What would happen when yahoo gets bought by Microsoft? Many claim that the two companies have different cultures, and that there might be integration issues. I read an interesting article tonight: ”Making the deal real: How GE capital integrates acquisitions” I decided to post the summary on my blog, as a test of interest.

The acquisition process is generally fairly simple.
1. An assessment of the compliances with regulations
1. Sent out a letter of intent
2. financial negotiations
3. signing announcement
4. closing of the deal.

Ronald N. Ashkenas, Lawrence J. DeMonaco, and Suzanne C. Francis underline that integration of the two companies can be complex. “Sometimes the acquisition succeeds, but mainly because the acquired company is not integrated in the acquirers organization.” The authors compare an acquisition with an arranged marriage. The parents negotiate the deal, sign the contracts and expect the couple to live happily ever after.

Four general tips on how to approach acquisitions:
1 Acquisition is a process

An acquisition is not a project with a timeline; integration can be slow and costly. The integration can include costly communication tactics. Investigate the management culture of the target company. Facilitate the issue management of cultural differences.

2. Acquisition requires a social team player to facilitate the acquired company

“The acquiring team is lead by a general manager and consists of people in various areas including tax, finance, business development, human resources and technology.” One would guess that the leader would be responsible for integrating the acquired company, while this might not be the case. The authority position often limits the ability to become a facilitator. People in the acquired company need to be able to ask stupid questions, this is why there should be a person responsible for the social aspects.

3. Have a crisp management plan ready, to avoid scaring the employees

The employees of the aquired company might ask themselves, who are these new owners and what are their intentions? The uncertainty of creeping changes should be taken away, but in a way that everyoneÂ’s dignity is maintained. There is no such thing as a merger of equals, so the way that the acquired company will do business will change.
Basically, “every employee has to know if they still have their job.” “The answer is to have decisions about management structure, key roles, reporting relationships and other career affecting aspects ready before the announcement to acquire is made.”

4 Require an action plan with a time limit from the acquired company

“In acquisitions, many people; sometimes thousands need to learn to work together.” An idea is to initiate a 100 day plan for integrating. Create situations that allow the employees to socialize, exchange information and feelings. There should be a clear formularization of the acquiring companies methods and values so that the acquired company is able to create an action plan. This method will make the transition, and can be used to reflect upon.

Ronald N. Ashkenas, Lawrence J. DeMonaco, and Suzanne C. Francis, 1998, Harvard Business review’, pp. 168-178

The language of business is English, not dutch. Every self respecting person aiming for a decent career knows that. The Dutch have different terms and systems than for example the USA. I compiled this list to help you translating your CV into english.

VMBO – preparatory secondary vocational education
MAVO – junior general secondary education
HAVO – senior general secondary education
VWO – university preparatory education; pre-university education
Gymnasium -No equivalent in English. Pre-university education including the study of Latin and/or Greek.
Vakopleiding (MBO) -vocational training
MBO – senior secondary vocational education
HBO – higher professional education; professionally oriented higher education
HBO bacheloropleiding –
undergraduate programme; undergraduate degree programme of higher professional education; bachelor’s degree programme; bachelor’s degree programme of higher professional education
HBO diploma – HBO diploma, HBO degree, HBO degree certificate
HBO masteropleiding - graduate (or postgraduate) degree programme (of higher professional education); professional master’s degree programme; master’s degree programme of higher professional eduation; HBO master’s degree programme
WO -academic higher education; university education
Masteropleiding universiteit – university masterÂ’s degree programme
Hoger economisch onderwijs (HEO) - higher education in economics and management
Hogeschool - university of professional education
afstudeeropdracht – final project
afstudeerrichting – specialization; main subject; major field
Scriptie – thesis; final paper
Stage -internship; work placement; traineeship
Stagebegeleider – internship supervisor, work placement supervisor ; traineeship supervisor
Stageplaats – internship place; work placement; internship post; trainee post
Stagiaire – student intern, student trainee
Studie -degree course, studies
Vak – subject
Vakinhoud – subject matter
Vakgebied – field; field of study
Keuzevak - optional course; elective (course) [AE]Voltijdsonderwijs - full-time study programme; full-time education
Deeltijdsonderwijs -part-timestudy programme or courses
Zelfstudie – independentlearning; private study; self-instruction; self-tuition
Werkcollegetutorial -seminar
Hoorcollege – lecture
College lecture – course of lectures
Diploma – diploma
Cijferlijst - listof marks, list of grades, grades list
Propedeuse – propedeuse;propaedeutic year; first year of a degree programme
Uitwisselingsprogramma -exchangeprogramme
Uitwisselingsstudent - exchangestudent
Vrijstelling - exemption
Eindcijfer - finalmark, final grade
Bedrijfseconomie - BusinessEconomics
Accountancy - Finance and Accounting
Commerciële economie – Commerce,Marketing
Personeel en Arbeid Personeel – Policy and Human Resources
Management,Economie en Recht – Management,Economics and Law
Bestuurskunde - Public Administration

People can listen to tremendous ideas, but need to care about it for themselves to become passionately involved. The key is to explain the goals in such a way so that the listeners are enabled to recognize passion. The explanation of the idea must be in the right language.

Example: Companies create new visions that commonly contain words such as growth, profit and shareholder value. This cannot create passion for the Employees of that company, why? Employees talk about emotional aspects such as personal happiness, family and friends. No employee considers terms as ‘creating shareholder value’ and ‘create excel spreadsheet numbers’ as intrinsic work motivators, and a reason to go out of their beds in the morning.

Make a translation to the right language and create a connection between the initial idea and all the passions that people have for themselves, their families, and their communities in a wider world.

Here are 11 tips for companies that are starting up in the trading business.

1. Be adaptive

Because you can since the company is still small. I would underline that the main focus has to be to start doing more business. Have short-term goals to be able to recognize valuable opportunities for your company

2. Advertisement

Do not forget about marketing, Consider advertisement with popular search engines if you are selling on the web. Use platforms, partners and web advertisement (adwords, Microsoft search and/or overture). Create a marketing plan and be creative with free publicity

3. Avoid staying in stealth mode to long

You can not sell anything when you are in stealth mode

4. Aim at direct customers, since the company is able to be personal and consumer targeted.

Your first customers are probably people from the direct social network, since marketing is limited. Focus on this group by making a special offer to direct social environment. Give special attention to friends, family and colleagues since they are great PR channels.

5. Start selling the product on website for exponential growth

Check if the product is agile to sell on the market at all. Then find the quickest ways make the sells grow exponential. Create a alliance, or start selling the product online.

6. IT related investments

There are open source solutions that do not take as much time as self developed websites.

7. Things to consider before launching

Legal aspects, good distribution, stock, payment by credit card, feedback from customers etcÂ…

8. Get long term vision

Startups usually lack protocols for information sharing. The idea is to be adaptive, this can be done by scheduled collaborative meetings where everyone has input on the creation of the long term vision.

9. Try cross selling the product

It could be useful for a startup to think about possible media partners and/or distributors to collaborate the product or service with another business. Pizza hut managed to enjoy quick worldwide advertisement through collaboration with PepsiCo.

10. Limited budget

If you have trust in the product, consider a funding. Try to get ‘smart money’ from a partner that you trust. Make a vision for the long term and present it. Again, have a tight story and be trustworthy.

11. Chaos by lack of planning and organizing

If you are a organizer, make sure that you cover all aspects regarding the company. If you are rather developing or selling, consider getting a leader. You do not want to loose momentum during this turbulent time. I would recommend getting a standard system for bookkeeping, CRM and overall idea processing. Consider open source but look at outsourcing the bookkeeping as well.

I just received an email from domainrenewalonline.com. They told me to renew my joop.in domain within 90 days to prevent expiration. I was shocked! What does this mean, and who is sending this.

When I was thinking about this, I realized that I just moved this domain to a new domain registrar. Maybe something went wrong during that process?

So I have contacted my registrar, and they confirmed that this email is a trick from a third party. They get domainname information from the WHOIS database, and send this mails in advance. The site looks pretty authentic, but it’s just a scam.

I geolocated the sender as mailer2.domainrenewal-online.com in Norrtälje, Sweden. The Whois database returns the following address for domeinrenewalsonline.com: Domain Renewal SA, Avenue Louise 65, Brussels, BE.

The scammers fined my ‘renewal’ for €69.95 ($95,– USD), it feels like I saved this amount of money today! I might buy my friends a round of beers tonight :)

I wonder how much money they make from others with this scam.

Symptoms: My phone started to do random reboots last week, and sometimes the Micro SD card would disappear. It would only reappear after rebooting the device. Sometimes the phone reset while playing music with Windows Media Player.

Okay, I found a solution to this but don’t laugh, I just wanted to share it with you because I went to the trouble of doing a hard reset first. I was scared that the problem was hardware related and that I have to send it back.

Cause: There is a little sensor switch inside your device, located immediately next to your SIM card. This detects if the cover is being removed to turn off the phone. When released the phone will reboot. My sensor seemed to be getting defective, hence I was get getting more reboots while the cover was attached properly.

Solution: If you are lucky, the sensor isn’t broken, and you can just put a little bit of paper on the sensor to enhance the pressure. This seemed to be sufficient for my problems. No random reboots ever since!

I wish all problems could be solved with a little piece of paper!

“Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value.
Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.”
- Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (1973: 9)

I found some audio files from 1970 where you can hear him speak. He presents parts from his manuscript called “Deschooling Society” about his reasons why institutionalized education is bad for society.

EDIT: updated stream

This is the URL to stream RTLZ on your pc. Useful at the office or if you do not have access to the channel through your television.
rtlz stream (available on weekdays from 8:00 to 18:00)

EDIT: this application is no longer maintained, rather use this initiative.

I have improved my deviantart facebook application a little bit tonight;
have a look over here!

Updates:
*Your own scraps (enter your deviantart username)
*Selection of the number of thumbnails
*Faster

It is still in developer mode!, help me out at: facebook development

If someone has an idea to accelerate this method (There is no deviantart API, hence this slow solution) please let me know.

How it works:

1. It fetches the latest additions from your deviantaccount’s RSS feed. (length is defined in setup)
2. The application uses deviationnumbers found to load the real (bloated) deviantart page in the background.
3. The application uses javascript to ID the thumbnail.
4. The thumbnail gets loaded in a iframe
5. The entire proces is repeated X times.

David Allen claims that the key to a stress-less life is to move tasks out of your mind by recording them somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.

Some carry a notebook or a hipster PDA to keep track of everything that pops to mind. This way, they can look at their notes and create actions around them.

I prefer a different technique, which combines the power of GTD, ICal, Inbox and my windows mobile.
This is because I always carry my mobile phone, and it can story many todo’s. I just write scraps on my mobile and redefine the item later on my laptop, when I got the time to do it.

How to set it up:

I use Midnight Inbox as my GTD tool, and set it up with the following todo settings:

Optional: And I prepare my OUTGOING todo’s in a context called “errands” (because my mobile is on me when I go shopping)

Then I setup my Ical-MS phone like this with the syncing program called missing link.

Say that I am talking to a friend of mine, and he advises me to read a certain book. Or when I have a idea in the middle of the night, and want to get it off my mind. Normally I would have to get a piece of paper and write it down, but that is just to much work to be efficient.

I just grab my phone en enter it directly from the homescreen.

Missing sync for MAC OSX or Active sync can automatically sync your phone on USB connection, after which everything is copied to your calendar application.

I process all my actions once a day, all the E-mails, calender notes, and the todo’s from my mobile.

Inbox will show the item, and now I have time to clarify my commitment to it, and I can decide what I want to do with it.

In this case action: “buy book” , context -> “errands”. Because the book has to be bought outside the house while I am shopping, it will be synced to my shopping list.

UPDATE: the skin can be found here. You can download the todo plugin from this website

An MBA typically takes about two years to complete. You have to travel a lot, participate in class discussions, studygroups and give presentations. For me it is just the only way to do a master in business.

But is a university study efficient and the degree worth the trouble?

The 25-year-old Josh Kaufman claims not, and that his compiled list of must read books would bring you to a graduateÂ’s MBA level of thinking. Although, only if you have the discipline to study on your own.

After all, the universities do not have a monopoly on the information and the right books alone could therefore be enough.
Although you don’t gratuate, but you can try to put a PMBA (personal Master of Business Administration) on your resume.

I am going to use it as a planning-to-read-most-of-it-in-the-holiday-season booklist :)

I stumbled upon a website where you can submit your startup ideaÂ’s.
KillerStartups.com is a user driven internet startups community. Entrepreneurs, investors, and bloggers are staying informed on up-and-coming internet startups using our blog platform, where internet entrepreneurs submit their startup to see what others think about it.

Vote for the one you think will be a killer.

killerstartups.com

Stuart Skorman is describing some of the relations between entrepreneurship and poker in his book “Confessions of a serial entrepreneur”.

1. Aggressiveness, sometimes you can succeed by bluffing your competitors.
2. Play tight, the goal is to be conservative. It could be smarter to start a franchise instead of a company from scratch.
3. Hone opportunism, act in the right place at the right time.

I am currently chatting with Bart Zuidgeest, he just came back from his holiday and we are having a coffee in Club 11, located on the eleventh floor inside the old Post CS building.

This afternoon we will have a chat/brainstorm with Bart Kaasschieter fromkast.nl.
The ‘Hogeschool van Amsterdam’ gave all the bachelor gratuates a voucher for their website.
This voucher contained a code that allowed to pick any tie we liked at their site!

Their ‘kast’ platform is going to expand with wines, watches and pearles.

Another fine sunny day at Bloemendaal! Although somebody tried to steal my wallet, luckily I felt his hand grabbing the wallet in my back pocket. He grabbed it, and I touched his hand while he wanted to dive behind some people. He got scared and dropped the wallet immediately.

Maybe I should have been more offensive, but I am just glad that I still have my stuff. Reminds me of that movie “King of New York“, where Christopher Walken gets robbed by a gang inside the metro and decides to offer them a job. He gives his card and says, “I want you to work for me, please visit my office” The gang was stunned by his proposal and walked away.

Ron Avitzur- “It is a cliche in our business that the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent – the attention to detail – makes a good product.”

This book was written by Thomas Friedman, and it is called “the world is flat. This Chinese translation is acknowledging this once again. Learning Mandarin is hard, today I realised that I am able to speak some words; maybe formulating simple sentences. Reading on the other hand is a whole different world.

I met a stranger today, and he sounded depressed. When I asked him what he did for a living he became passionate, but he told me that he had a problem. And what he told me had to do with his employees. He said to me: “Keeping the good employees within a company is an utopia. The good employees will always leave, the bad employees will stick around.” Could that be the problem? Maybe the company does not allow good people to be satisfied with their effort? It made me curious, maybe I will meet him again sometime…

“You have been misled, away from the true and divine presence in the Universe that men have called God. I don’t know what God is but I know what he isn’t. And unless and until you are prepared to look at the whole truth, wherever it may go, whoever it may lead to … if you want to look the other way or if you want to play favorites, then somewhere along the line you’re going to find out you’re messing with divine justice.” This is a quote mentioned in the much talked about Zeitgeist movie I would encourage you to give it a chance as well! At this point you are just thinking, “just another conspiracy theory movie”. And well, you are right! But this one sums everything up! :-D I found it to be an eye opener and scary in some ways! forward to 6 minutes if you are hasty!
zeitgeistmovie.com/

Just watched the the great global warming swindle. It claims that global warming is not connected to our CO2 output, but to the sun flares.

I registered as a ‘elfstedentocht’ attendant this year, and I hope that the great global warming swindle is right!

I updated the skin of my site, and I do realize that this post looks a bit funny by now.

EDIT: this application is no longer maintained, rather use this initiative.

I created my first facebook app.

1. It loads the RSS from my username
2. Uses deviationnumber to load real (bloated) deviantart page
3. Using AJAX to get the thumbnail out
4. Pushing that into an overviewpage.

*slow!
*no facebook setup yet, so no personal application possible

[link]

If someone has an idea to accellerate this method (I did not find a deviantart API, hence this slow solution) please let me know.

We are at the HES building in Bijlmer Amsterdam. Tanja and I just did a pitch for radio Veronicaschool.

Today we won the first prize with our commercial! (final cut pro)
Most of the other students are working in groups that are greater than us, so we won six tickets the pathe cinema’s! We had a lot of fun making the commercial, and the prize is even better!

See the commercial…

I visited ‘Fashion DNA’ with Barbara today. “From 1 August to 22 October 2006 the Rijksmuseum and the Nieuwe Kerk are presenting a remarkable exhibition: ‘Fashion DNA’. This is the first fruit of a two-year cooperative agreement. In ‘Fashion DNA’ the Rijksmuseum’s rich costume collection is the starting point for a unique exhibition on the body, identity and image. The exhibition at the Nieuwe Kerk has been spectacularly designed in a contemporary style by Italo Rota, the Italian architect known for his work for Roberto Cavalli, Dior and others and for his designs for the Winter Olympics in Turin.”

Summer 2006, Amsterdam. 33 degrees!

Some pictures from my time in Barcelona…

My internship project at Citibank has ended. No delays, both projects completely done. Party with chocolate cake for everyone

That’s it… my work in Spain is done! Time for a few weeks of holiday and than back to Amsterdam.

People who are born in Barcelona, probably die here as well. it is common to see entire families centered around the same neighborhood. This importance of family and the feeling of threat from the rapid increasing number of immigrants make some locals unable to understand and accept the increasingly number of foreigners that are coming to this city. DonÂ’t look surprised if you donÂ’t get any (decent) service in a store if you just talk English. My experiences of over pricing and bad service where although solemnly with the elder local people.

This got me to ask a younger local what he thought to be a possible cause for my experiences. He told me that the root of the anger lies with the number of bachelor-parties given by the English. :-)

Barcelona offers the Mediterranean beach, a good climate and the convenience of the city in a radius of 4 km, not so strange that there are over 1200 people from the Netherlands living in this city. As an outsider, it seems difficult to really get to know the local people. I am wondering how the other people from my country are experiencing this.