And then sometimes you get occasions like this one – must have been quite dramatic really. I wonder how much people say “Prove you own XX of the company” and “Prove that meeting was correct” and “Show me the bit in the company rules which say I have to do what you want” – and when people decide to comply or take it to Court.

Fascinating mix of law, management, and good old interpersonal relationships – with a healthy dose of basic logistics like “We’re locked out, where can we hold this meeting?”.

This article was written by Giles Tremlett in Madrid, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 2nd September 2010 17.57 UTC

It was a strange way to wrest back control of the 100-year-old family company but, after her sons locked her out, María Teresa Rodríguez – the matriarch of Spanish biscuit manufacturer Galletas Gullón – decided to call a board meeting in a car.

The meeting in the company car park, attended by her daughter Lourdes and another major shareholder as photographers surrounded the Mercedes, saw her appointed sole administrator of the company.

The 68-year-old thereby took away control of Spain’s third-biggest biscuit manufacturer from her three sons and two brothers.

The 35-minute meeting, also attended by a notary who sat in the passenger seat, was duly advertised with two posters stuck to the front windscreen.

A family feud pits the Gullón men against its women. Sons and brothers had tried to block Rodríguez’s attempts to take control by declaring the board meeting irregular and locking her out of the company HQ.

A security guard turned mother and daughter away from the front door of Spain’s biggest biscuit factory, in the western town of Aguilar de Campoo. But those in the Mercedes controlled 80% of the company. Their takeover was a shoo-in.

The man in the driver’s seat of the Mercedes was Juan Martínez, the former company chief executive fired by Rodríguez’s sons last year. He held 16% of the stock.

Rodríguez had appointed him to help her run the company after her husband, José Manuel Gullón, died in a car accident in 1983. Rodríguez herself had been executive president – until she, too, was eased out by her children.

Last year’s rebellion against them and the decision to sack Martínez sparked the feud over the business, which has 400 employees, exports to 80 countries and has an annual turnover of €162m. It also saw a court award him €8.2m for wrongful dismissal.

“The company will go to my children, but only when I decide,” she said in a recent interview.

Yesterday’s board meeting failed to resolve the underlying problems. The sons today claimed it had not been properly convened and said their mother was illegally using voting shares left to them by their father.

“None of the reasons they have given to invalidate the meeting are true,” said a spokesman for Rodríguez. “All legal actions taken by the sons and brothers of María Teresa Rodríguez pursue a single illegitimate aim: to keep hold of power.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Just imagine then what the pros can do… From RISKS:

?Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 16:26:51 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: WSJ: What Do Online Advertisers Know About You?

Tim Jones, *Wall Street Journal*, 4 Aug 2010

In a groundbreaking new series titled “What They Know,” the *Wall Street
Journal* is taking a close look at the information that online advertisers
collect about you as you browse the Web: “The tracking files represent the
leading edge of a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers who
are in effect establishing a new business model for the Internet: one based
on intensive surveillance of people to sell data about, and predictions of,
their interests and activities, in real time.”  What the industry knows
about you may surprise you. The articles examine the world of tracking
cookies, and other less well-known tracking technologies like flash cookies
and beacons. They found that “the nation’s 50 top websites on average
installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors,
usually with no warning.”

Using information gathered this way, the advertising industry is able to
accurately guess substantial information about you – often including your
gender, age, income, marital status, credit-rating, and whether you have
children or own a home. The findings are used not only to determine what
advertisements you see, but sometimes to decide what kind of discounts or
credit card offers you’re allowed access to. …
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08/what-they-know

What They Know:
http://online.wsj.com/wtk

Online Behavioral Tracking:
http://www.eff.org/issues/online-behavioral-tracking

Scary stuff.

…but they took it down because the quality wasn’t good enough so when they put it back again I’ll point to it again!

So Via BoingBoing I found this seriously geeky explanation of how Apple Devices decide what charger they are connected to and what they can do with it quite enlightening.

Basically the charger tells the iPhone/iWhatever device what current it can draw (0.5 Amp or 1 Amp it seems) by putting a voltage on the data line, which the iPhone senses. So when older chargers don’t put this voltage on the line, that’s why you get charging not supported….

It still feels a little tricky as a process, but I would think in a year or so you’ll be able to buy one on arrival at a country, and fill it up with your credit card… which would make a lot of sense. Of course the operators won’t like their loss of data roaming charges, but it will have to happen at some point.

I just did it with a recent post from simoncoles.org and one from elnblog.org and they both came up with David Foster Wallace. Never heard of him before but I’ve just Amazon’d and will see what I think!

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

First watch the video.

Then check out this article on The Register for more detail.

“The main finding is that knowing that unexpected events might occur doesn’t prevent you from missing unexpected events,”

Over the last decade, Wall Street has declined to reward Microsoft for its superior profit. The explanation is simple: Professional investors don’t believe Ballmer, and they don’t see bigger profits in Microsoft’s future. Conversely, they bid up Apple’s shares precisely because they think the company will keep growing revenue and profits. Apple has managed to enter new, growing markets, a feat Ballmer has repeatedly failed to accomplish.

Of course Apple could be in the same situation except for one thing:

Microsoft didn’t have Apple’s stroke of luck. Fire one if its founders who goes on to start two companies, Pixar and NeXT, and then comes back twelve years later, tempered by the experiences, good and bad, ready to lead the company to an amazingly successful second act. Except for Ballmer’s two-year stint at Procter & Gamble, all he and Gates have ever known is Microsoft.

Interesting perspective. It is interesting how irrelevant Microsoft are becoming to daily life. Of course they are still dominant in Enterprise IT, but at work we’re increasingly seeing either their IT folk being much more open to the rest of the IT world, or we’re seeing the business bypassing their IT dept. entirely and going for Cloud-based solutions.

Microsoft—in a nutshell—is a company that had one successful product that we are all beholden to—that then used that capital to buy other people’s products and ruin them. They are not bad people, but they do stab their friends in the back. Also, they are a bunch of nerds, which is probably why they have never managed to produce a decent interface.

Google—in a nutshell—is a company that had one successful product that we are all beholden to—that then used that capital to buy other people’s products and ruin them. They are not bad people, but they do stab their friends in the back. Also, they are a bunch of nerds, which is probably why they have never managed to produce a decent interface.

Apple is a company that produces amazing, human-usable products. I love them for the same reason I love any such company, and I forgive them their eccentricities because their products are so amazing. They make decisions that I’m told are bad for me, yet I don’t see that reflected in their products as I use them.

(from marco.org)

There’s no record of Shakespeare’s embarrassing early attempts. No MP3s of Bach’s school choir. Maybe if we were more used to seeing people suck before they get good at something, we wouldn’t expect perfection from day one.
[snip]
Just think about the millions of people on the internet, each in their own timeline of learning something new. Most people will never get to 2,500 hours. They’ll never not suck. It’s not personal, it’s just math.

So that’s why the vast majority of everything on the internet sucks. It’s because most of the people doing it, most of the time, just haven’t put in the hours yet. And most of them never will. So only a small percentage of all the people online will ever be vaguely good at whatever it is they’re doing.

But here’s the thing: I think this is beautiful. People are out there, trying new things, learning the hard way, and sharing their experience. That gives me hope.

Anyway, I saw this  a week or so ago and have to say I do somewhat agree – when I look at the energy and passion people put into being football supporters, I can’t help but be saddened. Why can’t that be put into something more personal and productive? The men who don’t know their wive’s perfume but do know every move of Manchester United? The boy who dreams of meeting Beckham to get his autograph, rather than being on the pitch himself?

It isn’t that I don’t like football, I just don’t see the point. And I am saddened when people view me as weird when I say that – what have we come to when you are weird if you want to make your own path, rather than watch a bunch of other people have fun and then argue pointlessly about details in the pub later?

As an aside, Jo and I turned up in Basel during Carnival (we wondered why we couldn’t get any hotel rooms… should have been a warning sign!) and it really was quite special. I wonder why we have nothing like that in the UK?

If the Cameron government is bad news for those seeking radical change, the World Cup is even worse. It reminds us of what is still likely to hold back such change long after the coalition is dead. If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football. No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. And in the tussle between them, football is several light years ahead.

Modern societies deny men and women the experience of solidarity, which football provides to the point of collective delirium. Most car mechanics and shop assistants feel shut out by high culture; but once a week they bear witness to displays of sublime artistry by men for whom the word genius is sometimes no mere hype. Like a jazz band or drama company, football blends dazzling individual talent with selfless teamwork, thus solving a problem over which sociologists have long agonised. Co-operation and competition are cunningly balanced. Blind loyalty and internecine rivalry gratify some of our most powerful evolutionary instincts.

The game also mixes glamour with ordinariness in subtle proportion: players are hero-worshipped, but one reason you revere them is because they are alter egos, who could easily be you. Only God combines intimacy and otherness like this, and he has long been overtaken in the celebrity stakes by that other indivisible One, José Mourinho.

In a social order denuded of ceremony and symbolism, football steps in to enrich the aesthetic lives of people for whom Rimbaud is a cinematic strongman. The sport is a matter of spectacle but, unlike trooping the colour, one that also invites the intense participation of its onlookers. Men and women whose jobs make no intellectual demands can display astonishing erudition when recalling the game’s history or dissecting individual skills. Learned disputes worthy of the ancient Greek forum fill the stands and pubs. Like Bertolt Brecht‘s theatre, the game turns ordinary people into experts.

This vivid sense of tradition contrasts with the historical amnesia of postmodern culture, for which everything that happened up to 10 minutes ago is to be junked as antique. There is even a judicious spot of gender-bending, as players combine the power of a wrestler with the grace of a ballet dancer. Football offers its followers beauty, drama, conflict, liturgy, carnival and the odd spot of tragedy, not to mention a chance to travel to Africa and back while permanently legless. Like some austere religious faith, the game determines what you wear, whom you associate with, what anthems you sing and what shrine of transcendent truth you worship at. Along with television, it is the supreme solution to that age-old dilemma of our political masters: what should we do with them when they’re not working?

Over the centuries, popular carnival throughout Europe, while providing the common people with a safety valve for subversive feelings – defiling religious images and mocking their lords and masters – could be a genuinely anarchic affair, a foretaste of a classless society.

With football, by contrast, there can be outbreaks of angry populism, as supporters revolt against the corporate fat cats who muscle in on their clubs; but for the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

My main newspapers are The FT, The Economist and The Week. I used to read The Sunday Times but it was increasingly pointless and whilst I might try it for a month I can’t really see me paying for The Times. However, I can see me increasingly reading The Guardian despite it’s left-of-center reputation being slightly out of whack with my normal repertoire.

Anyway, I’ve installed the plugin and shall see how it goes. I often find myself pointing colleagues to various articles, so the plugin might prove useful.

All I need now is for The Guardian to produce an iPad app, and for the FT iPad app to support emailing links to articles…

Outlook have just updated their web site which features a segment from me on Outlook in the workplace. Normally I hate videos of me and I don’t really like this one but I’m really happy to be able to do my bit to promote Outlook. Most organisations are quite dysfunctional internally and if the majority of people have attended Outlook things get a lot lot simpler. It was quite fun being interviewed on camera too, I’ve done big presentations but was very nervous about the whole camera thing but really enjoyed it in the end.

This is probably the moment to embarrass my friend and colleague Jodie who is the blonde lady who starts this video off and appears in other videos on the site. She’s just completed Summit and I’ve never seen her happier.

Outlook is one of those experiences which can only enrich you – a great experience, stupidly cheap, and full of great people. Highly recommended to everyone.

We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.

The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if the worst or even near worst happens. We are seeing the puny forces of man vs. the awesome forces of nature. We are going to need some luck and a lot of effort to win…and if nature decides we ought to lose, we will.

Interesting analysis, scary conclusions.

That article also pointed to this introduction to drilling offshore wells which answered a lot of basic questions I had.

It is a sad aspect of politics that complex issues need to be boiled down to soundbites and in the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster it has come down to “Let’s punish BP because it is all their fault”. I suspect there’s a lot of fault to spread around and such a simplistic conclusion is no doubt more than a little unfair – but it is also not at all helpful for getting the problem fixed.

If you worked for BP right now, I wonder how you’d feel about your company being the scapegoat. And what about the engineers working frantically to find a fix? Bet they love to read the papers in the morning watching Obama wanting to know “Whose ass to kick?”. And then when they finally get to spend time with their kids, I can just imagine the conversations (“Daddy, did the President kick your ass? Is that why you are never home?”).

This is one of those complex situations with many many contributing factors and we’re all in fact a little bit to blame. Perhaps those who enjoy vilifying BP so much should consider that they aren’t doing much to solve the problem – and if they really cared about fixing properly it the first thing they should do is quit driving their car so much…

Then I saw this article which helped explain its popularity:

people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville
[snip]
Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations.
[snip]
The most important thing to recognize here is that, whether we like it or not, seventy-three million people are playing Farmville: a boring, repetitive, and potentially dangerous activity that barely qualifies as a game. Seventy-three million people are obligated to a company that holds no reciprocal ethical obligation toward those people.

So what’s interesting is that Farmville is about respecting and reinforcing social bonds – now I feel bad for not actually responding to Clare (sorry, was in a travel week…) but also that Zynga are cleverly using this to line their own pockets. I’m not too sure how I feel – that so many people are using to socially groom each other is a wonderful thing, but that the economic surplus is going to one entity seems a little bit of a shame.

Anyway, at least I understand why people play it, even if I can’t actually get engaged with it myself!