Here I am in the Korean Air lounge waiting for my plane and reading blogs. The neat thing about blogging overseas is watching sunrise over the U.S. blogosphere. West coast bloggers are fast asleep except for the odd insomniac posting at 2:49am, but the East Coast bloggers are starting to stir, and the early risers are starting to post, coffee in hand. Over the next hour as 6am comes and goes on the East Coast, blogging traffic will pick up considerably in the East. By the time the West Coast bloggers get up and see what news transpired while they slept, the East Coast guys are on their second or third post of the day and thinking about lunch.
Of course the opposite happens in the evening as the West Coast twilight bloggers post while the East Coast guys are fast asleep.
And all this while, we traveling jetlagged travelers post at any and all hours without any discernible pattern.
Window Manager - A (Now Retired) Executive Who has Nothing to do but Look out the Window
Friday, September 24, 2004
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Or Not So Tough to Go to This Place
Am I noticing a trend in my Korea travels? First the bathroom, now this. All I know is that I am staying away from the second floor of this building. However, "A Merry Making Place" in the basement sounds like a fun and lively establishment.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
My Work Won’t Survive Me, Much Less the Product
I was watching the Oscars a few years ago and they were giving out a lifetime achievement award to some director, praising his “body of work”. A few days later I was watching a documentary and they talked about an artist creating his “masterpiece”.
These two phrases kept ringing in my head for a few days and I started thinking about how, and if, they apply to the modern worker. Do we have a “body of work” or a “masterpiece” we can point to at the end of our careers that will last longer than we do?
The short answer: no. In my case, what marketing professionals create is as transitory as the products we work on. Sure, I have a few articles and publications floating out there in the ether, but the vast majority of what I do day-to-day is forgotten within a year, or certainly by the time the product is obsoleted.
If my “body of work” were put into one location, it would actually be quite volumous - everything including product definitions, roll-out plans, roadmaps, advertising, focus groups, forecasts, several start-up business plans, and lots and lots and lots of PowerPoint presentations (or its predecessor, Harvard Graphics, or its predecessor, Foils). Then there are the gigabytes (terabytes?) of emails I have created in the last 15 years (yes, email existed in 1989. We did it on mainframes). All this work would fill a good sized room, or at least a very, very large hard drive. But no one would give me an award for this body of work, and I certainly can’t find anything in there that anyone else would call a masterpiece.
So are there “bodies of work” and “masterpieces” in business at all? Sure, the bodies of work are the companies you buy stuff from everyday – the “body” being the sum of all the little things that individuals in the company do that contribute to the whole. And the masterpieces are those companies that are successful in providing quality goods and services to consumers while providing returns to investors. So the little things that we do as workers are like brush strokes within the masterpiece, not the masterpiece itself.
The bottom line is that these two artistic ideas are ill-suited for business workers. We workers just have to accept the fact that what we do is transitory and that it will be the company, not our individual work, that will be our legacy.
These two phrases kept ringing in my head for a few days and I started thinking about how, and if, they apply to the modern worker. Do we have a “body of work” or a “masterpiece” we can point to at the end of our careers that will last longer than we do?
The short answer: no. In my case, what marketing professionals create is as transitory as the products we work on. Sure, I have a few articles and publications floating out there in the ether, but the vast majority of what I do day-to-day is forgotten within a year, or certainly by the time the product is obsoleted.
If my “body of work” were put into one location, it would actually be quite volumous - everything including product definitions, roll-out plans, roadmaps, advertising, focus groups, forecasts, several start-up business plans, and lots and lots and lots of PowerPoint presentations (or its predecessor, Harvard Graphics, or its predecessor, Foils). Then there are the gigabytes (terabytes?) of emails I have created in the last 15 years (yes, email existed in 1989. We did it on mainframes). All this work would fill a good sized room, or at least a very, very large hard drive. But no one would give me an award for this body of work, and I certainly can’t find anything in there that anyone else would call a masterpiece.
So are there “bodies of work” and “masterpieces” in business at all? Sure, the bodies of work are the companies you buy stuff from everyday – the “body” being the sum of all the little things that individuals in the company do that contribute to the whole. And the masterpieces are those companies that are successful in providing quality goods and services to consumers while providing returns to investors. So the little things that we do as workers are like brush strokes within the masterpiece, not the masterpiece itself.
The bottom line is that these two artistic ideas are ill-suited for business workers. We workers just have to accept the fact that what we do is transitory and that it will be the company, not our individual work, that will be our legacy.
Oh, I'm Back in Korea
Ah, back in Korea – on the good side of the DMZ. I visited the DMZ last year, so I have looked into one of the two remaining Axis of Evil. I'm not in a hurry to go see the other one.
I’ll start off this trip with a bit of Korea trivia (Korevia?): On the Korean flag above, you probably already recognize the yin-yang in the middle. What you probably didn’t know is that the four symbols surrounding the Yin-Yang represent the four elements: earth, water, fire and air.
I’ll start off this trip with a bit of Korea trivia (Korevia?): On the Korean flag above, you probably already recognize the yin-yang in the middle. What you probably didn’t know is that the four symbols surrounding the Yin-Yang represent the four elements: earth, water, fire and air.
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