The fact is, you have to take the rough with the smooth. When it comes to reviews, accept a pat on the back when it is offered to you, but you also have to receive the brickbat ('A remark or comment that is highly critical and typically insulting') if it comes your way as well. As I've discovered over the years of organising running races (see www.Trionium.com), you can't please all of the people all of the time, and some people are not happy unless they have something to complain about: you have to take some criticism with a pinch of salt. The same applies to some of the compliments too: as Rudyard Kipling wrote in his celebrated poem 'If,' 'If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same... yours is the earth and everything that's in it.'
In the popular 'opera' Carmina Burana, there is a recurring motif of the wheel of fortune, often depicted in the Middle Ages with four people secured to it as if to a primitive Ferris wheel: One at the height of fame and fortune at the top, and one in the depths of despair at the bottom (and two others, in the process of ascent or descent as well). In the same way, appearing on the front cover of Sports Illustrated magazine is supposed to curse that particular sportsman to a swift decline (although it is more often the case that they are pictured at the zenith of their powers and prowess - and the only way is down).
In similar fashion, 'superstar' hedge fund managers can outperform the rest of the market for a few years, gain themselves a reputation, gather vast sums for their funds (and make themselves million/billionaires in the process) and then swiftly fail, in a process called 'reversion to the mean.' It's natural, really, that if enough fund managers have a bet on the markets, then a few will have a few 'superstar' years on the trot. Whether they manage to do this through skill (alpha) or luck (beta) is still hotly debated by academics (and people deciding on bonuses).
What brought me onto the subject of reviews, fortune and other people's opinions was my recent family holiday in Slovenia (lovely country, friendly people). After the trip, I posted an online review (and photo) of a cheap hotel that we stayed in that was built next to a railway line, close enough that the trains could almost be touched. It turned out that ear plugs were not enough to keep the noise out and we had a bad night's sleep. My opinion was that even though the hotel was cheap, it was still not a good option and that I wouldn't recommend anyone else to stay there. Amazingly, the hotel proprietor emailed me to berate me (twice) for posting this online review, and suggested that I should only stay in four or five star hotels in the future. Sorry, but when it comes to people's opinions on services, it's the customers' opinion which counts, not those of the provider of the services!
You may have noticed over the last couple of years, that we have been seeking the opinions of our readers a great deal. The head of one of Germany's biggest engineering companies pointed us in the right direction during an interview when he mentioned that he was reorganising the company in order to 'become closer to customers.' We decided that we would pay a great deal more attention to what our readers (and conference attendees and exhibitors) thought as well.
Since then, we've extensively been using an on-line polling tool called PollDaddy. It is very easy to put together a survey and to send it out to people whose opinions you value. Of course you can acquire answers to the questions you want to ask, but you can also ask people for their own new ideas, which is were the magic really happens!
Recently we have asked our readers whether conferences on supplementary cementitious materials and waste heat recovery in the cement industry were required (according to our readers, they are required, so we have organised them: CemTrader, in May, and CemPower in June, both in London).
We've asked our readers and delegates where the next Global CemFuels Conference on alternative fuels should take place: More than half of the respondents said that it should take place in Istanbul, so that's where it will be, in March 2013.
Last year, for the first time, we conducted our annual reader survey online and had a great response: We've since been including more country reports in Global Cement Magazine, as well as keeping the subscription costs down. We've listened to and acted upon your opinions. The fact is that any business that doesn't know what its customers want (or knows what they want but doesn't give it to them) is heading for a fall.
With all of this in mind, we'd like to ask you for your opinions on Global Cement Magazine and its associated events. Of course, we want to hear all of your opinions - the good and the bad (but preferably not the ugly - leave your brickbats at home!). Please take our opinion survey at http://propubs.polldaddy.com/s/global-cement-reader-survey-2012 - thanks!