Saturday, January 27, 2007

Open and Transparent, yeah right.

Not really about Amsterdam this time....

An article in the International Herald Tribune caught my eye last week. Jason Goldberg, of Jobster fame, has been blogging.

Executive blogs are tricky, for three reasons;
- any statement, any expression of doubt, can be picked up by the media where it's chewed over, sucked dry and spat out. And somewhere in that process it can affect the company's shareprice or relationship with stakeholders.
- blogs should be about stuff that's interesting, meetings are even less thrilling to read about than to attend.
- the characteristics that make a great CEO don't necessarily make a great writers

Despite that, there are successful and interesting executive blogs, and Jason Golberg's is probably up there in terms of interesting content. However late last year he used his blog to deny any potential redundancies at Jobster promising that there would be no news until the new year.

66 people, 40% of the company, were made redundant on 3 January. Which is technically after the new year. Unless there was some shocking new information recieved on 2 January then Mr Goldberg was less than open about the company's difficulties in 2006.

Mr. Goldberg embraces blogging as a way to demonstrate openness saying "It's the nature of Web 2.0 and new media that if you don't embrace openness, it will come back and bite you." Indeed.

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Sunday, January 07, 2007

Intergrated?

The government's long awaited law came into effect with the new year, I am now charmingly classified as an "oldcomer", and could be required to go through the integration training and exam. I would definitely need to do it before getting any payment from the government.

According to the official site
Integration means that you [the immigrant]
- Can speak, read and write Dutch
- Can understand spoke Dutch
- Know how we live together in the Netherlands


The last one is related to Dutch norms and values, except that they've had a hard time coming up with what Dutch norms and values are. Eventually a series of questions were compiled into this test by a Dutch TV station, who then ran the test on TV. Unsurprisingly people, regular Dutch people and celebrities, failed. Apparently migrants have to be better than the locals.

Under the current rules it's up to the Gemeente (city council) to administer the courses and the test. I have heard one rumour that Amsterdam's not in a big hurry to implement it in a widespread way. With maybe 200,000 people falling into this category in Amsterdam it's not surprising.

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