Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Importance of Milestones

As a visual person, I have always found written milestones and project road-maps quite useful. You give me a list of dates; I’ll most probably forget them. But you give me a visual roadmap of important milestones and objectives; I won’t forget what’s to come down the road.

It came to my attention lately that we don’t use such visual cues often enough. In fact, we often don’t even verbally communicate important milestones in both professional and personal contexts. When you take the time to analyze the impact of this, you may just find that not having well communicated milestones considerably hampers your project’s progress. I’ve actually recently experienced this detrimental outcome in both personal and professional situations. The lack of objectives and milestones will undoubtedly lead to inactivity, a state that we often naturally derive to, whether intentionally or not. Total chaos can potentially be avoided by a simple thing such as a roadmap. Don’t think twice, just do it.

 

Who Gives a #$ about Climate Change

For a while Climate Change was all over the media. Everyone heard about, lots were talking about it. Nowadays, not so much. You’ll see here and there an article about it, but nothing really in the hot spot. What’s unfortunate with the news coverage about Climate Change is that it doesn’t really address the immediate problems we all face. In fact, who really cares about it? Everyone is working hard every day, going to their jobs, caring for their families and just struggling to keep it all together. I don’t see how saying the planet is warming by 0.1 degrees is going to make a big impact on people. Why aren’t we talking about the very real and present dangers. A simple example, fuel prices. Recently in Laval the pumps were up to 1.23$ per litre. What does that really mean? Well assuming you own a jeep patriot (9L/100KM) and your office is 30Km from your home (leaving out traffic), you will be using 108 litres of fuel in a month. At a 1.23/l list price, this will cost you 132.84$ per month. That is a lot of cash! And in a family where both parents work separate ways, you double that amount. This is an expense for being able to work – we’re literally paying a fortune to be able to work. *So why aren’t we more aggressively investing and researching into alternative fuels and energy – not just for vehicles but for our general energy requirements? It’s one thing to talk about climate change, but if nothing is being done about everyday issues, how can we change anything?

On the other hand, considering less omnipresent issues, there’s (ir)responsible forest management. We don’t think about it, we don’t hear about it but it should be in our radar. Here we are logging, illegally logging, cutting for urban development, and let’s not forget cutting for tar sands development. What we forget is that by cutting our forests we’re also eliminating our source of clean fresh water and clean air. I’ll leave the detailed analysis of this closing statement for another time. But think about it.

What are the real issues in your opinion?

The True Enterprise

This Saturday my son and I had a nice boy’s day out. The day started off with a nice breakfast at the restaurant followed by a visit to the bookstore. We staid there a while and headed out to see the new Harry Potter. On our way back home, my son chatting along sitting in the back of the Jeep, I realized what my life’s true Enterprise is. My son. It’s ironic that we often call a new business “your baby” – you nurture it and give it all you have to make it grow and succeed. Although I will be spending much of my life starting businesses, the one and only true enterprise is my child – to help him grow and better himself, to go beyond imaginable borders, to succeed, to live a wonderful life.

I raise my hat to all dedicated parents out there. Never forget what your true enterprise is.