How much is your daughter worth?

One of my sisters in Nigeria is about to get married and the thorny issue of "bride price" has arisen. It is a fascinating and complex process steeped in tradition. My father has issued to the prospective groom's family a carefully drafted, typed list of 36 very specific items required before the traditional wedding can proceed.

I can't go in to all the details as negotiations are reaching a critical stage. Mediators have been appointed. Venues for the bilaterals have been agreed and talks about talks have commenced (although at this stage the UN Security Council has not been brought in to play). However I can reveal that the precise number of "smoke dried pure river fish (maggot free)" may be disputed.

For those whose culture does not include a "bride price" this whole exercise is easy to misunderstand. The brides family is not "selling" their daughter. The thinking is this. A man comes along and says he wants to take your daughter away. Naturally you refuse. Who does he think he is and why does he think he can deprive you of your beloved daughter? Go away and leave us alone, you cry. Our daughter is ours and we want to keep her.

Oh we beg , the man's family says. Look, they say, come on be reasonable. You say you love and value your daughter. Well, tell us how much you love and value your daughter and we'll see what we can do to help soothe the pain of the loss that you will suffer?

The girls family go in to a huddle. Wise old folk gather and discuss the issue. Remember old so-an-so's daughter? We loved and valued her this much. Then there was Mrs Muggings daughter. It was that much. Okay, let's put our list together.

A list is draw up. it is non-negotiable. It is a statement of the worth of the daughter in the eyes of the family. It is designed to send a message so it is pitched high. Some items are there to amuse and entertain. Some are genuine points of negotiation. Some are for the celebration (in the UK the bride's family pays for the Wedding, in Nigeria the Groom's family contributes a lot to the Traditional Wedding and that gets added to the list). It's part serious business, part pantomime. Finally in a serious of complex manouvers, the list is handed over.

The boys family are in a tricky position. On the one hand they are obliged to recoil in horror at the huge price being demanded by the bride's family. However, are they saying that their family isn't wealthy enough to afford the price? How embarrassing. Or are they saying that the girl that their son has chosen to marry isn't worth that much? Hmmmm. Tricky business.

And although I said that the list isn't negotiable, a compromise can always be reached. The position taken by the brides family is this - the list is a clear statement of the worth that the bride's family puts on their daughter, who they don't want to part with anyway. However the groom's family will come and present what they feel they can present and after much grumbling and dissatisfation from the brides family, including threats to walk away from the whole thing, everything will get sorted out.

Now, as the father of a clever, beautiful, talented young daughter here in England, I will not have the opportunity to set a bride price. But boy, oh, boy if I did have to put a value on my daughter let me tell you the groom's family, friends, casual acquaintances, descentants and anyone else who knows the groom would be paying out for generations to come!

My Gap Year

When I am all grown up I am going to take a gap year.

I am saving it up so that I can really savour it. like the last sweet in the packet. It's not something to be rushed. I don't know when I'll do it or what I'll do with it, but I am looking forward to it.

I would probably travel, but I don't like the idea of backpacking and slobbing around in dingy hostels. Perhaps I would travel from 5 star hotel to All-inclusive resort around the world. I'd love to tour around the USA. To go to India, China, Africa. High in the Swiss mountains. Paris. Ahhhh.

More likely I would go and sit in a library somewhere for a year and browse interesting books. I'd find some books that were so complex they would make my head hurt. But I don't know if that would keep me busy for a whole year.

I might try to learn something new. Pick a new topic, a new domain and immerse myself in it.

Or I might get out and about, meet interesting, intelligent, thoughtful people from around the world and think of interesting things we could do together.

I would want to create new things. New initiatives. Things that I could look at and say "wow, did we just do that?"

I think I will try to do some good in the world. Try to have an impact and change some things for the better. Or at least flap my wings like a butterfly and see what storm blew up across the world.

I would spend lots of time with my family. Watching, talking, helping, enjoying. I would want to spend time standing on the touchline and cheer my son scoring tries at rugby. I would want to have the time to go to concerts with my daughter and "throw my hands in the air like I just don't care". I would want to sneak off to the cinema with my wife, buy huge illegal buckets of popcorn and munch all afternoon.

I might even see if I could start a company. But not any old company. I would start an outrageously ambitious company that was trying to do something completely new. that if it worked would change the face of the world. And if it didn't then it wouldn't.

Hold on, hold on just a second. Aren't I doing all these things anyway? I seem to be doing exactly what I want to be doing. Now what am I supposed to do on my gap year? Damn!

Kasparov, Karpov and Simutowe

After 25 years Kasparov and Karpov, the chess Grandmasters are back to their old ways, battling it out for supremacy.

I am filled with awe when I think about the brain power that must be being set to work when these two meet. Intelligence is an interest of mine and I enjoy being amongst exceptionally smart people.

Not that I lay any claim to be exceptionally smart myself, although I did once score 104% in a maths exam. But when you meet people who are really, really clever then if, like me, you fall into the category of "definitely not stupid" you have enough smarts to appreciate what they are capable of.

Speaking of chess, I am not bad at the game myself. I wouldn't say I was a keen player, but I can put up a decent fight. However at my old software company, we had some really smart developers who were excellent chess players. Not that I ever played against them but it just wouldn't have been worth it to them. They would have beaten me as if I wasn't there.

Then we hired a testing analyst. As well as being a jolly decent software tester, he turned out to be an English Grandmaster . On one of our team awaydays, we set up about 20 chessboards for all of us, in a horse-shoe and he played against all of us simultaneously, moving swiftly from board to board. He beat us all as if we were children. Only one of our software engineers put up any sort of resistance, which I think he foundquite entertaining. For his own amusement, when all of us had succumbed, our grandmaster reset the engineer's board and then replayed the whole game from memory talking us through the moves as he went. Amazing.

However, he would admit himself that there were other international grandmasters who would beat him as if he was a babe in arms, and those grandmasters would bow their heads if they ever came up against a "super-grandmaster" such as a Kasparov or Karpov.

So, where does that leave me on the intelligence ladder? Slightly above a cabbage I think. Fortunately I have never felt bad about not being "the smartest guy in the room" because I grew up with two exceptionally smart brothers, so there was no point trying to compete on that score. In fact I find myself drawn to genius, I enjoy observing it, just being in its presence.

Sometimes I get mistaken for being smart and this is unfortunate, as happened when I was doing my physics degree in Nigeria. There was a mathematician who shared a couple of courses with me. He was super-smart and somehow got it into his head that I was too. So, when other lads were heading off to the bar for a bottle of beer or two, he would beg me to stay behind for an hour or so to "solve vectors" with him. Oh, the happy hours we would spend, him with the chalk at the blackboard scribbling away, turning occasionally to say "what do you think, Tom, is it correct, Tom?" Me lying on the desks, legs crossed, smoking away, pondering for a few minutes and then pronouncing, to his great relief "by jove, I think you've cracked it". I never had the heart to say "I have absolutely no idea what those funny little squiggles you put on the board actually mean, but can I go now please? Beer doesn't drink itself you know!".

Over the summer I have been reading extensively on the nature of intelligence, how to identify those with a real gift in certain areas and how to unleash their full potential. I am fascinated by gifteness and intelligence and I am also puzzled as to why the African continent has not managed to unleash its fair share of genii and what happened to my vector-analyzing friend who was easily as smart as the smartest people I have met since from London to Silicon Valley. Did he fulfill his full potential or did the rigours of African life mean that his awesome brainpower was put to the task of making a half decent living day to day? If so, what a waste!

For example, in a continent of nearly a billion people, why is there only one chess Grandmaster, Amon Simutowe from sub-saharan Africa? Is there a different distribution of intelligence across the African population? I don't believe there is. But if there isn't then that means that, just taking the young people, of which there are about 400 million across Africa, there must be something like 8 million (2%) who would be eligible to join Mensa!

I imagine what the continent could be like if we could find and unleash some of this brain power and so I am creating a charitable foundation to take on that challenge. In Britian, USA, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and all over the world countries are investing millions into gifted and talented programs for their young people and I want to make sure that the same thing happens across Africa. I have been working on this for a couple of years now and the bits of the jigsaw are coming together. It's an impossible challenge and it's going to be a long and fascinating journey that will start in earnest next year when we run our first major gifted Academy program. The outcomes are unpredictable and that makes it even more exciting.

And if in ten years time all I suceed in achieving is finding and unleashing 10,000 young people who all beat me at chess as if I was a babe in arms, then I will be very, very happy.

Mingling with the Party Boys

Today I attended the launch of a policy document by the Conservative Party shadow Justice Minister Dominic Grieve QC. The topic was the surveillance society and government databases and as it looks a fair bet that we might see a change of Government in 2010 I thought I had better accept the invitiation and hear what the thinking is from opposition quarters.

The content of the paper and discussion is covered elsewhere (here and here for example) so I won't bother repeating it. Suffice to say that despite not being of a Conservative persuasion myself, I was a bit surprised to find that I agreed with pretty much everything in the paper and I was impressed with the way Dominic Grieve handled himself during the lengthy Q&A session.

But having never been to a real live "launch" of a political policy document before I was keen to find out what it was like. So I put on what I thought looked like a Tory sort of suit and set off to the invitation only event held at a Microsoft office in London.

The event was smaller than I thought it would be. There were about 40 people present and I suspect at least 10 of them were party faithful. Judging by the number of badges on the reception table when I arrived, I think the majority of guests were present (perhaps 10 or so missing) so it seems that these launch events are not designed to be the big "show and tell" affairs that I had assumed.

Speaking of party faithful, I do like watching young politicians on the make. They tend to be caricatures of whatever party they belong to. I slipped in and sat on the back row just as the event was getting going and a young lad in his twenties spotted me, glided across the carpet and pressed a copy of the report into my hand. I say young lad and I think he was a young lad but he somehow managed to look as if he was comfortably into his fifties. He looked as if he had been born in his fifties. This may be the look you go for if you are an aspiring Conservative. I must find out what the Labour lads try to look like these days. I know what your typical libdem aspires to.

After a brief introduction by someone important but instantly forgettable, Dominic Grieve stood up and made a few remarks about his document. Then we got down to the meat of the event - the Q&A. Dominic sat between two other folk, a mate of mine and all-round good egg called Jerry Fishenden and Eleanor Laing MP, Shadow Minister of Justice. I must say, I was slightly taken aback to see Jerry up there, not because he shouldn't have been but I just hand't expected it and it's always a surprise when you see someone you know unexpectely out of context, being all grown up and speaking in deep, well modulated, authoritative tones. Jerry was, I believe, the techno-totty (on account of knowing what he is talking about when it comes to technology) and Eleanor's role was to agree with Dominic and repeat what he said but in a soft reassuring Scottish brogue.

Despite it being a small and largely friendly group (why would you invite your critics to your own launch party, after all?) the questioning went on for a good hour and was very persistant. This was the bit where I was reminded why I will not make a good politician. Most of the questions were pretty good as the audience knew its stuff, but some were self-serving drivel and it would have been quicker if the questioner had just stood up, waved their arms in the air and said "Yoo Hoo Look at me. I'm here!". That's when I would have said "yes, yes, yes, we've all seen you, you ARE big and you ARE clever, now sit down", Dominic however looked thoughtful and came up with half-decent answers that gave the impression that he gave a damn about the questioner. Impressive.

Probably the most impressive was a question that the chap next to me asked about ISO standards verse kite marks. I assumed that Dominic would immediately pass the question over to Jerry, who might have stood a chance of knowing what the question was about. Indeed, I thought I caught Jerrry shifting uneasily in his chair. But to my surprise Dominic responded to the question himself and actually answered it pretty well.

As I didn't understand the protocol for asking questions (such as did your question need to make sense or not) and because my personality type makes it illegal for me to speak unless spoken to in strange public settings, I didn't get around to asking a question. But almost everyone else did and the session had to be cut short and brought to an end.

Job done, the group prepared to retire for drinks, nibbles and networking in Microsoft's plush offices (Microsoft have been very smart boys, getting so close to the opposition, no other tech companies in sight at this stage). Networking is something the young party boys really know how to do and I could see them stretching and limbering up for a good session of trusting about, grasping hands insincerely and looking just past your left shoulder as they speak to you just in case someone slightly more important hoves into view. I should really have stayed and sprayed business cards around, but there is only so much I can take. I made my excuses (to myself, under my breadth) and fled.

Son's new school sets me homework!

My son looked resplendent in his new dark green school blazer and tie for his first day of secondary school yesterday. Suddenly he looks all grown up. Time has passed so quickly.

I still remember my first day at secondary school. Me and the boys going by ourselves on the train to Teddington in our brand new school uniforms, messing about on the train. We threw paper at each other, climbed on the seats and made loads of noise. What fun!

I also remember my second day at school. The second morning, at Assembly in front of the whole school, the Headteacher slapped his cane on the table and shouted "Four new boys were seen in the school uniform, THE SCHOOL UNIFORM, messing about on trains. If you were one of those boys STAND. UP. NOW." All 1,000 boys sat in complete expectant silence. Then one by one Tom, Stephen, Steve and Ross (not necessarily in that order) stood up, quivering like jelly and as the whole school looked on sniggering, we made our way to the Head's office to be disciplined!

These days caning is out and health and safety is in. No more horrible Mr "VZ" taking a run up and whacking boys with his trainer. It's forms, forms, forms now. There are so many forms to fill in when your child is going to a new school. Clubs to join, health and safety to worry about and the trickiest of all - the Ethnic Origin form.

This school has a long and complex list of options available for me to tick to identify my lad's ethnic origin. It was easy to dismiss most of the options - Irish traveller, Polish etc. But then we were left with these "black" choices:

Nigerian
Caribbean
Black European
Black and any other ethnic group
Other black
Other black African
White and black African
White and black

Well this is not as easy as we thought. Let us consider the situation.

My son was born and has lived his whole life in England. He is a south London, rugby playing, Fulham football club supporting geezer. One of his parents was also born and grew up in London of Caribbean parents. The other parent was born in London with a white English (plus a quarter Irish) mother and a Nigerian father.

So what variety of "black" is my boy? I puzzled and puzzled. I could of course have opted out and just not ticked one of the boxes but I think its no bad thing for the school to be aware of the diversity (0r not) of its student population. Finally after much thought and voices saying "oh for goodness sake, just tick something" I came up with an answer.

I'll tell you what I did later, but what would you have ticked?

Confirmation that I am the ladies choice

Great news! I finally have irrefutable evidence that Ilube is the ladies choice.

I know many of you have thought this for some time, but now there is hard evidence to back it up.

Okay, perhaps that's not the same Ilube. Mind you, it's cooler to be the ladies choice than to be a lubricant for dry eye conditions.

Having said that, I prefer being an eye lubricant than a biomass project in Slovakia or a socio-linguistic research project. But I guess I don't get to make these choices. If you've got a name that lends itself to a wide range of products and services, you get used to it. But for the avoidance of doubt, let me explain where the name ILUBE originally comes from.

To do this, I need to tell you a story that goes back to the tail end of the 19th Century. A young lad in what is now Nigeria, West Africa was hard at work under the hot sun, clearing bush to plant his seeds when he was "seized" by warriors. He was kidnapped, taken hostage by warriors from a rival tribe and taken into captivity.

The boy was dragged off to Urhobo land in modern day Delta State (which reminds me - if any of my Urhobo friends are reading this WILL YOU PEOPLE PLEASE STOP KIDNAPPING MY ANCESTORS!).

The young lad grew up amongst these Urhobo people as a captive/servant and he eventually married a local Urhobo/Itsekiri woman called Inene from a town called Okpara Waterside.

The couple's first three children were born there. Their second child, and first son, was a boy who was named, Oritseritseilubeye, which is an Itsekire name. Snappy name I know, and for day to day use it was shortened to ILUBE - a ha!

The couple settled down and engaged in fishing and trading commodities (not as in "BUY GOLD, SELL OIL" on the international markets but "buy fish, sell bananas" in the local market). At the time Inene was pregnant with their third child.

However, one day the captive lad who was now a grown man was at the market in Abraka when he overheard some traders speaking in his own language, Emai, that he had not heard for many years. After several months he plucked up courage to cultivate their acquaitance and eventually disclosed his true identity and how he came to be in this strange and distant place so far from "home".

This is now the first half of the 20th century and British Colonial administration was gradually creating an environment that made it more conducive for displaced persons, refugees, prisoners of inter-ethnic wars and slaves to migrate back to their ethnic areas.

Our hero determined to try to gain his release from his captors and make his way home. With his wife heavily pregnant, the local "Oracles" were consulted and revealed a surprising insight. The Oracles claimed that the unborn child would refuse to be born until a solemn promise was made that the child would be taken to its father's land.

This caused much panic particularly amongst Inene's family and in the circumstances Inene and her people, after a number of family conferences, eventually gave in and agreed that after the child was born, the family would be allowed to leave. The child, Itakhor, therefore agreed to be born and everything went smoothly.

However about 6 months after Itakhor's birth there was still no sign of the captors releasing the man and his family and Itakhor fell ill and refused to respond to the usual medication.

The Oracles were again consulted and not surprisingly the unfilfilled promise was quickly identified as the root cause for the child's illness. Rapid arrangements were made and, as the Oracles predicted, the child quickly recovered, so the family set off on the epic trip on foot through dangerous terrain back to Emai land. The baby Itakhor was strapped on to Inene's back, as is the custom, and young Oritseritseilubeye sat astride his fathers shoulders. The family set off at a pace set by the little daughter and oldest of the three children, Uledikun, on a dangerous journey that took several weeks, following a route and directions obtained from the Emai traders.

Years later Oritseritseilubeye or Ilube for short, now settled back in Emai-land, had children of his own and as is sometimes done, his sons decided to take his first name as their surname, thereby establishing the Ilube family. One of his sons is my father and you may not believe it but I actually met the lady Inene when I was very young and she was very, very, very old, blind and simply terrifying.

So now you know the origins of the name Ilube. Mind you, that's not to say that I was wrong in my starting assumption. Oh yes, I'll say it again for the hard of hearing. I am indeed the ladies choice :)

Talking to strangers

Internet security types, like me, are always advising people to be wary about who you are talking to on the Web. We advise parents to tell their children not to talk to strangers, and rightly so. In particular we try to advise teenagers about "stranger danger".

So, why was I not surprised when I was told about a fairly new site, set up by a teen for teens that is sweeping across that generation like crazy.

Enter Omegle - tagline "Talk to Strangers". Yes, it's a site that encourages you to chat to strangers on the web immediately without any controls, restricitions, nanny-words about being safe etc. Just dive straight in and chat to strangers about nothing. Waste hours chatting to strangers.

At the same time as being slightly "creepy" it is a great lesson in targeting customer needs, if you are thinking of creating a start up. Start with your customer, in this case teenagers, and think about their requirements. Two stand out. One - Annoy your parents by doing the exact opposite of what they tell you to do. Two - achieve this whilst wasting time in an entirely non-productive way.

It's wierd and compelling and apparently loads of kids use it in an idle moment. Sitting near your computer and mind wandering? Reach over to Omegle, click the button, chat to a stranger amongst millions somewhere in the word. If it gets boring, disconnect and carry on staring at the lightbulb. Brilliant ! And spooky! No wonder its so popular.

It's interesting to see how kids use it too. They are quite brutal. If the conversation is threatening, wierd or boring they just press the "disconnect" button and start another chat with a new stranger. Perhaps there is some useful learning going on here on how to deal with annoying strangers online - you disconnect them without a second thought.

I was explaining it to some of my technical colleagues and they were dubious. They said they think you are not chatting to a real stranger. They think you are chatting to a robot, a piece of simple artificial intelligence software that is able to engage in a fairly believable conversation by reflecting comments back to you. So I thought I would put this to the test. Here's what I got (I am YOU and the stranger is STRANGER).

Omegle conversation log

2009-07-27

Connecting to server...

You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

A word of advice: "asl" is boring. Please find something more interesting to talk about!

Stranger: hi

You: hi, are you a real person or a computer?

Stranger: i'm a real person u idiot! :)

Stranger: female or male?

You: yeh, that's what a bot would say

Stranger: haha

Stranger: okay then how are u doing?

You: i'm doing wednesday, u?

Stranger: not so much really..... what is wednesday?

You: i'm pretty certain you are a computer program

Stranger: okay then i dont want to talk to a person who thinks that i'm a computer program!! see u

You: hey don't go!

Stranger: why?

You: i am from the future

Stranger: haha! u are not funny

Stranger: are u a male?

You: sometimes, but only after 6am and on green days

Stranger: are u sure u are okay?? because it doesn't sound like that to me..... call a doctor!!

You: i am a doctor

Stranger: yeah..... how old are u... doctor?

You: the square root of pi minus the height of the moon

You have disconnected.

So, was I talking to a person or a Bot? I think it was a person but I'm still not 100% sure. Have a play with it and let me know what you think. Horrific or harmless fun? And if you get arrested for grooming teenagers don't blame me!

Bojangles Birthday

Somedays you must focus. Focus on the business, the fund raising, the revenue, the cost base, getting the PR right, wrestling with the technology.

Other days you focus on one thing and one thing only - yourself. Nothing else matters. Wake up selfish, be selfish all day and as midnight creepes towards you, let your selfish head rest on your selfish pillow, breath out and relax.

That day is called your birthday and today was Bojangles Birthday.

I woke up late and slowly opened my pile of presents. I love opening presents. It doesn't matter what they are, I just love opening them. I take my time. Prod them, rattle them, sniff them and then slowly unwrap them.

I wander off for a mid-morning breakfast with my wife. Full English and a steaming hot mug of tea.

I arrive at work just a few minutes before lunchtime and disrupt everyone by telling useless jokes and generally behave like a naughty schoolboy. Then I wander vaguely off to lunch with a couple of my favourite Professors and my Chairman. Sitting in a French cafe overlooking the River Thames in leafy Richmond, I laugh and joke with my mates until its time to drag ourselves back to the office.

I arrive back in the office in time for my two - yep, two - birthday cakes to be lit and then I settle down to an afternoon cuppa and a couple of slices of cake. A big piece of chocolate and an slice of the jam sponge one. By the time I had finished that it was nearly time to go home.

Got home in time to prepare to go to dinner with the family. A great turn out - it was going to be just the four of us but over twenty turned up. My mum, brothers and sisters and the kids turned out in force and we had a jolly time, taking over a restaurant that usually only gets about four diners on a typical evening.

Finally, I get home, make myself a jasmine tea, take a look at facebook, smile at the "happy birthdays" people have sent me and then settle down one last time for the day to listen to my old friend, Sammy Davis Jr, singing my tune - Mr Bojangles.

"He said his name was Bojangles, then he danced a lick
Right across the cell
He grabbed his pants, took a better stance, jumped up high
That's when he clicked his heels
Then he let go a laugh, Lord, he let go a laugh
Shook back his clothes all around

That was Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles
Mr. Bojangles, Lord, he could dance"

Today was my birthday and it was all about me :)

Play up! Play up! And play the game

Strategic planning for start ups is just a game. Literally, in our case. We don't do long term, 3 or 5 year strategic plans. We create a "Game" and then we play it full on. Play up! Play up! And play the game.

A lot of companies produce sophisticated 3 year plans, full of precise detail and copious spreadsheets. Business schools churn out battalions of MBAs capable of producing a 3 year plan at the drop of a hat.

But our approach is different. We define two things. One is the "Enduring Purpose" and the other is "The Game".

The Enduring Purpose gets defined once and never changes. It is a statement of why the company itself exists, what its ultimate purpose is. It is a single, clear, carefully thought through sentence and it is aspirational. You may never achieve it but that doesn't matter, it serves as a guiding light that you are constantly working towards.

The Game gets defined frequently. It typically has a 12 month timeframe, but it can be shorter (Garlik's current Game is a 6 month game) or longer. However its best to think in terms of 12 months.

The Game starts with a sentence, usually along the lines of "By the end of 2010, we will have...." and it needs to be a clear step towards achieving the Enduring Purpose.

Underneath the sentence or two that defines The Game you will write some Conditions of Satisfaction. There may be 3 to 5 conditions of satisfaction and these are the statements that make it clear how you will know whether you have "won" the game.

For example, if you are running an environmental company, GreenCo, then...

Enduring purpose..."GreenCo will change the world by giving families real power over their impact on the environment around them and inspiring them to reduce the harm they cause."

The Game..."By December 2009, GreenCo will launch its GreenHome online platform to consumers across three continents and establish itself as the leading player in consumer green issues".

Conditions of satisfaction....

a) GreenHome will be launched in USA, UK and India by December 2009
b) GreenCo will acquire a critical mass of users by December 2009
c) GreenCo will be recognised in the environmental industry as a thought leader in the USA

This whole structure should fit onto a single side of A4. If it's much longer than that then it probably isn't clear or focused enough to be useful. Underneath each condition of satisfaction, you will list 1 to 3 "measures" that make it absolutely clear what you mean by "critical mass" for example or "recognised in the ... industry".

The final step is to allocate accountabilities to each condition of satisfaction. Whilst there may be several people involved in each item, you need to give someone (including yourself) the primary accountability to hit that CoS.

The process of putting this together should take you 2 to 3 days of debate and discussion and plenty of flipcharts and if you can you should tackle it off-site so that you can clear everyones mind of the hassles of the day to day. In fact you might want to start off by having some discussions that help people to get their immediate angst out of the way.

As you get into the debate, you and your leadership team should test each word to make sure it says what you mean it to say. Words are important here because you need to get clear on what matters to you. There may be some debate amongst the team about the wording so remember that ultimately the Chief Executive gets to decide and the rest of the team aligns behind the CEOs decision.

But what about years 2 and 3 I hear the MBA's chant. Don't worry about them. Play your Game full on for the short period you have defined and as you get to the end of that period, define the next Game, consistent with the Enduring Purpose, for the following period. Nothing matters except The Game.

So, Play up! Play up! And play the game, and everything else will look after itself.

Leo Sayer made me do it

Over the past 3 years we at Garlik have put a lot of effort into building a state of the art semantic technology platform. We raised millions of pounds from hard nosed VCs, hired brilliant software engineers, bought bucket loads of servers and developed some pretty impressive software.

And then last week, we took the core bit of technology (something called an RDF store for the geeks amongst you) and GAVE IT AWAY!

Yes, we released that software, 4store is it's name, as open source software, free for anyone, anywhere to download and use for whatever they want.

Why one earth did we do that? I hear you ask (not dissimilar to my investors reaction). Simple. Because Leo Sayer told me to. You see, I'm just a boy, giving it all away.

Actually, the real reason is that we want to help the semantic web grow by encouraging as many businesses and other organisations as possible to publish their data in the right way, so that it all links together into one huge web of linked data - the next generation of the web. They need tools to do this, we have those tools, so why not give them away and see what happens? That's how the web itself grew after all.

Within the first 48 hours, thousand people from all over the world have visited 4store.org and projects are springing up using the software. It's exciting. It makes me feel like dancing.

Sometimes when you do stuff like this, you can feel like a one man band. Nobody knows or understands. Is there anybody out there wanna lend a hand?

p.s. for those of you old enough to remember Leo Sayer, here's a bit of trivia for you. When he was a huge British pop star in the 70's he lived in Richmond...and my grandad, Maurice Christian, used to tune his piano! There, feel free to use that. It may come up in a pub quiz one day.

Who the hell are you, my friend?

Facebook and other social networks have highlighted a troubling social phenomenon that is causing people like me a real problem – “Asymmetric Memory Retention” or AMR.

AMR is the situation where you interact with someone who has a shared experience with you, but whereas one of you has a clear recall of what happened, the other has no memory of the event or even the other person at all. I’m not talking about a vague and distant recollection. I mean no trace at all.

Whilst AMR has existed forever, in the past the likelihood of you meeting someone who you had completely and utterly forgotten was very remote. But with the advent of Facebook, twitter and all the rest it is becoming increasingly common. We’ve all had that friend-request out of the blue from someone saying “Hey, Tom, you old rogue, remember that day with the red bowtie and the halibut?” But how are you supposed to handle that situation? What are the social norms of interaction when you are a victim of AMR?

To gain some insight into this, I turned to the academic literature on AMR. This turned out not to be very fruitful because I have only just this second invented and named the concept of AMR so no-one has actually studied it yet. However, I am confident that before I finish typing this blogpost, a Professor of AMR will emerge to challenge outdated notions of AMR treatment and present their own theory, along with a best-selling book entitled “Who the hell are you, my friend?”, on how to embrace the joys of AMR for fun and profit.

The issue popped up for me recently because I came across an ancient photo album containing scenes from my distant past – nearly 40 years ago. The picture above is me back then with my great friend, Raymond (who I do remember very well of course), aged about 9 or 10 I think. Some of these pictures I look at and remember exactly, in a very deep way. I couldn’t tell you the date, perhaps, but I remember not only the event but exactly how I felt. In fact when I look at them I am not observing them from the outside, I actually feel as if I am experiencing the events again. I looked at one and tears immediately welled up in my eyes, as the painful emotions I felt at the time reappeared.

However, there were some photos that I looked at as if I was a stranger. I could see my younger self standing there looking back at me, but I had no recollection at all of being there. That’s a very odd feeling.

It is even odder when you are contacted by someone who was in the photo, who knows you really, really well but you remember nothing at all of them. The face draws a blank however hard you stare. The name doesn’t ring the tiniest bell, the events are a complete mystery. You have no idea whether they are just lying or whether your memory has been wiped clear. We call this Deep AMR. I say “we” but I mean “me” as no-one else has heard of AMR, yet.

I am wrestling with just such a Deep AMR problem. I have a message and a friend request from someone that I have absolutely no recollection of, but they clearly know me very well so we must have hung out together at some point. Mind you I was a bit distinctive in my youth – I think I was the only “dark glasses with 5 inch afro, poncho and clog wearing physicist” hippie in West Africa at the time, so perhaps more people remember me than vice versa. But what is the correct social etiquette in this Deep AMR situation?

Do I come clean and say “sorry, old bean, I appreciate that you know me well but I have zero recollection of you, so we will have to start again as if we are complete strangers” Or do I bluff saying “hey, you old dog, how’s it hanging homie? Remind me about the good old days again” and hope that some glimmer of a memory of him returns.

It’s quite unsettling really and no doubt someone will tell me it’s the beginning of the onset of altissimo (I say “altissimo” because I tried to spell that word beginning with A that means you lose your memory but I mangled it so badly that the spell checker offered me altissimo instead and I liked the sound of it). But I don’t mind it. I find it fascinating and I’m wondering if I am the only silent AMR sufferer out there or whether Facebook is inflicting this previously hidden problem on loads of us.

The importance of being lazy

I was at a dinner a couple of weeks ago sitting next to a high powered Washington executive when a young investment banker came up.

"How's it going?" the Exec said. The young banker excitedly said "It's going great. I haven't had a single day off work for the last 6 weeks. I've worked straight through, including every saturday and sunday."

"Excellent" says the Exec. "My staff never go home before midnight. The other night I said goodnight to them at 3am and they just laughed and said "do you mean goodmorning, boss?".

They then both looked at me expectantly. "Ooooh", I said "Well, erm, well, sometimes I do up to 2 hours of productive work a day. On a good day of course". Phew, just listening to these two was wearing me out.

You see, I discovered something interesting a few years ago. It turns out that a lot of what we do at work is a complete waste of time. I reckon that if you work for a large corporate then 60% of what you do makes no difference to anyone anywhere and if you work for a start-up it's more like 40%. Fortunately your corporate competitors probably waste 70% of their effort so your 60% of non-productive effort is pretty good going.

You can do lots and lots of this timewasting stuff in the hope that if you do lots of stuff then you are probably doing a bit more useful stuff. Or you can try to figure out what the useful stuff is and just not bother to do the rest. That's what I try to do.

My strategy is to try to do ONE really high impact thing each day. One critical decision, one cut through phone call, one killer email, one transforming conversation. I know in myself when I've done something that really makes a difference and once I've done it, I relax. Sure, I'll do a few other things but knowing that I've done that ONE BIG THING is enough for me to declare that day a good day's work, even if it only took me 5 minutes.

Mind you, this strategy doesn't work if you kid yourself about whether the thing you did really was a high impact thing. You need to sit down, look at your To Do list and see whether there is anything on it that will make a real difference. If there isn't then prepare yourself for redundancy! You can hid behind "being busy" for a while but it will catch up with you. Come on, is there really anything on your "To Do" list that makes a serious difference? Then, do it.

The other important thing to making this approach work is not to feel guilty, once you have done your ONE BIG THING. If your boss comes around the corner and you are relaxing with your feet on your desk, sipping a cup of cocoa, are you sure the ONE BIG THING is big enough to stop the top of his head blowing off? If it is, then sip away my friend, you've earned it.

I like to think of this strategy as a "Tai Chi" approach to business verses the standard hard-form Karate style of business. It's a soft power approach. If you enjoyed Chinese films in the old days, then you would have loved it when the muscle bound young man attacks the old, blind begger with his powerful karate blows and kicks, but the old man uses his relaxed, almost nonchalant tai chi style to block all the blows, whilst calmly eating a bowl of rice, before causing his over-enthusiastic opponent to punch himself in the head.

Actually the principle I am interested in is that of "Wu Wei", the art of doing things "without action". So, you run around if you want to, hustle, bustle, put those hours in, show those bosses that you've got what it takes. Me, I will think carefully about my objectives, I'll do my ONE BIG THING each day as effortlessly as possible and then I'll relax and cheer you on with my feet up. Good luck!

Sports day in Cape Town

Today the World Economic Forum in Cape Town was all about sports, well for me at least.

This afternoon I joined delegates on a trip to Greenpoint Stadium that nestles between Table Mountain and the Atlantic ocean.

When we arrived we were met by a barrage of photographers and journalists. I knew we were important but not that important, surely? It turns out I was right because after we collected our hard hats and sat in the auditorium for a briefing on the stadium, we were asked to stand to welcome President Jacob Zuma and various other eminent personalities, including the Secretary General of Fifa. Zuma was there to kick off the one year countdown to the first match of the 2010 World Cup.

The President literally kicked off the countdown, as we all went out onto the pitch (I can claim now that I have stood on a World Cup football pitch). In front of what must have been several thousand construction workers, Jacob Zuma spoke more eloquently and fluently than I had heard him in front of the WEF audience, then as we counted down, kicked a ball into the stands.

I did enjoy the fact that, after signing disclaimer forms and donning hard hats, in the middle of the massive construction site, standing under cranes as high as the sky, the South African national anthem was played and we all, including the President, immediately took our hard hats off and held them to our chest. That must have been the health and safety officials worst nightmare!

Later on that evening, I attended a soiree in honour of the 800 WEF delegates, in the presence of President Zuma and a number of other African Heads of State. Again the whole thrust of the evening was the 2010 World Cup. There is such enthusiasm building up here, it is going to be one HUGE party and I am definitely going to come to Cape Town in 2010 to be a part of it.

I thought I had done enough sport when I finally got back to the hotel at about 11pm, only to find all the hotel staff wearing British Lions shirts over their uniforms, because the Lions had just checked in to the hotel that I am staying at. I can see a group sitting round the pool now and I can hear some gentle rugby songs wafting upwards. I have a feeling that this hotel is in for a lively time over the next few days!