• Too many people waste their time straining to do things that aren’t right for them.
• Too many managers ask the wrong people to do the wrong job– the job that isn’t a good fit.
• Too many companies focus on doing business outside their core competency.

How do you solve this problem?

• Find a job that let’s you do the work that you’re the best at.
• Don’t grasp at straws when you’ve fallen, rather refocus on your goals.
• Help your employees find their strength and then put them to work using their strength.
• Determine what your company does best and stay sharply focuses while outsourcing and spinning off every thing else.

Is it ever ok to break the rules? Here’s a case to consider.

In this mornings soccer game Caleb was playing goalkeeper and a player on his team had the ball and was under pressure about three feet away from him. The player passed the ball back to Caleb (who had a forward on him) with his feet so following the rules Caleb had to handle the ball with his feet and did not pick it up even though both of his coaches were hollering at him to pick it up. Consequently, the player from the other team kicked the ball right into the goal. The referee explained to Caleb’s coaches that Caleb was following the rules, but one coach just kept repeating that Caleb knew the rules too well.

In older more experienced leagues soccer players committ “professional fouls” and knowingly break the rules to prevent a goal. For example, the goalkeeper is out of the goal and a defender steps in front of the goal and prevents a goal from being scored with his hands or a forward beats the last defender between him and the goal and the defender grasps at the forwards jersey and pulls him down preventing a goal. You also see players in basketball purposely fouling all the time to stop the clock and put their opponent on the line rather than letting them take a shot.

So here’s my dillemma, do I teach Caleb about the professional foul? Tell him to go ahead and pick up the ball to prevent the goal, because at the worst if the ref calls it (which they only do about half the time) then under his age groups rules it would only be an indirect kick (two players have to touch the ball before it goes in the goal).

Do I teach him that it’s ok to the break the rules in a game as long as he is willing to accept the consequences of breaking the rules or is this to grey for him to understand? If I teach him it’s ok to break the rules of soccer under certain circumstances do I start down the slippery slope of it’s ok to break some rules some of the time depending?

Someone told me today, “No self-respecting salesperson takes no for an answer.”

If you know me then you know I am not a salesperson, but this old adage clearly strikes me as off-balance. When a good salesperson won’t take no for answer they end up getting hung-up on, ignored or in a worse case scenario– escorted out of the building by security (believe me, I’ve seen it happen).

Instead when the answer is clearly no, then the salesperson should focus on why their offer was declined and how this can be a yes in the future. When a salespersons refuses to take a no they just ruin the relationship with the client, their personal reputation and any possibility of future business with that company.

I’m not an expert in polling research methodology at all, but I’ve recognize a couple flaws in the polls we constantly see touted in front of us.

• Sampling methods are flawed and don’t pull from a complete census.
• Tracking polls work for following trends, but not to predict what’s going to happen on a single day.
• It’s difficult for polling companies to properly represent who has voted and who has not since states early/absentee voting vary great.
• People lie.

It’s about that time in the Presidential election cycle for the media polls to start meaning absolutely nothing.  This always happens right about the same time the media really starts hyping the spread between the candidates in the poll. There are two issues with looking at nationwide polling data. First, we don’t elect a president by popular vote so whoever is winning the national polls doesn’t matter at all and second, the basic polls are flawed in and of themselves (I’ll try to go more into this later in a later post).

The best way we have of handicapping the presidential race is to look at the flawed polls in individual states in conjuction with those states electoral pull. A couple of websites do a great job of this.

• CNN.com’s electoral map calculator gives you a chance to see who CNN is giving the race to at this moment in time and which states are leaners and tossups. It also lets you play with electoral math by changing who wins what states and see historical races.
• I also really like electoral-vote.com because it breaks down the polls state by state and tells you the latest polling data from which state and how current it is. During the last election cycle I think I visited electoral-vote.com three or four times a day for the two weeks preceding the election.

Do you have any election trackers that you like? Share in the comments.

I’m not into virtual games and virtual worlds, but I’ve ran across a couple of stories in the news the past few days where a crime was created in a virtual world (like Second Life) and then people were charged by the real police for a crime in the real world.

• In the Netherlands two kids were convicted of theft in a Dutch court for stealing a virtual amulet in the game Runescape. The details are pretty scarce, but apparently the two kids “coerced” another kid to hand over the items, and to the court that’s as good as theft.
• The AP ran a story over the wire about a Japanese lady being arrested after killing her virtual husband after he quickly divorced her in the virtual world. She was charged with illegal access onto a computer and manipulating electronic data because she stole the guys password and logged into the computer.

Virtual worlds run the way they are programmed to run. If there’s a problem with something that occurs in a virtual world, then the programmer who controls the game should fix the problem rather than the real world police.

Even though I am rarely posting on this blog now, I have switched it over to a WordPress blog. WordPress is a great blogging platform and is a great choice for a CMS for smaller sites. I’ve used it on several sites over the last couple of of years. I’m not completely satisfied with this WP theme. So expect to see some changes there before this blog gets forgotten about again.

While I moved this blog over from blogger, I also moved my wife’s blog over from blogger and set it up with it’s own domain – mamabyrd.com.

I’m running both of these off a webfaction shared hosting account. I’m trying to consolidate all of my side projects into this one hosting account and they offer unlimited domains. It’s a little more expensive than a base godaddy account, but it offers a lot more customization.