Why do we go to school? Or university? What is all about? Does anyone remember? Is it just about getting a piece of paper? Is it just about becoming an authority on a subject? Or is there more to it? Isn’t it also about developing leadership abilities? And isn’t it also about tapping into your creative energy? And what about learning how to manage processes? And what about learning to listen and absorb knowledge? And what about the opportunity to network, meet people and build relationships?

I read an article in a business journal a while back that was very intriguing. This short and well-written piece did make me a little nervous though. It hinted at the end of the academic system, as we know it. University professors are earning commissions for identifying talent. Perhaps I misunderstood this but it sounds like students are being encouraged to launch start-ups long before they graduate. Young people are dropping out of top universities at faster and faster rates to get into the IT start-up phenomena that the Internet has helped spark off. My question is: is it healthy? And when does this end? Is a boy in a school, say, going to drop out at age 14 to start a company? And what next? Is a teenager going to become a billionaire? Is this clever?

Yes, I have a lot of questions on my mind this spring day. Not only are people experiencing extreme pressure and stress at younger and younger ages but soon there is going to be pressure to drop out of university. I mean, if everyone else is doing it then what is wrong with you hanging around campus when there is a revolution going on out there. Furthermore, you continually hear the term “exit strategy” which appears to go hand-in-hand with the majority of these new start-ups. What exactly is an “exit strategy”? Let’s see. 10 years ago we never had so many business oriented publications. We never had students dropping out of universities to launch start-ups. And we never heard of the term “exit strategy”. Do you know that it is actually a military term that first surfaced in the Vietnam war – do the job and get out. Yes, guerrilla tactics have come to business.

If everyone has an exit strategy, and I mean everyone, then who will actually do any work? I mean, who will be left to do the work if everyone exits? Yes, war has exit strategies because then you take no prisoners. Is this what business has become? A war? Who is the enemy in this new war? And who are the champions? I think I am getting carried away, but I’m sure you get the point though. The enemy is quantity again. And quality, our poor understated hero, is really getting pushed aside.

http://coolfidence.com/does-an-education-slow-you-down-solution-20075

With services like Skype, GoToMeeting, WebEx, Google Hangouts and Join.Me, we’re almost at the level of a Star Wars Jedi High Council meeting, where our holograms sit in a room together with actual people.

Gone are the days of holding a phone receiver to multiple ears to hear what the other person is saying. On smartphones, we’re getting patched into conference calls to all four corners of the planet while standing in line at grocery stores (unless you order food online or via UberEATS).

Video conference calls are used to save time, but we still need to be prepared to ensure that time is saved efficiently.

http://coolfidence.com/12-tips-to-avoid-looking-like-a-rookie-on-a-video-conference-call-solution-20074

Not so many years ago farming was about producing the best harvest. These days it is more about producing the most harvest. What has happened to the quality there used to be in the world. Everything is about quantity these days. Everything is about numbers. It is all about the bottom line. What about the purpose of what we do? What has happened to the quality of life? Is it really all about money? I don’t really have the answer but I do have more and more evidence these days that money is the only thing on people’s agendas.

http://coolfidence.com/quality-vs-quantity-solution-20073

Staring at a screen conditions us to not listen properly and aids in forgetting details due to lack of concentration.

It also seems to add to shorter attention spans. How many more full-length books got read before smartphones started delivering us bite-size articles, just long enough to read between meetings?

There are studies that propose that people who make more eye contact derive benefits such as becoming more compassionate and less selfish.

It also makes us look more trustworthy and more engaged.

Who do you hire, someone who engages you eye to eye, or the person shiftily staring at their shoes or glancing at their phone on the boardroom table?

If someone ignores you for their phone, you know they’re not mentally engaged and it can damage trust. Put yourself in the other seat: How would you feel if someone kept missing parts of your conversation because their phone was far more fascinating?

Eye contact enables us to gauge other people’s emotions, vulnerability and feelings while they’re in front of you. Which is essential for developing emotional intelligence.

http://coolfidence.com/are-you-in-a-staring-contest-with-your-smartphone-solution-20072

Do any of you remember the movie Jerry Maguire? Now this was a show! Talk about pulling it all together. This was an amazingly spiritual journey. Watch it again. The main characters are Jerry Maguire played by Tom Cruise and Rod Tidwell played by Cuba Gooding Jr. An amazing transference takes place as we witness two heroes who go on a journey (a transformation, or “character arc”), one learning how to love a woman, and the other learning how to love the work he does. By the end of the film Jerry accepts his responsibilities as a man, and as a husband, and Rod comes to terms with his purpose – he learns to work, in this case play football, from the heart, not from the head.

Jerry undergoes a struggle right at the start of Cameron Crowe’s masterpiece of a screenplay where he realizes that work is the transference of love made visible. You see, Jerry loves what he does, sports management, that is, but he does not like the fact that everything is becoming about money. He cannot reconcile trading quality for quantity. He can’t sleep one night and he gets up and says, “I had lost the ability to bullshit.” He sits by his laptop and writes his turning-point memo – the mission statement his company needed: Less customers, less profits, better relationships. He got fired that week. Jerry was right. This is the problem in the world today.

Rod Tidwell is a man who understands the importance of personal relationships. He loved his wife, brother, and family more than anything in this world. Hence, he was looking for the personal touch in his career – he was a people’s person. After being fired from his “sports factory” Jerry becomes a sports agent with one client and the pay-off line was “In Rod we Trust.” Leaving the movie aside for now, let us look at what has happened here. Two people struggle to find balance in their lives. They are deeply spiritual but they each have only half the equation. Life is about relationships, in the home and in the workplace.

http://coolfidence.com/no-we-dont-want-your-business-solution-20071

WhatsApp have more than a billion worldwide users, but most of them aren’t in America. Why is that?

With the social media explosion, everyone’s become a communication machine, even if it happens to be with auto-responding bots on Twitter. But not everyone wants to post everything to everyone, sometimes you’ve got to keep it discrete.

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world, used by an estimated 55.6 percent of the world’s countries. Over 70 million users in India alone. Brazil, Mexico, Russia and Africa are also massive WhatsApp adopters. (No, Africa isn’t a country.) So why isn’t the US jumping onto a winning instant messaging app?

It provides a lot more than just traditional text messaging, such as seamless photo and video sharing, voice recordings, internet calls and more. WhatsApp messages get sent via the Internet, so they’re basically free over Wi-Fi and doesn’t deplete your data limit. Whereas text messages get sent over the telephone network, who aren’t afraid to charge.

So why the disconnect?

The biggest reason seems to be a great diversity of competitive mobile operating platforms, offering bundled flat-rate packages on SMS and MMS at a much lower cost than countries outside of the US. In the US, MMS messages are still part of the unlimited text messages included with your plan. WhatsApp’s cost effectiveness perhaps doesn’t provide enough reason for Americans to switch.

In other countries with less resources and higher data costs, the population have to get creative to save money. The rest of the world seem to have been drawn to WhatsApp as a cost efficient and user-friendly workaround. This also includes other options such as Skype, Telegram, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, iMessage and Kik.

The day Whatsapp started offering phone calls was a major milestone in communication for many. Before this it was overly expensive to call internationally. You sometimes had to wait until you flew home to find out whether your newborn was a boy or girl. Now we have almost free group calls linking all corners of the planet.

And why not, we should all be able to communicate freely. Or at least at an affordable cost. (Let’s not get started on local data pricing.)

http://coolfidence.com/whatsapp-with-america-solution-20070

Is competition a good thing? We are all scripted to believe it is. People often say things like, “We welcome competition.” Is competition a natural thing? Is it a product of society or is it something inherent in all of us. Animals don’t compete. They try to survive – there is a big difference. Animals certainly don’t try and better each other in the process. The leopards, for example, are climbing trees, not the corporate ladder. It’s not about eating more, or catching the antelope faster than the next guy. It’s about eating – that’s it. I think. So, do we need to beat our competitors? Surely we should strive to beat ourselves, besides, why climb the corporate ladder when you can take the escalator?

http://coolfidence.com/compete-with-yourself-solution-20069

A business represents a group of people – a team. And this is probably where the cracks start appearing. A team should try challenging itself to continually improve on the day before, the week before or the year before. And we need teams. “We” compete better than “I”. There is enough competition in the marketplace – there is no need to bring it into your corporation.

I guess we can debate whether competition is a natural principle for hours? Or whether it is something that is a result of our surroundings and the society we have been conditioned by. The world is in an anxious state (just watch the news on any given day). There are too many obsolete and incomplete paradigms in the world. Competition is one of them. We live in a world where we are told that competition is good for us. And it is a powerful, deeply entrenched principle that is old fashioned. It is a not paradigm of mutual benefit, but rather of win/lose. Win/lose is incomplete. All teams need to win. Take a soccer match, for example. Can both teams win? How can this be so? Dig deep into your imaginations here. If the principle was “stretch” and not “competition” then both teams could win. The game could always be a draw and each team would try to do better than they did before and they would stretch themselves and try to realize their full potential. And in the match itself you would exercise, bond, socialize and have fun. In short: we could get 2 teams to play each other and reap all the benefits of social interaction and yet at the same time we could have everyone be winners.

Ticks causing fever were documented as far back as ancient Egyptian times; they’re also famous for spreading Lyme disease. Australia even has something called a Paralysis Tick, which you don’t often hear mentioned in their tourism brochures. But there’s a new tick in town that’s a lot more useful to us… the blue ticks on a WhatsApp message, indicating that we’ve officially communicated with someone.

You can send images, video clips, audio files and make calls, and the company prides itself on being securely encrypted, for free. All with an interface that makes it easy for your technophobe aunt to use, partly why it’s achieved so much success over the last decade.

Other messaging options like Viber, Telegram and WeChat are all solid, but can’t beat the current messaging heavyweight champion. With 30 billion WhatsApps sent daily, it’s the most popular messaging application on the planet.

What is the protocol with WhatsApp and instant messaging? Does it have a place in business, or is it just for sexting couples or teen gossip? Is it too intrusive to be used on a professional level?

Using Direct Messages on Twitter, Facebook mails or even asking someone to get hold of you via your Instagram comments could once be seen as an encroachment on privacy, but are now all fair game to aid communication. Like it or not, shouldn’t we be able to use all the new communication tools at our disposal?

When cellphones first came out, they were nice to have, and then became an invasion of privacy. Getting hold of someone immediately suddenly became the most important thing. Was instant connection just as important when you could only get hold of people on a landline? Back then you had to plan ahead for proper correspondence.

Even further back, Pheidippides is said to have run from Marathon to Athens (250km) to deliver news of a military victory against the Persians. If only he’d had WiFi.

http://coolfidence.com/instant-messaging-whatsapp-with-that-solution-20068

A successful company continues to live its purpose by a set of values that are rock solid. These values make up the “how” part in the three questions. How defines the behaviour and attitude of a company’s people. There is no universal accepted set of correct core values. You discover “how” by looking within. You cannot fake values. You either have them or you don’t. Values are not open to change – they must stand the test of time.

A company typically will try to articulate about five things that it holds sacred. At Internet Solutions (IS), for example, we believe in professionalism, customer service, integrity, empowerment and fun as our core values. We strive always to be professional, both internally and externally. We endeavour to be customer focused, always acting with integrity. We attempt to empower our staff by listening and by sharing. And we try to work hard and play hard. And we always stand firm in our beliefs, never compromising what we represent, and never violating our integrity. We are very passionate about our company and what it stands for. Our intense belief in our value system and our purpose is what drives this passion.

Like many companies today, the organization I am describing here is largely a people business. It is about people sharing ideas with people, it is about people proposing solutions to people, and it is about people working together. It is about relationships. We practice professional behaviour at all times, both internally with staff, and externally with customers. And we always strive for win-win relationships.

I have learnt who works for whom in our organization. Whenever someone joins the company we have to work harder and listen more. I want all of the people who come on board to win. If they win, I win. It is that simple. And for them to win they need to be empowered. Their ideas need to be heard. And they need to make a difference. My job is to make sure that they can make a huge difference.

http://coolfidence.com/please-read-the-house-rules-before-entering-solution-20067

It’s not easy for advertisers nowadays. Gone is the Golden Age of advertising, when there was a monopoly on consumer attention. There’s only so much prime time space available on TV, billboards and in major newspapers. This is also incredibly expensive to iterate enough times to get noticed. Traditional advertising platforms are more likely to be seen as (expensive) wallpaper. A new style of marketing is required to create engagement, and in the digital realm, there’s plenty of room for this.

http://coolfidence.com/stop-shouting-reasons-to-add-storytelling-to-your-marketing-solution-20066

It used to be all about the advertising agency. The father figure and purveyor of cool, telling people what to think and buy. We’ve now moved to a consumer-empowered market, where the customer is the centre of the universe.