Makes you think, doesn't it ?

In this saturated age of brand awareness, public image, verborrhea, communication, pseudo-sophistication and what-the-****-not, how refreshing to find a source of inspiration.
Here's Intel's original business plan, in all its 18-line misspelled glory:



Click the title for source information.

Mistakes

Many people say they like to learn from their mistakes.
That's fine, but I'd rather learn from someone else's.
It's a lot cheaper.

Rui Costa
Fri, 07th Dec, 2007
Lisbon, Portugal

To the love of my life

You inspire me

Through your eyes
I can see
That life goes on bliss and blue

With you, for you
Forever

Assumptions, assumptions

What you think you know will hurt you. Everybody knows it.
Personal failure affects you and perhaps those depending on you. The higher up on the power scale you rank, the higher the number of those affected.

Assumption-based mistake types

Battle of the Somme, northern France. After pounding German defences for about one week, the British think the dead-quiet around the battlefield meant that the German deeply-entrenched defenders had been annihilated.
July 1st, 1916, was the darkest day in British military history: a complete failure military-wise and the heaviest single-day human toll ever sustained by British forces (a total loss of 57,470, of which 19,240 dead).

ABMT #1: "the danger isn't there because I can't see it"

Cape Canaveral, FL, 28th January 1986: Morton Thiokol's engineers tell their management the Challenger shouldn't fly because there's a "100-year cold" going on.
Management relays to NASA, of which the top brass, under pressure from DC, go, "reconsider the recommendation". Management at MT relay back to their engineers something like "prove that it cannot fly".

ABMT #2: "I am right because you cannot prove me wrong"

Pearl Harbour, HI, 7th December 1941: Suffice it to say that part of the japanese force was even detected by an american radar outpost - and dismissed as probably a training flight.

ABMT #3: "I can't see how they could make it, so they can't"

The list of ABMTs goes on and on.
The heavier the toll, the harder the lesson: "Never make assumptions", my trainer Nikki Riddle used to caution me and my fellow trainees. Easier said than done.

What is your Pearl Harbour ?

Rui Costa
Tue, 27th Feb, 2007
Lisbon, Portugal

Milton-freed man

Joining Peter Drucker right up there, Milton Friedman passed away at 94 on 16th Nov 2006, as Nobel laureate José Saramago celebrated his 84th anniversary. What a coincidence that two greats whom I admire have come to share a fateful date.

The year was 1980 and I wouldn't miss an episode of Free to choose for the world. Then I bought the book, necessarily a translation at the time, and sped through it as fast as I could.

I wish to state my appreciation for a man who, togehther with his wife, Rose, forever changed a 13-year-old's views on the State and its role in society and government, welfare, money, free will, self-reliance, free enterprise and trade, and ultimately, freedom.

He was the first to allow me to mentally entertain the words capitalism and freedom at once. Perhaps someday his detractors will get some of the concepts he held dear and self-evident.

So long, master.

Rui Costa
Mon, 11th Dec, 2006
Lisbon, Portugal

Education and American competitiveness

[Edited for typos from the original, published as a Talkback comment to Dan Farber's "Competing in a flat world" entry on ZDNet's "Between the lines" blog, 16th Nov, 2005.]

Someone said that success is when opportunity meets preparation - to which I add "and motivation". While it's relatively easy to churn out techies as it is a "bricks, brains, books" matter, it's hard to create a society geared towards innovation and progress. The former is about hard individual labour; the latter, about collective change in culture and mentality few dare think of or are ready to take on. In that respect, the US is a unique sociological experiment in the history of mankind.
That's why the Soviets went under - they set sattelites in orbit and manufactured tanks while failing to produce jeans and toasters.
Qualifications by themselves are no guarantee of success. An open, risk-rewarding, entrepreneurship-friendly country (and that doesn't have to mean worker-unfriendly) like the US will come out on top 9 times in every 10, for they have the opportunity, the ingredients and the incentive to making money. America will lead the world as long as the fundamentals above hold or someone else gets better at them.
If for this or that reason the US doesn't find the right brainpower within her shores, she can always import it as with any commodity. I for one would love to be imported.

Rui Costa
Wed, 23rd Nov, 2005
Lisbon, Portugal

Take one

It was bound to happen.
Like so many before me, I gave in to the temptation of sharing my thoughts with the world out there - for what they're worth.
It's not about ranting, fixing the world or being narcissistic. I just may come back in, say, 40 years, and look back at the person I used to be.
Hence the name.