February 2006 - Posts

Two weeks off during Christmas
15 February 06 04:53 PM | Ivan Joseph | 2 Comments   

I mentioned earlier that Sun has a policy of compulsory vacations. Turns out Amgen has something similar - the whole company takes time off during Christmas. I'm told that being a bio tech company that competes aggressively with Genentech, they try to Read More...

Japanese Visa - third degree price discrimination
15 February 06 04:41 PM | Ivan Joseph | 1 Comments   

Usually whenever I travel abroad I need to get a visa and often friends / colleagues from other countries don't need one. I remember once even not being able to make a trip since I was transiting through Canada and didn't have a Canadian visa When I applied Read More...

Traffic Congestion - a taxing solution
15 February 06 04:38 PM | Ivan Joseph | 0 Comments   

Gary Becker, Nobel Prize winning economist has suggested a tax levied differently based on time of day. Read more in his blog post - http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2006/02/the_solution_to.html There are positive incentives like we have here Read More...

Land of the rising Sun
15 February 06 04:17 PM | Ivan Joseph | 0 Comments   

Next week I head off to Japan for a couple of days to run a Marketing pilot. I'm pretty excited - it's my first trip to Japan and after having read and heard so much about it am keen to see what it really is like. Just checked the weather - it's equally Read More...

More names
15 February 06 04:07 PM | Ivan Joseph | 0 Comments   

So I was thinking about naming a bit more and thought about the clever naming schema developed by Motorola in which they knock off a vowel but the word retains its meaning eg Rokr, Razr, Pebl. Clever because it catches the eye, is distinctive, can be Read More...

Jack of all, master of none
15 February 06 03:55 PM | Ivan Joseph | 0 Comments   

I was at this interesting training program a couple of weeks ago called 'Developing Value Propositions for New Offerings' when Professor Dipak Jain, Dean of Kellogg said something quite insightful. He said that the reason that 2 in 1's or different products Read More...