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Professionalism

I hate “professionalism”. I know, it’s a requirement for many jobs. But I’d feel uneasy and unwelcome in such jobs and companies, so I might as well say: Just fuck it.

Professionalism is about average people posing as if they were smart. Professionalism is to the corporate world what political correctness is to politics. That is to say, bullshit.

The idea of “best practices” is no better. If everybody is doing something, how can it be the “best” thing to do? Average at best. More probably, mediocre, dumb and boring.

Rich and poor countries

A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars.
It’s where the rich use public transportation.”

— Enrique Peñalosa, Ex-Mayor of Bogotá

Rich and poor countries. A quick check: which large European cities have seen more downloads of their official public transport app on the iPhone than on Android? Only Berlin, Amsterdam and Vienna. Whatever the reason – it is possible, of course, that the iPhone app was launched much later than the Android app – many other cities don’t fare too well: in Milan we have almost twice as many downloads on Android; in Barcelona, twice as many; in Paris and Rome almost 7 times as many; in Dublin, 25 times as many.

Clueless Ikea

Clueless Ikea, you say? How clueless can a smart company be? We’re just about to find out. Apparently, Ikea sent a (relatively civil and mild) Cease and Desist letter to Jules, the person who’s been running IKEAhackers for the past 8 years. As a result of this, Jules will have to either take away all the ads from her website, which she can’t do because the website is now her full-time job, or move it to a new domain name.

What should Ikea have done?

The easy thing to do: chill out, don’t make a fuss about nothing, ask her to take away ads to competing companies and add affiliate links to Ikea.com instead and give her a very generous cut on sales. Also, send free IKEA furniture her way to have fun with :)

The gutsier one: quietly buy out Jules’ website for a few million Euros, and then hire her to a six-digit salary so she can keep doing full-time what she obviously loves doing and is so good at. Update: Apparently, they have decided to wise up. Good.

Not quite so

In an otherwise pretty interesting post, I spot this…

If it’s cheaper to produce content than to buy advertising space…

Not quite so. Wait a second. The goal should not be merely “to produce content”, but rather to offer interesting perspectives and information that will make as many people become aware of your company, its products and services as you could do with advertising. Which is different. Merely “producing content” doesn’t quite cut it.

There is one question that matters and one question only: does it work?

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