Turns out that after three interviews I didn’t get a VP role in a high profile company that was looking for an interim manager for six months . Limited feedback, only to say that I was more IT than software development, and that they were not sure if my management style would be a good fit. Interesting, seeing as I understood it to be a senior role where detail was not the key driver (or so I was briefed...). After three interviews where the rapport was good it is hard to understand what it is about my style they don’t like. I won’t ponder over that for too long, but I will reflect on Seth Godin’s blog of yesterday:

Craftsmanship
Find a calling and then deliver.
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’” – Martin Luther King, Jr. HT to Andy.

(BTW that is what I call inspirational blogging – only six of the words are his own!)

I wrote a short blog on Christmas Day (read it here http://url.ie/4fjs ). It wasn't meant to offend, but it has received a lot of flack (read the comments!). In fact I have just re-read it and it is quite inoffensive. If anything it pays respect to Jon Morter and his campaign and the good it did. Jon actually replied to me on Twitter, and did not seem fazed by my blog. So it seems that some of his Facebook campaign's followers take it a little bit more seriously than he does.

Guys, this is all about Market Forces. The market will decide, and has decided what will be No1, the leader, the best product, or whatever. Marketers have known this for decades – that is why they have marketing! The X-Factor, Cowell, SyCo, ITV are huge marketing machines. Jon Morter proved that Facebook is also a huge marketing machine. The marketing machine(s) influence the Market Forces. The Market Forces decide the outcome.

In fact, when Jon was on BBC's Breakfast he himself said that Joe McElderry would have the number one spot for the New Year. The consequence was that the forces of the market made it so.