Where are the jobs now? What does that mean for your future and your business’ future?
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I was looking up a reference to 37 signals approach to software and couldn't resists looking at their entire portfolio of products. One product that I noticed is the 37signals Job Board.
Look at the jobs listed.
Now notice where the jobs are located.
Now think about where they are NOT located: the South East. Why is that?
I use this type of business intelligence when thinking about hiring actions. I also keep things like this in mind with life/career planning. Shouldn't you?
Next, go over to the CNN/Money Magazine's list of Best Places to Live. What do you see? Essentially the same locations.
So if your are thinking about starting a business or expanding your business, what are the implications on where you should locate your business? We like to talk about globally distributed teams, virtual teams, telework and all sorts of wishful thinking. It turns out that science is telling us that people work best in co-located teams of 5-7 people. This means you should plan on hiring locally to your office and expect the people to be local (within 20 minutes or less) of their team's work area.
Now what does the two aforementioned lists tell you about the strategic location of your business?
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Starting another blog for Business Management advice
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I decided to start another blog for capturing all the management consultant observations and wisdom that comes to me throughout my life under that sun. My initial hope was rather self-serving: create a place to dump my brain that connects all the places on the web where I draw upon as a person body of knowledge (PBOK). As I work on the content more and more (as yet unpublished), I realize that inadvertently I may put a toe-hold on fulfilling my goal finding the people I want to mentor and those who would mentor me: in short, leaving a living legacy.
"A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way." -- John C. Maxwell
Silly software licensing models
I recently stumbled upon a situation where I violated the terms of my software license agreement. Following that, I almost bought another piece of software where I would have inadvertently broken the terms of my license agreement there, too.
What gives?
What would cause me to violate the terms of my software license agreement? A bad software license agreement. In both cases, one from the most well-known software company and one from a shareware developer. What they have in common is a two-tier software license model where you can purchase a license for personal use or a license for commercial use at a significant premium.
So here is the scenario that caused me to violate my software license agreement: I purchase the "Home and Student" version of a well known office suite. In the fine print is a clause that states I cannot use the software for commercial work. I assume that means I cannot create work products that are sold to someone. A colleague sends me a document at home which I open, review, edit and send back to him using the restricted software. Bingo. I just broke my license agreement. Or did I? Where does personal use end and commercial use begin? If I create a document and post it to my personal website and then, using the Creative Commons License model, allow for a derivative work with attribution with royalties... did I just violate my software license agreement? Isn't the content what was being licensed and not the file format?
If a lawyer wants to pipe in on this, contact me. I'm sure that in communist, er... socialist democratic (gotta be P.C. these days) countries there are probably some kind of tax implications I'm ignoring such as valuation of software as an asset, etc.
The entire thing is silly. One price and quit jerking me around, please. As a side note: I've since found "free", open-source replacements for both products. Not only are they viable alternatives, but is actually a step-up.
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