SLOW Movement

The Unreal Times: BCG hires McKinsey to advice it on how to become number 1

 

This is hilarious! :D

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The Unreal Times

India's favourite satire, spoof, parody and human portal

Source: http://www.theunrealtimes.com/2011/08/12/bcg-hires-mckinsey-to-advise-it-on-how-to-become-number-1/

BCG hires McKinsey to advice it on how to become number 1

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McK will use the BCG matrix to slot BCG consultants as dogs and cows

Strategy consulting major Boston Consulting Group (BCG) announced today that it has hired the services of the world’s number 1 strategy consulting firm McKinsey to advice BCG on how to replace McKinsey as the number 1 strategy consulting firm.

“We are sick of being second best. After a rigorous year long internal analysis session that involved 35 BCG consultants (editor – this translates to roughly over 2.9 lakh manhours assuming each consultant put in 18 hours a day,7 days a week), 45 proprietary BCG frameworks, and over 900 Powerpoint slides, we came to the firm conclusion that the best strategy would be to hire McKinsey to advice us on becoming #1,” said Vijayendra ‘Baba’ Haryal, Global Head, BCG.

McKinsey has readily agreed to serve its new client as professionally as possible. “In normal times, we’d have asked them go climb a tree. But with another looming recession, we can’t afford to be choosy. Hopefully we should be able to retain BCG as an anchor client for at least 5 years,” said Achal Nath, Senior Partner, McKinsey.

Achal pooh-poohed the idea of a potential conflict of interest. “As long as they are paying us, we are happy to advice them. One of the firm’s core values is to place the client’s interest above everything else, so there is no question of  a conflict of interest” said Achal. The Senior Partner however did concede that in theory BCG can replace McKinsey as the number 1 firm at the end of the engagement. “Yeah, in theory they should. But the cool thing about consulting is that we are not required to put our money where our mouths are, so I am not gonna lose sleep over it,” he shrugged.

The McKinsey team deployed for this prestigious assignment has been persuaded by BCG to use the famous BCG Growth-Share Matrix for some of the analysis. “Yeah, we have our own tools but these guys seem quite sentimental about this stuff and insisted that we use it. So in the first phase of the engagement, we are gonna slot BCG consultants into dogs, cows, question marks, and stars so that the dogs can be kicked out and the stars can be promoted. We will then see what to do with the question marks,” said team lead and rising McKinsey star, Raghib Ahmed.

Pundits think BCG’s move is a master-stroke. “If McK indeed helps them become #1, great! If not, BCG can then tell prospective clients that Mck’s advice does not always produce results,” said Li Chin, a Hong Kong based business journalist. “Hmm… that’s an interesting line of thought. To be honest, we just want to get hold of some nice Mck slides, but that will help too,” said ‘Baba’ Haryal, Global Head, BCG to The UnReal Times.

FT: E-mail contract is not worth the kilobytes

E-mail contract is not worth the kilobytes

By Lucy Kellway

Published: June 5 2011 20:47 | Last updated: June 5 2011 20:47

This column may be illegal. In writing it, I am inviting Philips, the Dutch electronics company, to sue me – and I’m rather hoping it will. Then I would be the first person in history taken to court for disobeying the most annoying and most pointless legal paragraph ever drafted.

The contract I’m about to break is the one that sits at the bottom of almost every business e-mail. In simple terms, it says that if the e-mail isn’t addressed to you, you must delete it at once, notify the sender and not tell a soul. I’m not the first to ignore such a command, indeed it is flouted hundreds of thousands of times every hour – almost every time that anyone forwards anything at work.

The other day I received a message that was most definitely not intended for me, but was passed on by a reader who thought I might like it. It was written by Frans van Houten, the new chief executive of Philips and sent to all his 100,000 employees to tell them about a management initiative.

“We agreed a new set of values ... as they are better suited to unlock our full potential in a fast moving world,” he said. He explained that these new values “would replace the 4 D’s” – which turn out to be such dismal, dull, derivative and depressing things as “Delight customers” and “Develop people”.

He quoted Gandhi (who surely would never have uttered the words “Be the Change”, had he known just how many scores of dodgy management initiatives would be launched on the strength of them). He finished by inviting underlings to go with him on a “journey” named Accelerate! “We have asked the 200 leaders ... to own and drive Accelerate! ... Please join me and Accelerate! to win together.”

Immediately below this stirring sign-off came the normal disclaimer. It said the message was confidential, and “intended solely for the addressee(s). If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use, forwarding, dissemination, or reproduction of this message is strictly prohibited ... please contact the sender by return e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message.”

Rather than do as instructed, I have decided to follow the common law of the internet. This decrees that whenever you get a crass message, you must forward it to everyone in your address book, or post it on your blog, or, if you are fortunate to have such a thing, write about it in your newspaper column.

In so doing, I am at least notifying the sender, though maybe not in the way his disclaimer intended. My justification for passing the e-mail on is that the world needs to know when public companies are indulging in flabby management nonsense. I think it’s fair to bet that Accelerate! – despite the additional oomph that comes from the exclamation point – is not going to “unlock full potential” in any world, fast-moving or not.

Of course, Philips could now see me in court. If it does, I don’t think it’s going to win. I’ve consulted some experts who assure me that in European law it’s pretty much impossible to foist this sort of contract on someone unilaterally. Legal disclaimers on e-mails are not only unenforced but unenforceable – making one wonder why they are so popular. The only plausible explanation is that companies use them simply because others do; no one dares be odd one out.

Last week I got a short e-mail from someone who works at the French bank BNP Paribas with a long disclaimer that made the Philips one look restrained.

It started off by doing some legal defining of terms, explaining that message will hitherto be denoted by “message”. Having done this in English, it went on to do it in French as well.

Finally, after a whole series of heavy warnings given in both languages, it bossily instructs the recipients: “Please consider the environment before printing.”

This is a damned cheek. Anyone who elects to print out this e-mail (a decision is surely up to the recipient, not to the sender) is thus forced to waste a lot of additional ink and paper as these paragraphs are automatically and needlessly reproduced in hard copy.

I’m happy to report that e-mails sent from the FT system are neither bossy nor threatening, and come in just one language. Every e-mail finishes thus: “This e-mail was sent by a company owned by Pearson plc ... Registered in England and Wales with company number 53723”.

This is good for being brief, though less good for containing a numerical fact that I bet no one who has ever received an e-mail from me has ever found even slightly diverting. There is a way of making this automatic sign-off better and briefer still: do without it altogether.

[email protected]

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: The dull names of those who rose

The dull names of those who rose

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: May 1 2011 19:17 | Last updated: May 1 2011 19:17

Whenever I used to hear that someone had saddled a son with a name like Tarquin, Apollo or Silas, I always feared that the child would be teased at school. I now find I’ve been worrying about the wrong thing. The real damage done by an outlandish name doesn’t happen in the playground but in the boardroom.

LinkedIn has just consulted its database of 100m professionals and found that chief executives overwhelmingly have boring first names. When it comes to the corner office, Ed will do nicely but Tarquin will not do at all: the most popular CEO names are Peter, Bob, Jack, Bruce and Fred.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Must I remember my kids’ ages just to log on? - May-08

Lucy Kellaway: Drivel is in the detail on pay - Apr-17

Lucy Kellaway: You might be a genius, but I won’t tell you - Apr-10

Writing is on the wall for ‘customer care’ - Mar-27

Lucy Kellaway: China conniptions - Mar-20

Lucy Kellaway: Business leaders are worse than they think - Mar-13

I wonder that I have never noticed this before. If I trawl my mind for the names of the most remarkable corporate titans, they all have unremarkable, monosyllabic first names – Bill (Gates), Paul (Allen), Jack (Welch), John (Chambers). If they were born with longer names, they make them shorter: Jeffrey becomes Jeff (Immelt); Robert becomes Bob (Nardelli, Horton); and Christopher becomes Chris (Gent).

Two syllables are only really acceptable when they are a cute version of a more formal name. There is Jamie (Dimon), Sandy (Weill), Larry (Bossidy). But three syllables are not acceptable at all. I can’t think of a single famous boss in the US or UK with a long first name. Even less can I think of one with a flamboyant or weird one. The only mad name that sticks in my mind is Loïk Le Floch-Prigent, the disgraced former head of Elf. But he doesn’t really count as he is a) French and b) has spent rather a long time in prison.

The LinkedIn research suggests different sorts of corporate jobs attract people with different names. If you have a cheery-chappy name such as Budd or Troy or Chip, then you will do well in sales, while a longer, straighter name such as Andrew will make you a perfect engineer. If, however, your name has seven or more letters, corporate life isn’t right for you at all. You should open a restaurant instead.

This idea – that your name shapes your career – passes under the name of “nominative determinism”. One of its supporters is the journalist David Brooks, who has dredged up the peculiar fact that people called Dennis are more likely than most to end up as dentists, while people called Lawrence are more likely to become lawyers. We want, he says, to do things that sound like us. I’ve often marvelled at how this idea works negatively: financial villains tend to have dodgy names – think of Madoff or Fuld, for example.

When I was at school, I thought such things a tremendous joke. “Have you read Great Falls by Eileen Dover?” I’d ask, and then scream with laughter. But real life turns out to be funnier than childish jokes: there was an article written on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology (vol 49, pp173-176, 1977) by J.W.  Splatt and D. Weedon.

Though the statistical evidence for nominative determinism may be a bit flaky, it figures. If we accept that the way people look affects their careers, then it isn’t unreasonable to think their names do too.

However, in the case of CEOs, what the Bob-Bill-Jack ascendancy tells us about corporate life is rather depressing. It says that diversity is bunkum: B-B-J puts foreigners at a clear disadvantage. Indeed, if you are born Gróf András István, but fancy running a big semiconductor company in the US, then you would be well advised to change your name to Andy Grove instead.

Indeed, the standard management guff tells us that the people who get ahead are the ones that are “unique” and “authentic”. Yet B-B-J shows this to be nonsense – if you want to get on, you need to sound and seem as unremarkable as everyone else.

B-B-J is evidence of a pervasive corporate lie. We are led to think that CEOs are friendly, when in fact it is their job to make people do things they don’t want to do and then fire them if they are not up to scratch. The matey little names – that seem to say “let’s have a couple of beers” – hoodwink us into thinking otherwise.

Finally, B-B-J tells us that it’s different for girls. The women CEOs on LinkedIn aren’t called Sue and Jill and Beth. They are Cynthia, Deborah and Carolyn; like my own CEO, Marjorie Scardino, they choose to use all three glorious syllables. Their names aren’t saying “let’s have a beer” but something more honest, if a bit more desperate: “Take me seriously.”

People often say that there will only be equality at the top when there are as many incompetent women CEOs as there are incompetent men. I’ve got another measure. Equality will be with us only when our female leaders ask to be called Debs and Marge.

[email protected]

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Must I remember my kids' ages just to log on?

This is oh so familiar.... having to remember multiple passwords :P

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Must I remember my kids’ ages just to log on?

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: May 8 2011 17:00 | Last updated: May 8 2011 17:00

Returning to the office last Tuesday after a long weekend, I couldn’t start work as I’d forgotten my computer password. Perhaps it was the combined excitement of a spectacular wedding followed by a spectacular death, but my brain was no longer able to retrieve a simple sequence of seven characters.

In the early days of computers I never forgot my password. But that’s because the top secret word I’d chosen was “Kellaway”, which I found could be effortlessly recalled even in the most fraught moments. Things only started to go awry when the computer security experts told me this password would no longer do. Reluctantly, I went for something a bit more elaborate and, to make sure I didn’t forget it, I wrote the word on a Post-it note and stuck it to my screen.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Lucy Kellaway: Dull monikers - May-01

Lucy Kellaway: Drivel is in the detail on pay - Apr-17

Lucy Kellaway: You might be a genius, but I won’t tell you - Apr-10

Writing is on the wall for ‘customer care’ - Mar-27

Lucy Kellaway: China conniptions - Mar-20

Lucy Kellaway: Business leaders are worse than they think - Mar-13

But now Post-it notes are frowned on and the computer insists that my new password must contain a confusing mixture of cases, numbers and squiggles and be endlessly changed. To help me cope, I have devised a system: I rotate people in my family, with capital letters, punctuation and ages. Yet, as I found on Tuesday, this system is not foolproof. I daresay it is simple enough for any hacker to crack in a nanosecond, but it is complicated enough to foil me. I can’t remember which family member’s turn it is, whether it’s a full-stop or a comma, or how old they are.

It would be bad enough if there was just one password to remember. But I have passwords for my bank, e-mail, Amazon and for everything else I’ve ever bought online. Most of these are variations on a theme, some longer than others, but which is which?

I take some comfort from the fact that my remedial performance is better than that of some. A recent study of 23m passwords showed that by far the most popular password is still 123456. Of words, “Password” is in first place, followed by “Iloveyou” and then – bafflingly – by “princess” and “rockyou”.

There is a new App that will shortly be available on iPhones offering a series of pictures to help us remember random passwords, but it looks a bit complicated to me. Instead, I can think of a simpler mnemonic based on the only thing I can ever remember perfectly – Beatles’ lyrics. Thus a splendid password could be H!Ins, H!Nja – (“Help! I need somebody, Help! Not just anybody”). But there are two problems with this. First, I’m not sure I have the punctuation right, and, according to a recent academic study, mnemonic passwords may be no more difficult to hack than your kid’s names.

Many sites try to make things more secure by asking supposedly memorable questions. But I find the answers to these tend not to be memorable at all. Indeed, I often have to invent answers and then write them in my diary so that I don’t forget them. Which zip code were you born in? Er, no idea. What was your father’s middle name? He didn’t have one.

Even worse are the websites that think preferences are more secure than facts. Whenever I want to check how much money I have in my account, my bank asks me: What is your favourite food? As I don’t really have a favourite food, I found myself writing: Maltesers, but this didn’t feel quite right. Worse still is being asked to name your best friend. Like most adults I’ve advanced beyond the stage of having one. So do I write down my best friend from primary school? And should I still write her down even though we’ve had a bit of a falling out?

In the end, however obscure your password, we now know that it isn’t safe. Whoever hacked into the PlayStation network last month now has access to 100m passwords, and even though these are apparently “hashed” – ie scrambled – with a bit of further hacking they can presumably be unhashed. And given that most of the users probably use the same passwords for everything, the hackers could well have a high old time dipping into bank accounts and spending other people’s money online.

The few real techies I know have tried to protect themselves by buying software that generates an endless stream of random passwords and remembers the lot of them. There is a problem with this, too. You have to remember a master password to get into the system.

In the end, I can’t help wondering why it’s all so complicated. In order to do the most sensitive thing of all – get my hands on my own cash – all I need is a plastic card and a simple PIN code of four numbers. I don’t need to know my favourite food or remember how old my children are. Why is it that we still can’t do the same thing on a computer?

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

Calvin and Hobbes: Dreaded moments - food you hate

We have our share of such dreaded moments... forced to eat what's on our plate...

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WSJ: How to Get a Real Education

THE SATURDAY ESSAY
APRIL 9, 2011

How to Get a Real Education

Forget art history and calculus. Most students need to learn how to run a business, says Scott Adams. 

By SCOTT ADAMS

I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?

Scott Adams

I speak from experience because I majored in entrepreneurship at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. Technically, my major was economics. But the unsung advantage of attending a small college is that you can mold your experience any way you want.

There was a small business on our campus called The Coffee House. It served beer and snacks, and featured live entertainment. It was managed by students, and it was a money-losing mess, subsidized by the college. I thought I could make a difference, so I applied for an opening as the so-called Minister of Finance. I landed the job, thanks to my impressive interviewing skills, my can-do attitude and the fact that everyone else in the solar system had more interesting plans.

The drinking age in those days was 18, and the entire compensation package for the managers of The Coffee House was free beer. That goes a long way toward explaining why the accounting system consisted of seven students trying to remember where all the money went. I thought we could do better. So I proposed to my accounting professor that for three course credits I would build and operate a proper accounting system for the business. And so I did. It was a great experience. Meanwhile, some of my peers were taking courses in art history so they'd be prepared to remember what art looked like just in case anyone asked.

One day the managers of The Coffee House had a meeting to discuss two topics. First, our Minister of Employment was recommending that we fire a bartender, who happened to be one of my best friends. Second, we needed to choose a leader for our group. On the first question, there was a general consensus that my friend lacked both the will and the potential to master the bartending arts. I reluctantly voted with the majority to fire him.

But when it came to discussing who should be our new leader, I pointed out that my friend—the soon-to-be-fired bartender—was tall, good-looking and so gifted at b.s. that he'd be the perfect leader. By the end of the meeting I had persuaded the group to fire the worst bartender that any of us had ever seen…and ask him if he would consider being our leader. My friend nailed the interview and became our Commissioner. He went on to do a terrific job. That was the year I learned everything I know about management.

Read More

• Turning the Classroom Upside Down

At about the same time, this same friend, along with my roommate and me, hatched a plan to become the student managers of our dormitory and to get paid to do it. The idea involved replacing all of the professional staff, including the resident assistant, security guard and even the cleaning crew, with students who would be paid to do the work. We imagined forming a dorm government to manage elections for various jobs, set out penalties for misbehavior and generally take care of business. And we imagined that the three of us, being the visionaries for this scheme, would run the show.

We pitched our entrepreneurial idea to the dean and his staff. To our surprise, the dean said that if we could get a majority of next year's dorm residents to agree to our scheme, the college would back it.

It was a high hurdle, but a loophole made it easier to clear. We only needed a majority of students who said they planned to live in the dorm next year. And we had plenty of friends who were happy to plan just about anything so long as they could later change their minds. That's the year I learned that if there's a loophole, someone's going to drive a truck through it, and the people in the truck will get paid better than the people under it.

The dean required that our first order of business in the fall would be creating a dorm constitution and getting it ratified. That sounded like a nightmare to organize. To save time, I wrote the constitution over the summer and didn't mention it when classes resumed. We held a constitutional convention to collect everyone's input, and I listened to two hours of diverse opinions. At the end of the meeting I volunteered to take on the daunting task of crafting a document that reflected all of the varied and sometimes conflicting opinions that had been aired. I waited a week, made copies of the document that I had written over the summer, presented it to the dorm as their own ideas and watched it get approved in a landslide vote. That was the year I learned everything I know about getting buy-in.

“Why do we make B students sit through the same classes as their brainy peers? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make sense to teach them something useful instead?”

For the next two years my friends and I each had a private room at no cost, a base salary and the experience of managing the dorm. On some nights I also got paid to do overnight security, while also getting paid to clean the laundry room. At the end of my security shift I would go to The Coffee House and balance the books.

My college days were full of entrepreneurial stories of this sort. When my friends and I couldn't get the gym to give us space for our informal games of indoor soccer, we considered our options. The gym's rule was that only organized groups could reserve time. A few days later we took another run at it, but this time we were an organized soccer club, and I was the president. My executive duties included filling out a form to register the club and remembering to bring the ball.

By the time I graduated, I had mastered the strange art of transforming nothing into something. Every good thing that has happened to me as an adult can be traced back to that training. Several years later, I finished my MBA at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. That was the fine-tuning I needed to see the world through an entrepreneur's eyes.

If you're having a hard time imagining what an education in entrepreneurship should include, allow me to prime the pump with some lessons I've learned along the way.

Combine Skills. The first thing you should learn in a course on entrepreneurship is how to make yourself valuable. It's unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it's easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well. I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The "Dilbert" comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That's how value is created.

Fail Forward. If you're taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you're doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. I failed at my first career in banking. I failed at my second career with the phone company. But you'd be surprised at how many of the skills I learned in those careers can be applied to almost any field, including cartooning. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.

Find the Action. In my senior year of college I asked my adviser how I should pursue my goal of being a banker. He told me to figure out where the most innovation in banking was happening and to move there. And so I did. Banking didn't work out for me, but the advice still holds: Move to where the action is. Distance is your enemy.

Scott Adams

Attract Luck. You can't manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn't work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers. Readers of the Journal will find this point obvious. It's not obvious to a teenager.

Conquer Fear. I took classes in public speaking in college and a few more during my corporate days. That training was marginally useful for learning how to mask nervousness in public. Then I took the Dale Carnegie course. It was life-changing. The Dale Carnegie method ignores speaking technique entirely and trains you instead to enjoy the experience of speaking to a crowd. Once you become relaxed in front of people, technique comes automatically. Over the years, I've given speeches to hundreds of audiences and enjoyed every minute on stage. But this isn't a plug for Dale Carnegie. The point is that people can be trained to replace fear and shyness with enthusiasm. Every entrepreneur can use that skill.

Write Simply. I took a two-day class in business writing that taught me how to write direct sentences and to avoid extra words. Simplicity makes ideas powerful. Want examples? Read anything by Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.

Learn Persuasion. Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design. Usually those skills are sprinkled across several disciplines. For entrepreneurs, it makes sense to teach them as a package.

That's my starter list for the sort of classes that would serve B students well. The list is not meant to be complete. Obviously an entrepreneur would benefit from classes in finance, management and more.

Remember, children are our future, and the majority of them are B students. If that doesn't scare you, it probably should.

—Mr. Adams is the creator of "Dilbert."

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

FT: Brands that laugh all the way to the bank

Brands that laugh all the way to the bank

By Rhymer Rigby

Published: January 6 2011 21:51 | Last updated: January 6 2011 21:51

Passengers on Kulula, the South African airline, might find themselves looking twice when they gaze out of the terminal window at their aircraft. Last year, the carrier painted one of its jets in what it calls its Flying 101 livery. The aircraft is now a shade of green with text on the fuselage. Next to words such as “co-pilot”, “engine #2” and “black box”, arrows indicate their location.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

The last word: Online retailer takes the Twitter test - Dec-30

The last word: Dress codes that suit the office - Dec-23

The last word: Panto wins golden goose for UK theatre - Dec-09

The last word: California chain gang gears up for commute - Dec-02

The last word: Secrets to a CEO video - Nov-25

The last word: Vinyl’s stamp of approval - Nov-11

“Humour is part of our brand ethos,” says Nadine Damen, Kulula’s marketing manager, “although it’s almost less about being funny and more about being down to earth and honest. We have other aeroplanes painted in cow spots, camouflage and one with a zipper down the side.”

A sense of fun, she says, runs through the brand. “Our safety briefing was written by comedians. We got a lot of flak for this at first but what we discovered was that using a bit of humour actually makes people listen.”

Humour is one way that brands can punch far above their weight in terms of awareness. When it works, a funny campaign or brand identity can differentiate a commodity product from its peers.

“In a few sectors like beer, it’s almost a category norm,” says Jim Prior, chief executive of The Partners, a branding consultancy. However, he adds, it is hard to do well. “Generally, you see some humour in advertising, which is quite discreet. But it’s rarely all that funny and it rarely goes all the way through. To do that, you have to be brave and confident.”

Many brands manage to be sporadically funny but those that successfully build themselves around humour are far more unusual. The UK soft drink brand Tango did it from the mid-1990s with a series of advertisements. The most popular featured an orange blobby man who slapped drinkers with the catchphrase “You’ve been Tangoed”, a slogan that passed into common usage.

A more recent example is Comparethemarket.com, the insurance comparison site whose brand identity centres on a Russian meerkat called Aleksandr Orlov and the fact that comparethemarket.com is easily confused with comparethemeerkat.com.

“In 2008, we’d been going for a year and research suggested we had a big issue with name recognition,” says Kal Atwal, the website’s managing director. All the comparison sites “had ‘compare’ in their names”. The campaign had a tangible impact: monthly site visits have gone up from 50,000 to 2m.

The meerkat has proved so popular that a number of spin-off products were launched, including an “autobiography” of Orlov that was published in time for Christmas. “Even the Russians seem to like him,” says Ms Atwal. “Russian TV covered the book launch.”

Humour can also reinvigorate older brands. Old Spice has found a new audience with its “Smell like a man, man” ads. Iain Tait of Wieden+Kennedy, the agency behind the campaign, says because a lot of men’s toiletries are bought for them by women, “we needed to create a character who was adored by ladies but who men don’t find threatening”. The answer was a character who combines extreme handsomeness with being funny. “It’s a very knowing kind of humour that comes from the character playing it straight,” says Mr Tait.

Why don’t more brands take the plunge? Mr Prior says companies worry that being amusing makes people question their credibility. But, he argues, “consumers are more sophisticated than that. If you take an airline, passengers know that airlines take safety very seriously.”

“[The Old Spice ads don’t] send up the product and he doesn’t make fun of himself,” explains Mr Tait. “You need to treat the audience with a bit of respect and credit them with intelligence. When you try and spoon-feed them the gag, that’s when it becomes embarrassing.”

Still, as the case of Kulula shows, the potential rewards are huge. “We’re a little airline at the bottom of Africa,” says Ms Damen. “Who in the wider world would have heard of us if we hadn’t done this?”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

12 Days of Christmas (Indian Version)

No offense... but this is a funny one that I chanced upon while searching for Muppet's version of 12 Days of Christmas :)

Muppets: The 12 Days of Christmas :)

WSJ: Why We Can't Stop Playing - Angry Birds

GADGETS & GAMES
NOVEMBER 30, 2010

Why We Can't Stop Playing

Mixing Psychology With Physics, Cute Characters, And Lots of Cheering

By NICK WINGFIELD

 

Angry Birds is dominating the best-selling-applications charts for Apple's iPhone.

Not since the invention of bacon and eggs has the collision of fowl and swine tasted so good.

A game called Angry Birds is dominating the best-selling-applications charts for Apple's iPhone with a simple, whimsical premise: Players turn different species of scowling birds into projectiles with which to crush a collection of grunting pigs scattered around various ramshackle structures. More than 12 million copies of Angry Birds have been sold since it went on sale late last year, most of them 99-cent downloads for iPhones and iPod touches, according to Rovio Mobile Ltd., the Finnish company that created the game.

A number of famous people are said to be fans of Angry Birds, a popular mobile game that is one of many in a growing category of casual games for phones. Nick Wingfield explains.

Why do smart people love seemingly mindless games? Angry Birds is one of the latest to join the pantheon of "casual games" that have appealed to a mass audience with a blend of addictive game play, memorable design and deft marketing. The games are designed to be played in short bursts, sometimes called "entertainment snacking" by industry executives, and there is no stigma attached to adults pulling out their mobile phones and playing in most places. Games like Angry Birds incorporate cute, warm graphics, amusing sound effects and a reward system to make players feel good. A scientific study from 2008 found that casual games provide a "cognitive distraction" that could significantly improve players' moods and stress levels.

Casual games are defined by the ease with which they can be picked up, including by players bewildered by more complex "hardcore games" for PCs and consoles, with their intricate story lines and controls. The category spans early sensations like Tetris, the Russian-made puzzle game for PCs and consoles from the 1980s, to Bejeweled, a decade-old shape-matching game that is still in wide use in mobile devices. The average mobile-game player is 45 years old and nearly as likely to be female as male, according to a survey last year of more than 1,100 customers of AT&T's wireless service sponsored by PopCap Games, the maker of Bejeweled and other titles. When asked where they play mobile games, the top answer from respondents to the survey, conducted by Information Solutions Group, was while waiting for an appointment.

Angry Birds has attracted an unusually high-brow roster of fans. U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has said he plays the game on his iPad, according to Andy Payne, chairman of a British games-industry trade group, who spoke to Mr. Cameron at a group dinner in September. (A spokeswoman for the prime minister didn't return a request for comment.) The author Salman Rushdie in a recent radio interview called himself "something of a master at Angry Birds." And comedian Conan O'Brien posted a YouTube video recently to promote his new talk show, in which he boasts that he's on level four of Angry Birds.

Angry Birds falls into a category known in the industry as "physics-based games," in which basic actions like falling and ricocheting provide the underlying challenge and fun of a game. Players use their fingers on the iPhone or iPad's touch-sensing screens to adjust the tension and angle of a slingshot loaded with a bird, with the goal of maximizing the damage the avian missiles cause to the pigs.

Another physics-based game at the top of the App Store's charts is Cut the Rope. Players must figure out how to deliver a piece of candy dangling from various cords into the mouth of a sweet-hungry monster called the Om Nom. Cutting the cords in the proper order swings the candy into the creature's mouth.

Amber Strocel, a 34-year-old stay-at-home mom in Coquitlam, British Columbia, got hooked on Angry Birds a few months ago when she got an iPhone and has often played it while waiting for dinner to cook. Ms. Strocel, who says she hadn't played a game in years before Angry Birds, says she's amused by the game's characters, especially the mix of laughs and grunts that the pigs emit when she fails to hit them with birds. "They kind of kind of mock you," she says. "There's an appeal to that."

Players' infatuation with games like Angry Birds can end as quickly as it starts, often when the novelty of a game's features wears off. Ms. Strocel recently dumped Angry Birds for another reason: She completed all its levels. "It was fun while it lasted," she says.

A Field Guide to Angry Birds

Mikael Hed, chief executive of Angry Birds-developer Rovio, says the game's success is "really the sum of all of its parts," including the edgy-but-cute characters, amusing sound effects and simple rules. Rovio started in early 2009 with a rough idea of the protagonists it wanted to feature—a cast of stern-looking birds. It decided to make the game's villains a group of sickly-looking green pigs, in homage to the swine-flu pandemic then grabbing headlines. The reason the birds are so angry with the pigs, according to the back story of the game, is that the pigs swiped the birds' eggs to cook them up.

Rovio spent about $100,000 on the original Angry Birds and has invested more in new game levels that it offers, free, through updates to the game, a Rovio spokesman says.

Fueled by word of mouth, the game landed on the best-seller chart for Apple's App Store for Finland late last year. In February, when Apple made Angry Birds a staff pick in the U.K. App Store, sales exploded, Mr. Hed says. A couple of months later, the game became a best-selling paid app in the U.S. App Store, he says.

Like many casual games, Angry Birds uses positive reinforcement to make players feel good when they succeed: After a player lays waste to all the pigs on a level of the game, a raucous wave of cheers goes up. Other than the gentle mocking of the pigs, Mr. Hed says, "our game doesn't really punish players."

Game designers say this type of "reward system" is a crucial part of the appeal of casual games like Angry Birds. In Bejeweled 2, for example, players have to align three diamonds, triangles and other shapes next to each other to advance in the game. After a string of successful moves, a baritone voice announces, "Excellent!" or "Awesome!"

"That's a big part of" the game's success, says Jason Kapalka, chief creative officer of PopCap. "You're getting this unambiguous encouragement." PopCap estimates Bejeweled has garnered more than $350 million in sales and sold more than 50 million units since coming out a decade ago.

The length of the typical casual-game-playing session was less than 15 minutes, according to the survey of mobile-phone users. The survey also found that the primary benefit respondents said they got from playing was a "distraction from the issues of daily life."

In the 2008 study, sponsored by PopCap, 134 players were divided into groups playing Bejeweled or other casual games, and a control group that surfed the Internet looking for journal articles. Researchers, who measured the participants' heart rates and brain waves and administered psychological tests, found that game players had significant improvements in their overall mood and reductions in stress levels, according to Carmen Russoniello, director of the Psychophysiology Lab and Biofeedback Clinic at East Carolina University's College of Health and Human Performance in Greenville, N.C., who directed the study.

In a separate study, not sponsored by PopCap, Dr. Russoniello is currently researching whether casual games can be helpful in people suffering from depression and anxiety.

Write to Nick Wingfield at [email protected]

Copyright 2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Non Sequitur: Blind Date

WSJ: The Perfect Stimuls - Bad Management

• SMALL BUSINESS
• NOVEMBER 6, 2010

The Perfect Stimulus: Bad Management

If no one had a hamster-brained sociopath for a boss, who would start new businesses?

By SCOTT ADAMS

One of my earliest childhood jobs involved shoveling manure at my uncle's dairy farm in upstate New York. Things were going well until my uncle explained that no matter how well I performed, I would never be promoted to farmer. Or even cow. I had hit the manure ceiling.

I consider that experience my first economic stimulus package—the unwelcome realization that my current job was a dead end. While my classmates were building snowmen with carrot noses (mostly the girls) and carrot genitalia (mostly the boys), I started to do some serious career planning about how to get out of the fecal relocation profession and into the warm embrace of a loving corporation. I studied hard, and I earned money for college by mowing lawns, shoveling snow, shoveling even more manure, and (my personal favorite) shoveling frozen manure covered with snow. I saved my meager funds, and with the help of my parents, who both took extra jobs, plus a few scholarships, I clawed my way into college.

Years later, my dream came true. I got a job with a large bank, and I never again needed to shovel manure. Corporations use something called PowerPoint instead. Thanks to my farm training, I was so good at designing PowerPoint slides that my coworkers called me "The Natural." Jaws dropped when I introduced my signature move: the frozen PowerPoint slide with snow on top.

In those days, I was a furious bundle of ambition and determination. The old-timers told me I had a "rocket strapped to my ass." All I needed to do was get my "ticket punched." It wasn't long before I was able to enjoy my second economic stimulus package: bad management.

Though most of my immediate bosses were entirely reasonable and competent, the organization at large was riddled with hamster-brained sociopaths in leadership roles. Surely, I thought, this must be a problem that exists no place else on Earth. Otherwise we'd all be living in caves and holding long meetings on the feasibility of using sticks as stabby things.

One day, a position opened above me, and I was the most obvious candidate to fill it. My boss called me into her office and said she had some bad news. She explained that the media was giving our company a lot of heat because almost all of our managers and executives were white males. Promoting me, she explained, would only make things worse. I asked how long I might need to wait for all of this to blow over. My boss was vague, but she said the timeline involved smoothing out the effects of two centuries of corporate discrimination.

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Copyright Scott Adams, Inc.

I decided to jump ship and go where my talent and hard work would be rewarded. I took a job at the local phone company and soon discovered, to my horror, that banking was not the only industry in the world managed by hamster-brained sociopaths. Once again, my immediate bosses were quite capable, but interacting with other departments was like being the last human in Zombieville and trying to buy groceries at dusk. Still, it was marginally better than shoveling manure, so I doubled down. I finished my MBA classes at night and distinguished myself as an up-and-comer.

One day my boss called me into his office and explained that the media was giving the phone company a lot of heat because almost all of the managers and executives were white males. So, he explained, promoting me would only make things worse. You might say that was the day that the "Dilbert" comic strip was born, although I had not yet drawn one. Let's call it a tipping point. From that day on, I considered myself an entrepreneur. All I had to do was figure out what business I was in. The phone company was willing to pay for almost any sort of semi-relevant training or education that I was willing to endure. It was like an accidental school for entrepreneurs. From an economic viewpoint, I was in exactly the right place, with exactly the right amount of career discomfort.

I wasn't suffering alone. Many of my co-workers already had active side businesses and ambitious expansion plans. The guy in the cubicle behind me was running a concert equipment rental business. Across from me was a guy running a computer tech support business. We had Amway dealers, Mary Kay sales people, inventors, authors and just about any other business you can imagine. That's not counting all of the business plans in the incubation phase. I think we all understood that working in a cubicle and being managed by Satan's learning-challenged little brother was not a recipe for happiness.

The way I describe it may sound pessimistic, but consider the alternative. Imagine a parallel universe where employees enjoy going to work. They feel empowered and fulfilled—so much so that they don't care about the size of their paychecks and never want to leave their jobs. That's exactly the sort of nightmare scenario that would destroy the economy. The last thing this world needs is a bunch of dopey-happy workers who can't stop humming and grinning. Our system requires a continuous supply of highly capable people who are so disgruntled with their jobs that they are willing to chew off their own arms to escape their bosses. The economy needs hamster-brained sociopaths in management to drive down the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship. Luckily, we're blessed with an ample supply.

To put it in plainer terms: The primary purpose of management is to kill any hope that staying in your current job will work out for you. That sort of hope is like gravel in the engine of progress. The economy needs workers who are fed up, desperate and willing to quit their jobs for something better. Remember, only quitters can be winners, because you can't do something great until first you quit doing something that isn't.

You see this same dynamic with countries. The United States is a nation founded by people who couldn't stand the leaders of their old homelands. I'm no geneticist, but I suspect that the "screw it, I'm out of here" attitude can get passed on. We're probably the most disgruntled, self-loathing, hard-to-satisfy people on Earth. It's no wonder our GDP is awesome.

Israel is another perfect example. The entire nation is full of people who were displeased with their last situation. And Israel's economy is one of the most vibrant in the world. If every Israeli became satisfied at once, they couldn't keep the lights on for a week.

I have always assumed there's a correlation between imagination and risk-taking. You wouldn't leave an unpleasant but relatively safe situation unless you could imagine a better outcome. So the people who leave a company first tend to be the visionaries who can best imagine entrepreneurial success. The last wave of people who leave are usually excreted just before the door is chained. They didn't imagine it would happen so soon. Bad management is how imagination gets wings.

—Scott Adams is the creator of 'Dilbert.'

Copyright 2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Funny: The look-alike game :)

Calvin and Hobbes: It's Saturday!

One of the many memorable moments...

WSJ: How to Write Like a Cartoonist

LIFE & STYLE
OCTOBER 9, 2010

How to Write Like a Cartoonist

By SCOTT ADAMS

Last weekend a French fry got lodged in my sinus cavity.

I suppose it all started when I was 11 years old. Two of my school buddies and I were huddled on the schoolyard, whisper-sharing everything we knew about the mysteries of the human reproductive process. We patched together bits and pieces of what we had heard from our older brothers. This was problematic, because two of our brothers were unreliable, and one was a practical joker. And to be fair, my friends and I were poor listeners.

As I later learned, we got a fairly important part of the reproductive puzzle wrong. I can't be more specific about our faulty information, at least not in The Wall Street Journal, so instead I will tell you a story about golf. If you choose to draw any parallels, that's your own fault.

Okay, so this golfer hits a majestic drive, and follows it up with an awesome chip and an improbable putt. The golfer pumps his fist and dances a little jig. He turns to his caddy for a high-five and gets no response. "Wasn't that some great golfing?" the golfer asks. The caddy says, "Yes...but it was the wrong hole."

Last weekend, I was visiting my tiny hometown of Windham, N.Y., enjoying dinner out with my parents, my sister, and two 80ish widows who are longtime family friends. One of the ladies mentioned running into an old schoolmate of mine who was part of the misinformed schoolyard troika of way-back-then. When I heard my schoolmate's name, I flashed back to that day, vividly recalling the key bit of information we got wrong, and I wondered how long it took my buddies to correct their mistaken understandings. I took a bite of my French fry and listened to the rest of the story about how this fellow hadn't changed much since he was a kid. And then one of the widows added, sort of as an afterthought, "He never had any children."

Let me tell you that this was a bad time for me to have food in my mouth. The situation demanded a spit-take, but this was a nice restaurant, and I was sitting directly across from the two innocent widows. I clamped my lips shut and hoped for the best. Something sneeze-like exploded inside me. It was an unholy combination of saliva, potato, laughter and compressed air. I squeezed my sphincter shut, closed my eyes, and well, I don't remember much after that. I think the French fry hit the top of my sinus cavity and caused some sort of concussion.

Anyway, the reason we're here today is so I can give you valuable writing tips. My specialty is humor, so let's stick with that slice of the assignment.

The topic is the thing. Eighty percent of successful humor writing is picking a topic that is funny by its very nature. My story above is true, up until the exaggeration about the French fry in the sinus cavity. You probably assumed it was true, and that knowledge made it funnier.

Humor likes danger. If you are cautious by nature, writing humor probably isn't for you. Humor works best when you sense that the writer is putting himself in jeopardy. I picked the French-fry story specifically because it is too risqué for The Wall Street Journal. You can't read it without wondering if I had an awkward conversation with my editor. You might wonder if the people in my story will appreciate seeing my version of events in The Wall Street Journal. I wonder that too.

In the early days of my cartooning career, as the creator of "Dilbert," part of the strip's appeal was that I was holding a day job while mocking the very sort of company I worked for. If you knew my backstory, and many people did, you could sense my personal danger in every strip. (My manager eventually asked me to leave. He said it was a budget thing.)

Humor is about people. It's impossible to write humor about a concept or an object. All humor involves how people think and act. Sometimes you can finesse that limitation by having your characters think and act in selfish, stupid or potentially harmful ways around the concept or object that you want your reader to focus on.

Exaggerate wisely. If you anchor your story in the familiar, your readers will follow you on a humorous exaggeration, especially if you build up to it. My story was true and relatable until the French-fry exaggeration.

Let the reader do some work. Humor works best when the reader has to connect some dots. Early in my story I made you connect the golf story to the playground story. The smarter your audience, the wider you can spread the dots. I used this method again when I said of my aborted spit-take, "I don't remember much after that." Your mind might have filled in a little scene in which, perhaps, my eyes bugged out, my cheeks went all chipmunk-like, and I fell out of my chair.

Animals are funny. It's a cheap trick, but animal analogies are generally funny. It was funnier that I said, "my cheeks went all chipmunk-like" than if I had said my cheeks puffed out.

Use funny words. I referred to my two schoolmates and myself as a troika because the word itself is funny. With humor, you never say "pull" when you can say "yank." Some words are simply funnier than others, and you know the funny ones when you see them. (Pop Quiz: Which word is funnier, observe or stalk?)

Curiosity. Good writing makes you curious without being too heavy-handed about it. My first sentence in this piece, about the French fry lodged in my sinus cavity, is designed to make you curious. It also sets the tone right away.

Endings. A simple and classic way to end humorous writing is with a call-back. That means making a clever association to something especially humorous and notable from the body of your work. I would give you an example of that now, but I'm still having concentration issues from the French fry.

—Scott Adams is the creator of "Dilbert." This column features a new contributor each week on the art of writing and speaking.Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page C12

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Dilbert: Social Media

Calvin and Hobbes: Sleeping hungry tiger

Heh :P

Non Sequitur: iRomance

Non Sequitur: Bar and Grill

Pun intended! Heh :)

WSJ: Betting on the Bad Guys

A tongue-in-cheek guide to investing... from Scott Adams, the guy who gives you Dilbert. Enjoy! :)

===

ESSAY

JUNE 5, 2010

Betting on the Bad Guys

Cartoonist Scott Adams's personal road to riches: Put your money on the companies that you hate the most

By SCOTT ADAMS

When I heard that BP was destroying a big portion of Earth, with no serious discussion of cutting their dividend, I had two thoughts: 1) I hate them, and 2) This would be an excellent time to buy their stock. And so I did. Although I should have waited a week.

People ask me how it feels to take the side of moral bankruptcy. Answer: Pretty good! Thanks for asking. How's it feel to be a disgruntled victim?

I have a theory that you should invest in the companies that you hate the most. The usual reason for hating a company is that the company is so powerful it can make you balance your wallet on your nose while you beg for their product. Oil companies such as BP don't actually make you beg for oil, but I think we all realize that they could. It's implied in the price of gas.

Scott Adams

I hate BP, but I admire them too, in the same way I respect the work ethic of serial killers. I remember the day I learned that BP was using a submarine…with a web cam…a mile under the sea…to feed live video of their disaster to the world. My mind screamed "STOP TRYING TO MAKE ME LOVE YOU! MUST…THINK…OF DEAD BIRDS TO MAINTAIN ANGER!" The geeky side of me has a bit of a crush on them, but I still hate them for turning Florida into a dip stick.

Apparently BP has its own navy, a small air force, and enough money to build floating cities on the sea, most of which are still upright. If there's oil on the moon, BP will be the first to send a hose into space and suck on the moon until it's the size of a grapefruit. As an investor, that's the side I want to be on, with BP, not the loser moon.

I'd like to see a movie in which James Bond tries to defeat BP, but in the end they run Bond through a machine that turns him into "junk shot" debris to seal a leaky well. I'm just saying you don't always have to root for Bond. Be flexible.

Perhaps you think it's absurd to invest in companies just because you hate them. But let's compare my method to all of the other ways you could decide where to invest.

Technical Analysis

Technical analysis involves studying graphs of stock movement over time as a way to predict future moves. It's a widely used method on Wall Street, and it has exactly the same scientific validity as pretending you are a witch and forecasting market moves from chicken droppings.

Investing in Well-Managed Companies

When companies make money, we assume they are well-managed. That perception is reinforced by the CEOs of those companies who are happy to tell you all the clever things they did to make it happen. The problem with relying on this source of information is that CEOs are highly skilled in a special form of lying called leadership. Leadership involves convincing employees and investors that the CEO has something called a vision, a type of optimistic hallucination that can come true only in an environment in which the CEO is massively overcompensated and the employees have learned to be less selfish.

Track Record

Perhaps you can safely invest in companies that have a long track record of being profitable. That sounds safe and reasonable, right? The problem is that every investment expert knows two truths about investing: 1) Past performance is no indication of future performance. 2) You need to consider a company's track record.

Right, yes, those are opposites. And it's pretty much all that anyone knows about investing. An investment professional can argue for any sort of investment decision by selectively ignoring either point 1 or 2. And for that you will pay the investment professional 1% to 2% of your portfolio value annually, no matter the performance.

Invest in Companies You Love

Instead of investing in companies you hate, as I have suggested, perhaps you could invest in companies you love. I once hired professional money managers at Wells Fargo to do essentially that for me. As part of their service they promised to listen to the dopey-happy hallucinations of professional liars (CEOs) and be gullible on my behalf. The pros at Wells Fargo bought for my portfolio Enron, WorldCom, and a number of other much-loved companies that soon went out of business. For that, I hate Wells Fargo. But I sure wish I had bought stock in Wells Fargo at the time I hated them the most, because Wells Fargo itself performed great. See how this works?

Do Your Own Research

I didn't let Wells Fargo manage my entire portfolio, thanks to my native distrust of all humanity. For the other half of my portfolio I did my own research. (Imagine a field of red flags, all wildly waving. I didn't notice them.) My favorite investment was in a company I absolutely loved. I loved their business model. I loved their mission. I loved how they planned to make our daily lives easier. They were simply adorable as they struggled to change an entrenched industry. Their leaders reported that the company had finally turned cash positive in one key area, thus validating their business model, and proving that the future was rosy. I doubled down. The company was Webvan, may it rest in peace.

(This would be a good time to remind you not to make investment decisions based on the wisdom of cartoonists.)

But What About Warren Buffett?

The argument goes that if Warren Buffett can buy quality companies at reasonable prices, hold them for the long term and become a billionaire, then so can you. Do you know who would be the first person to tell you that you aren't smart enough or well-informed enough to pull that off? His name is Warren Buffett. OK, he's probably too nice to say that, but I'm pretty sure he's thinking it. However, he might tell you that he makes his money by knowing things that other people don't know, and buying things that other people can't buy, such as entire companies.

People Love Berkshire Hathaway And That Has Done Great

I'm not saying that the companies you love are automatically bad investments. I'm saying that investing in companies you love is riskier than investing in companies you hate.

Second, take a look at Berkshire Hathaway's holdings. It's a rogue's gallery of junk food purveyors, banks, insurance companies and yes, Goldman Sachs and Moody's. The second largest holding of Berkshire Hathaway is…wait for it…Wells Fargo.

(Disclosure: I own stock in Berkshire Hathaway for the very reasons I'm describing. And my first job out of college was at Crocker National Bank, later swallowed by Wells Fargo.)

Let's talk about morality. Can you justify owning stock in companies that are treating the Earth like a prison pillow with a crayon face? Of course you can, but it takes some mental gymnastics. I'm here to help.

If you buy stock in a despicable company, it means some of the previous owners of that company sold it to you. If the stock then rises more than the market average, you successfully screwed the previous owners of the hated company. That's exactly like justice, only better because you made a profit. Then you can sell your stocks for a gain and donate all of your earnings to good causes, such as education for your own kids.

Having absorbed all of the wisdom I have presented here so far, you are naturally wondering if I have any additional investment tips. Yes, and I will put my tips in the form of a true story. Recently I bought something called an iPhone. It drops calls so often that I no longer use it for audio conversations. It's too frustrating. And unlike my old BlackBerry days, I don't send e-mail on the iPhone because the on-screen keyboard is, as far as I can tell, an elaborate practical joke. I am, however, willing to respond to incoming text messages a long as they are in the form of yes-no questions and my answer are in the affirmative. In those cases I can simply type "k," the shorthand for OK, and I have trained my friends and family to accept L, J, O, or comma as meaning the same thing.

The other day I was in the Apple Store, asking how to repair a defective Apple laptop, and decided, irrationally, that I needed to have Apple's new iPad. The smiling Apple employee said she would be willing to put me on a list so I could wait an indefinite amount of time to maybe someday have one. I instinctively put my wallet on my nose and started barking like a seal, thinking it might reduce the wait time, but they're so used to seeing that maneuver that it didn't help.

My point is that I hate Apple. I hate that I irrationally crave their products, I hate their emotional control over my entire family, I hate the time I waste trying to make iTunes work, I hate how they manipulate my desires, I hate their closed systems, I hate Steve Jobs's black turtlenecks, and I hate that they call their store employees Geniuses which, as far as I can tell, is actually true. My point is that I wish I had bought stock in Apple five years ago when I first started hating them. But I hate them more every day, which is a positive sign for investing, so I'll probably buy some shares.

Again, I remind you to ignore me.

—Scott Adams is the creator of "Dilbert."