Shola's Web Space

Happy 231st Anniversary America.

Watching the history channel today on the history of the revolution, one see that there are certain values that a foundational to America.

Individualism, freedom  in many ways, of speech, thought and political association.

Do you know that Rhode Island to meet their quota of soldiers sent slaves? back people have been involved in every “American” war since the very beginning.

This is a great country on many levels and I am proud to be an American!

Playing [or is it working] on my computer tonight, I noticed that while working on any set of tasks I am constantly distracted by other things I could be doing. It is like I have these set of parallel processors in my head and in a random manner a parallel thread becomes the main logic chain.

For example, I wanted to clean up the clutter on my desktop and while doing this I found a folder (although it is always there right on my desktop) that contains interesting articles that I wanted to read. Typically, I would have ended up with a partially cleaned desktop and half the articles read.

Is this attention deficit disorder? Or is this simply a lack of discipline to follow through, to do something to its logical conclusion? I think it is the latter, although it may be caused by the former.

When I write, the use of brackets to express an adjunct thought or commentary is an expression of how my brain is constantly working in parallel.  Reflecting a little bit, this is a common pattern and one that I need to pay more attention to and hopefully solve.

The immediate solve for tonight, I put the things I wanted to do down on paper and force myself to finish the tasks off is some chronological order.

A good friend, Jessie Bolin is going to work in South Africa for five weeks as a member of the IBM’s Corporate Services Corp. A program she describes as being like the peace corps. She and a team of 12 IBM’ers from different parts of the world (US, UK, India, Australia, Germany, Japan, Finland and New Zealand) and different disciplines ( Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance and Communications) will be working with local non profits to address specific business issues.

Six other teams like this from the IBM Corporate Services Corp, will be working on similar projects in  China, Philippines, Romania, Ghana, Vietnam and Brazil. The question is what are the gives and gets and the motivations in this awesome adventure.

From IBM’s perspective, the goal is to develop leadership skills while helping to address the world’s socio-economic issues. From the participants viewpoint, I would guess similar goals, while having fun, travelling and living in a foreign country and developing a global perspective of your company with other folks in the company.

For the countries and the non profit – the goal is getting world class talents to work on some of the really important challenges they are facing with probably severely limited resources.

This is a truly interesting adventure for Jessie, and I hope to follow her experience, you can too through her blog at: http://www.jessieinsouthafrica.blogspot.com/

The pundits are now saying the recovery is for real this time, so I suspect one more time the market if going to go down. However, I think it is time for me to start to think about the economy and recovery for myself, rather than believing what other folks think.

From what I know about economics, there is the time to look at the economic indicators, for oneself and see what they are actually doing rather than trusting the pundits.

As amateur economist, we must first identify the list of leading economic indicators and lagging economic indicators. And then choose the one we think we can believe in based on previous performance and availability of data.  Finally, we should track this indicators.

List of Economic Indicators:

1. http://www.investopedia.com/university/releases/

Tracking the direction of the indicators:

http://www.marketwatch.com/tools/marketsummary/calendars/economic.asp

http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/ecalendar/index.html

Having worked in technology and at Microsoft for a while, I know there lots of Nigerians in technology. However more and more are showing up in marketing content.

Two new folks are Makinde Adeagbo (new facebook page) and Dolapo Falola (google reader) more grease to your elbows.