Author: adriandobre

back then…

12 years ago I had to borrow a good backpack for a seven days camping trip. We had lame tents, weighing 10 kilos and not much of a shelter when it was raining badly. We sometimes slept in a small puddle and spent long minutes trying to start a fire with wet wood. And there are so many good memories coming from then. Now I have a cool tent that I haven’t used… ever… the expensive backpack moves me every once in a while from country to country and I use the sleeping bag – that can handle freezing temperatures – to couch sleep until I buy something to lay on the bed. My frustration.

Color Combinations and Readability

In the previous days I helped my brother build a presentation site for his new financial business and this sent me thinking about color schemes and readability. Bellow is a list of links that I found useful

Color Combinations and Readability. – an article by Richard H. Hall that brings scientific results to backup claims.

http://juicystudio.com/services/luminositycontrastratio.php – a site where you insert background and text colors and it calculates readability for you

Carrefour Romania – Environmental Carelessness

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Update (2014): Carrefour in the city I mentioned bellow started allowing people the choose whether to bag their fruits or not.

For years Carrefour Romania has been constraining customers to buy items wrapped around in plastic bags even when this has been obviously unnecessary. My phone complaints have remained unanswered.

Whenever I go back to Romania for holidays, I run in the same unfriendly attitude of Carrefour in Resita, Romania. As I’m not allowed to weigh my own fruit items – never saw this in any other country/ supermarket, ever! – the person operating the scales bags single items of fruits and labels the bag with the price tag. Complaints seem to go unnoticed, as I’ve mailed and phoned the Romanian head office in previous years. Continue reading →

Work Engagement Vs. For The Sake Of Doing It

A company says: we’ve created these projects where you can volunteer to help. We’ve created them for you to have enough opportunities to develop. We… We… We… {We in this real case is a group of managers}

The message that reaches me: here are some projects we created with the purpose of development. We may be sincere in our interest and commitment to your development, or we may just care to tick the box of employee engagement, the FACT is that we decided on the projects by ourselves. You can either get involved or not. We did our part and and no one can blame us for being passive.

Gallup released their Engagement Survey last month. Worth taking a look at.

Seventy-one percent of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and are less likely to be productive. That leaves nearly one-third of American workers who are “engaged,” or involved in and enthusiastic about their work and contributing to their organizations in a positive manner. This trend remained relatively stable throughout 2011.

A good interpretation of the survey can be found on the Harvard Business Review blog.

About Striving To Be The Best In Your Field

A post by Seth Godin reminded me of how many times we work hard to be the best in our field and as we work our way forward, heads cluttered by books, strategies, meetings, conferences etc., we forget our substance.

Rarely can one person reach the sought after spot of being the best on the field. The best trainer, the best manager, the best CEO, the best guitar player, the best parent…

As we all have the same tools at our disposal, the task of being the best can become a lifelong obsession.

But how about substance? Why not be one of the best and differentiate yourself through other skills. Why not be one of the best managers and a promising writer? A great trainer and a fun-to-listen-to guitar player? It’s more fun when you encounter something more than a living bag of tools.