Hot air

I got a link to a video discussion about the financial crises with the title "Bird and Fortune - Subprime crisis". It is a funny video but anyway shows perfectly the style how business often is done in these days:

• Acting irresponsible
• Playing at high risk
• Absence of any essential value

I want to focus on the last point - "Absence of any essential value" as I can see this as a general problem many times in all imaginable areas:

• In meetings
• In advertisements
• During chats
• Whole companies selling nothing but stuff
• Certain relationships
• News Articles
  
• ...

I have lately seen a lot of companies putting a lot of effort into marketing strategies and marketing activities. However, when it becomes concrete - for instance if you want to test some software or start with some concrete planning - then they stop their efforts, keep being very vague in their commitments or keep repeating their marketing slogans.

On the other hand there can be relationships where no content can be found and whenever you meet these people you think that there is no development and no value extracted from talking to these persons.

It is just talking hot air! In so many cases there is nothing behind, no real value to be added, no real information, no real productivity gain.

How to identify such environments and establishments?

• Try to identify the concrete purpose or benefit (how is productivity increased, can you get closer to your goals, can you be happier) - in many cases just ask (yourself).
• Ask for concrete next steps.
• Search for concrete information (dates, values, material things, steps to reproduce, causes and effects, empirical studies, ...) in the information provided.

Just try to focus on concrete information and with a little exercise you are able to skip all the buzzwords and marketing phrases.

Don't waste your time dealing with such companies or people that never (or only very slowly)

• get to the point and
  
• get into action.

Related posts: Crash course, Efficient meetings, Tell not more and not less, Who cares?, Guarantees and responsibility, People and Information.