Enjoyed my uncle's 60th birthday party on the weekend!

My uncle Richard (Dick) Parker turned 60 last week, and his kids (in cahoots with his wife) organised a fantastic surprise party for him. What a great way to honour a special guy!

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Australian Media Group - MYOB Premier solutions in a Mac environment

For those of you who use Macs in your business environment, you may be interested in our latest project which involved getting MYOB Premier Accounting to run quickly and reliably in an environment which, for the past eleven years, has operated exclusively on Macs.

Before Aktiv Tactics got involved in designing a solution, Australian Media Group had managed to run MYOB Premier in a peer-to-peer style configuration via Windows Vista running on Parallels over the top of the Mac OS X. However, it was unstable at best and, as with most LAN-based MYOB Premier setups, was tediously slow.

MYOB do also sell a product called MYOB Premier Enterprise, but from what I can tell it's more about branding and charging you for their support than about any substantial changes to functionality. What they do for Enterprise, we've done for the standard Premier - we run it in Terminal Services.

Why Terminal Services? There's two main reasons (and the biggest factor applies to PC-based networks as much as to Mac networks).

1. Speed! Because Terminal Services executes the user applications on the server, data is not transferred across a network connection. This is the largest single reason why we run this way. The performance improvement is radical. Many companies have MYOB Premier data files approaching 100MB in size (or even more!), and this data is not being requested a record at a time as a client-server database would - instead, the data is being interrogated at the client side, meaning that all of it needs to be pulled across the network. This makes it a horribly slow beast! However, when it's installed in a Terminal Services environment, the performance improvement is dramatic and the only data transfer across the network is screen refreshes, audio and keyboard/mouse inputs. This will work brilliantly even from outside your office - for example, if you have another interstate office, are travelling overseas, or just want to work from home.

2. Stability. For all those who currently run MYOB Premier on Windows/Parallels over Mac OS X this is another big one. Unfortunately Parallels crashes far too often, and when you're using a multi-user accounting system that's not fun! It creates huge frustration, wasted time, but more seriously, potential data integrity issues. Once you start running Premier in Terminal Services, it's running on a native (and very stable) Windows platform. The Remote Desktop Connection client software is available for both Mac and Windows users, so you can still happily run your Mac computers and just jump into Terminal Services for your MYOB software. (You also have the option, if you wish, to run other Windows applications such as Outlook, Word, Excel, and so on which are generally far more powerful and full-featured than their Mac equivalents.)

In AMG's situation, we've used a HP server with Quad processors, RAID-1 (Mirroring) hot swappable hard drives, redundant power supplies, etc... which we picked up for an absolute steal, and it ensures high availability for their applications. With four users on Premier, it's only utilising a fraction of its capacity.

If you go down this path, it's important to watch out for a couple of 'gotchas' along the way, e.g. licensing requirements under Terminal Services mean that you can't use Microsoft Office products which require activation, you MUST purchase an Open/Volume License product. (And you may think you're just going to run MYOB Premier on Terminal Services - however, if you want to use the MYOB OfficeLink to generate reports and correspondence, then you'll also need Office on the Terminal Server.)

All in all, this has turned out to be an elegant solution which offers excellent performance, great flexibility, and integrates well with the client's existing Mac environment.

How the public service gets away with gross negligence and incompetence

If ever you wanted to learn a few lessons to avoid failure in your business, I would strongly recommend you study the public service - they're a great example of what NOT to do! (Although my views are largely formed from my experiences with Victorian and Federal Government bodies, I suspect that there's a certain degree of this in the State and Federal Governments throughout Australia, and overseas as well.)

What distinctive traits do these Government instrumentalities exhibit? And how are they the polar opposite to common sense, diligent endeavour, creativity, and performance?

If you take a look at the whole gamut of departments that are supposed to be 'serving' their 'clients' - DHS (Department of Human Services), Centrelink, Child Support Agency, Department of Education, and so on - the following characteristics are common themes:

Public servants:-

• defy common-sense and logic to follow a frequently misinterpreted and inappropriate textbook guideline
• operate reactively rather than proactively, to cover their butt and avoid additional work once a problem rears its head, rather than to anticipate challenges and create the best possible chance of a fantastic outcome for all concerned
• completely disregard the client's time, costs, or level of knowledge about procedures and subject matter, to blindly pass all responsibility back to said client and thereby avoid any personal responsibility
• take the bureaucratic path whenever possible (and often when you didn't believe it was possible) in order to avoid personal responsibility for any decisions
• 'blame' everybody else (i.e. "I have no control over that, it's up to [somebody else]")

My most recent experience of this has been at Koonung Secondary College who, under the auspices of the Department of Education - Eastern Metropolitan Region, is in the death throes of another sorry tale of culpable negligence and gross mismanagement even as we speak.

Having accepted my son's enrolment at the start of this year to commence Year 7, any service-oriented, success-focussed business person would have evaluated his needs and taken proactive steps to ensure his integration into the school was positive and productive. Given my son's known behavioural difficulties, this would no doubt have entailed consulting behavioural specialists, developing a strategic plan, ensuring that aides were available as necessary, identifying shortfalls in resourcing, and opening up strong communication channels with all 'stakeholders' (that includes the parents).

Of course, I could possibly have pre-empted today's predicament late last year when Marilyn McKeown at Dept. of Ed - Eastern Metropolitan Region, and the school itself, insisted that, based on their protocols and procedures, my son would not be eligible for anywhere near the assistance he had received during Grade 6. At this time, I flagged with Marilyn McKeown that his needs had not suddenly evaporated and, in fact, moving school to commence secondary education would be disruptive and almost certainly lead to greater pressures and challenges on my son. It would be fair to say that the school and the Department of Education were unambiguously, emphatically, repeatedly warned that difficulties were virtually guaranteed and that proactive strategies and resourcing were not only desirable, but essential.

Given that all these issues had been identified last year, you would expect, would you not, that any responsible, capable, effective team would be on the ball and ready with options right from the very outset. Identifying risks, assessing their severity, coming up with suitable risk mitigation options. Or, if unable to provide the level of service required, politely acknowledge their lack of ability/resources, and decline to take an enrolment they could not service.

Well, today I heard from my son's mother that the school is approaching a situation of potentially expelling my son. So far, I've received ZERO communications from them. Not even one phone call or email. Never a request for a meeting. And they're already 'suggesting' (to my ex-wife) that we look at alternate schools.

Of course, this example is but one amongst millions experienced every day by Australians around the country. As anybody who has ever made application to Centrelink for any payment can tell you, dealing with the bureaucracy there will make living on the streets under a bridge seem exotic.

And while there are many lessons to be learned from these illustrations about what NOT to do in business, indeed in any arena of life, one question to which I still haven't found an answers is:

How do they get away with it???

Just for a bit of fun...

I was trying to find some software on eBay this morning and came across some rather unusual 'Terms & Conditions' which I thought were worth sharing - hope you enjoy!

I will resist the urge to put some strict, angry, meaningless terms and conditions in fine print here. Bleating endlessly on about nothing worthwhile except how you must read my thousand word terms, sign a legally binding agreement witnessed in triplicate agreeing that, if you don't pay within 8 seconds I will re-list the item, leave you negative feedback, launch legal action in 37 countries to have you executed (or deported to New Zealand). Would that it be over yet, but no - then requiring you pass an exam on the terms followed by a complicated series of life & death trials that will seem never ending, but may ultimately, if I am completely satisfied (and having a particularly nice afternoon) involve you getting this item at some stage in the
distant future. Just like all other eBay sellers.

I however will simply resort to an old gypsy curse. Buy this, pay me and leave me some groovy feedback OR... May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits!

- Fred's Discount Crud

What would you do if your child had autism?

When I launched Aktiv Tactics, I knew that my personal preference was to work with organisations that are really making a difference in people's lives. However, I expected that I'd have to spend much of my time working with profit-hungry corporates in order to "pay the bills", and set aside just a small portion of our resource and time to assist the more altruistic organisations.

Somehow (I'm inclined to ascribe it to divine providence) I'm actually finding that many opportunities are arising to assist organisations which see their role as being far more than purely commercial profit.

One such client that I've just started working with is Quickstepz Paediatric Therapy, an inspiring small autism therapy clinic founded by Kate Boland in St. Leonards, NSW, to make a real difference in the lives of autistic children and their families. Kate is an accredited Occupational Therapist who has also pursued training in the Greenspan Floortime therapy model. Kate's therapy services offer real hope for families who have struggled with the challenges associated with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Children with autism exhibit a number of socialisation difficulties, due to their impaired ability to understand normal interactive cues and engage with their peers in an appropriate manner. Quickstepz Paediatric Therapy works with children and their families in an individualised manner to identify the developmental delays a particular child is experiencing and then proactively focus on therapies which will enhance their abilities in each of those areas.

My role, as a consultant to Quickstepz, is to improve their visibility in the community and ensure that families who have a child diagnosed with autism will become aware of the services available through Quickstepz. Working to a tight budget, we're commencing with a range of web site optimisations and improved internet marketing, but are also exploring opportunities for media coverage of the Floortime techniques, as this is a new initiative in Australia.

For more information about Quickstepz, Autism Therapy, or the ways in which I can assist your organisation to be more effective in impacting the lives of other people, please email me or phone 1300 85 70 75.

Bible College of Victoria looking to refresh marketing strategies

The Bible College of Victoria is one of the 'old-timers' amongst Melbourne's theological landscape. Originally formed as the Melbourne Bible Institute, they have a well established campus and curriculum taking full-time and part-time student enrolments at their Lilydale campus in Outer Eastern Melbourne.

With a relatively new principal (Mike Raiter), a new Administration and Marketing Manager (Patricia Wong), and the recent departure of their publicity officer leaving a vacancy for a review and fresh outlook on marketing, I've been invited to assist BCV in recommending strategy and undertaking many of the routine publicity and marketing tasks that are required.

I'm excited about the opportunity to work with BCV as this is a very rare opportunity to work in an environment whose primary objective is not financial but rather the spiritual welfare of Australia and, indeed, the world. None of my other clients could make that claim! Although responsible stewardship of resources demands that we measure financial performance as a key indicator of our success, I relish the challenge of communicating to potential students and donors about the powerful impact that BCV's theological training has for students serving in the real world.

Bible Colleges generally struggle against society's subliminal programming that says "theology is irrelevant" and so there is the frequent temptation to try to skew courses towards alot of the "how", often at the expense of the "why" - in other words, teaching people "how" to interact with those in need, "how" to counsel them, "how" to "do ministry". The opportunity in this marketing assignment is for us to communicate far more powerfully how a solid "why" base (in other words, a solid theological understanding of the Bible and its principles) provides a far more versatile foundation which can better adapt to any circumstance that arises.

I have no doubt that the lessons learned from this assignment will also give me some further powerful insights into human behaviours and will be an invaluable experience.

Is the Rudd Government going to create or kill opportunities?

With a recently installed Labor Government now holding the political reins in Australia, what can we expect for the future of this country? And how will it affect our business prospects, and ultimately our personal hip pockets?

I could, of course, write several entire books on the possible ramifications, touching on compliance issues, employment (from employer and employee perspectives), fiscal policy, innovation, market psychology, and more, but for the purposes of this forum I'll just touch succinctly on a couple of ideas which stand out for me.

Firstly, I believe that to a large extent we create our own success. Within the Australian market place, we're all playing by essentially the same rules and within the same environment, so our success can come not so much because the environment is perfect, but because we choose to capitalise most effectively on that environment, outperforming our competitors and winning the loyalty of our customers. So philosophically I am inclined to argue that a new Government doesn't really alter my or your prospects of success. We create our own opportunities through recognising our competitive advantage in a relative sense, rather than through any absolute notion of opportunity.

However, it is certainly true that new challenges (and, some would say, opportunities) will present as the new Government alters the political and commercial landscape. It is also true that we are competing not only against local Australian businesses, but also against international competitors - many of whom may have less regulatory controls, greater flexibility in employing, and a more innovative and competitive business environment.

From a business perspective, it is easy for me to lambast the Labor policies on Industrial Relations and employment, and I'm sure most would struggle to argue with my position when viewed purely from a commercial standpoint. However, I'm not going to take aim today at the policies. Instead, I think the bigger threat is the attitude underlying it.

Anybody who knows me knows that I'm a strong proponent of personal responsibility. I believe that first and foremost we are responsible for ourselves, for taking actions to achieve the best possible outcomes in our lives (and, by extension, in our businesses). I'm also acutely aware that there are many disadvantaged people around the world and even here in Australia, for whom there are many barriers and legitimate blocks to their success. I believe it is incumbent on society to assist those in need but (this is where it gets tricky) I don't believe the fact that people need assistance relieves them of their own personal responsibility and vindicates them blaming others for their position.

Unfortunately, I believe Australia (and particularly the unions in conjunction with Labor) is acquiring an attitude that somehow "the world owes me". Although it is true that society should be protecting the weak and assisting the needy, I don't believe it benefits anybody for those people to harbour feelings of being hard done by. Instead, we should be providing every encouragement for people to personally believe in their ability to rise above their current circumstance and, through hard work, dedication and persistence, improve their own life and those of their families and communities.

I've known since before the election, of Labor's viewpoint on IR matters and am concerned that their philosophy is just going to create more dissatisfied employees (or unemployees as the case may be) whilst simultaneously reducing job opportunities. But yesterday's "Sorry Day", in my respectful opinion, further illustrates this philosophy. (And I won't here enter into a discussion about whether or not there was a "Stolen Generation" - that's a huge can of worms - rather, I'll just focus on attitudes rather than facts.)

Noel Pearson, a respected Aboriginal leader, wrote a well reasoned article in The Australian on February 12th, in which he states:

One of my misgivings about the apology has been my belief that nothing good will come from viewing ourselves, and making our case on the basis of our status, as victims.

Only one day after the apology, when the Rudd Government should expect the whole country to feel a huge burden off their shoulders, the blame game has been further escalated to now reporting "Brits Refuse To Say Sorry". Was it not an apology from Australia's Government that was sought and obtained? Why are some people now trying to find another axe to grind?

I am in complete agreement with Noel Pearson that it is completely unhelpful for the Aboriginal community to view themselves as "victims". And no amount of apologising will help their very real plight in the present day until that victim attitude can be overcome by a new attitude of optimism and can-do-ism.

The greatest damage the Rudd Government is doing to the nation of Australia is fostering the notion that "somebody else owes me/us". The greatest opportunity for you and me is in refusing to be caught up in that, and instead choosing to create our own opportunities. And the greatest act of kindness we can do for our less advantaged neighbours, is to offer assistance that is not a handout but rather inspires the individuals and communities to take responsibility for themselves.