I am a fan of various gadgets. Sony announced a cool gadget: a device that lets you plot your digital images to a map.

Quote from the press release:

“Using time and location recordings from Sony’s GPS-CS1 GPS device and the time stamp from a Sony digital still camera or camcorder, photo buffs can plot their digital images to a map and pinpoint exactly where they’ve been.
The 12-channel GPS unit is 3-½ inches long, weighs two ounces, and is sold with a carabineer to easily attach to a backpack or a belt loop.

[…]

To arrange your pictures geographically, import the logged data from the GPS device, using the supplied USB cable, and then download the digital images to a computer. The supplied GPS Image Tracker software synchronizes the images on your digital camera with the latitude, longitude and time readings from the GPS-CS1 device.

Once synchronized, your photos can become virtual push pins on an online map by activating the Picture Motion Browser software bundled with the latest Sony cameras and camcorders released after July. You can easily add new photos and coordinates to the mapping web site, courtesy of Google Maps, and showcase years of globe-trotting.”

I do have my shares of pictures (see some of my pictures here) I would like to put on the map. Combined with Google Earth it would be a great show for the family and friends.

Unlucky me, I have a Cannon camera, so I have to wait.

I am still digging through old articles. I just found a “cool” one about presentations. It was published in November 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review.

The article is about never ending circles that are poisoning every presentation.

A short quote:

“[..] a Boston-based software company helpfully illustrates the stages of its application management life cycle. Through some trick of causality, termination leads to deployment. This may be a good model from a consultancy’s standpoint—when a client’s projects end, they start again—but if you’re paying the tab, you probably want the project to actually end when it’s terminated.” 

And the picture:

Next time when you see a presentation guiding you in circles, stop for a second and ask if this really makes any sense.

As Gardiner Morse said:

“Though you’ve seen a million of these, you’ve probably never thought much about them. That’s because, like optical illusions, they play on your expectations and trick you into seeing something that isn’t there: If one arrow leads to the next, then of course the steps follow. But once you start examining these ubiquitous diagrams, you’ll be amazed by what you don’t see.“

 

For the readers of “Built to Last”, be sure to check Jim Collins’ article in Fast Company magazine.

I just read two very interesting cases about Honda from Harvard Business Review: Honda (A) and Honda (B).

This is the story of management books. Honda (B) is the real life and Honda (A) is the management book written after. Often authors fall in the trap of “Post hoc ergo propter hoc”.

Even in social sciences or in psychology one can make experiments to test his theories. The only “science” without experiments is the management science. I am not aware of any test conducted by any university to test a management theory. Yet every day, a new management theory pops-up.

The B-schools stubbornly consider management to be a science and teach it like math.

Warren Bennis and James O’Toole published an article on this topic in the Harvard Business Review (“How Business Schools Lost Their Way”).

The root cause of today’s crisis in management education, assert Warren G. Bennis and James O’Toole, is that business schools have adopted an inappropriate–and ultimately self-defeating–model of academic excellence. Instead of measuring themselves in terms of the competence of their graduates, or by how well their faculty members understand important drivers of business performance, they assess themselves almost solely by the rigor of their scientific research. This scientific model is predicated on the faulty assumption that business is an academic discipline like chemistry or geology when, in fact, business is a profession and business schools are professional schools–or should be.