Tag: facebook

November 26 2015, 06:21

How interesting and useful it is to explore FIAS.

It turns out that in Russia there are 5500 hamlets – an official name for a settlement, as well as 443 stanitsas, 196 auls, 188 uluses, 150 settlements, 90 slobodas, 57 hamlets, 55 villages, 35 homesteads, 20 arbans.

The nearest hamlet to Moscow is Parshino, located in the Moscow region, within the rural settlement of Tsaryovskoye of the Pushkinsky district.

Stanitsas, of course, are mainly in the Krasnodar Krai and Stavropol Krai.

For example, there is a place called Birlyuki in the village of Avdotyino of the Noginsk district of the Moscow region – an official name.

November 24 2015, 10:25

Here are a few more rules that help in life and work:

1. The client has the right to want/demand/ask for anything, including the impossible and a day before the project deadline. This is their right as a client. Your right is to say no and/or include it in the project, but ask for money and/or do it for free. If it “works” and you do it “for free” or “because they nagged you!” for even one out of ten requests, then this unpleasant strategy will further reinforce itself in their mind. If you do nothing, then they probably won’t come back to you. Understanding this helps to work with “difficult” and “irrational” clients. They are actually good people, they just chose such a tactic to achieve their goals 🙂

2. The client has the right to be obtuse and deliberately fail to understand/accept obvious things. Sometimes this is explained by the mental abilities of specific individuals, but sometimes it is a deliberate tactic that gives an advantage in negotiations. For example, “empathizing with your situation” and “understanding how difficult this is” significantly impedes bargaining. Exhaustion in contract negotiations, for instance, forces one to make quick and ill-considered decisions. Therefore, you should always understand whose favor time plays – yours or the client’s, and whether there is any reason for the client to drag it out.

3. Even the dumbest and most irrational decisions sometimes have hidden reasons that are not visible to you, but evident to those making these decisions.

4. Personal goals often outweigh work-related goals. Often, a client chooses a product/service not because it is genuinely useful to the business, but because this particular manager or specialist, after a year of working with them, will be worth twice as much in the job market. Generally, the market values people with such experience for a reason – meaning, the product is good, too, but very, very many decisions are based precisely on this logic. Therefore, it’s always useful to think ahead for them and even estimate which achievements they could add to their CV. This is partly why quick wins are so beloved 🙂

November 20 2015, 06:26

My vision of how an employee/department/company should develop:

stage 1) work steadily/predictably (i.e., meet expectations; even if it means working slowly and making mistakes sometimes, but within an expected scope)

stage 2) +work with quality (even if not quickly, but steadily)

stage 3) +quickly/efficiently

stage 4) +with others’ hands (but with one’s own mind)

stage 5) +with others’ minds (but with one’s own as well)

If you reach stage 5 and want to go further, you need to find another area/level of complexity/scale and start with stage 1.