Root and Stomp it !

Which is the spring that allows somebody or renders somebody available to actions that are not correct? Plato thought over this problem in “Republic”. The position is very simple: if the only reason to be just (and get the award) is given by social conventions (rules under the form of incentives), then it is sensible to behave justly in public only, when we cannot do otherwise, that is only when we are visible.

“Is it possible to resist evil temptations if you are certain that you will not be discovered?”
(Plato)

Here we shall discuss the concept of invisibility. If you manage to be invisible, then you can allow anything. Then you assist the deliberate “thefts” in your company, towards the collaborators, towards anybody between the “employee” and the obtainment of the objectives. The bigger the company, the easier it is to be invisible. And every year, these companies resemble jukeboxes more and more: the more incentives, the more money, the more “songs” will be played at a high volume level. Pity that they often and suddenly are false. The cycle becomes perverse and in short you must reset everything and recommence with new awarding systems, new modalities for distributing the incentives. A continuous
merry-go-round based on mechanisms that are unique for economic recognition. Incentives as opposed to economic value. And then the jukebox starts to play, more
money and more songs. How do we get out of it? Easy. We bet on people! We bet on their value, we bet on creating environments where we substitute the chorus in songs that are out of tune. And then we can convince them that it is possible to pursue that which Adam
Smith wrote on the innate honesty of individuals in his book “Theory of moral feelings”.

We only need a small effort. We create satisfaction and environment to promote recognition. For example, when “Somebody” makes a good job, we say so sincerely, publicly.

“No matter how egoistic the human being may seem, there are obvious innate principles in human nature that make man take an interest in the destiny of the next man, the good of which becomes a necessity, even if he cannot obtain anything but a detached feeling of satisfaction”.

(Adam Smith)

Taken From : PROVOCATIVE THOUGHTS FOR MANAGERS
Unconventional ideas to unleash talent in organizations

Whereas, the party of the first part, hereafter known as The Party Of The First Part, shall agree to enter into agreement, hereafter known as The Agreement, with the party of the second part, hereafter known as The Party Of The Second Part…

What does it all mean? Why is it so confusing?
As a designer, you speak one language (HTML, CSS, Search Engine positioning, etc.). Lawyers speak a different language. They don’t have to learn yours, but because you are the party of the first part (or is it the second part?) and you will be issuing contracts, you should learn to understand theirs.

So let’s start with some contract basics…

A contract is a signed, legally binding agreement between you and your client. It defines your responsibilities (design), the client’s responsibilities (payment), and the requirements and limitations of the job. As a professional designer, you will have a standard contract. It will have a large section of “standard legal stuff” where you fill in the blanks (your name, client’s name, etc.). It will also include a place where you will insert the specifics of the job from the proposal.

Here is some sample information that should be in the “standard legal stuff” section of your contract…
a) Who’s who…
Your name and client’s name, or the names of your businesses

b) Responsibilities of both parties…
What services you are going to provide (Web site design, Search Engine submission, graphic design, etc.) What your client will provide so that you can complete your task (graphics/photos, information, etc.) and what your client will pay you for your services.

c) Special considerations…
Limitations on the work you will do, fees for additional work, etc.
d) Confidentiality…
You agree not to give any of the client’s proprietary information to anyone. Your client agrees not to give any of your proprietary information to anyone.
e) Copyrights…
Who owns the work products (Web site, graphics, text, etc.) when the work is done? Does the client have unlimited rights to sell and distribute these, or is he limited to just the one copy on the Web site? Do you have the ability to use the same design and graphics for another client?

f) Indemnification…
If your client gives you material to use on the site that belongs to someone else and you get sued, what happens? The contract should include a clause that says the client will assume financial responsibility if you are sued because of his actions. He should also be protected from you.
g) Termination of contract…
What happens if one party wants to end the agreement? Do you get paid? Suppose you are the one who wants to quit? Can you?

h) Limited warranty…
If you run into problems and cannot deliver the final product, what are the client’s legal options? Can he sue you for millions of dollars? Your contract should limit your liability to just the value of payments that were made to you. The client should be able to get his money back, but no more.
i) Governing law…
Contract laws vary from country to country and state to state. Where is your contract defined?
j) Severability…
If one paragraph of this agreement is declared invalid, the rest of the agreement is still in effect. This is necessary in the event that a court declares part of your contract invalid.

k) Force Majeure…
The client cannot hold you responsible for events beyond your control (earthquakes, floods, personal tragedy, etc.). However, you are still responsible for completing the work after the problems have passed.

When you take all of this legal stuff and incorporate the contents of your proposal, you will have a very complete contract to give to your client. It will define who is responsible for what, what work is to be done, how much you are to be paid, etc.

Some designers prefer to work without contracts. They feel that contracts are impersonal and that a handshake is sufficient. This sounds great until you get a client who decides not to pay you. It happens all the time. And if you get stuck in a position like this, there is little you can do about it.
Never accept a job without a contract. You have no legal protection without one.

And don’t even consider writing your own contract.

Contracts are written in a very specific language that only lawyers and judges speak. The language is very clear to those who speak it. Many words that you and I use everyday have a completely different meaning when used in a legal context.

If you write your own contract and you have to go to court to enforce it, the slightest mistake in the legal language can render it invalid — or may even turn it against you. Your contract should come from a lawyer and it should reflect the conditions and events found in your business. But having a lawyer write a Web site design contract for you can be fairly expensive.

There are some free contracts available on the Internet. They tend to be very simple and most don’t address all of the problems you will run into. There is also no guarantee that these freebies were written by legal professionals. Do your research carefully.

SIDEBAR

“Start Your Own Home-Based Website Design Business” includes a contract that my lawyer and I developed specifically for my business, Website Design Biz.com

We started with a standard services contract, and then I had my lawyer add clauses to address every problem that I ever faced and every problem that I heard that other designers had to face. And when it was complete, I went through it clause by clause and translated the “legalese” into English. You are free to customize this template for your own use.

Well-written legal proposals and contracts are essential to the longevity of your business. They protect the obvious — your time and finances. However, they also protect your enthusiasm — a precious asset that is not always valued in the early days of your business.
A constant struggle to make ends meet, due to avoidable mistakes or omissions in either the proposal or contract, is psychologically draining. This type of situation can make you question your ability to run your own business. Don’t get caught in a downward spiral. Spend the necessary time to get things
right at this critical beginning stage!

There are so many variables to consider when you are starting up your own business. This Course highlighted a few of the more important ones to get you off on the right track. It’s now in your hands.
OK,

Taken from : The Webmaster Business Masters Course
Build Your Webmastering Business While Building Your Client’s Business

DISTORTED LOGIC OF INCENTIVES AND FALSE NOTES

Many authors and, especially academics, think that economy and administrating people is nothing but incentive science. This means that incentives constitute an instrument created to push the individual to do what is considered to be correct (and is good), pushing him away from what is considered to be detrimental (and which is bad). The question that emerges out of this affirmation is: for whom? Considering the fact that incentives do not pour down from the sky and that somebody has to invent them, a question immediately appears: for what reason? We are all educated according to the logic of incentives and its opposite, from a very early age. That is, awards and punishments.

If you got a good grade, fine! The red flaming bike is yours. If you are silent during an interrogation, that is bad! You appear to be an idiot. If you are part of the football team of your institute, fine! You are tough. At the end of the year, if you manage to reach the
objectives for sales and returns, great! You are in the career. Too many contributors do not pay income tax? Withhold money at the source for everybody. And so on …

It would seem to be a perfect mechanism, but strange things happen. If the problem is about incentives, then how can you avoid that somebody behaves shrewdly? After all, we are all continuously in situations where we feel like changing things, “push” data or
behave shrewdly. Our culture often seems to award those who behave shrewdly. Like “if
something is tempting, imagine the feeling obtaining it through shrewdness”. Therefore we have football players simulating, waitresses that withhold tips and do not share them with their colleagues, managers that manipulate data (for their personal good or for their image sake). And an athlete who cheats to lose is exposed to insults (cheating to lose is a mortal sin within the world of sports), whereas a person who cheats to win is only a shrewd person and he finds a great number of people who are ready to defend him (cheating to win is a venial sin in the world of sports) .

Move, move, the night is short time flies, do not play difficult and you cannot withdraw,
we have put in another hundred lire… You are like a jukebox, jukebox you must play, jukebox, jukebox you must sing, jukebox, jukebox don´t get tired, all night make us dance!…

(“Juke box”, Edoardo Bennato)

Taken From : PROVOCATIVE THOUGHTS FOR MANAGERS
Unconventional ideas to unleash talent in organizations

After your proposal is complete, you need to submit it to your prospective client.

Your proposal is a marketing document. It can make the difference between working (i.e., $$$) and not working.

Make it impressive. It should be visually appealing, clear and easy to read, and free of typos and errors in grammar. If you have difficulty with any of these things, get someone to help you. Your client will make his final decision based on your proposal. It would be very sad to lose this job because of a few spelling mistakes.

You must also make sure that the proposal addresses all of the client’s requirements and that it answers all of his questions.

You can submit your proposal in one of three ways…
• Mail
• E-mail
• Deliver in person
If you are going to send a hard copy, print it out on a laser printer, or better yet, a color laser printer.
If you choose e-mail, don’t just copy it into the email, send it as an attachment so your prospective client can see your proposal in all its glory on the screen. If you just paste it into the e-mail, it will be sent as simple text and all of your layout efforts will be lost.

If you deliver it in person, be sure to present a professional appearance. The proposal should include a cover letter that introduces the proposal and perhaps highlights some special features or skills that your design and/or company has to offer. Anything that you can do to make yourself stand out from
the competition will work to your advantage. After you send the proposal, call your prospective client to tell him that it is on its way. Offer to go over it when it arrives so that any questions can be cleared up quickly. If you don’t get a call in a day or so, follow up with another phone call to verify that the proposal was received and to answer any questions.

Taken from : The Webmaster Business Masters Course
Build Your Webmastering Business While Building Your Client’s Business

READ TO BELIEVE!

Because life is a shiver that flies away It is stability beyond the insane Beyond the insane
(“Sally” – Vasco Rossi)

In the film “1492: Conquest of Paradise” by Ridley Scott, Christopher Columbus, old and defeated, encounters the Treasurer of Spain which blames him for being a dreamer, an idealist. Then Columbus shows him the cities, the palaces, the great and small works of art and asks him what he sees. “Civilisation”, the Treasurer replies. “Well”, Columbus concludes, “all this was created by idealists like myself”. We need to imagine a new world to transform reality. To work with fantasy, make projects, invent things in your mind, have ideals. Dreams as a premise for reality, as an invention of the future. Dreams that occupy our daily spaces and encounters that which is the worst form of ostracism against change: bureaucracy. You can use bureaucracy to everything, even to the future. The bureaucrat is an able worker expert on useless things that unfortunately are necessary; he is capable of working showing everybody that he is as busy as can be.

He has only few, but very firm principles from which he never makes derogations: not decide and move sheets of paper (never writing anything).

This is to simulate solving a problem and using experience and knowledge accumulated as a barrier towards action. Unless it is attached to true emotions, knowledge is purely decorative, bureaucratic, does not lead to marvel, but becomes pure ornaments of our lack of action. Maybe he is useful to identify somebody who makes an errors sometimes, in order to have a provisory saving and be able to say that it was evident things would end up that way.

Read the rest of this entry »

How much is it going to cost? This is the most important thing your client wants to know.

You have to make this part very clear. No matter where you put it in the proposal, the cost quote will be the first thing your client reads. In fact, it may be the only thing your client reads.
Your cost quote must be very easy to understand…

Web site Development (80 hours @ $75.00/hr.)$6,000
Search Engine Registration Fees $ 449
Domain Name Registration Fees $ 30
Total $6,479

Additional work will be billed at $75.00 per hour.
Payment is to be made in three installments of $2,160, $2,160 and $2,159 per the attached schedule.

Generally, the payment schedule follows this pattern… 1/3 advance, 1/3 midpoint (client approval) and 1/3 delivered (client approval). You should also include a separate section for recurring fees (hosting, domain name renewal, etc.).

Taken from : The Webmaster Business Masters Course
Build Your Webmastering Business While Building Your Client’s Business

Can we talk about individualism or are we dealing with valuing ingenuous people? What can we say about talents? We search for them, show them off, tear them away from our competitors with ferocious selections; the “talents make the difference”, “our talents”?

So many evaluation procedures to find them and then what? So many words to convince them that they are in the right company for them (but then you do not understand why others in the same company or others in other companies that are less right for the job are not dismissed).

Often, talents in the company are considered as different and it is troublesome to assume the risks involved with having relations to a different person, a talented child in pre-school often causes reactions in the teachers who contact the parents to protest against the vivacity of the child, against his scarce attention and maybe his exuberance hinders the correct performance of the activities. Just like pre-schools, companies and schools do not give much space, accept or value diversity: they often search for it, invoke it even, but then, at the end, they fear not being able to handle diversity and not being able to satisfy the requirements necessarily made by a different person.

What if it were devious to talk about “talents” and “difference”? Maybe the true challenge for organizations does not lie in handling professionalism outside the norms as exceptions?
Maybe the true difficulty for the company, in which the organization and the business fall dramatically, lies in creating thoughts and an awareness, especially in the ordinary individualities: the smile in the voice of the switchboard operator, the precision of the reply from an accountant, the ability of listening to suggestions, the necessary space to express disagreement, the respect for other people’s time.

I am increasingly and deeply convinced that many companies that think they have a need for people with great talents really need small human individualities, not abstract “human resources”, but only people. There is an increasing need to price small and great individualities that are present, rather than trying to identify what is missing (which instead ought to be carefully analyzed and planned, without trying to manage it in a hurry only to try and recover lost time). People to know and price so that they can free themselves from the dream of winning the lottery.

Now, Mister, the day my number comes in I ain’t ever gonna ride in no used car again
(“Used Cars”, Bruce Springsteen)

Taken From : PROVOCATIVE THOUGHTS FOR MANAGERS
Unconventional ideas to unleash talent in organizations

Both you and your client need to know how long the work is going to take.

And just so you know, it will take longer than you expect, especially if you are just starting out. (Unless, of course, you are using SBI! which will look after much of the tedious, time-consuming work.)

You need to be very careful with the schedule. It will eventually be incorporated into the contract and will become legally binding. You don’t want to commit yourself to any dates you can’t achieve. You also don’t want to miss any contract dates because of things you can’t control.

There are easy ways to deal with this…
First, break the job into three or four major sections and define the tasks to be done within each section. This will give you bite-size pieces. It is much easier to estimate the time required for small tasks. Next, use approximate estimates (3-4 days, 2-3 weeks, etc.). This will give you a
lot of breathing room in your schedule.

Finally, include the following paragraph in your proposal…
This schedule defines the major tasks to be completed during the life of the project. Individual tasks may be added, deleted or moved as required to meet the demands of the design. The elapsed times are estimates and may vary depending on workload, changes, customer submissions, and third-party service providers.

Unless your client is working against a specific deadline, he will probably accept these parameters.

Taken from : The Webmaster Business Masters Course
Build Your Webmastering Business While Building Your Client’s Business

The site map is a list of pages that you expect to include in the new site. It should also include a brief description of each page and a list of special features that will be found on that page.

Define the site map as accurately as possible because the size and complexity of the job are defined here. If this is not done correctly, you may not be paid what the job is worth, or you may have to increase the client’s cost. Both scenarios are not pleasant.

The site map in your proposal can be very simple…
• Home Page — introduction to the client’s business and products

• Article Pages — up to six article pages, written by the client
• FAQ — Frequently Asked Questions
• Guarantee — product warranty information
• Testimonials — comments and feedback from customers, includes a feedback form
• Contact Us — company address, phone, fax, e-mail link, map, contact form

Taken from : The Webmaster Business Masters Course
Build Your Webmastering Business While Building Your Client’s Business

IS OUR COMPANY’S VALUE CONNECTED TO PEOPLE!?!

Talk about a dream, try to make it real You wake up in the night with a fear so real Spend your life waiting for a moment that just don’t came Well, don’t waste your time
waiting (“Badlands”, Bruce Springsteen)

Apart from using elevators in which we look steadily downwards out of fear of meeting the gaze of other people, we spend a great part of our lives at work, often inserted in an organization that should allow us to work and live in a collaborative environment, in which the value is collective and is related to the sum of individualities, single professionalisms and capacities of all of us.
But is it so? Are organizations so attentive towards people´s needs and conditions?

My impression is that organizations often are veritable jungles, a “tough place to live; a place in which you are chewed, torn to pieces and expulsed in a fraction of a second together with everything that you in time have been able to build as regards conscience, career and relations; a place in which you often spend the most of your time trying to avoid the worst and to figure out the right line of action; a place in which maybe work, ability and capacity are important, but often not essential.
A place where many people travel eternally trying to drive past others with the blinkers on, ready to surpass anybody who tries to remain ahead of them. And, as Bruce Springsteen sings: “The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive” in his album “Born to Run”.

A kind of smart folly of rational fools ready to run in any direction, since the important thing for them is the race and they do not ask themselves why they are racing. And when you ask why, the reply is always “for the career, knowledge, relations”, the same motives for which you may be dismissed from the race. Often during conventions and seminars you hear phrases like: “The value of our company lies in people”, “We take care of our resources”, “Without our talents, our company would not exist”, “Our company is very attentive to the needs of our collaborators”, “Our company is based on values and to us people are always a top priority”, “We are continuously looking for the best, those who make a difference”.

This is what they say: stories, or rather, fairy tales?

In fact, one says (or speculates) that the value of companies is represented by human resources (human “resources” is a synonym of basic hypocrisy), repository in which knowledge, competence, professionalism and meritocracy constitute the true credo. This is what they tell us.

That which people experience and feel personally may be represented through an image, an analogy which is different from these stories: the Roman ships in which many slaves were gathered and forced to row (it was thanks to the slaves that the ships would travel across the seas and reach the ports) and a figure (a figure such as a modern administrator of human resources) drumming on an enormous drum to indicate (impose) the rhythm, his rhythm.
Talking about slaves… Often companies fill their mission, their ethic codes, their communications with the expression “human resources” and these human resources increasingly show that they are getting farther and farther away from human beings made of flesh and bone.

Can we move to Ireland or India without changing the company value in any way? Can people be considered to be so neutral? If this is the case, why then waste time, resources, ink, paper trying to value/publicize the “company culture”?

How is it possible that organizational structures are represented as neutral boxes characterized only by a title, whereas it is known to everybody that the true contents of the boxes and the work performed are so closely connected to the names and surnames of those who they wish to insert or who already are inside one box or another? How is it possible that the company has not been able to represent the fundamental and obvious difference between the work performed by/together with one employee and the work performed by/together with somebody else?

Taken From : PROVOCATIVE THOUGHTS FOR MANAGERS
Unconventional ideas to unleash talent in organizations