Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Business coaching is one of those things that you may think is a pointless waste of money when you’re just getting going with your business but it can provide you with insights that would ordinarily take you years to learn and cost you dearly with the mistakes that you made along the way learning them.

A business coach can make a whole lot of those expensive mistakes go away and moreover provide you with tips to give you major advantages in the business marketplace too.

 ActionCOACH is a group of people who aim to give you all of those advantages through their “14 Points of Culture” system thereby helping you to become the best person you can be to succeed in your ventures.

I find that normal long haul flights aren’t too bad in that you get on the plane one day and arrive later the same day if you’re going west or perhaps early the next day if you’re going east.

However, if you’re doing the London to Sydney trip in one hit you get on the plane one day and get off it two days later which is more than a little disorienting I think. OK, there’s a break for refueling in that two days but it’s usually at a peculiar time so it may as well be one continuous flight.

Also very weird is the flight from Buenos Aires to Sydney. That crosses the date line so you lose a day along the way. Or, rather, you don’t because what actually happens is that you leave Buenos Aires in the evening, in the middle of the flight the sun comes up and then goes down again a few hours later and finally you arrive in the evening so your “missing day” is actually a few hours long.

Rental prices tend to lag the corresponding rises in house prices, essentially because rental contracts are generally 6 to 12 months in duration.

With the incredibly strong rise in house prices in Northern Ireland over the last year to 18 months it could only be expected that the rents being asked for would make a move after the customary time lag. Now, the house prices have levelled off at the moment but that’s not stopped the rents starting to shift upwards.

For example, in one estate which we have a vested interest in, a typical house was £130k in September 2006 vs £225k now. The increase in rents being asked is also heading upwards over that time from a typical £425 last year to £495 now. So far that’s only a 16% rental increase compared to the 73% price rise but I suspect that it’s merely a taster of things to come from the landlords as they test the water for reactions to that rise. Certainly if the prices of the houses resume their progress upwards I would be surprised if there wasn’t a certain amount of catching up happening this time next year with the rents.

Sony is one company that continually plows its own furrow in terms of standards and had done so for many years.

All through the era of the VHS-C standard, they kept producing their own Hi-8 camcorders and throughout the price of the corresponding tapes remained higher than the equivalent VHS-C tapes. Now, in those days they could argue that the Hi-8 tapes were better quality but that doesn’t apply in the digital era.

They continue to stick with the memory stick on their cameras when everyone else has mainly gone down the SD route. It’s certainly not the case that the memory stick memory is “better” in some ways than the SD cards yet the price is around three to four times! Yes, for what you’ll pay for a 1GB memory stick you’ll get 4GB worth of SD cards.

If you think that British ATMs are complicated beasties, you should look at some of the Spanish ones.

For one thing, they’re easily twice the size of the UK ones. That’s not because they’re ancient but because they have seemingly millions of different functions. Whereas in the UK, a bank ATM has basically three slots (card, money and receipt) and a UK building society machine adds two extra slots to deal with deposits, the Spanish variety has all kinds of slots and it takes a few seconds even to find where you’ve to stick your card in.

These days ATMs are quite sophisticated and generally work out what language you speak from the card you’ve inserted rather than asking you which language you’d like. However, that’s frequently a step too far when it’s an expat wielding the card as you may well not be using a card from your own country when you’re on holiday or just travelling.

It’s certainly something that the French machines don’t allow for. The machines usually ask you what language you want but revert to French if you use a French card regardless of which language you select!