One of the greatest challenges to any business of any size is marketing. With thousands of businesses touting their wares on the internet, in the press and on every advertising surface available, how do you make your voice heard so that you can get your product or service to eager customers?
Much of business forecasting involves analysts crunching numbers and extrapolating scenarios from current reality, relying on their market knowledge and a number of reasonable assumptions. But what about when things get unreasonable? Companies have been wiped out by things coming at them from left field that their bean counters failed to predict.
Back in the old days of rock’n’roll you got into the music business by getting as stoned as possible and following a band around until they finally accepted your presence and gave you something to do. Now things are different. It’s an industry run by (mostly) clear-headed businesspeople and has a set of well-defined job descriptions. There are even pensions, for Led Zeppelin’s sake.
Science fiction authors imagined artificial intelligence (AI) using its superior computing power to conquer humanity. Lucky for us, that hasn’t come to pass (yet!). Instead, what we have is so much better: helpful AI capable of automating many key tasks involved in running your business.
The recent US college admissions scandal hit the news largely because a few celebrities were involved, but this kind of thing must be going on all the time. To recap the scandal:
The FBI says pushy parents paid $25m in bribes to get university places for their children.
Actress Lori Loughlin is alleged to have paid $500,000 for college places for her two daughters, in a deal which also got them on to the University of Southern California rowing team.
What is the real value of an MBA? The skills developed, or the prestige of the issuing institution? For those seeking to add an MBA to their resume, their answer to that question will make the difference between spending thousands of dollars and spending no dollars at all.
Drones are filling our skies. If companies like Amazon manage to negotiate their way past aviation restrictions, drones will soon be delivering our shopping to our homes and workplaces. No longer just toys and aerial photography tools, drones are here to stay. They are used in search and rescue, disaster relief, bomb disposal, military and civilian reconnaissance, archaeology, infrastructure inspection, anti-poaching, conservation, construction and law enforcement.
In 1233 a papal bull decreed that anyone admitted to the mastership at the University of Toulouse should be allowed to teach freely in any other university. Ever since then it has been set in stone that the rite of passage into a master’s degree is a three or four-year undergraduate degree. Pretty much by definition, a master’s is a follow-on from a bachelor’s degree.
Sometimes the Earth bites. Some would say ‘sometimes the Earth bites back,’ with climate change and rising incidents of flooding in mind. But most natural disasters are not man-made. There’s very little we can do at the moment about earthquakes and volcanoes, for example. And hurricanes and typhoons were around long before we started filling the atmosphere with CO2. So studying natural disasters and preparing for them shouldn’t be undertaken with a sense of guilt about self-inflicted damage. It should be done with a simple sense of self-preservation.
Ever since the robot dog K-9 appeared in Doctor Who in the 1970s, geeks of a certain age have fantasized about having a metallic sidekick that does most things a real dog would do but doesn’t need to poop and can beat them at chess.
