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Hugh MacLeod again touches on one of his most interesting idea’s about facilitating cultural transformations within businesses. As Hugh’s background is advertising, I’m sure this is what he is most familiar with, and I’m sure he is on to something when he says, “…the future of advertising is clients increasingly asking their agencies to help re-invent not just their brands, but their actual companies.”

But I also think that this opportunity isn’t limited to advertising industries. I’m in IT, and I too see the same opportunities, just from a different angle. Perhaps the angle I see is a bastardised version of Hugh’s, along the lines of “…the future of IT is clients increasingly asking their IT service providers to not only provide services, but to manage and transform the effectiveness and efficiencies of their systems.”

And, yes, I absolutely believe the winners in this regard will pay lots of attention to the cultural aspects of facilitating such a change. This isn’t an original idea of my own, to be sure, but I’m not convinced that anybody is actually anywhere near delivering on this promise. Therein lies huge potential.

Another interesting article I read was by John Dodds who comments on a recent interview with Eric Schmidt and Larry Page from Google. John rightly points out the positive way that Larry handles a line of questioning about Google’s entrance to the Chinese market. Read what John has to say about that - he is spot on. But I also liked a one liner from Larry, which he said after Eric praised him for his successful inventiveness. He very humbly remarked (this may not be exact, but it is pretty close), “I’m very lucky to have failed enough to have been successful.” Therein lies some good advice. It reminds me of a story Mark Cuban tells about himself.

Well, the first State of Origin game is on tonight. I’m off to watch the game with my Mum and a few friends. Go the Maroons!

I wonder if Levi will get to see it on TV…

[Update] The sad news is that the Queensland Maroons lost this game by one point. The score at half time was 14-0 in favour of the New South Wales Blues, but Queensland came back to level the score at 16-16 with about five minutes to go. However, with three one minutes to go, Brett Finch (a late inclusion due to Craig Gower injuring his knee in training yesterday) kicked a field goal which won the game.

Damn it!

I can see that a few Queenslander’s will be voicing their displeasure with Brent Tate (he did play poorly for most of the game), and possibly even their bewilderment in why Steve Price was selected, but the team really does need to take responsibility for this. In spite of having their wingers playing out of position, and an all-rookie back row, the Queensland side was simply out-hustled in the first half. You can’t take 50 minutes to play yourself into form and expect to get away with it against a side the calibre of New South Wales.

However, Queensland could still bounce back to win the series, with the next game played at Lang Park, and the third game being playing in Melbourne. I sure hope so anyway. C’mon Maroons, get some mongrel in your game!

Microsoft are starting to make some noise about their forthcoming Office 2007 suite (it has just been released as a downloadable Beta 2). Of particular interest to me is the fact that they’ve ditched Frontpage (YAY!), and are going to support, among others, WordPress. Apparently we’ll be able to compose articles in Word, and at the press of a button post it. Furthermore, it does it while sticking to standards (so they claim, at least).

Sounds good. I hope it is that easy. It is time Office did something really cool to impress me.

Christopher Carfi points out a simple truth, but one worth repeating: “…everything commoditizes over time except for you.”

I love what John Dodd’s has to say here on his blog Make Marketing History.

I’m off for a couple of days to enjoy the great outdoors. We’ll be camping near Esk, and doing a bit of hiking while we’re there.

Andrew Bartlett has an interesting post on some of the issues facing indigenous communities throughout Australia. From what recent media coverage has highlighted, there are still very serious problems within these communities, such as substance abuse and sexual abuse. It also shows that there is still serious problems with how these issues are not being resolved.

Yes, Web 2.0 has officially become old news. I now want to jump on the Web Candle plus Monkey bandwagon.

At least I’ll have better luck grasping this concept, maybe…

Here is the best simple explanation of the Net Neutrality movement I have seen so far.

Two interesting posts from Seth Godin: this one on trade shows, and using a booth effectively, and this one on internal barriers marketers throw at themselves (to be honest, I can relate to the third one some days).

As an IT professional, I found this post about Dell and HP very interesting.

Greetings loyal readers! (Don’t you love how that makes it sound like this site has thousands of readers? I wish…)

The purpose for this post is to let you know that sometime after 5:00pm AEST  today there will be some downtime for this site. The reason is that the good people at Dynamic Web Hosting are relocating my site over to a bigger, better, faster Server on a bigger, better, faster network. Something like that, anyway.

Even though this upgrade won’t take very long at all, it may take a while for the DNS Servers to catch up with the change, so it could possibly be a few hours before the site is back up and visible to all. Again, something like that anyway.

See you on the other side!