At school I was never any good with understanding strategy. To me it just seemed like a waste of time and something for nerds to do.

And it was, of course (not a waste of time but something for nerds to do). Now I know it to be true because let’s face it: to a large degree nerds really DO rule the world. They are the ones who sort out everything technological. Without them, quite simply, civilization would revert back to the days of black and white television. We’d be lucky to have any computers at all, let alone half-way competent Antivirus Software. Imagine what would have happened if Bill Gates had been born with…say…Hulk Hogan’s brain? It doesn’t bear thinking about!

The fact is, strategy is crucial to everything, including business. When strategy is employed correctly, taking all variables in to account, each business works to a fuller potential and the world runs more smoothly.

The following post is all about business strategy and taking in to account the crucial importance of these variables: http://www.eniginscampaign.com/2010/07/27/change-your-view-on-strategy/#more-292

It would be impossible to focus on all these points, so I have chosen just one to concentrate on. This, my strategically minded (or challenged) friend, is people issues.

Indeed, if you forget the people in a business and just focus on the business then pretty soon you have a hollow shell with rotten business guts. And who wants that? No, in order to run a successful business and employ a corker of a strategy you need to listen to the people. Yes, human emotions can be messy and Yes, they can get in the way of profit, but don’t take them in to account and more fool you.

Be sure to check the above post out, there is much more besides this, such as how you can always work out a new way to do something, even if it hasn’t been done before.

For a long time I used to mock people who had iphone’s and wrote blogs. I mean, I write blogs so I can hardly talk, but what I mean is this: I used to mock people who updated their Facebook status fifteen times a day and who used blogs to tell the world about all the trivial things they had done. And yes, I do still mock them, but because of what happened yesterday I do now have some sympathy for those using iphone’s, mainly because of the whole app thing.

This is why: yesterday my friend Marty started showing me some interesting things that his iphone could do. To begin with I was skeptical, but after a few minutes I was converted! His phone was doing all kinds of amazing and very useful things, and one of those things was calculating his carbon footprint. All he had to do was enter some information, and it would update it daily, automatically, depending on what he was up to. It would even make handy suggestions about how he could go a different route and save more petrol!

This post is about similar things.

And indeed, as the article suggests, the future is already here, and while a lot of the new-fangled technology may just be fashionable, there is a lot that is genuinely useful that we should be taking advantage of. Does that mean I will be getting an iphone in the near future? Who knows, stranger things have happened–

I am a girly girl. I like shoes. I like the idea of Cellulite treatment if I get too fat. I like shopping. I like buying rubbish magazines which go in to detail (if you can call it that) about celebrities and the scandal they get in to. I can’t help it, it’s just in me.

One thing I don’t get is HD TV. I just don’t see what’s wrong with regular TV. The worst thing is that all of us, whether we want it or not, will soon be forced to buy an HD TV! This is according to my boyfriend who knows about these things. I know nothing about it, as if you hadn’t guessed…

That’s why I love my high heels. High heels will never change, not ever. In a hundred years (if our species makes it that far), I feel confident in saying that they will still be exactly the same. You won’t be forced in to buying a new kind of high heels, either. High heels are something I can depend on whatever happens in the world. High heels would be the first thing I would rescue in the event of a fire, and as such I have a special plan worked out (all of them bagged up and ready to go; bagged up in flame retardant material, that is) just in case that should happen (which I almost wish it might, because then I might get rescued by a hunky fireman, which would be very nice indeed).

]]> http://butterflytales.co.uk/2010/05/27/faith-in-heels/feed/ http://butterflytales.co.uk/2010/05/11/gordon-youre-it/ http://butterflytales.co.uk/2010/05/11/gordon-youre-it/#comments Tue, 11 May 2010 09:45:02 +0000 admin http://butterflytales.co.uk/?p=2174

As a child I loved watching films rated 18. Horror films mainly, but anything which I wasn’t supposed to be watching was almost as good, even if it wasn’t scary at all. One of the films I loved was It. The film about the evil killer clown with bright red hair. Being the kind of child who was scared of clowns and also sort of intrigued by them (actually I was more scared of people like Chris Evans who had red hair and were real), it had everything I needed.

Now, many years later, there’s a new It in town and his name is Gordon Brown.

Or there was, until he resigned yesturday…

Seriously, look at the front cover of that DVD (It, not the yet to be made The Making of Gordon Brown as a Terrible Prime Minister; although if that film did exist then I’m sure people would rent it, probably people who have run out of torture devices and are after something really horrific I expect) and you’ll see precisely what I mean. The smiles match perfectly.

Sadly, it seems that the killer clown could have done a little better as Prime Minister. Now we’re left with a soiled country, again, and isn’t that such a big surprise?

Want to read the thoughts of someone else who has this on their mind? Look no further than the following link.

Enigin are diverse, to say the least. They have blogs on digital stuff, new technology stuff, and current affairs too. The best thing? You can learn about how to save up to 40% of your energy while also learning about how people in high places joyfully ruin our country.

Catching grass-hoppers as a young girl used to be my favourite thing to do in the whole entire world. Allow me to elaborate; it wasn’t cruel, and no harm (psychological, if that’s possible, or otherwise) was done. It was more cradling that catching. I didn’t want to cause the little fellas and fella-rets distress. I merely wanted to feel them in my hands. The strange sensation of a tiny life bopping around, a miniature coiled spring.

I used to be good at it. How good? Very. On average I’d catch five or six every time my brother and I went to the meadow by my house. I was always sad when the weather grew dim and the grasshoppers disappeared to wherever it was they went. As soon as I heard their clicking again, sounding out across the whole meadow at the start of the summer, I went straight out there.

Fast forward fifteen years and I don’t often get the chance to catch grasshoppers. Maybe that’s inaccurate. I don’t make the chance. So last week I did just that. I set out to catch some, when I would otherwise have been out buying shoes (or doing something else dull like getting a Caravan insurance quote ).

It went badly. Something had changed. Everything was the same (apart from I was twice as big and twice as obvious to grasshoppers) but I just couldn’t catch any. It took me an hour to catch one, but when I did, excitement danced within me, I’m telling you!

]]> http://butterflytales.co.uk/2010/04/14/nice-thoughts/feed/ http://butterflytales.co.uk/2010/04/07/believers/ http://butterflytales.co.uk/2010/04/07/believers/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:55:59 +0000 admin http://butterflytales.co.uk/?p=2000

We all know the benefits of eating lots of healthy fruit and veg, don’t we? We know that doing so, combined with a healthy diet and a decent amount of exercise, is the key to living for longer and making the whole living life thing that much more pleasant. But do we expect too much from fruit and veg? Hit the link to go to the BBC website and see about the latest revelation where fruit and veg is concerned: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8605270.stm

Personally, I wasn’t surprised in the least to hear that eating five-a-day actually does little for curbing western cancer rates. That’s not to say that I didn’t want it to be true, just that the realist in me found himself slightly bemused: because, come on, when you break it down it is only fruit. And cancer is a very powerful thing. Surely expecting something as simple as eating fruit to outright cure such a thing is slightly naïve, isn’t it? It’s the same as saying that Female hair loss can be cured if we stop looking at females'hair and scaring it off.

Then again, hope is extremely important, and there is nothing wrong with many thousands of people thinking that something like this could possibly be true. In fact, it can only have a positive effect. The more people get used to eating healthily, the less they are likely to be tempted by man-made things such as cigarettes and alcohol. And in a world where we need to get in shape fast, with obesity growing at a terrifying rate, I can only see good coming from us clinging to these beliefs, even if the beliefs themselves are not entirely solid.

The one thing that breaks up relationships and marriages, business partnerships and anything which involves one person needing to communicate with another via speech, isn’t affairs, it’s the moment one person says to the other “so–what are you thinking right now?” This almost always succeeds a sweet, superior moment. A moment that, looking back and trying to make sense of the break-up, appears to be the happiest moment of the relationship. Because of this sweet moment, the inevitable answer causes a state of horribleness so nasty that the world comes crashing down at once: the relationship doesn’t stand a chance.

If only they taught the art of lying at school from a young age. I don’t mean sinister lies, or those unsettling lies that are never good, I mean damage-limitation lies. Lies which enable a relationship to go on and on.

Take Mike for example. Mike loves Kate, but Kate can be very, very annoying. At the age of 32 she also has braces. Kate doesn’t know this, but Mike had a run in with a girl with braces when he lost his virginity. Because of that girl, Mike also lost some blood.

Now, if, when Kate had asked “Thow what are thoo thinking?” Mike had said, “How beautiful you are, and how much I love you”, Mike and Kate would have gone on to have three children, and a wonderful life together. But Mike didn’t say that. Mike said, “How much I can’t stand your damn braces!” This made Kate very upset. So upset that Kate’s father beat the crap out of Mike, and Mike ended up giving up his dream of becoming a professional photographer, and went back to work for Corporate events london.

The point is be careful! You don’t want to end up like Mike!

“I love a bit of fashion, me”: you know that anyone who says that probably loves a bit of fashion a bit too much. And these alleged (dangerous to know) fashion lovers are everywhere. Only the farthest reaches of the Canadian Rockies and such other remote regions are free of this human disease. But there is no doubt in my mind that in 2,000 years Grizzly bears will be spotted wearing Kappa hoodies–

The orange beach towel is a good example of a modern day eye-saw which is permitted. Why is it permitted? Easy to answer: cheap and brightly coloured beach towels are available for cheap and by the hundred. Same goes for everything in this western world that is mass produced. As mass production has enabled a large variety of products at an affordable price, we’ve all jumped on the bandwagon and forgotten that just because something is cheap doesn’t mean we have to buy it–

Eye-sores come in many forms, of course: you have the eye-sores which are painful to look at, and you have the eye-sores which are cheap supermarket goods; food that looks like it was recently bequeathed from the mouth of hell itself, but is cheap, and therefore a good idea to buy.

It’s a problem we will probably always be lumbered with: our eyes bigger than our bellies, the part of our brains which says “hang on a minute, this looks rubbish, do you really want to buy this crap?” is blocked from view. And what happens is that we end up looking like a bunch of clowns who’ll buy anything, any time.

Enigin are doing their best to help supermarkets change their approach to the fridge freezer. How can they do that? Click the link and you’ll see in detail.

This Enigin company, you see, specialise in the field of making fridges and freezers and chill-cabinets more efficient; both for the consumer and on a mass scale like in supermarkets. And this is a fantastic thing for everyone involved. It means that in the future, costs may well come down. For now, the demand for frozen and chilled goods is so great that some energy will just have to be wasted, but it’s nice to know that the time is fast approaching when we’ll really be able to do something positive about it. Enigin will surely be there, because that’s what the company do. For more information, see any number of their web-sites which explain theur plan of attack in more detail.