http://stevenclark.com.au Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:57:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Have you ever found yourself in the immediate position of purchasing an item and noticed an add-on fee? The fee is your cost to have a bed or a sofa delivered to your address... or the prescription lens fitting fee my optometrist tacked onto my bill late last year (which ... http://stevenclark.com.au/2010/03/10/two-ways-of-framing-a-surcharge/ Tommy Wong brought up an interesting subject this week - upward management. The critical role that middle managers achieve when supporting their own manager and making that manager look good. Its about managing your own manager. Its about reflective glory rather than direct ego-driven pursuit of credit. The management of peers ... http://stevenclark.com.au/2010/03/07/managing-upward-as-opposed-to-downward/ Let's not pull any punches here - my name is Steven Clark, this is my prolific weblog... and I am an information addict. At any one time I am in the middle of reading (from end-to-end) at least three books, there are at least six books in this house which ... http://stevenclark.com.au/2010/03/02/the-importance-of-reading-broadly/ The setting was the global steel industry in the years preceding the Global Financial Crisis. The companies involved were Mittal Steel and the Luxembourg based Arcelor. The combatants were Lakshmi and Aditya Mittal's vision of a globalised steel industry, a vision of rationalisation and economies of scale; Guy Dolle's vision ... http://stevenclark.com.au/2010/03/01/cold-steel-book-review/ "Dissect your beliefs", the person says. "Why, I'm happy with who I am. Very happy. Its a crap world and I have it good", says I. "But I want to understand life more than intellectually..." they say... I don't ask but think - how arrogant to assume I only understand ... http://stevenclark.com.au/2010/02/28/how-to-appreciate-the-amazingness-of-life/ University is back this week and I'm enrolled in my last core MBA unit - BMA779 Strategic Management - and my second last MBA elective - BMA684 Electronic Marketing. I'm also enrolled in HEJ504 Media Writing as the first half of my Journalism and Media Studies specialisation. Its been an ... http://stevenclark.com.au/2010/02/23/understanding-the-postgraduate-mba-program/ Hands up if you have been on a company intranet, probably your own company intranet, confronted by an electronic bureaucracy of confused procedure, ill-placed information silos and unexplainable over-provision of information for the job at hand. More often than not intranets are the dumping ground for anything project or work ... http://stevenclark.com.au/2010/02/22/intranets-should-be-about-people-and-processes/ http://stevenclark.com.au/2010/02/21/all-things-new-and-beautiful-including-me/ One of my favourite shows on television at the moment is Mathew Evans as the Gourmet Farmer. Its also one of the most inspirational shows on television. My life has taken several directions to date (some worse than others, including life-prisoner, fisherman, farmer, lawn-mower and fruit picker). In the last decade ... http://stevenclark.com.au/2010/02/20/mba-skills-and-small-organic-industry/ This is an opinion piece, make up your own mind about this issue. This article is meant only to have you question the structure and validity of the optometrist's industry-wide practice of charging a lens fitting fee to customers who do not purchase in-house frames. Here's a question that harks back ... http://stevenclark.com.au/2010/02/19/what-exactly-is-a-lens-fitting-fee/