In Ireland, we always celebrate the first warm spell of the year because (A.) it’s the first one, and (B.) it may be the last. But what may not have occurred to you is that the short, simple weather forecast, that have brought nothing but good news this week, is actually a perfect model for …
When the recession hit a few years ago, a company I was doing a course for told me that tea and coffee were no longer being provided on training days. It was the first thing to be cut and, in truth, it should have been the last. The point might seem obvious – keep people …
I caught twenty minutes of the BAFTA’s on BBC1, last week, and took a particular interest in the acceptance speeches. Which weren’t very interesting. Even though the award ceremonies date back to Cecil B. DeMille, the whole thing struck me as really strange. The first winner – best adapted screenplay, I think – said he …
I guess I had to talk about him at some point. Everyone else is. And when it comes to ‘awful’ presentations, or ‘awful’ presenters at least, they don’t come much more awful than Donald Trump. The particular item that drew my attention, though, was president Trump’s counsellor, Kellyanne Conway, inadvertently coining the term ‘alternative facts’ …
Have you seen the levitating ping-pong ball on hairdryer trick? It’s not actually a trick, it’s called the Bernoulli effect and is the phenomenon that causes airplanes to lift off the ground and prevents racing cars from doing the same thing. I heard this at a student presentation, recently, where there were pictures of airplanes …
Here is a video of a 4-minute presentation I gave, without words. Sound daft? Well, I was making the point that writing text on slides and then reading it out is crazy, and yet most people do this. The obvious fix is to remove the text and let the presenter speak. But there is another approach: keep the …
Irish entrepreneur of the year, 2012, Edmond Harty keeps an eye on the latest technologies across all fields and asks the question: ‘Can I apply this to dairy farming?’ Often he can. Edmond had the idea for one of his company’s most successful products, the Moomonitor, on a flight to Canada after reading an article about …
After the financial crash, everyone in Ireland is now an expert in economics. Except that nobody is. Phrases like ‘bailout’, ‘Troika’ and ‘burn the bondholders’ have been bandied about but I’m not sure how many people actually understand them. Stephen Donnelly does. Recently elected independent politician in the Irish parliament, Stephen told me, in a …