MasonFok.com

It is the small things that count!!!

Mason Fok — Sat, 19 May 2012 09:56:42 +0000

I think now that society has come to expect the basics and even some pretty elaborate basics are standard, it is the small things that count more and more.

The happy secret to better work

Mason Fok — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 03:55:22 +0000

The Entrepreneur Rollercoaster

Mason Fok — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 23:40:27 +0000

This is a great summary of what it can be like to jump into a new venture. It is not for everyone and this animation only shows a very limited picture of the true experience.

Economic Armageddon and You

Mason Fok — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 04:37:01 +0000

There are a great many resources that point to pretty much the same thing. But this short 5 minute video really sums up the hard reality of the global economy.

A life lesson from a volunteer firefighter

Mason Fok — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 10:09:57 +0000

This so perfectly puts what it is to be a Lion, a community volunteer.

“Not every day is going to offer us the chance to save somebodies life, but everyday offers us an opportunity to affect one.”

Mark Bezos – TED Talk 2011

Work-Life balance

Mason Fok — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 05:22:55 +0000

I couldn’t help myself from posting this. I was at TEDxSydney when Nigel Marsh did this talk on Work-Life balance… It was a Saturday.

I was happily working along when I noticed the talk make it to the TED podcast and decided to watch it again… On a Sunday.

Game Theory/Dynamics Advisors, a new breed of business optimisation professionals…

Mason Fok — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:40:38 +0000

Games are around us and if you listen to some futurists you should expect to see a lot more highly targeted applications promoting more interactive b2c relationships. One futurist stood out to me some time ago as he had predicted an age when vital sign monitoring would be embedded and points issued for physical activity, where those points could be used to receive lower life insurance premiums.

I think there are a lot of steps between the world today and that hypothetical but for now my position on this is that within 10 years a new profession will peer its head into the business community, one of game theory/dynamic advisory. Universities will offer courses in game dynamics/theory optimisation to meet a growing need for professional game theory advisors. Why be a business advisor when you could specialise in game theory? But for the most part, right now the only people looking to apply the methodology are game designers and selective “Internet” start-ups and entrepreneurs.

What should you earn without ever thinking of spending…?

Mason Fok — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 13:51:51 +0000

Every so often I see well known brands do something that makes my jaw drop. The thoughts begin running through my mind, they are usually so careful, how could this happen, surely they know what they are doing. Thankfully, the answer is usually revealed over time.

GoDaddy, easily one of the largest brands in the domain name business is the latest to fall victim to their own success. I will bore you with the details of the seemingly basic change they made later, for now I want to focus on the underlying change that makes my jaw drop.

GoDaddy has for the moment anyway, adjusted their home page strategy from selling their domain registration services and earning trust from new and old customers to something that sounds similar but is in fact extremely different.

GoDaddy’s home page today is still focused on selling their domain registration services, but in place of earning trust they have made what I believe to be a critical mistake. Rather than earning the trust of their users from their core focus, they are leveraging (and I would go as far as saying “SPENDING”) their trust.

The home page of GoDaddy today has selected by default the .co extension rather than the widely known .com extension for their domain registration availability search. If this all sounds like about the same thing to you then you are one of the many not educated in domain names but might think surely when I go to the biggest domain registration service to check a name it would be for the one everyone knows.

The point being GoDaddy’s trust is what gets existing users to refer their friends to GoDaddy. But if GoDaddy spend that trust to make short term gains, by selling .co names to people that don’t know the difference between .co and .com they are making people question if sending friends to GoDaddy is still a wise move.

The CEO of GoDaddy (Bob Parsons) has a list of rules for success in business and life in general. I would suggest adding this one to the list:

Earn Trust, but never spend it.

Trust is difficult to earn. But once it is spent it is difficult to start again.

Rome was not conceptualized in a day!

Mason Fok — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 23:35:40 +0000

I like to consider myself a bit of a creative thinker, an idea man that can generate concepts/solutions at the drop of a hat. But, I don’t think I have yet had an idea present itself in a singular moment, at best I get a briefing of a complex issue and an hour, a day, or a week later a strategy has formed. So I feel a lot more comfortable after seeing this talk by Steven Johnson on “Where good ideas come from” as the pestering fact that despite being in the IDEAS field the “Flux Capacitator / Eureka” experience had this far eluded me.

Irrational Decision making maybe set in stone

Mason Fok — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 05:42:52 +0000

I love a good experiment and especially one with monkeys. You have to give credit to the universities that fund this kind of research as the financial rewards for themselves as I think the majority of this researches findings will be on the broader society.

Anyone feel like undertaking a study near the Newcastle area of this nature give me a buzz