Mozilla vs Explorer

Neil Deakin writes about 101 things that you can do in Mozilla which you cannot do in Internet Explorer. The first 5:

1. Tabbed browsing: Lets you display more than one site in a window using multiple tabs.
2. Popup blocking: Block all those popup ads.
3. Prevent scripts from doing various things such as moving windows, closing them and setting cookies.
4. Link toolbar: Displays content from the tags provided by a document, allowing one to navigate to various parts of a site.
5. Sidebar: The sidebar provides a number of tabs by default, and others can be added by the user.

Tablet PC

Writes Walter Mossberg: "If you pine to take digital notes at meetings, or do a lot of on-screen reading of long documents and don't mind spending an extra $250 or so, the Tablet PC may be for you. For everyone else, I'd advise waiting until these things get better."

TECH TALK: Good Books: What Management Is and Drucker

What Management Is: How It Works and Why It’s Everyone’s Business
By Joan Magretta

It seems so obvious what management is. Or does it? Magretta explains in straightforward language basic terms like Value Creation, Business Models, Strategy and Organisation. We tend to use these terms so often without quite really understanding their significance. is a must-read – both for beginners and practitioners.

Writing about business models, Magretta writes:

A business model is a set of assumptions about how an organization will perform by creating value for all the players on whom it depends, not just its customers. In essence, a business model is a theory that’s continually being tested in the marketplace.

A business model is a story of how an enterprise works. Like all good stories, a business model relies on the basics of character, motivation, and plot. For a business, the plot revolved around how it will make the money. For a social enterprise, the plot is how it will change the world (or at least its targeted corner of the world). In both cases, the characters must be precisely delineated, their motivations must be plausible, and the plot must turn on an insight about value.

Many a time, we end up managing by trial-and-error (not all of us are fortunate enough to have formal a management education). There are times when we feel that our choices would perhaps have been different if only we knew then what we know now, or if we had spent that little extra time thinking on some of the fundamentals of the plan. Magretta’s book makes us think – on some of the most basic principles on our business runs. And therein lies its success.

Managing in the Next Society
By Peter Drucker

Drucker’s book begins with “I did once believe in the New Economy. The year was 1929…”. For those among us who have only known the New Economy, Peter Drucker’s newest book (a collection of recent essays and interviews) needs to be read! Drucker has seen the world of all of business for the better part of seven decades. In his book, he talks about the information economy and what has changed (and what hasn’t), and the social trends (demographics, for one) which portend huge change in the coming years.

Here’s what Drucker says about one of four entrepreneurship pitfalls – where the new and growing business typically gets into trouble:

The [pitfall] comes when the entrepreneur has to face the fact that the new product or service is not successful where he or she thought it would be but is successful in a totally different market. Many businesses disappear because the founder-entrepreneur insists that he or she knows better than the market.

The majority of successful new inventions or products don’t succeed in the market for which they’ve been originally designed. [Entrepreneurs reject unexpected success.] Because it’snot what they had planned. Entrepreneurs believe that they are in control. And that leads to the [next pitfall]. Entrepreneurs believe that profit is what matters most in a new enterprise. But profit is secondary. Cash flow matters most.

My recommendation for entrepreneurs and managers: take two days off from life, read both the books, think, and live them.

Tomorrow: Warren Buffet and Nexus