Disqus - Latest Comments for jbeller

Re: Adam Carolla On The O'Reilly Factor - Bill O'Reilly - Fox Nation

Justin Beller — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 10:57:58 -0000

Which just goes to show that if there is any state in the union that will drag us all down, it's California. I'm sorry if this offends the residents of California. I am after all one of those "mean" people Adam speaks of. I'm sorry you don't like it when someone tells you the truth. Makes me wonder if you were one of those kids raised to play soccer games where they didn't keep score and everybody was a winner.

Re: Not Obama's Most Empathetic Moment - President Obama - Fox Nation

Justin Beller — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:32:41 -0000

The woman asked a legitimate question, but she didn't take him to task as much as she should have. If Obama cared about this economy as much as he says he cares, there would be fewer extensions of those visas because we have plenty of qualified people in this country to do those jobs he spoke about.

Re: Not Obama's Most Empathetic Moment - President Obama - Fox Nation

Justin Beller — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:29:42 -0000

Hey, I'm only guessing here, but there's a simple reason why this woman's husband doesn't have a job. Companies are turning to the visas to to bring in workers from overseas that they can pay less and give fewer benefits to than their U.S. counterparts. It's all about controlling costs and labor is the easiest cost to control.
This is the business environment that government has created. Rather than letting commerce and industry run their natural course, labor unions and the environmental lobby have infested our government and created the conditions where business can no longer afford to business in their own country! Who's side is the President on? Ask yourself that question when you pull the lever in November.

Re: Was Perry's Gaffe Worse Than This? - James Stockdale - Fox Nation

Justin Beller — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:32:32 -0000

Something not a lot of people know about Admiral Stockdale's debate appearance is that he was not prepared because the Perot campaign forgot to inform him that he was invited. People forget that back during that presidential campaign, the Reform Party (a 3rd party) was not necessarily recognized as a legitimate party. Perot and his camp had to fight tooth and nail just to be included in the debates.

Once Stockdale learned that he was invited he had little time to prepare for the debate. Now, there is no excuse for being unprepared for something as important as a debate. But the gaffe was more on the part of the Perot camp for not informing the Admiral.

As for Perry - he's over his head needs to gracefully bow out before he damages his political career even further.

Re: Employees Need Structure, Innovation Does Not

Justin Beller — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 08:29:23 -0000

There in lies the problem. The traditional forms of leadership and management education (books and schools) don't take into account that everybody is different. If you are to lead and manage folks like you, Tac, they need to understand that what they apply to the rest of their staff won't work for you where other forms of structure, leadership, and guidance will work better.

Maybe they teach it in MBA programs, and maybe they don't, but I think every manager should take a course in learning styles. This way they can better understand others and learn how to adapt their management style to the other person to maximize their potential.

Re: Employees Need Structure, Innovation Does Not

Justin Beller — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:32:23 -0000

It's interesting that you bring up accountability because it seems to be a running theme over at my blog. I had a great conversation with John G. Miller, author of QBQ! on Monday and we talked a little about this structure in the form of the "parent - child relationship". We've experienced as children, we experience it as parents (if we have kids of our own), and we experience it in the workplace in the form of the manager - employee relationship.

Psychologically, we need that structure to know what direction to head in and whether or not we're meeting expectations. It's a necessary evil. However, in the end, we're all accountable to ourselves and it begins and ends with each and everyone of us - structure or no structure in an organization.

Re: Ted Nugent: America Ripe for Riots Under Obama - Riots - Fox Nation

Justin Beller — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:44:43 -0000

Once again, Uncle Ted gets it right.

Re: Pig Maher: Rick Perry ‘So Dumb’ Republicans Are ‘Even Considering Voting For a Black Guy’ - Bill Maher - Fox Nation

Justin Beller — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 21:29:17 -0000

What an a-hole.

Re: What Steve Jobs Learned From Walt Disney About Organizational Design

Justin Beller — Mon, 09 May 2011 14:47:25 -0000

I imagine most businesses have similar org structures where the person at the top is the visionary/leader and those below bring about the vision to reality. You are right about the difference between the above org charts and many others. Places like Apple and Disney are idea-based companies while many others are production-based.

Idea-based companies are the innovators and risk-takers in our society and we definitely need them, but the danger of idea-based companies is when you have one or a few people at the top (who have all the ideas), the entire structure will suffer when they are absent. You basically have a rudderless ship. I fear Apple will struggle after Jobs, but it appears they are taking steps to make sure that the struggle will not be for very long. Now, this begs another question: you can teach management, but can you teach ideas and innovation?

Re: What is the Greatest Gift You Have Ever Received?

Justin Beller — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 12:37:09 -0000

When it comes down to it the greatest gift I received was my life, thanks to my parents. As bad as things get, especially this past year, I have to remind myself that it could be worse. I could be living in Afghanistan out of a cave. When it comes down to it, I'm alive, I'm free and at the very least I have hope that tomorrow will be a better day.

Re: HP Names Former SAP Head Léo Apotheker New CEO

Justin Beller — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:59:26 -0000

I could be wrong, but does this signal HP's intention to move from the US to relocate the corporate headquarters overseas?

Re: Keep Killing Your Blogs

Justin Beller — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:13:57 -0000

That's fine by me if folks want to kill off their blogs in exchange for e-mail newsletters. That's less noise for people to filter through to get to valuable content.

Newsletters are secondary to blogs in my overall marketing approach. It's push marketing (newsletters) vs. pull marketing (blogs and RSS feeds). I find the "pull" marketing applying the laws of attraction much more lucrative than an e-mail newsletter.

I may not be too far off from this assumption, but don't most e-mail newsletters end up deleted instead of being read?

Re: Use LinkedIn Effectively

Justin Beller — Mon, 24 May 2010 08:51:02 -0000

I actually have my LinkedIn profile and a Twitter account for my business linked. I wasn't sure about it at first, but over time I found it to be a good fit. With my business Twitter account I engage by sharing interesting links with little commentary, new blog posts and updates to interesting projects I'm working on. The key is to understand you have different audiences for LinkedIn versus other social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. My personal Twitter account will never see the light of day on my LinkedIn profile.

Re: Google Wave Now Open to All

Justin Beller — Wed, 19 May 2010 13:49:14 -0000

One of the things Google fell short on in rolling out Wave was they didn't fully explain the benefit of the tool in certain contexts.

Working in corporate environments where discussions and debate produces lengthy e-mail chains, I can see where Wave would be beneficial. I can't tell you how many times I've been pulled into a long e-mail thread after it has already been bounced around a dozen times. It's confusing to get the gist of the conversation.

I don't recall ever seeing any case studies on how Wave is a valuable tool in certain contexts. I'd hate to see it fail. Perhaps it can be integrated into Gmail to give it new life.

Re: Solving Problems vs Fixing Problems

Justin Beller — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:01:26 -0000

I might have a different take on this. I too like to solve problems and I hate being a "fixer".

To me, fixing a problem is short term. It only puts a band-aid over the root cause to a problem. It doesn't get to the heart of the problem to reach a real solution. Solving a problem is either permanent or long-term because it seeks to reach the root cause to a problem and treats apparent issues as symptoms or clues to what really needs to be done.

In my career, I have come across more people fixing problems believing they are actually solving them. In some cases, their fixes make the situation worse.

You ask what kind of problems I like to solve? I love to solve the "why aren't these people doing what they ought to be doing" problems. Fixes don't apply to that world, only real solutions.

Re: Education: Should It Be Cut Back?

Justin Beller — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:39:57 -0000

Thank you, Mike, for referencing my blog post regarding the widely accepted belief that cutting training in a down economy is actually a cost-effective move. It really does more harm than good. In the short-term you are able to allocate resources (cash) to other areas, but in the long-term a company hamstrings their ability to be productive and profitable once the economy turns around. They will have an untrained, unskilled workforce unprepared to take on the challenges of an emerging new economy. In the end, the company is not competitive in their respective industry.

I agree with you completely that balance is essential when making cuts. It is after all a necessary evil. Most companies when encountering economic challenges will not eliminate training all together, but they may make cuts to import forms of training that are crucial to the success of the company. It's wise to look at training from a cost-savings or profit perspective. I recently wrote about it here:

http://www.pinpointperforma...

Re: 5 Ways to Jump Into Rapid E-learning

Justin Beller — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:34:10 -0000

Thank you for your insightful comment, Jon. I think you pretty much summed up what I intended to say. Quality instruction does not come without proper planning. That planning is strong instructional design. In instructional design, one way transfer knowledge and skills is to make the learning as concrete or as real as possible. Though scenarios (which I made sure to include in my links), you make the learning experience relatable thus ensuring retention.

A "speedy" development process is great, but attention to detail when it comes to the quality of instruction can never be ignored.

Re: [NCB Best Of] Wikipedia is the best thing ever!

Justin Beller — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 13:39:15 -0000

Happy blog anniversary Tac.

One thing I might add regarding wikis is something I told a colleague when explaining to them the concept behind a wiki. Their concern was that being open source anybody can say anything about a given topic without any governance. It's not policed so therefore it is not reliable.

On the contrary I explained to them the power of groups, networks and communities. The people who are passionate about a topic(s) are the ones who are going to police the content and make sure it is accurate. They have a vested interest in it. There's far too much content out there for just one or a small group of people to conduct shenanigans with, so while the concern is justified the risk is more often minimal.

Re: An Open Letter to Web Startups: Please Take My Money

Justin Beller — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:59:49 -0000

@Tac.

Don't I feel stupid.

Re: An Open Letter to Web Startups: Please Take My Money

Justin Beller — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:23:06 -0000

Wow! That's news to me. I discovered coComment about a year and half ago and really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, it dropped off my radar screen and it was largely due to technical problems. I noticed how it was hit and miss when it came to integrating itself with your chosen browser. The goal was that everytime you commented on a blog post, it would track your comment and aggregate all comments to a single page in your account Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

Maybe it was just me and lack of technical skill...

I think we're going to see more of this as the year unfolds. When we have economic downturns like the one we are going through, the stong businesses emerge and weak ones fall by the wayside.

I'll probably get eggs thrown at me for saying this, but we need this. There are far too many web 2.0 tools out there. It's confusing! The ones that hold real value will survive.

Re: A Failure to Communicate

Justin Beller — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:57:44 -0000

No, Tac. You are not being irrational. You're just being practical. I've never embraced fax machines for the simple reason that I find them to be very archaic and antiquated. E-mail is far more efficient.

At the risk of shooting myself in the foot and offending everyone I am in service to, I have never embraced telephones (land lines and cellular). I find them to be intrusive and an interruption to my daily life. E-mail, text messages and instant messaging is the best way to communicate with me. I find it far more manageable and I respond better.

To quote one of my favorite movies, "What we have here is failure to communicate." The reason: everyone has their preferred mediums. If the mediums are not compatible between two communicators, then there will always be challenges.

Re: Web 2.0 Jumps the Shark

Justin Beller — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:32:54 -0000

I don't think you or any one person has killed Web 2.0 and made it Jump the Shark. If anything it is watered down and over saturated. Too many people have jumped on the bandwagon and it is slowing down and not producing much real value these days.

I predict a tipping point will come soon much like what happened in the e-learning industry some years back. Everybody produced a learning management system (LMS) or learning content management system (LCMS). Many of these startup companies ended up being acquired by the bigger companies. There are now just a handful of big-boys on the block. I believe we'll begin seeing a lot of these Web 2.0 companies merging or be bought up by Microsoft, Google or emerging companies before too long. In fact, I think it's already starting...

Re: Facebook Reality Check

Justin Beller — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:46:43 -0000

When it comes to these social networking sites, it depends on who you are trying to reach and connect with and how you intend to use each medium.

There was a study that was reported over the summer that found MySpace and Facebook demographics are splitting among social class lines (http://www.guardian.co.uk/i....

Whether the study is valid or not, it was very interesting nevertheless. The point is the communication channels you choose will either help or hinder you in reaching your target audience as part of your overall business strategy. You have to understand who using that specific medium and whether or not the users in that channel are the people you are trying to reach.

Re: What do you do?

Justin Beller — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 11:37:52 -0000

I get a little annoyed by that question. In my mind it is very clear what I do, but when it comes to explaining to people what I do and the value it provides they sometimes get a glazed-over look.

I often reference a book called "Book Yourself Solid" by Michael Port. Basically, he says you need to throw out the elevator speech we've all been taught to create and come up with a simple statement called "Who and Do What".

Port's statement is "I'm the guy you call when you want to stop thinking small and start thinking big."

I've come up with my own: "I make technology easy to learn and easy to use."

The advantage is the statement opens up a dialog for honest, meaningful conversation with the other person.

Re: What does it mean to be a blogger?

Justin Beller — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:16:35 -0000

To me, being a blogger is somewhat of an ego trip while at the same time it is a way for me to record my thoughts and ideas. If I'm able to share those thoughts and ideas with other people and they draw a benefit from what I have to say - great! At the very least I have something to go back on when I get a new idea and want to connect it with something I thought about in the past.

Besides, I get a kick out of seeing how my blog drives traffic to my websites and the websites I have drive traffic to my blogs. It's always fun to have people comment on what you have to say, creating a conversation.