Erwin's StarOffice Tango

Erwin's StarOffice Tango
Erwin Tenhumberg's Insights into Open Source and Dancing
... or why Open Competition matters

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Dienstag Juli 26, 2005

"Why We Buy"
I'm currently reading "Why We Buy" by Paco Underhill. The book is about consumer behavior. A friend who works as a category manager at Unilever recommended the book to me. It's a great book! What books about consumer behavior can you recommend???
( Jul 26 2005, 07:37:43 AM CEST ) Permalink

"How Business Schools Lost Their Way"
I just read the HBR "How Business Schools Lost Their Way" in the German edition of the HBR magazine. Pretty interesting!!!

The German magazine also included and interview with Ernst Baumann, HR VP at BMW. He was asked questions regarding the importance of an MBA for leadership positions at BMW. According Ernst Baumann the existence of an MBA degree does not have any effect on promotions or salaries. It's the actual skills that matter. BMW seems to be especially keen on soft skills like the ability to work in teams, business ethics/conduct, communication, etc.

According to the article, BMW has made very good experiences with business schools where real managers teach instead of just academic professors. Their experiences with INSEAD however were pretty bad. INSEAD was used for leadership trainings, but the BMW managers could not take the INSEAD professors seriously because obviously the professors had no real experience and insights about the topics they were teaching about.
( Jul 26 2005, 07:28:31 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [3]

"Valuable Data Requires Open Formats"
"So I unzipped the OOo archive and checked the styles.xml file using xmlwf (checking to see if the XML was 'well-formed', which is step one of two on the road to correctness; the second hurdle is validity according to the schema). Sure enough, there was a duplicate element attribute at the line and column indicated in the cryptic OOo error message.

Edit it out, zip it back up, try again, and ... same error, different location. But after a couple of iterations the problem was fixed.

Sure, it was a pain, and sure, it should never have happened. But in an imperfect world, I'd much rather have my data in an accessible format that can be manipulated by many different tools than locked up in an undocumented, proprietary format."

The full article can be found here.
( Jul 26 2005, 06:57:40 AM CEST ) Permalink