T M T

Here is what I heard from a friend last night:
To manage your trust with friend or co-workers, you need to watch for when do you agree/disagree with the person, and whether the opinion you agree/disagree with turns out to be correct or not. Here is the four scenarios:

1. you agree, and it is correct – the trust goes up;
2. you agree, and it is wrong – the trust goes down;
3. you disagree, and it is correct – the trust goes down;
4. you disagree, and it is wrong – the trust goes down;

So according to this, your best course of action is to voice your support only when you truly believe the opinion is correct (or it can stand the trial of time). In all other situations you should keep quiet.

There are lots of things they don’t teach in business schools – for example meeting etiquette.
Here is what I learned in the hard way – the bigger the meeting, the shorter and less you should speak.
Why? the more you speak, statistically more chances that one of several things will happen:
1) you spoke of something someone else hated;
2) someone misheard/misinterpreted what you said;
3) the meeting is running behind, the boss looks at the watch and looks at who’s still talking endlessly.
4) you successfully finished your long speech, only to find out that you didn’t know some key counter-evidences about to be presented next – now against you.

Anyway, you should reserve your long-winded speech for those coveted one-on-one meetings. Bosses hate other people talking endlessly in those big meetings. Well, unless the boss is your friend or supporter. In that case, he or she will be embarassed instead.

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I’ve never really thought too much about the blog name I picked – just the three things I think about a lot.
It just hit me today – I happened to have picked three very statistically male-dominant topics.
Well, I don’t want to get into any psychology stuff – I just feel that I get to explore the things in life that I really like, and I’m very happy.

Recent issue of Fortune magazine has an interesting story (google: seacode offshore). A former tanker captain and an IT veteran teamed up to build a computer outsourcing company on a used cruise ship 3 miles off the shore of California.
By international convention, the ship and its crew (software engineers from India, China, etc) follows the law and tax code of the registering country (Panama for example). The crew are even allowed short shore leaves. They will work 6 days/week, take 2 months off for every 4 months work. There’s not much time difference for US customers. Even face-2-face meetings are now very cheaply possible.
Such a briliant business idea.