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When commuting by bicycle, one often does not think of racing strategies – not unless one is a seasoned bicycle commuter, possibly. For sometimes competitive bicycling and bicycle commuting may not seem so dissimilar, especially in a large metropolis like New York City where even the motorists race against each other!

It’s a fanciful stretch, to be sure, but not one that is entirely impractical. Though a movie (taking place in hilly San Francisco, no less), the 1979 Kevin Bacon vehicle “Breaking Away” was not totally making things up in showcasing some wild rides through urban traffic. It’s the type of trip bicycle messengers will probably encounter, using the corresponding kinds of tactics only they would attempt, but it’s racing in all but name only.

Now this is not a politically correct thing to say in many cycling circles – definitely not the type where people are all decked out in spandex and shades, where you must wear helmets even when merely walking your bike – but riding in the streets can be quite competitive, though it’s hard to see how pedal power can win versus the internal combustion engine. And of course it’s no contest ordinarily, except when city streets and rush hour traffic can be utilized to provide the cyclist the advantage in many situations.

Or, in two words, racing strategies.

The kind that might seem quite similar to any used at official competitions but which are adapted specifically for urban commutes. Every veteran cyclist has his or her database of these, stored inside the mresistors of their brains – indeed, within the very fiber optics of their nerves.

A seemingly reckless attitude to the p.c. police, who seem to forget the generally dangerous circumstances surrounding many’s first childhood attempts at bicycling, but it’s the reality : urban bicyclist commuters have more in common with professional racers than the image-makers would like to admit.

The most common, as it would be the easiest, for any average person to generate some money through the web would be to become an affiliate marketer, getting paid commission for selling others’ services or products. Clickbank is really a digital marketplace that brings together such products and services with would-be affiliate marketers eager to help spread the word! Available in more than two hundred countries, the company is among the most heavily visited websites on the internet. Founded in 1998 at the height of the dot-com frenzy, they have survived the dot-bomb crash becoming a secure online retail outlet that safely processes over twenty-seven thousand transactions a day, or one sale every three seconds somewhere around the world!

With numbers like that – since marketing and making money is about the numbers – practically everyone with a dream is getting in on the act. One thing they discover pretty quick is to use the right tools for the job, which is to say utilize the right Clickbank software. Dependent on one’s precise requirements, a wide range may be available. Data-mining software program is among the most popular. In the end, you’re attempting to market to people – but how would you get in touch with them to start with ? You need to find out where they are. Contact info.

Other kinds of Clickbank software include mall scripts, ads, e-book creators, and those offering market analysis. Not so coincidentally, many are sold right through Clickank!

That means these are sold through affiliate marketers – to other affiliate marketers! (Hey, it’s a fish-eat-fish world online!)

Sounds fishy?

Exercise due diligence as a consumer. Though a marketer online, you too are being “sold,” in a very real sense, even if not that involving money (definitely will involve time and effort).

Mention the subject of business communications these days and a lot of people will think of instant messaging, cloud computing, and so on. After all, it’s the 21st Century! But in spite of our ever increasingly wired world, many senior executives lament the lack of communications skills in even middle management. Ironically, all the automation that technology offers seems to make people less thoughtful as well as, evidently, less intelligible, too.

The Powerpoint presentation can serve as a good example of what’s wrong. Everyone expects charts – or thinks everyone does. So charts are dutifully made, only without an understanding of what is really being graphed. It is like the old lament about Hollywood movies relying more and more on visuals as opposed to story, graphics rather than concepts. In fact, it’s a cry that goes all the way back to Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, who is recorded as having thought that the invention of writing made men’s memories much more unreliable, the reasoning being that the faculty was exercised less often and therefore rendered weaker. (Now how’s that for an anecdote to open your next sales presentation with!)

Yet there’s little doubt that new hires today seem slightly less capable of critical thinking and close reading. Therefore, those much-maligned Powerpoint presentations: big on visuals, short on actual information, or data that’s useful. Evidently, we are now at the point where, conferences being required, many decide on using Powerpoint as “filler” for having something tangible to say, very similar to what semanticists call verbal barking, only in this instance the “rhetoric” is visual and meant to distract attention.

What to do? AT&T’s Bell Labs, the Google of its time, once tried an executive grooming program, an ambitious in-house program created to raise the next generation of leaders from within. It lasted only one or two classes, because a lot of graduates, schooled within the classics designed to make them better thinkers and thus more fully realized human beings, began to put their families above the company. Such is the problem: organizations demand organization men, but not simple yes-men, either.