Category: Various

  • Professionalism – 5 Things We Can Learn From Athletes

    PROFESSIONALISM Professionalism is on of those things that is hard to explain. We admire people that are really professional. And many folks would probably think of themselves as being highly professional. Yet, many people are frustrated when it comes to their careers. They are either not getting promoted or they feel that their accomplishments are…

  • Charts? Yes, I know….

    Dashboarding….Part 2. Yes, we do know that we shouldn’t eat those chips. Yes, we do know that we should read more books. Yes, we know that we shouldn’t drink that much coffee. But…..BUT…..We all know that there are small things we can do that could really have a big impact on our life or job.…

  • The great productivity leap?

    THE GREAT STAGNATION Last Wednesday evening while waiting for a connecting flight at Vienna airport, I came across an interesting eBook by Tyler Cowen: ‘The great stagnation“. Thanks to the iPad, I ended up reading the entire short book on the flight back home. To keep things short, Tyler Cowen looks at some of the…

  • IBM Business Analytics at the Gartner BI Summit 2011

    It’s that time of the year! The annual Gartner BI Summit is just around the corner. This year’s edition will take place from January 31st through February 1st at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge in London. IBM is one of the main sponsors for this event, and my team and I will be quite busy…

  • Never trust a statistic?

    Everybody hates and loves statistics. Right? If we can, we use statistics to obtain buy-in. Otherwise we might argue against them. They always say: “Never trust a statistic that you haven’t manipulated yourself.” Regardless of what we think about statistics, we are constantly being bombarded by them. News, websites, TV, etc.. They are everywhere. In…

  • And now something completely different….

    Happy Holidays! Hope you will have time for a break to recharge the batteries. A few weeks ago, I started reading a great book by Garr Reynolds: The Naked Presenter. The author turned my attention to a wonderful speech by John Cleese. Yes, the famous comedian. And this is not a speech about comedy but…

  • 5 things we can learn from professional athletes

    Here we are again. It’s that time of the year. We sit down and review our accomplishments for the year. And we are also starting to plan ahead for the next year. We craft plans and we get excited. Excited about improving our performance and the performance of our teams (apart from personal goals). Many…

  • Cool software? The Connected Business – Part 3

    Yeah, those spreadsheets. Welcome to part 3 of this series of posts. An interesting special section in the Financial Times prompted me to post a quick summary with interesting quotes. But the report did not necessarily provide some specific details about why spreadsheets make our lives difficult. Part 2 then focused on the particular pain…

  • The connected business?

    The Financial Times from December 8th 2010 included an interesting special report called “The Connected Business”. A bunch of great articles about technology in the office of the CFO. One thing that caught my attention was the fact that the entire section highlighted the problems caused by the use of spreadsheets. For people who work…

  • Behind the scenes – Middle East Cognos 10 launch

    Snow. Massive amounts of snow. And it’s really cold. Hmm…Do I really want to leave here? Greetings from Dubai airport. My colleague and I are stuck here right now. Most flights to Europe are delayed due to winter weather. Oh well….the joys of traveling. But this trip was really worth it. We just finished a…