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November 2008

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Entrepreneurs On Business Quests

  • Nicolas Martignole
    Nicolas is a passionate technologist and an explorer of new ways and usages of technology. I like his no-nonsense way of approaching topics and definitely enjoyed learning and working with him at a scrum training.
  • sandrine Plasseraud
    Great new marketing evangelist in the UK.
  • Hans Rosling
    Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. I "discovered" him at a conference in Paris and found his quest for a fact-based understanding and analysis of the world most appealing.
  • Sylvain Zimmer
    A young talented wiz kid who has been on a couple of business quests in the past five years... and he's in his early twenties!
  • Laurent Kratz
    A serial entrepreneur currently very focused on the music industry.
  • Emmanuel Vivier
    One of the top evangelists of new marketing methods in Europe: buzz, wom, viral & more.
  • Pascal Leurquin
    Chef d'entreprise belge de 44 ans, marié, 3 enfants.

Licensing & stuff

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Youth's week at the finest restaurants of Belgium

A friend of mine who is currently attending evening classes to become a chef, sent me an email saying that the "Maitres Cusiniers de Belgique", a sort of guild of master chefs of Belgium, is organizing its yearly  "youth's week". Between September 18 and 23 young people between 18 and 23 years of age will be able to eat in the country's finest restaurants for a fixed price of 35 €/person.

I found that to be quite an effecitve way to do low cost public relations and to tease young people who are the future customers of top restaurants. Here's a link if you know someone who could be interested in  (and qualified for) the event.

New recipe & why a restaurant is a top B-school

20050827_recette_tartedelegumes_002Continuing to publish Open Recipes, I give you the delicious, yet healthy, vegetables pie, which was invented during the weekend. The recipe is only in French and I might translate it one of these days.
Download CusineLibre_RecetteLibreTarteAuxLegumes.pdf

You know, a restaurant is a good metaphor for almost any business regardless how hi-tech the business can be. And I spent a few summers working in restaurants back in the eighties. There is marketing (place, style, menu), sales (the helpful guy or girl who comes to get your order), operations (the kitchen), finance (cashier desk), procurement (where we get the ingredients & drinks)... and so on. It is actually one the best places to learn about the eternal truths of general management, people management, customer care, CRM, knowledge management, planning... and a few other very practical things.
As ever, good instructions on how to make what the customer is asking for are important... only insofar as they are actually applied. So it's more about the skill than about the plan. More about the action than about the talk. As Gandhi said, "an ounce of practice is worth more than a ton of theory".  Which is also one of the eternal truths of Life in general. And that's valid for every single being, from the leader of the most advanced nation as he keeps babbling (but not doing much) about freedom and democracy, to the tinniest creature as it tries out ways to evolve in a Darwinian world of co-opetition as Hamel, Prahalad, Brandenburger and a few other researchers-practitioners would put it.

So go on and try this recipe. Take pleasure executing every single step of it. Have fun doing it. Make each action a celebration of how perfect our universe can be (it just depends on attitude). Eventually you will end up having something quite enjoyable in your plate. Bon appétit!
 

Open cuisine, open recipe and creative commons

ResultatfinalAs you might know, I believe in an open and free world of sharing, caring and respect. From political freedom and respect for vital values to open-source products and free software. That does not mean chaos for the simple reason that an open and free world can be reasonably regulated and governed. Creative Commons is a good example of rules that make sense while fully repecting freedom and openness. So I thought I would test it by promoting a new breed of open "source": Open Recipes and Open Cuisine.
I kind of like trying things out for myself - I think Carl Jung had a type called "feeler", the active experimentator if you will. Therefore I chose to write a recipe of an adapted version of Moussaka that I created a couple of years ago. Well, a Greek guy writing a recipe about Moussaka makes sense somehow... Anyway, this is the result of using the Creative Commons framework to publish under a Share-alike license the recipe. I call this new breed of open source cuisine Open Cuisine and the recipes shall be officially called Open Recipes :-) And the French version: "Cuisine Libre" and "Recette Libre".

There are many creative ways to move towards and open and free world of sharing, caring and respect. This is one very small example that is within the limits of my modest abilities. What matters is not how great or ambitious the initiative is; what matters is the flow and movement within. Don't think too much about that, just go out and try it as an attitude; it's not perfect, it does sometimes fail and overall it does improve quality of living by transforming the way one chooses to perceive the world.

Two documents can be downloaded from this blog, one in English and the other one in French. Enjoy!
Download MoussakaOpenRecipe.pdf
Download CusineLibre_RecetteLibreMoussaka.pdf

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