Back in March I asked Are you overpaying your CEO? It seems rather prescient looking at the news today.

The BBC is reporting that Bank shares fall despite bail-out - which is kinda stating the obvious. The government's taken majority stakes - they're basically angel venture capitalists. Like any angel VCs, they're coming in with a high level of control. They're coming in to save the business, so it makes no sense to leave it as is, and their money's going to get repaid first.

Is this the end of the fat cat bankers? The argument for the ridiculous bonuses has always been market related. I reckon the fact that the bankers from one bank will represent the majority of shareholders at another's means that shareholders should not decide banker salaries.

Following on from part I I have a few more idea:

Idea 4: Deming's theorys were developed for manufacturing, but have also been applied to software development as the "Agile method".

Investigate using this high particiapation model in other industries.
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For me Word 2007 has one really 'killer' feature. I didn't think there have been any significant improvements to it since Office 97 - it just gets more expensive and needs more processing with each new version. Now, in Word 2007, they've finally added something that really makes it worth upgrading.

Word 2007 has a built in referencing library.

At the moment I'm trying to choose a suitable topic to study for my final MBA year. So far I've had a couple of ideas:

Idea 1: Investigate the 17% pay gap between men and women Aims: What cultural and social factors effect womens' work choices? To what extent is this gap caused by discrimination? Are current laws sufficient to rectify this? What else could be done? This subject is relevant to my current job, and it's something that really interests me.

I have of late, but how I know not, become rather addicted to stackoverflow.com:

It's currently only in private beta, open to about 2000 users, but I can see it taking off when it goes fully live.

It fundamentally similar to LinkedIn's Answers (but geared to programming questions) or expertsexchange.com (you can tell they really didn't think about that name beforehand - they finally added a hyphen recently) but free. Basically users ask questions and other users post answers.

Recently I needed a form, loaded by reflection, that dealt with a collection of some type. I figured that we need to know the type when we loaded the form, so it would be better to have a generic form (save it having to check the object type through reflection for every action).

Turns out that .Net can handle generic forms fine, but the form designer in VS2008 can't.

The Xbox 360's dashboard was quite impressive when the console launched, mainly because it had one at all. However it's not a particularly well designed interface. It works, but it's slow, clunky and wastes a lot of space. There's been rumours of a redesign for a while now.

Over at thefanboys.com they've had a go at imagining how it could be:

It's a well considered design that addresses most of my issues with the current dashboard.

Nice little graphic on the current state of the web.

I've recently been reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His theory (massively simplified) is that big unexpected events come along despite any existing inductive conjecture, but we're prone to make those conjectures anyway.

For instance if you had seen thousands of white swans you might form the hypothesis "all swans are white". However it only takes one black swan to disprove your hypothesis. Had you placed a seemingly safe bet on the next swan being white you would lose out.

There are an awful lot of leadership and management models out there, most appear to be trademarked by consultants offering training in whatever model it is. The MBA teaches lots of them: Blake's Leadership Grid™, Hersey & Blanchard's SLII, Fiedler’s LPC scale, to name but a few. Most have wider messages that are of far more value than the detail.

My own personal opinion is that it all breaks down into three broad archetypes: leaders, managers and bosses.
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