creating efficiencies (i.e., cross-platforming).
• Don’t think about an IDEAL reader—know that the real reader is busy, overbooked, distracted.
• Too many publishers think this way: “Buy my book and/or go away!” NO! This creates a high barrier of entry.
• ENABLE READERS. ENCOURAGE ENGAGEMENT.
• CREATE MANY DOORS TO ENGAGEMENT—MULTIPLE POINTS OF ACCESS.
• Maybe the reader needs a little snippet/sample to convince them to buy. You have to create ON-RAMPS to the book itself.
• Reader must be able to enter door of their choice—don’t just offer them the front door.
• The book is just the beginning. We’re in the content-culture-information-ideas business.
• You can’t tell people they have to buy a book THIS way. Have to play a new game.

Categories of Branding

[k: Smokler is speaking of various possibilities here for branding handles]:

Author brands

Non-fiction:

• Author is an expert or maybe a very interesting person (this is the platform)—market the author.

Fiction:

• Author has a track record
• The book is auto-biographical (e.g., a personal account of abuse)—turn author into spokesperson. Create links to subject matter.
• Author speaks well on own behalf—let him/her shine.
• Author is disgustingly gorgeous—get him/her out there to strut!

Book-centric brands

• Fiction: “This is a great book—buy it” is NOT branding. Who are you to say so? [k: He must be thinking of the multiple access points again as contrast].
• Non-fiction: IDEA is king—sprinkle it all over the place—check out FREAKOMICS website (lots of different doors).

Re: Acquisition strategies

• Take the long view—build stars (like Old Hollywood). What is the author’s personae? Invest in careers, not just books. And allow author to have his/her own platform [website].

Re: Publicity

• Think big and small. Branding is about REACH.
• Think about email lists, write about upcoming events—think like politicians do. Get your event on www.upcoming.org. Very important.
• TRACK your readers (mailing lists, fan letters).
• Re: Publishers being so busy already, Kevin addresses how to resource this work: “Who will do this stuff? Maybe IT, or online marketing department, but ideally DIRECTOR OF READER RELATIONS.”
• Publishers/authors have to keep fans on the hook—don’t ignore them between books.
• Today, content is divorced from its packaging.
• Everyone is both a producer and a branding agency.
• WITH CHANGE COMES OPPORTUNITY.
• Kevin recommends checking out these two websites/services that can really help publishers in their marketing: Pub Sub and Upcoming.org.
• James (THE James of Work Industries fame) says to also look at Google Alerts and Technorati.

Kiley Turner is a writer, editor, and creative director whose projects span print, Web, and mixed media. Current and recent work includes research design and interpretation, editorial direction, branding, marketing collateral development, art direction, and editing. Her writing portfolio includes features, copywriting, Web content, press releases, newsletters, and white papers. She is a partner in Turner-Riggs Workspace, a creative strategy consultancy based in Vancouver.

Posted by Kiley Turner | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Services • News
Permalink

A Quick Guide to Reading Webstats

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, I was in Penticton visiting a client, Theytus Books. Theytus is Canada’s largest indigineous publisher and I’m part of a team doing work for them to analyze some of their business practices and make technology and web recommendations. Visiting Theytus’ office and business setup was a great experience and helped me contextualize the work I’m doing for them. The visit improved my understanding of Theytus’ technology and web practices, and it allowed me to get a better handle on how our recommendations will end up living in their world.

On the second day of our visit, I sat with Anita Large, Theytus’ Managing Publisher, and asked her to show me Theytus’ hosting account. We went through some of the details and I made notes. Then we opened up Theytus’ webstats. Anita knew about her webstats and knew they meant something about the performance and health of her website, but she didn’t have a great understanding of what each metric meant and so she had stopped looking at them.

I spent some time going through the Theytus webstats with Anita, and it was suggested to me by a colleague, Kiley, who also listened in on my webstats chat, that Anita was not alone in wanting a quick guide to webstats. I walked Anita through the stats in about half an hour and she loved being able to understand the words and figures. So, in the spirit of sharing, and because I think Kiley was right, here’s a quick guide to reading webstats.

Webstats Software

First, a quick note on the webstats packages you’re likely looking at if you use a basic web hosting package, such as the Mini-Me package I use for Work Industries from Nexcess.net, a service I recommend.

The webstats software you’re using is free and offered en masse to everyone. Common webstats packages used include AWStats and Webalizer, both of which are not great but will do the job for most people starting out or looking for an overview of their website’s performance.

Think of it this way: the webstats packages that come with basic hosting are like the standard gauges on a car - speedometer, oil temperature, battery amps, fuel volume. They tell you some basics and you’re able to start off and get around with them. A more advanced car comes with some more advanced gauges - tachometer, turbo-boost, oil pressure, fuel consumption, tire pressure. An expensive car built for a specific purpose - an F1 race car, a rally car, an endurance car - requires more specialized tools that provide greater volume and more granular detail of information. The more advanced tools also require skills and experience to interpret the information, relate it to the performance of the car, and turn it into a meaningful action plan to change the performance. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here, let’s stick with the basics.

Just as with a car, some of the measures in your webstats are useful for managing and enhancing your website. Some of the measures are just added-on information to sell the car. They’ve been added because they make sense to the folks who built the webstats packages or simply because they could be added.

Knowing how to interpret the measures - to transform them into useful information - is far more important than the volume or detail of the measures. The more you invest in your car or website and the more you demand of its performance, the more you need to know, and the more you need to create a strong feedback loop that monitors performance. The reporting should be commensurate with both the rewards of analysis and the analyst’s level of expertise. A daily commute doesn’t require an F1 race car.

So which measures matter and which measures are just added-on information?

Finding the Meaning in the Glut

For most websites, here are the numbers that matter from the common webstats packages:

Meaningful Webstats

1. Unique Visitors: This is the single best measure of how many people are coming to your website. Under detailed scrutiny it’s flawed, but as a basic measure, it works very well. Keep your eye on it. Your Unique Visitors number should be growing month after month and year over year. See if you can find monthly patterns in this number, or seasonal patterns that correlate to something in your business. (This stat can also be called Uniques.)
2. Visits: Visits displays the total number of times people or spiders have come to your site. People are humans visiting with a web browser, while spiders (or bots) are computer programs used by websites like search engines to crawl your site and retrieve its content so it can be added to the search engine index. (Here is a good list of the search engine bots’ names.) The Visits stat is the second-most important thing to watch. (Visits can also be called Number of Visitors or Visitors.)
3. Page Views: The Page Views number shows you the total number of pages requested and served by your web server. If a user comes to your homepage (1), then clicks on a link to your About page (2), then clicks on Contact Us (3), then closes their browser window, they will show up in your stats as 3 page views, 1 unique visitor, and 1 visitor. (Page Views can also be called Pages.)
4. Referrers: These are the other websites and sources of links (called direct referrals, meaning bookmarks, email links, direct URLs typed into the browser) that are directly sending you traffic. Keep an eye on this stat because it will tell you where your users are coming from and who is linking to you.
5. Search Keywords: These are the searches people are using to find your website. When they click through to your website, the search engine tells your web server what search they used, and your webstats software reports on this.
6. HTTP Status Codes: These will tell you what errors your web server has logged. The most common and most important to stay current with are 404 errors - “file not found.” These occur when someone tries a URL and doesn’t get anything back from the server. They often indicate a misspelled link or misreferenced file (internal) or a mistake from an external site pointing at your site. Either way, you want to track down each of these errors and see what’s causing it. Each one is a potential connection with a prospective client.

Kinda Meaningful Webstats

1. Days of Month: It’s interesting to watch which days attract more traffic, and to watch which new content or events on the website can drive user behaviours, but it’s very hard to correlate these stats back to events.
2. Days of Week: See above. But, the real value in looking at Days of Week is seeing which days people visit your site. Generally, the middle of the week will be busiest, with Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday probably your most popular days.
3. Hours: If you blindfolded yourself and had to guess when people were visiting your site, you could probably draw a graph pretty close to the way this stat appears. A business-related website will draw people during working hours and a website that caters to personal interests will draw people in the evening.

Mostly Meaningless Webstats

1. Hits: Hits represent the most overused and abused term in website performance. Hits mean nothing. I’ve heard some people say that HITS are How Idiots Track Success. Simply, a hit is one file requested and served from your server. That file could be any type. A homepage consisting of 37 files (not unusual) will register 37 hits every time a person or bot requests the homepage. Hits mean next to nothing.
2. Bandwidth: This is the amount of data transferred from your web server to requestors. Unless you’re metered by bandwidth, it’s not too important. You’ll likely find that your homepage or most popular landing page is the top bandwidth user, unless you have high-bandwidth files on your server, such as audio, high-resolution images, or video files. Don’t pay much attention to bandwidth unless you’re close to your hosting limit.
3. Hosts: These are the ISPs used to connect to your site. Unless you can differentiate ISPs from URLs, skip spending any time on this stat.
4. Visitor Domains: Depending on your webstats, these have varying degrees of accuracy. Basically, every request to your web server comes from a requestor using an IP address. Visitor Domains groups these requestors by IP address, which are assigned in blocks to various organizations and countries. But the mapping of IP addresses to countries is very unreliable, so Visitor Domains ends up being unreliable.
5. Operating Systems: Microsoft Windows is the most popular operating system in the world. Do you need your stats package to tell you that? What are you going to do with that information? Nothing, unless you’re offering software for download.
6. Browsers: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is the most popular web browser in the world, but its market share is eroding. Mozilla Firefox is second and growing. Apple’s Safari reach is small. So are Opera’s and a few others. The only important thing I have ever learned by looking at Browsers is that a mobile browser was accessing one of my websites. That .2% of my traffic was interesting to me. But I wasn’t going to do anything about it. Build your site according to the W3C web standards, employ a good web designer to ensure your site works with the quirks of the major browsers, and every few months glance at the overall market share of browsers.
7. Any other stats overlooked here.

Setting Up and Securing Your Webstats

In your hosting account, you likely have access to your stats page. It’ll be called webstats or the name of one of the software packages listed above. A few questions to ask are:

• Is your stats page secure or can anyone with the URL for it see it? This is important. Copy the URL of your stats page, log out, then paste the URL into the address bar of your web browser. Can you see the stats page? If so, it’s not secure and anyone can see it. You want it to be secure. Get in touch with your hosting company and tell them you want it secured. If they balk at this or try to charge you money for it, change hosting companies.
• Is your own activity tracked in your stats package? You probably visit your own website. Is your webstats package adding you or your company’s activity to its numbers? Ask your hosting provider. Or, look for a page that only gets accessed when you’re logged in. If one of these pages shows up in your stats as getting activity, then you are skewing your own stats. This could mean very little, if you have strong traffic volume, or it could mean a lot. Contact your hosting provider and ask them how to remove your own activity from your stats. There are ways to do this, such as not including the traffic of a specific IP address, so be persistent and get them working for you.
• Do you get your webstats on a regular basis? Are they run automatically? You should be able to answer “yes” to both of these questions. You also want to get your webstats on as regular a basis as possible. Weekly is good, daily is better.
• Never let your ISP or host throw away your webstats. Historical data are important and data storage is cheap. If they insist on removing your historical webstats, tell them you still want the data and ask them to export them to a file for you to keep.

Trends to Watch: How Your Webstats Relate to Your Efforts

Here is a first-draft list of things to watch for in your stats:

• Month-over-month trends for meaningful metrics (or week-over-week if you get weekly stats).
• Spike activity in unique visitors, visits, and bandwidth. The good scenario is when this correlates with a link to your site from an external site with lots of traffic. You’ve been found, deemed worthy of attention, and linked to. Watch your referrers to see where the traffic is coming from. The less-good scenario is when a spike correlates to poached content (other sites using your images to serve on their pages) or some kind of scraping of content (other sites literally copying and pasting your content onto their own site).
• Search keyword phrases: These will tell you what terms people are using to find your site in search engines. Some search keyword phrases will come as no surprise if you’ve built your site correctly, but others will be completely unexpected. This is both the pleasure and frustration of working on the web - getting found for what you offer and getting found completely randomly for something you never considered being found for. Search keyword phrases are leading indicators of areas of opportunity for your site.
• Referrers: Since referrers are the websites that are sending you traffic, of course you’re going to want to pay attention to them. Who are they? What made them link to you? Can you find how they linked to you? Go to their website and get in touch with them. The web is made of people. Web people love to get a “thank you for linking to me” email.
• Most popular entry pages: These are the pages people have bookmarked or linked to. Why? Are you an authority or resource for something you never intended to be? Sleuth around a little and find out why people are coming to that page of your site.
• Overall number of visitors: Unless you have large enough numbers - like in the hundreds or thousands - for the Meaningful Webstats listed above, don’t sweat changes in your overall numbers too much. Watch them, but don’t obsess. Small numbers are often statistically unreliable. Ignore the percentages of change until you have large enough numbers for them to mean something.

So that’s it. What do you think? Many of you out there have great knowledge of webstats packages, far more than I have. Feel free to take this quick guide and use it to educate others - just give me some credit for starting the snowball rolling!

If you have anything to add or ask, please do so. Together we’re much stronger than any of us alone or on islands. The web is about links and connecting information. Add a comment, send me an email or post on your own site and link to this post to continue the conversation.

Posted by James Sherrett | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Services • Web Marketing • Web Content
Permalink

Y oh Y do you bury the lead?

(Cross posted from the AdHack website.)

The Age, a solid Melbourne newspaper I used to enjoy reading when I lived there for a few months, has a great article about the shift of power from marketeers to consumers entitled Y oh Y won’t you buy that brand?

Unfortunately, they totally bury the most insightful input towards the end, and force you to read a load of bumfy comfort food for panicky marketeers before they come clean with the clear answer to their question. Below I have saved you the time and excerpted the gems.

Peter Sheahan, a 26-year-old business consultant, released a book last year called Generation Y. He says word of mouth has always been powerful, but its influence is upped a notch among young adults.

“The speed of which word of mouth spreads is faster with this generation than it has ever been before and it’s a result of the technology they use to stay in touch with each other,” Sheahan says. “Gen Y can’t go to the toilet without telling five of their friends first.

“They are going to tell people if they like something and they make decisions based on the story we are going to tell once we have bought the product.” Often the story they tell relates to an experience.

...

Sheahan believes brands trying to reach the 16-30 market could save money if they went back to basics. “Stop trying to figure out how to bullshit your way into a market that has a BS-detector on their head,” Sheahan says. “Stop trying to trick an over-stimulated, heavily marketed-to generation and start being genuine and authentic in the first place. If you deliver an original, quality product, that will get people talking and it will end up marketing itself.”

Simple.

Posted by James Sherrett | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Services • Web Strategy • Web Marketing • Web Communities
Permalink

Welcome to First Weekend Club

I’m proud to announce that First Weekend Club has become a Work Industries client. First Weekend Club describes itself like this:

First Weekend Club is a cross-Canada film club that celebrates Canadian film and talent.  Our goal is to build audiences and appreciation for Canadian cinema and to get more people to make a domestic choice when selecting a film at the theatre or off the video shelf.  First Weekend Club is helping more Canadians discover Canadian cinema and talent and become part of a growing community of film enthusiasts.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be developing and refining web strategies with them. If all goes according to plan, soon they’ll be web marketing geniuses.

If you’re interested in Canadian films, be sure to sign up for the free First Weekend Club emails, which feature only the best Canadian films showing in your town.

I’m also on the lookout for passionate people with strong opinions of film, and Canadian film in particular. If you fit the bill, or you know someone who fits the bill, contact me, James Sherrett. We may well be able to help each other out.

Posted by James Sherrett | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Work • Clients • News
Permalink

Work Industries on the Road in Penticton

Just a quick note to clients and partners. Work Industries, that is: James Sherrett, will be on-site with Theytus Books tomorrow, June 18, returning to the office the following day, June 19. Communication may be sporadic in the interim, and most messages will be returned on Wednesday, June 20.

If the meantime if you need to get in touch with me, the usual means of contact will work.

If you’re ever looking for a great place to stay in Penticton, be sure to consider Cormier’s Studio, which looks out over the lake.

Posted by James Sherrett | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Work • News
Permalink

The Truth Experiment in Software Sales

Mark Stuyt was once a salesman for Peoplesoft, the enormous software company that makes an octopus of interlinked applications to run the administrative functions of large companies. A few years ago he embarked on what he called The Truth Experiment. Then he wrote about it for Canada’s Backbone magazine.

For years I wondered to what extent telling the absolute truth would impact my sales results. So, partly as a creative strategy to make the mundane task of flogging Enterprise Resource Planning software more interesting, and partly as a self-imposed social experiment, I committed to telling the complete truth to customers for an entire year. You read correctly. The absolute truth. Not the watered-down, it s not a lie if you really believe it in your heart, acts of omission don t really qualify kind of truth either. I committed to being completely honest and forthright in each interaction I had with my customers and prospects for the entire year, and I was prepared to risk my income to satisfy my curiosity. Little did I know at the time that my self-indulgent experiment would ultimately lead me to resign from PeopleSoft and move my family to Mexico.

When asked to participate in dysfunctional Request for Proposal (RFP) processes, I declined. When asked to share my opinion on product quality and stability, my responses were not filtered through a corporate agenda. When I discovered customers making undisciplined and/or naive decisions that would result in expensive long-term ramifications, I gave them clear guidance. When asked a direct question during a sales cycle, I told the truth. That being said, I didn t wield the truth like a club. I was professional, appropriate and sensitive to the position and objectives of the individual I was speaking to; but I told the truth…

Mark’s story rings true to me in many ways - the imbalance of the vendor / customer relationship, the deceit companies engage in with vendors, the deceit vendors engage in with companies and the rewards both parties can reap from that deceit. I’ve always been very suspicious of the phrase, ‘That’s business.’ By which I mean that I don’t like it when people rationalize their actions because what they’ve done occurs in a business context. By extension then, anything goes?

One of my driving desires in starting Work Industries is that I swim on my own, having chosen the people I want to work with as partners and clients, and having acted in a way I believe in. I hope I’m strong enough and fortunate enough to make it work as I believe it should.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out the about Work Industries section, and our guiding principals. Then let me know what you think.

(Thanks to Jürgen Ahting of E-Valuation of Information Systems for the link to Mark Stuyt’s story.)

Posted by James Sherrett | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Work • Clients • Personal
Permalink