Here are some pictures from my hockey game against Flesh Wound last Sunday:
(Click on pictures for larger plus Flickr annotations)
Me going in for the kill! (dark blue number #7):
Locker room picture:
This video clip is from a previous game, against the Rangers:
I see the term “cash generation” thrown around a lot, and today decided to look up and understand what it really means.
Basically, (all the cash flowing INTO the business) minus (all the cash flowing OUT of the business), in a given time period = cash generation.
Two other related terms are accounts receivable and accounts payable. Accounts receivable means money that will flow into the company but hasn’t yet (e.g. sometimes a company only sends a customer a bill once a month, instead one bill per order). In other words, this is money that customers owe the company.
Accounts payable means money that will flow out of the company, but hasn’t yet (e.g. the money your company owe your suppliers). So this is the opposite of accounts receivable. If you make iPhones, and got your internal components from China, then your Chinese supplier would send you a bill say once a month. So the point here is, you may place and order, and receive the goods, but you don’t pay immediately. But you will pay eventually.
And that concludes my first blog post on Business Terms 101 for Dummies series.
This is an interesting blog post. It reminds me of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the things thought by Stephen Covey is the “you bring your own weather to work” technique, where basically, you can come to work happy, or come to work pissed. You choose that. If you ran into some jerk in traffic on the way to work and got really mad about that, you’ll think about that all day at work and it’ll spoil your entire work day. If you just said “ah well!” and moved on, not spending any further thought into that and let nothing bad annoy you, then you proceed to have a good day at work. It’s basically a spiral effect where one bad thing will lead to another, and one good thing will lead to another.
The blog post talks about how hostage-negotiators have a 95% success rate, which really seems kind of hard to believe. A pushy car salesman couldn’t get such a success rate. But it’s because hostage-negotiators can actually make that human connection with the hostage taker, whereas most salesmen just want you to give up your money and then jump on the next prospect — sans the human connection part, since that part is kind of lengthy and requires effort. When you react negatively to a negative event that just happened to you, you become the hostage-taker. The hostage-taker is misunderstood, wants to be heard, and wants sympathy.
Anyway, this reminds me that you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to an event.
[SPOILER WARNING] – If you plan on watching the movie “Golden Door”, DO NOT PROCEED any further. The plot’s ending is outlined here.
Not too long ago, I implemented this new thing for myself where once a week, I would catch a movie on Wednesday night (or Thursday night) alone. Why? Well, I spend too much time at work, and when I’m not at work, I’m playing ice hockey, and that pretty much sums up my life right now. At any rate, it’s just a time period I’ve blocked out for myself to decompress, reflect, and maybe learn a thing or two from the movie.
Tonight, I watched Golden Door at the local independent theater. Basically, it’s a story of a dirt poor illiterate family in Sicily and the father (Salvatore Mancuso)’s dream of a better life, and his struggle to immigrate to the United States. Along the way, and stuck in the same boat and in the same class (the boat separated the “upper” class and the “lower” class), is this gorgeous, intelligent and elegant lady who obviously belongs to the upper class — but was stuck with the lower class. In the movie, it wasn’t clear how she fell out of place, but she was English and had no passport.
So anyway, during the journey, all the rich gentlemen from the upper class were actively wooing her, each of them boasting of their wealth, how he owns this big co. and that big co., and the promises of how “I can get you out of this [lower class] mess”. The lower class people had to sleep in really tight and filthy quarters on the boat. Living conditions for the poor was pretty bad on the boat.
The lady, Lucy Reed, did not take up any of their offers. However, since she had no passport, as a legal requirement, she needed to arrive in the US either married or engaged. As they neared the US harbor, she made her choice and asked Salvatore Mancuso (father of the poor family) if he would marry her. She did disclose to him that she needed a husband for entry to the country, and that their marriage was more out of convenience than love.
So why I am rambling about this? Well, because she didn’t take the easy way out. She could have married any of the wealthy gentlemen and be instantly elevated to “upper” class status, but she chose to stick it out with the lower class hardship and jump through all the immigration hoops designed for poor and illiterate people.
While it isn’t clear in the movie why she did that, it does remind me of an important lesson I have learned — that taking the easy way out is not always the answer. Sometimes, there will be a “deferred” price to pay, but a price, nonetheless.
In this movie (just to speculate), she probably valued her freedom and didn’t want to be tied down by a husband — be he rich or not. So she went with the simple and poor uncomplicated man. The rich gentlemen would probably have restricted her freedom more and be more strict with her, than the poor man. I’d imagine the rich gentleman insisting she be a stay-at-home wife, when she is more of the working-mom personality, which the latter would be aligned with the poor man’s strategy. The poor man could surely use all the bread-millers in the house he can get.
Here’s the trailer:
An interesting trend, see the 6 min video clip by Karl Fisch, edited by Scott McLeod.
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