I’ve just had the opportunity to spend a few days in Brugge (the view of the Bell Tower was from my hotel window). Although the centre of town was thronged with tourists it was only a few minutes’ walk to quieter districts where the architecture is just as impressive. Tourism is clearly the main industry of the town, although there are also lots of residential districts even within the old medieval city so I guess that there must be a range of other businesses in the outer parts.
In the strategy course we touched on (in varying levels of detail) the three main views of company strategy – since the course finished I’ve been adding reading on all three to my “incoming” bookshelf: The market-focused, competitive advantage approach of Michael Porter: The resource-based view of the firm, typified by Hamel and Prahalad: The game theory approach described by Dixit and Nalebuff: and then popularised by by Brandenburger and Nalebuff:
Part 3 of the pre-work for the strategy course, based on the tram company fictional case study. Continuing the [bliki]PARTS analysis[/bliki] started in part 2, I now look at Added Values. In [bliki]The Right Game[/bliki] Brandenburger and Nalebuff define Added Value as “the difference between the value created with the player included and the value created by the remaining players when that player is removed” If we imagine the Biddiford economy without the tram company, clearly the overall income will be reduced by tram company revenues.
More on the tram company pre-work for the strategy course. Having identified one option fairly quickly by applying constraints thinking, I went on to use the [bliki]PARTS analysis[/bliki]: Players Using the [bliki]value net[/bliki] approach, who are the various players, and what do we know about them? Customers The customers fall into two groups: The local residents We know that they are price-sensitive, and regard the trip to Old Orchard Bay as only one option competing for their leisure time and spend.
I’ve started looking at one of the pieces of pre-work for the strategy course. Summary notes of the problem are here. The challenge is to make the system profitable, with a strong steer to focus on increasing revenue. This post contains my first thoughts about a solution. My first thought was to look at the constraints in the system – how could the management increase Throughput without increasing Operating Expense or Investment?
I’ve just received the joining instructions and pre-work for Developing Deliverable Strategies There are two pieces of pre-work: The Right Game: Use Game Theory to Shape Strategy [notes] Will Biddiford’s Trams Make a Return? [notes] Some interesting stuff to get my teeth into! As I’ve noted here my learning goals are to: Enhance my ability to think strategically Gain further insight into overall business strategy and the ways to support and enhance that with technology.
I’ve been trying to automate OpenOffice from Ruby to carry out a batch format conversion of approximately 100 documents. I’ve researched a fair amount on the web, especially here, here and here, but I’m still having problems.
Specifically all works until I try and save a document using parameters (to tell OpenOffice to use an output filter), at which point the OLE Bridge is giving an error.
If anyone reading this has found and cured a similar problem I’d be interested in your thoughts. Code snip follows:
Jack Vinson has helpfully listed over 20 Knowledge Management blogs that he reads regularly. I already had about half of them on my sources list, I’ve now added Conniecto, How do you know that?, The Pragmatics of KM Equals Success, Knowledgeline, Mopsos, Myndsi, Networks, Complexity and Relatedness, …no straight lines…,; Reflexions, Scrapbook of My Life, SoulSoup, x28’s Blog and yet another f*$#&@! learning experience
…browser-based and thick-client. I’ve been coming back to the use of a wiki in the work environment, again with project teams, for rapid development of specifications and management of action lists. Two things that struck me, after spending a large chunk of the working day creating and editing stuff in a group of browser tabs. Firstly, that this is a really good way of developing a set of inter-related ideas; secondly, how it made periodic checking of my Bloglines feeds list and various email accounts less disruptive: it’s far easier and faster to Ctrl-PageDown to the next Firefox tab than it is to switch context between browser, email client and word processor.
Lots of signs of Spring this weekend: Buds on the Birch trees in the local woods An invasion of frogs to the small pond in my garden The first wafts of barbecue smoke