Making an Impact

I've just signed up to six weeks of marketing the business school. This is a fantastic opportunity to reintegrate myself into a working environment, get some projects completed and have a bit of an impact on the school which has spent the last twelve months educating me.

The MBA Guide

I can't vouch for the quality of this stuff since I haven't read any of it, but a former SBS alumni has put together a set of studyguides for MBA students everywhere. He's still looking for a publisher but he has posted a full glossary online, which may well help when it comes to revising or making sense of lecture notes. Read all about this at The MBA Guide

Useful article on usability

Taking time off from telling us how we could save jobs and increase profits if only things were easier to use Jakob Nielsen has published a handy introduction to usability. Well worth a read for anyone wondering how their website could be made better.

Writing for the web

I feel like a new labour speech writer. I've been looking at some of the copy on the SBS website and thinking about how to optimise it for search engines. One of the tricks is to work the phrase you care about into the copy repeatedly, but hopefully in a way that means it doesn't jump out at anyone. Like the way when the chancellor gives a budget speech he says 'prudence' over and over again, or Blairs constant use of the word 'trust' which no-one really notices.

Anyway, this is all part of a one week assignment on behalf of the school, developing recommendations for their marketing strategy and building the SBS brand. Here's a question for any readers out there...

Who is the most interesting writer about business you've ever come across?

More on this one later.

Bank Holiday Weekend in Cornwall

This Monday is a bank holiday in England, which means that those people with jobs have a three day weekend to enjoy. The August bank holiday is something of an institution here, the whole country decides to go somewhere and do something - often that somewhere is Cornwall and that something is sit on the beach. Those who are not prepared to sweat for hours in traffic jams do not go to Cornwall.

However this weekend was the only one when both Maria and I and some friends of mine in Cornwall were free. So on Friday night we picked up our hire car and drove the first 150 miles to Exeter, then on Saturday morning we ate our full English breakfast at the lovely Grange Guesthouse, looked at the palm trees (ah, you didn't know we had palm trees in England did you??) and headed into Cornwall. We got lucky with the traffic I think, and made the next ninety miles in about three hours - arriving just in time for lunch.

Then we headed for the beach. Cornwall has lots of beaches, all lovely. We even bit the bullet and plunged into the sea, which was freezing, but bareable. The Sunday was yet more beach, a spot of shopping and of course more pub food, this time eaten in a lovely beachside bar. Then, because unlike the rest of the country students with projects don't get Mondays off we had to come back to Oxford and got a taste of what it's like when there's no traffic about, no traffic jams just miles of open road, lovely.

More Iraqi Commentary

Another Iraqi blogger, this time a woman from Baghdad. Riverbend is taking steps to conceal her identity and it's pretty easy to see why. For Iraqi women there is a chance that liberation is about to turn into a whole new repression.