I´m constapated

Just saying this might free me from writers block.
Have too much on my mind and dont know where to start.

Rule # something
Never break a good habit

Mammon, oh gimme, gimme, gimme

People and organisations that put prosperity highest on their agenda are living a dangerous life. Much like any alcoholic or addict they are always looking for the next high.
I often write about the lessons I have learnt throughout my life and the importance of having an agenda where you strive to become good at something. I want to succeed, a lot. I think we should all, in one way or another, have success even though this means different things to different people.
Getting good takes time. It’s a discipline you acquire over a period of minimum 10 years, depending on what you want to be good at. If it’s leadership, probably more like 20-30 years.

We need goals, personal, financial and professional and others. But to me they are primarily checkpoints where you take out your compass and see if you still are on the right track. Because in this thing called life I still agree with Steve Jobs “the journey is the reward”. Even Jesus said, “I am the way…” not “I am the goal”.
The journey is about getting better at things, better today than yesterday. So in our quest for more knowledge we run to consultants, we Google, we go to the business book sections and drewl over the latest hype and hope that somehow this will give us the keys to the kingdom of… something. I have personally come to a stage in my life where I feel more and more empty the more of these books that I read. They do nothing for me anymore.

We use motivational speakers to fix our lives. Companies and organizations pay fortunes to consultants to tell them what’s in the crystal ball. We all want to prosper.

Especially the church craves prosperity. That’s their chance to compete with the outside world. I know so many churches that are more into prosperity than into the gospel, not knowing that they are going the wrong guys errands. It makes me sick when they preach personal management and prosperity. It’s preaching mammon. Mammon cannot be satisfied. Prosperity will always leave us hungry for more. It will always leave us empty inside. Mammon is not about money. Money is good; money is a tool without any value in itself. I mean who would worship a jackhammer, yet we worship money.
There’s no quick fix in life or in business. Either you do it right and your reward will be the satisfaction from whoever the stakeholders are or you do it wrong and the return will be disastrous, sooner or later. What will look like a homerun will turn out to be a fiasco.

My best recipe for breaking the stronghold of money is to give and give a lot. Give so that it hurts.

Well I just wanted to get this off my chest.

my take on "Ask and it shall be given"

Not wanting anything from anybody is integrity
Not needing anything from anybody is power
Not asking anything from anybody is plain stupid

Relationship manager

This just in.
74% of British online adults says that negative comments online influences likelyhood to do business with a company.
WOW!

77% says they experience problems when doing online transactions.

Social networks sites are highly influential. 51% of online adults says that social media content has directly influenced how they conduct their online transaction and 75% says it affected their choice of vendor.

Fractions of survey from Harris interactive.

This is real and this is happening. Yet most companies are sleeping and treat social media just like another channel to push offers down consumers throats.

It´s all about transparency and realtionships.

Fire the marketing manager and get a relationship manager

The road to greatness

I got some notes from my colleague that went to WIT in Singapore.
I loved this slide:

Vision requires risk → Risk requires followers → Followers require leaders → Leaders need to be meaningful → Meaningful leads to commitment → Commitment leads to results → Results lead to rewards → Rewards requires system → ( NOW THIS IS WERE IT GETS TRICKY AND MOST COMPANIES FAIL, ACCORDING TO ME )System require Transparency → Transparency require stability → Stability require culture (trust)

I borrowed this from Hans Lerch, vice chairman Hotelplan

My comment.
Most companies start with an idea or vision. Entrepreneurs are risktakers.
People love risktakers and starts to follow. Even if many entrepreneurs are bad leaders
they can through charisma lead because of common goals and a reward system.

By the time the company reach scale systems are put in place.
But here comes the tricky part.
Transparency. Transparency is a threat. Look at IKEA. Worlds best of everything but no transparency.

When it comes to culture I claim that all companies have one, especially those that doesnt care about the culture.
To succeed I think you need to give attention to all of above perhaps not in that order, but more or less.

Transparency, stability and culture. Important stuff for any company 2009 and beyond.

Shouting works!

On TV adressing bad industry practice in ZA

Some weeks ago we made a big number in South African media about the lack of transparency and general malpractice in our industry. Offline agencies and airlines hide taxes and fees and mislead customers.

We claimed that especially South African Airways were bad guys since they always hide their taxes online.
We were on three newschannels, Etv, SABC, MSNBC. We were on most radiochannels and all over print. Noone missed it.



SAA homepage up until a week ago. No taxes included


The New New South African Airways style of including taxes. Well done!

Well look at this now.
South African Airways has started to include their taxes online.

It´s nice that Travelstart can be of service to the consumers.
But this is also one thing I love about South Africa. Everything is possible and people listen. Especially power.

Travelstart de/reconstruction stories 28/30

So much started to happen in September this year as I was writing what we have been through as a company the last ten years. I started to write one blog post per day from Sept 1:st. I didn’t plan from one day to the next what to write about, but just went with the flow. I really enjoyed writing about the first couple of years of the company. I ravelled in memories and screw-ups. As the series went on and the company (should have) matured I got more and more depressed as I realized that Travelstart in Scandinavia is really not going anywhere, the way it’s currently set up. It’s one thing to laugh at your mistakes when you are young but as you grow up your continued childish mistakes becomes pathetic. After about my 15th blog post it got harder and harder to write as I realized a big change is going to be needed to get us out of this tailspin.

Read the rest here

Where are they now?

I shared lunch with an old industry colleague today. We haven’t met for almost 20 years.

We shared experiences and talked about the future and round off with some gossip.
We talked about ex colleagues and people we used to work with or that we had on our payrolls.

So where are they now?
One become an alcoholic and serves jail time for fraud.
Another become extremely fat and sits bitter in his apartment.
One lady is trying to scheme different agencies and when denied jobs she reports that she has been promised job to be able to sue.
One moved to Mexico after screwing suppliers and customers. Police is after him for credit card fraud.
One moved to South Africa after exit (not me). Good job.
One girl got married and got a bunch of kids. Lucky guy, she was very pretty.
Another girl started her own company. ( No wonder! She used to work for me 20 years ago.)
One guy got murdered.
One moved to Thailand
One became an executive for Malev, good job!

And on and on and on.
Dangerous business this…