Total Team Solutions

The Tablet by Apple.

2010-01-27T08:18:00.010-05:00

Apple and Jamaican tourism have something in common. The ability to grow when your competitors are contracting, even hemorrhaging. With Apple now officially a $50 billion company, their profits up 50% and the iPhone sales near 9 million they have shown that recession or no recession people want their digital wares from Cupertino, California.....bad! It is within this carefully crafted context that Apple is about to unleash the tablet today, January 27th. A date that seemed so far off a few months ago is now here. The hype has reached it's crescendo and I am reminded of that buzz you hear of musicians tuning their instruments and anxiety laced chatting in the crowd. This all ends when the conductor raises his baton. Mr. Jobs is about to waive his wand again and the press and the Apple fans are transfixed in another suspension of reality. We are plunged again into another techno-orgasmic escape of global proportions. Designed to drive their stock price even higher. Sigh...why didn't I buy that Apple stock in 2003.

There have been countless predictions regarding the tablet/iSlate/iPad whatever!?!?! But the ones that intrigue me the most are the following. Apple's partnerships with print publishers and the possibilities of the tablet as an input device. It was amazing to follow last year how the media covered numerous print houses that were crashing left right and centre as the Red Baron of the new digital reality shot them mercilessly out of the air. Remember the Napster days? Digital distribution was spear-headed by pimply-faced iconoclasts out to rule the world with gnarly code and a pirate server. Just like the music industry of yore before the iTunes store and Napster, the print industry was caught with their pants on the ground.

Last year, a very obvious tipping point for print was reached. Newspapers were folding (pardon the pun) all across the US. This accelerated Kindle lust and helped Amazon and others to sell e-readers like gangbusters. But Apple waited, biding it's time as they negotiated and secured contract after contract to enable their new product to be head and shoulders above the rest.

The tablet will create a whole new world for us content creators and designers. I can just imagine the next generation of children's books, sports magazines and the soon to be popular music LP that Apple introduced last year that I believe will transform our musical experience...again. As a designer, I am really looking forward to the input capabilities of the tablet. I think Wacom is going to suffer some serious losses over the next 2-3 years. It will not be pretty. They may have to shift to input wands and software for the tablet to stay in business.

One thing so many other pundits are not mentioning much of is that the tablet will not only be a platform for print media but also for Apple's twin juggernauts.

Apps and Music.

This is what the Kindle and the other players do not have. This One-Two-Three punch will really create the most sought after, life altering device since....fire. Either way, Apple is doing it again. Ol' Stevie is proving why he was chosen as CEO of the new millennium's first decade. It just goes to show that even if you get kicked out of the company that you founded there is always a chance for a second coming.

Can We Reform Healthcare without Cost-Cutting

2009-09-17T15:23:00.000-04:00

The short answer? No. (Read the article http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1917325,00.html). Aside from the hyperbole and exaggeration, we are a nation in trouble. Healthcare costs are crippling corporations and workers alike. Time for solutions instead of more fearmongering...or placating.

Most at risk are employees at the top of their pay ranges--generally people in the mid-40's to mid-50's. These are the people getting RIFed. They are also a decade or more away from Medicare eligibility.
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

ARRESTED: Raymond Clark III Charged With Annie Le Yale Murder

2009-09-17T15:21:00.003-04:00

It's a story that captured our attention for the past several days. A graduate student, just days before her wedding, walked out of a campus building at Yale and vanished--only to be found, sadly, stuffed into a wall at that same building.

What we can't forget is that Ms. Le was a victim of workplace violence. If early reports have any validity, her alleged attacker (who worked as a lab assistant where she conducted her studies), spurned in his attempts to force her to operate in "his" lab the way he wanted, killed her.

My question to all of us is this: Are we certain that we're doing the work of screening workers and others who enter our workplaces for potential threats? Yale is in the heart of an urban area, but the threat to Annie Le came--not from random big city violence, but from within the university.

Apple Adds Video to iPod Nano, Cuts Prices. New Phone in the Offing?

2009-09-10T09:45:00.000-04:00

Apple Adds Video Camera To iPod Nano, Cuts Prices For iPod Touch

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/09...

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled new features for the iPod Nano and price cuts for other iPods during a media event Wednesday in San Francisco. The new iPod Nano now sports a video camera, among other things.

Apple has been known to cut prices in advance of a new offering, and with the holiday shopping season around the corner, insiders wonder what's coming down the pike.

Are Consumers Paying Too Much for Text-Messaging?

2009-09-10T09:37:00.000-04:00

Are Consumers Paying Too Much for Text-Messaging? That was the question posed by the Time magazine article I read this morning. With costs to cellular carriers being a fraction of a penny and billings to customers standing at roughly fifteen cents a go, it's easy to see that, for cellular carriers, texting is, well, deliciously profitable at 98%. What's troubling for carriers is the trend of consumers to dropping or scaling back plans, which has lead them to offer bundles with unlimited texting as a "teaser" to draw customers back (like the "loss leaders" for Walmart: prescriptions, shoe repair and so on).

Emerging from the back of the pack, for example, are carriers like Sprint, that are offering unlimited text, picture and video messaging along with 900 minutes for 90 bucks in a clear move to siphon off customers from Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. The churn in the cellular industry continues.

Sensitivity Training Gone Terribly Wrong

2009-06-08T11:53:00.002-04:00

Many of you may know that I've lead a multi-division Affirmative Action and diversity initiative (why I have that white streak in my hair). "Sensitivity training" for the most part, left people scared of each other and tiptoeing around on eggshells.

So imagine how I giggled when I saw this.

Sensitivity Training - The best video clips are here

Boards, Stockholders and Execs Gone Wild

2009-06-07T23:13:00.000-04:00

The cascading systems failures in the mortgage, insurance, credit, automotive (stopping now...getting tired) industries has led us to a series of running postmortems to try to understand what went wrong--hopefully so we don't, well, do it again. In an article in today's New York Times, Roger Lowenstein has taken on an aspect of the economic debacle that has been largely overlooked: the role of stockholders. Here's a piece:

Let’s say you own a small business, maybe the local car dealership, assuming it is still extant. One day, you are feeling pinched and sell some shares of the business to a few folks in town. To keep things on the up and up, you create a board.

Every year you and the other shareholders get a report from the fellow you hired to manage the dealership. The business runs so smoothly you barely even think about it. Until one day, sales crash and profits, too. You would like to sell your stock, but it is in the tank. So you ring up the manager to see what happened. “Simple,” he says. “I quadrupled my bonus and I forgot to order a line of fuel-efficient cars. My bad.” Then he hangs up.

Feeling a little irritated, you try to contact some of the directors, but they are out driving gas-guzzlers that the manager supplied them and don’t seem inclined to return your calls. Now you are very irritated. As the biggest shareholder, you request that your name be included on the proxy ballot for the next election to the board. This the corporation refuses to do. Only the management (or its handpicked board) chooses nominees, and it is an iron rule of American corporations that ballots should not contain more nominees than seats. In the former U.S.S.R., this style of democracy endured for only 72 years. In American business it is timeless. Until last month, anyway, when the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed that shareholders who own at least 1 percent of the stock be able to nominate candidates to run in opposition to — and on the same ballot as — the slate offered by management. (Read the rest here)

The Compensation Gap Yawns
We've been having a pretty good time mocking executives with their huge salaries and giant bonuses. Truth is: as soon as we've moved on and the economy turns around, we'll probably go right back to the compensation structure we've known. We can't keep pretending that executives are solely to blame for bad business decisions and hefty rewards for failure. Truth is: HR wonks like me have been concerned about the canyon-like gap between executive compensation the salary/wages of the average worker. Just about 20 years ago, that ratio was 14:1. Now, amazingly, in the U.S., it's over 400:1. That might make some sense if corporate performance had increased by 28%; however, it hasn't.

"What did happen?" Now, there's a complex question.
A piece of the answer is connected to the friction between the rank and file stockholders and executives selected to run companies. The long-held assumption was that stockholders would only think in terms of short-term returns while executives would plan for long-term gain. With the recent trend towards CFO as the feeder pool for CEO's and the anayst-driven mandates towards frequent restructurings, one wonders how much sense this has made--companies seem to be planning by looking in the rear-view mirror for the past quarter's (or worse, the past month's) results.

Stockholders are provided elaborate reports that provided them with enough information...to keep investing. With the moves towards simplification in credit and mortgage documents, I can only hope that this trend will extend to the quarterly and annual reports, so that they can be easily read and understood by people who didn't get their degrees in accounting and finance. And those nominating slates for board members? Well, there's no democracy there. Stockholders are only supplied enough names to fill those empty seats and not a single name more. The SEC is now considering a policy change that will allow stockholders with 1% or more to add names to the board ballots. Good luck with that.

Another element is the composition of the Executive Compensation committees on most boards of directors. Committee members, who design the system of salary and perks that are supposed to spur a leader's best thinking and keep him or her interested in staying are, well, other leaders and corporate board members. In a sense, what has happened is that they've been voting to incrementally and inexorably raise all boats.

The Business Roundtable, a powerful lobby of corporate CEO's has shifted from their 1970's mandate to serve the interests of customers, employees, stockholders and the communities in which they operate to a single focus: making money for the stockholders, with an eye to ruthlessly reducing expense (read: employees). This shift had lead many thinkers in the areas of leadership and compensation to wonder whether it's infected our corporate goal-setting process with a "profits or perish" mentality. For example, in the 60s, then-Ford CEO, Lee Ioacocca gave marching orders that would prove both incomplete...and deadly:

Faced for the first time with competition from low-cost, high-mileage foreign imports, Iacocca set a specific target: Ford would design a new automobile that weighed less than 2,000 pounds and sold for under $2,000, and it would be on the showroom floor in time for the 1971 model year. What resulted was a mad dash to create the Ford Pinto.

The rush to roll out the Pinto had lethal consequences. Common-sense safety checks took a backseat to meeting Iacocca's deadline. In particular, engineers failed to examine the decision to place the Pinto's fuel tank only 10 inches behind the rear axle. When the Pinto was rear-ended, it often went up in flames. Fiery rear-end crashes caused 53 deaths, numerous injuries and a string of costly lawsuits. (Read the rest here)

Overly ambitious goals and overly generous compensation: A heady mix.

Now, maximizing stockholder wealth means something quite different when considered against the enormous stock offerings made to corporate execs...and the shift in comp and benefits mix in the last 30 years (from Big-C cash plus stocks to little-c cash plus Bis-S stocks to Big-...um, everything). I get how challenging this is...vesting of stocks is a dicey thing: execs are taxed on the value of the stock when issued--not when vested and received. And stock values have been known to crater to zero in just weeks, leaving execs to jockey for more up-front money as a hedge against stock volatility.

Noted economist, Milton Freidman, in the '70s opined that stockholders would keep companies moving in the right direction. Milty didn't however, anticipate profit-sharing and stock ownership plans for managers on down to key employees or even ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans).

What a hot mess.

GM, Gone as We Knew It

2009-06-01T15:36:00.003-04:00

Reading Michael Moore's account of the GM bankruptcy announcement from "GM town," Flint, Michigan (with over 40% of its workers employed by GM), I'm reminded of what it was like to work for R.R. Donnelley &; Sons in Crawfordsville, Indiana, when they announced a 70% reduction in force. Donnelley was the major employer and when it shed over 3.300 jobs in a town of 13,000 it landed with the force of a tsunami. Moore writes:

It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.

Moore insists, like others, that GM refused to build fuel efficient cars American drivers wanted to buy. I don't agree. Following Moore's train of thought, the roads would have been filled with SmartCars and Priuses (Prii?). Instead, we kept buying cars with gas mileage ratings that were nothing to boast about even in the 1980's. Like that chestnut from Richard Pryor (scrubbed for sensitive readers): we ordered poo, so we had no choice but to eat poo (not the same punch as Pryor).

The UAW, management and shareholders were locked in a zero-sum game of Money-Money-Money, with the workers wanting higher wages even when the company, feeling the strain of competing with foreign-based manufacturers making cars in the US making for a fraction of the comp/benefits costs; top management demanding enormous compensation packages despite company results; and shareholders, in the age of Googlized (inflated like Octo-Mom's lips) profits, revolt-ready if profits fell.

There are several things I'd love to see GM take with it to the dustbin as it regroups. GM had one of the most byzantine HR systems to be found anywhere. Now, sweeping and immediate changes are in the offing, regardless of the direction their Chapter 11 filing:

Some retiree benefit obligations to be reduced by roughly two-thirds; hourly staff will hit 38,000 by 2011; salaried workforce to be trimmed to 23,000; and the number of dealers will drop to 3,600.

Um, wow!

Human Resources at GM seemed skilled at figuring out how to line up employees in a orderly dance, even when profits fell below their historic highs. Called "Generous Motors," GM was known for high wages and lucrative comp deals for execs. However, in promising the moon in terms of retiree health and pensions in order to help keep salaries lower (yipes!), even when moving jobs offshore, it set itself a Sisyphean task. This from the Washing Post (H/T FiveThirtyEight.com):

GM began its slide down the slippery slope in 1950, when it began picking up costs for medical insurance, pensions and retiree benefits. There was huge risk to GM in taking on these obligations -- but that didn't show up as a cost or balance-sheet liability. By 1973, the UAW says, GM was paying the entire health insurance bill for its employees, survivors and retirees, and had agreed to "30 and out" early retirement that granted workers full pensions after 30 years on the job, regardless of age.

These problems began to surface about 15 years ago because regulators changed the accounting rules. In 1992, GM says, it took a $20 billion non-cash charge to recognize pension obligations. Evolving rules then put OPEB on the balance sheet. Now, these obligations -- call it a combined $170 billion for U.S. operations -- are fully visible. And out-of-pocket costs for health care are eating GM alive.

Retirement plans have historically been based on an actuarial formula that "works" for employers when retirees die within 2-5 years of retirement. Having retirees leave the company at as young as 48 (in their "30 and out" system), they stood to pay retirees and their mates for decades beyond the usually and customary (and grisly) benefits and comp formula. This report from Boeing shows a bit of what I mean:

Early retirement, as Boeing found, proved to be too costly, though there is some suggestion in the literature that early retirements have a greater illness and injury relationship. If that is actually the case, the new GM should focus more on wellness care and job design that takes a dramatic swipe at the possibility of injury.

We'll see.

We Just Don't Have the Words...

2009-05-28T20:20:00.002-04:00

I'm an HR wonk. I admit it. I love looking at the systems and strategies that have people be successful at their work. So, I admit that been concerned for quite some time that we no longer have the words to describe what we're doing.

"Layoff," a term that historically referred to hourly workers for whom there was not enough work and who had to be furloughed until worked picked up, no longer means what it used to. Now, due to administrative/legal alchemy, we use "layoff" to describe workers who continue to receive continued benefits and "salary" from a different budget "pot" that takes them off the books as a active employee, then "voluntarily" accedes to be separated from the company should there be no job for them to return to.

Of course, at no time is the employer looking for a new job for a RIFed worker.

Biz Failure and The "Rashomon Effect": Bring Out the Pies!

2009-04-10T15:29:00.002-04:00

My "little" brother (6'2" and 225 lbs) is a constable on patrol (actually, now a Sargent responsible for training and development) in our home town. Talking with him one day about how people process information, he remarked that sometimes the most challenging thing an officer could encounter is an crime scene with several witnesses, each with their own point of view on what "really happened."

I think about that long-ago conversation, sometimes, when speaking with management and leadership teams. Their take on what went wrong and what caused it can, at first, sound quite a bit like the wind-up for a Three Stooges pie fight...only without the pies.

Like the "Rashomon Effect" Perry and I were talking about (based on the amazing Kurosawa movie--think CSI: Feudal Japan in which people posit plausible, but differing accounts of events), blame-shifting and the regrettable inability to parse "what's so" based on the limits of perspective can surely hamstring a team looking to make a quick shift.

See how nicely I said that?

Even more troubling is the tendency of people to cling to their account of events...all the way to the bitter, hopeless (pieless) end.

It was those people HR hired!
If accounting could have given us better numbers...
The IT people can't program worth a damn!
I blame Bush, the economy, the Chinese, global warming.
(in sotto voce: it was the CEO's fault!)

What's powerful is the realization that no one "owns" The Truth (said with gravitas)--not even the CEO, who only knows what he or she sees...and little of that with absolute certainty. Even more powerful is the ability to put together a "workable truth" with enough facts with which to make decisions and enough flexibility to quickly shift as more information becomes available.

Good Friday? How About Great Friday!

2009-04-10T13:23:00.002-04:00

At Tea's Me Caf e in Indy having tea, listening to great jazz & getting things done?

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Chrysler Head to Resign While Chrysler Urged to Take Fiat Deal

2009-03-30T09:41:00.001-04:00

In a move that may just be window-dressing, the White House has urged GM CEO Rick Wagoner to resign and Chrysler to take a proffered deal with Italian auto maker Fiat in order to receive any additional bailout bucks. This from the New York Times:

The decision to ask G.M.’s chairman and chief executive, Rick Wagoner, to resign caught Detroit and Washington by surprise, and it underscored the Obama administration’s determination to keep a tight rein on the companies it is bailing out — a level of government involvement in business perhaps not seen since the Great Depression.

With Mr. Wagoner having been at the helm for almost a decade, it's clear that he's had ample opportunity to shape the thinking of other executives at GM--his thinking is part of their "DNA." What I find troubling is that there is no mention of the organizational change effort needed to re-shape their thinking (or, failing that, the need for additional blood-letting).

I'm certainly going to keep watching as the dismantling of the old leadership paradigm further disintegrates.

Does the nature of our communication need to change to maximize social networking opportunities?

2009-03-19T16:14:00.000-04:00

I posted this question on LinkedIn and thought I'd expand and cross post it, expanded here.

Social Networking. All the rage. However, I'm wondering whether Web 2.0 is really something more like what I've termed Relationship 1.0 (See me! Buy from me!) on a new platform.Given our opportunity to connect with people the world over in an instant, would we be best served to focus a little more attention on the kinds of communication (who or how we need to be or whether we're powerfully "in the world" of another) that works best on these and other platforms (including face to face).

Social network theories originated in sociology, social psychology and anthropology (imagine that) and, at their heart, describe the manner in which people connect. In 1954, J. A. Barnes started using the term systematically to denote patterns of ties between and amongst people, institutions and social groups--social networks. What, I wonder, would happen if those experts--"S.D. Berkowitz, Stephen Borgatti, Ronald Burt, Kathleen Carley, Martin Everett, Katherine Faust, Linton Freeman, Mark Granovetter, David Knoke, Peter Marsden, Nicholas Mullins, Anatol Rapoport, Stanley Wasserman, Barry Wellman, Douglas R. White, and Harrison White" (from Wikipedia.org) told us whether our use of electronic social media to create networks was really allowing us to create lasting connections with some velocity and effectiveness or just ersatz biz and personal links.

Interconnected nodes representing relationships

For example one theory talks about social distance--the nature of the comfort zone between people who are identified as different from one another (in terms of, for example, race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation). The Bogardus Social Distance Scale for example, uses a scale (below) where 1.0 would indicate no distance (or opportunity for difference-related friction).

As close relatives by marriage (score 1.00)
As my close personal friends (2.00)
As neighbors on the same street (3.00)
As co-workers in the same occupation (4.00)
As citizens in my country (5.00)
As only visitors in my country (6.00)
Would exclude from my country (7.00)

So. a Facebook "friend" or Twitter follower from another country may have a SD rating of 7.

Now,taking that a bit further, given what I'm trying to track, I wonder if there are other values to add to the scale to describe the vector point of the connection--what "source" the connection came from or the Connection Distance. Like this:

Connected with them directly (score 1.0)
Connected with them through a close friend or partner (score 2.0)
Connected with them through a business or professional associate (score 3.0)
Connected with them through an associate (score 4.0)
Connected with them through a stranger (score 5.0)
Not previously connected at all (score 6.0)

Could these two elements--Social Distance and Connection Distance--covary? Probably so, though I'm guessing here. What I'm reasonably sure of is that there's a hell of a lot more work to be done to understand these connections and be able to measure their autheicity, depth or value.

Just sayin'!

Starbucks Nixes Fixing Decaf after Noon

2009-02-13T10:46:00.000-05:00

If you're like me, you spend a fair bit of time at SBX for business networking, relaxed client meetings or to "change your air" while working on a deadline. So, I was surprised to see that Starbucks felt if necessary to stop preparing pots of brewed decaf in the afternoons. Seems that tossing the unused brew when it's a ripe 30 minutes old was getting costly.

On Pepsi's New Branding....

2009-01-21T14:55:00.001-05:00

I can see why so many people dislike the new Pepsi logo. Yes, I too
quivered when I first saw it. Yup they are famous for constantly
changing their branding and all that but a lot of the argument I think
needs to go deeper. Pepsico knew this backlash would happen. They knew the new design would not bode well with a wide swath of their drinkers but the “what” is not the question, it’s the why.

After taking a long hard look at the logo my guess for why they did it is this.

Yes there will be heavy online buzz (including this post) but this logo was not designed for the NOW,
it was designed for the future. Current context is not it’s focus. This
logo was designed for a future zeitgeist. A theme, a style, a mode of
thinking…not yet popular. When a company of the size of Pepsico
redesigns their branding as often as they do, they have come up with a
design that is projected from their future to the now. it cannot be
defined by not current tastes.

They do this not just for design longevity’s sake, but also
packaging purposes. If this new branding is to carry them through the
next 10, 15 or 20 years it allows them to project packaging costs much
better. For a company the size of Pepsico these projections can make or break their bottom line.

Think about it.

If they design a logo that is more concurrent with today’s
design language or thinking and it gets stale in 3 - 5 years, that is
going to be millions of dollars lost for the company’s that
produce their packaging, and in turn Pepsico, because it will represent
a massive retooling for these guys because of the sheer volume of
printing and production that goes into the packaging process. So for
me, that is the why. The design will slowly grow on us and it will soon
seem ahead of it’s time….. no I take that back. That’s probably what
the Pepsico board is betting on.

Beauty all around

2009-01-16T21:59:00.002-05:00

At the falls in a Tennessee state park.

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"Trouble Don't Last Always": Mother Wit for Tough Marketing Times

2008-12-15T14:44:00.001-05:00

Erik Deckers over on Twitter shared this link with me earlier today. Here's a taste of the article (a quick and good read):

Good news for marketing agencies, printers, and direct mail companies from B2B Marketing magazine. According to their “exclusive” survey, only 25% of all business-to-business marketers are going to cut their budget. But nearly one-third of them are actually increasing their marketing budget, while another 44% are leaving them intact. That’s good news for anyone in TV and radio advertising, digital marketing/advertising, and, of course, direct mail.

As I’ve been speaking to other marketing professionals around Indianapolis, they’ve all been saying the same thing: marketing spending is staying flat or increasing.

Increasing? In a down economy? Absolutely.

That may seem counterintuitive to some, especially the bean counters, but spending more on marketing now is smart. That’s because the 25% of marketers cutting their spending are your competitors. They’re hiding with their heads in the sand, which means their message isn’t reaching customers, which means customers aren’t buying, which means income is shrinking, so they bury their heads a little further. (Read on)

Here's what I offered as a comment:

Right on! I'd also add R&D and strategic planning. Here's why.

My Great Grandmomma was a woman from the American South who came North to escape the oppression of Jim Crow and find economic opportunity. Not educated past the 6th grade, she was filled with what the old folks used to call "Mother Wit," a kind of smarts that can't be taught in school. Momma Lena would look at the times we're now living in and remind me that "Trouble don't last always." She'd tell me to do everything I could to get ready for my blessing, adding "be ready to be found." That last bit was in her attempt to get me married off (Momma Lena, my Hubs is a marvel and I'm sorry you never got to meet).

Now, my spiritual path is one that this church-going lady would scratch her noggin hard over (I call myself a BaptiBuddhist Yogini), but her message keeps ringing in my head as I talk with fearful clients.

But, I digress: This won't last.

If we continue to freeze our spending completely, when the clouds pass, we'll be left in the ditch...by those companies that invested in (wait for it...wait for it...) marketing, R&D and strategic planning.

We see examples of firms that invested deeply even when they didn't have the sales figures to back up that investment.

A few years ago, when Apple's sales were sluggish and their customers spoke hushed tones about the Apple gospel of "not a PC," they invested--mightily. They learned more about themselves, their customers and the market. They created new products there weren't even names (or desires) for yet. They studied trends and created a few of their own. They created knowledge centers and centers of learning for customers and employees. They crafted their message. They created communities and systems in which those communities could interact. They cemented their brand. They became evangelists.

Apple and many other companies have succeeded by not giving in to scarcity and fear, but this says more about their strong, adaptable culture than, perhaps, anything else. That company's marketing systems are built to flex. Having gone up against the Microsoft Machine since their inception, they're accustomed to being the underdog with far less in cash reserves than their Redmond-based cousin.

That means that they had to get smart in whole new ways. Having proven that they could build a brand, largely, by word of mouth, they used their Mother Wit to design marketing systems that grabbed the attention of their customers--both those present customers and those who would have never thought to buy anything from Apple. We all know people who own PC's and iPods or iPhones, or shop at the iTunes Music Store.

I do think, however, that spending the same money on the same things is a no-go. The markets are fluid, malleable things. During this downturn, companies can--and should--be taking a close look at their knowledge systems (training, R&D, etc.) for ways to beef-up knowledge sharing and folding new learnings into development. Companies can also be looking (as they should have been along) at who their customers are, what they want, how they want to get it and how they want to be interacted with.

In short, this downturn is a "teachable moment," speaking volumes about continuous improvement in marketing, communication, product design, planning and execution--all the systems that make up a company.

The statement in the post about nonprofits and not cutting marketing or mailings is pretty brilliant. The recent presidential campaign is a testament to the power of marketing and of the creation of new, flexible systems for communication of messages to customers (in the political sense, voters). These nonprofits (Obama, Clinton, McCain, Romney, etc. for President) told us quite a bit about scalable messages and scalable marketing systems. And let's not forget, while the Obama campaign was raising money by the semi-load in its last month, we had already been in a recession for the better part of a year!

Relationship 2.0

2008-12-09T19:44:00.005-05:00

Web 2.0: The Architecture of Interaction
Web 2.0. It's a term we all know because, in fact, its existed along with the earliest elements of the World Wide Web, and includes social networking, co-creativity, collaboration and sharing. That means that social networking sites, wikis, blogs and other syndicated content were foretold in the creation of the Web.

Like Eric Schmidt famously said: "Don't fight the internet." Instead, he suggested using the power of the web as a platform for business and social interactions--an "architecture of interaction." That challenged me to use my website as more than just a web-based business brochure. And I've still got more north to go.

Relationship 1.0: Gaming the System
I love every single bit of electronic social networking with one caveat: I'm not sure if I'm all that interested in Web 2.0 if all we do is bring Relationship 1.0 to the party.

We all know the elements of Relationship 1.0. You can find them at every "networking event," for example, with people in a death match where the object is to (1) sell something to someone rather than connect, (2) figure out what can be gained rather than given and (3) promote a homunculus of oneself and never the authentic you. Extra points for having taken a class on smiling and handshakes (don't laugh, because they're out there). Then, dash home to add all those names to your newsletter mailing list and send out all of those "special offers" to buy your merchandise. If they didn't want you to send them endless stuff, they wouldn't have given you their digits. Right? Not according to the CAN SPAM Act (which arose because of internet abuses).

Trouble is: no one who goes to networking events goes looking to become your next customer. They went hoping you'd become their next customers. Trust me. I get to do my fair share of public speaking: I've asked.

Learn About You? I'd Have to Care
Twitter automation through services like Tweet Later are compounding the problem. Designed to help people manage their welcome and other tweets, these services are leading to some curious situations. For example, I routinely get welcome messages from other coaches asking me to join a teleclass or webinar or sign up for a free coaching session. I've been coaching for almost 18 years. Clearly they haven't read my bio. Now, I understand that having large numbers of followers, it can be tough to read the bios of every new follower, crafting a welcome message to each. And truth telling here: I use an automated welcome message service (I get sometimes 30 new followers a day and want to thank them for following). What i have found that works, is to click back through recent additions and sending a response to one of their more meaty tweets to let them know I'm listening. Also, I read profiles before I re-tweeet (forward a tweet) or reply the first time--just for context.

Follow Me, Follow You
There's quite a bit of strange controversy surrounding whether it is noblier in the web to follow people who follow you. Twitter notables like Guy Kawasaki suggest you're a lose if you don't. But that would mean, in Web 1.0 terms, that you would have been obliged to put everyone on a newsletter mailing list who put you on one. If Twitter users had to pay for the followers by level, there would be less of that nonsense going on. Like the book says, (they) just might not be into you. But that doesn't mean you can't be into them.

Relationship 2.0, then, is about the birds in the bush and not those in the hand--about connecting people to our connections. About paying the richness of our lives and relationships forward.

Think about it when you get (or give) that next self-serving tweet about that next business offer.

An Open Letter to Obama on Small Biz

2008-12-09T19:35:00.002-05:00

Just sent off a happy gram to the good people at Change.gov about small business. Here's what I said:

Small business is the engine that drives the economy, but the government has had little real focus on small business development in years. Multiple heads of the SBA in the Bush Administration, little in terms of money and talent. Little commitment. Now, we see the erosion of small business and the very agency tasked to support business growth is struggling for its own survival.

If the SBA was a small business, they'd be having their own fire sale.

Here's my coaching for you: Transform the Small Business Administration and appoint a new Director--fast!

SBA Scope
The scope of the SBA is too broad to help all of the very diverse business needs: non-employee microenterprise small businesses (0 employees), microenterprise small busineese (1-10 staffers), small-small businesses (10 - 50 or 75), small companies (75 - 250 employees) and larger small businesses (250 - 500 people).

Right now, with very little resources and scant support, they are tasked with job creation. There's little time, energy or resources for anything else.

REQUESTS

SCOPE
Divide up the SBA into business support segments (as described above). Given the fact that there has been shrinkage among non-microenterprise small businesses (something like 12% over the past half dozen years and dramatic growth among microenterprise (especially non-employee micro-e businesses), where are some inescapable facts: we can't afford for these businesses to fail (and add more job seekers to the tightening job market) and these businesses fill an important role in America.

Create an office of microenterprise small business soon, lest these businesses disappear.

SCORE
While I am sympathetic to the plight of new businesses, I am also cognizant of the fact that with its reliance on SCORE rather than existing consultancies, the federal government has set itself up to compete with some of the very small businesses they are there to support.

Further, the SBA is training business leaders that the services of consultants should be cheap or free. They never learn that as their businesses grow, their needs for more advanced business consulting and support services grows as well.

HR
Finally, I find it shocking that the SBA does not offer specific HR services and consulting to the businesses they support. With all eyes on the meltdown over executive compensation, union wages and other weighty human resources matters, I can't help but wonder whether the SBA is enabling the next generation of businesses to overpay execs, exploit workers, and hobble themselves with comp and benefits decisions they should (1) never have made and (2) would have made differently with specific counsel.

Thanks for listening.
Best,
Lalita Amos, MRHM
Total Team Solutions, LLC

What the Hairy Heck?

2008-12-02T16:54:00.003-05:00

I was still chewing on this blog post over a week after I first read it, so I thought I'd chew it over with you. In it, the author described the travails of a consultant who'd had his gig pulled right after he'd made the cross country move.

Michael Moses landed a job as a human-resources consultant in Chicago straight out of college. He moved to the Windy City from New York, signed an apartment lease and was ready to work. But then he got a call that more job hunters have been dreading—the company could no longer afford to hire him. ‘I was ready to go, and they just pulled the carpet out from under my feet,’ says Mr. Moses, who is 22 years old.

What bothered me about Mr. Moses' account of losing a job he actually started was the job he was being hired for. And while he doesn't mention what his degree was in, it stands to reason that at 22, it wasn't a Masters of Phd and that he didn't have the depth of experience most people think of when they think: consultant.

(sigh)

Hiring managers have to do a better job of considering talent. "Growing people" in a position seems like a smart idea, except when I consider that most companies are trying to get cheaper employees, hoping that they'll get the experience they need quickly. Besides, these workers, as Mr. Moses can attest to, are easily shed.

Our current job market shows a lot of daylight in this strategy.

2008-12-01T07:50:00.000-05:00

OK, now this was a little bit of a brain burner even for me (and we all know how much I like my noggin scorched). I asked the Hubs out of a cheap Sunday night date--books, computers, Kindle and coffee. So, I'm a cheap date. I already knew that.

Anyway, the Starbucks was the now usual dichotomy--great service in a dirty store (with the nastiest stains on the upholstery). While there, I noticed that the 10 by 10 foot area rug in the center of the seating area wasn't very securely tacked down along one edge. I noticed it--not because I was trying to strike up a conversation with it. I tripped over it. Every single time I walked to the counter or the restroom (I did say I was drinking java, didn't I?). I felt like less of a busted ballerina when I saw a cop trip over it on his way out the door.

Um, oops!

So, before I left, I thought I'd bring it to the attention of the shop keepers. Here's how that conversation went:

Me: Excuse me. I wanted to let you know that the carpet isn't secure on that one side (pointing) and that I and one of the cops had tripped over it.

He: Yeah, I know.

Me: I saw that you'd used some other kind of tape on it. A little double sided carpet tape would take care of it.

He: You saw we'd tried to fix it already (smiling tiredly--end of shift). We were going to get some electrical tape (!) but the store'd already closed.

Me: Electrical tape?

He: We can only buy from certain stores. Our DM said if the electrical tape doesn't work, for us to get what we needed from another place.

Me: Um, OK. Night.

Now, can you guess where my tiny mind went? A 2" by 36' roll of carpet tape costs about 10 bucks (I checked). Three trips to and from the store looking for electrical and every other kind of tape costs more than that in gas alone (let alone time away from the store on the clock). In addition, the store runs the risk of lawsuit if someone tripped, carrying a steaming cup of joe or a big cuppa tea, and splashed themselves (yipes!), someone else (crap!) or a little someone else--like one of the many Christmas-togged tykes getting hot chocolate with grandma (gonna roast in hell).

By looking to fulfill the letter of the store's purchasing agreement, it failed to meet another important standard: the standard of care with respect of customer and employee safety.

I find this kind of siloed thinking quite a bit in my practice with executives drilling the rules into the heads of their direct reports such that they miss opportunities for innovation, avenues to clear roadblocks and in this instance, chances to remedy safety concerns before an injury occurs.

It's the bane of the business world--the inability to get ahead of problems or opportunties before they run their predictable and almost certain course then reacting to events to mitigate the damage.

The Faith Friendly Workplace

2008-12-01T07:28:00.000-05:00

I used to work for the world's largest producer of Bibles. Curiously, they're the same company that produced that Madonna Sex book book a few years back. There was a pervasive atmosphere of religiosity. But what there wasn't was tolerance (got to find a better word than this) for other faiths or faith traditions. Like the sometimes maligned Chick Fil-A which routinely probes applicants on their family status and religious beliefs and practices but has come under fire for limiting opportunities for those in the "wrong faiths" (like Catholicism or Judaism), companies which provide space for religious expression (as opposed to religious accommodation like foot washes for Muslim adherents) are being watched for signs that they have an express preference for some expression over another.

This article from Workforce has some great tips for a faith friendly workplace like this from GM "If you want your faith group to be in Ford’s Interfaith Alliance, you’ve got to support the ability of other groups to meet." Read on.

'If You Didn't Want My Newsletter, Why'd You Give Me Your Biz Card?"

2008-11-25T07:19:00.001-05:00

BEGIN RANT

As I mentioned in my tweets, I was a speaker on a panel at Purdue. Wonderful program that connected minority and women-owned businesses with purchasing managers from Central and West-Central Indiana. Sure enough, after having dozens of business cards pressed into my hands (and passing out my share to people I'd like to stay in contact with), it's started: The unsolicited subscriptions to email newsletters.

In the old economy (pre-AOL/Compuserve/Netscape of the early 1990's), it wasn't inconceivable to get a paper and ink newsletter when someone got your business card. Back then in the pre-Can SPAM Act days, all one had to get was an address (which they could find in the phone book) and they were off to the races. Now, Can SPAM Act or no, people assume that if you give up that email address, you're asking--begging--to be added to their email list. Better yet, the really industrious ones think that selling their email mailing lists is what Martha Stewart would call "a good thing."

It isn't. If I get one of these, I get 10 and they don't just magically disappear by force of will.

I've maintained that networking (more aptly discussed as "prospecting with people who are uninterested in buying") as we've come to know it is such a bad idea. I routinely remove myself from those mailing lists...and toss the card of the offending biz person.

Better would be to ask how the person who gave out the card wants to be interacted with and then writing that on the back of the card. The chances of deepeming a relationshipo through relationship-appropriate communication is enhanced.

'If You Didn't Want My Newsletter, Why'd You Give Me Your Biz Card?"

Glad you asked. I thought you could keep it on file in case you met someone who could benefit from my services (or your associates, mine), that we could consider getting together to learn more about each others' businesses, that we might get together for tea to strategize ways in which we could both win (like a joint venture or other collaborative opportunity), that you might be interested in the free items on my website, that you might want to listen to my podcast and possibly appear on one, that you might use the biz card as a book mark...

Being added to your SPAM list was the last thing on my mind.

END RANT
(See? That wasn't too bad, was it?)

My Kindle Mentor--Found!

2008-11-24T12:34:00.000-05:00

Now, before any of you smart alecs go off mumbling that I've got a Kindle habit, let me be the first to say it: Hi. My name's Lalita and I'm a Kind-a-holic. Garland's found me slumped on the couch in front of the fireplace, glasses askew, clutching my reader like a just-returned foundling.

It's a cautionary tale.

Though, I will say that I've met some very interesting people hereabouts. Kindle owners, all. Today, it was Patrick, the man who started my Kindle crush. Like any self-respecting crack dealer, he let me have a free taste. He handed his Kindle over to me--a stranger--at SBX and let me play with it for the better part of an hour while he checked his email. Seeing him today, we was beaming when he saw me walking back to my table with my Kindle, which I've named (in the Amazon system), Gizmo (food and water--bad!).

He was with two friends, non-believers, to be sure, and leaned into me to tell me about all of the Kindle loot he'd gotten and still coveted. When he got to the subject of Kindle covers (he's got 3 or 4), he remarked to me, a fellow conspirator, that he "could see how women can get that way about purses.

And the bridges of understanding get stronger.

Friends have asked me to post a little about what I'm reading on my Kindle. Here's the short list:

Books

Newspapers:

Blogs:

...and there was peace on Earth.

Monday Morning Melodies

2008-11-24T11:47:00.001-05:00

I'm hanging at SBX, getting some writing done while I wait for the afternoon meetings to commence. It's a glorious day--misty and fit for fireplaces, chili and pots of tea (can you tell I'm feeling a little peckish). Keeping me company--my trusty Sirius radio. Listening to Alex Bennett (Sirius Left) and an otherworldly discussion on the merits of Michelle Obama's badonka donk, they redeemed themselves by playing some acoustic Amy Winehouse.

In spite of--or sadly, because of--her much-storied personal struggles, she still ranks up there as one of the singular talents of her day. My fear is that, like Billy Holiday, she'll be gone too soon. Still, when I listen to her sing, I think about my mother, who, though still at the beginnings of her life as a woman, loved Billy's ageless voice. Here's a sample:

Beneath their personal dramas that played/are playing out in the tabloids, these women suggest a vital link to my business life: Each in her own way, they crafted their own, singular sound...and sang it. Looking forward to next year and the current climate of fear and scarcity that abounds, I'm struck by the opportunity to, like them, further explore my singular sound--really find it--and sing it to those people whose ears are attuned to listen.

The work of working and living "Like Nobody's Business" isn't as easy as it might seem.

How Obama tapped into social networks’ power

2008-11-22T20:45:00.001-05:00

Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent
anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking
applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen
force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get
out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans.

As
a result, when he arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama will have not
just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters
who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to
believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to
govern. ...

First the Smokes and Now His Blackberry: Obama to Go Cold Turkey

2008-11-17T12:20:00.000-05:00

I shifted to a smart-enough phone from my Kyocera Palm-based smart phone a year or two ago and almost experienced projectile vomiting, shuddering and sweating--and that was just in walking into my local Wireless Toyz store to talk with them about the possibility of a switch.

President-Elect Obama, for security and other reasons, will more than likely need to let the Blackberry go. I wish him luck.. Oh, and a mop and bucket.

Miriam Makeba, Mama Afrika (a tribute)

2008-11-12T19:57:00.010-05:00

I was very small when I first heard Miriam Makeba. I'd come downstairs early one morning to see my mother putting on some music to jam to while cooking, cleaning and doing laundry. Momma danced through the house all day and when I asked her what the songs meant, she said she'd gotten the records from Sophia, a South African student who was studying at Purdue, just across the river. We'd ask her next time we saw her.

Sophia was like nothing and no one I'd ever seen--she was tall (or so she seemed to me at 8), mahogany, had a melodious accent, wore thread and beads in her long hair and was a refugee. Since the 1960's the South African government had been rescinding the visas of traveling students and others. Effectively, she and the others in her little contingent, were exiles.

Sophia brought us Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba. Momma brought Sophia Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis. What an exchange.

Our little house in that newly-integrated neighborhood (that would be us) was filled with people, music and foods from around the world.

Though it was that day I spent with Sophie--she was teaching Momma how to do my hair South-African style (in little semi-rural Lafayette, Indiana!) that I found out what Ms. Makeba was singing about. Her songs were about rural life there. They were about the evils of apartheid. They were about a deep love of Africa...about Zulu life. Sophia would say "here, she's saying 'Momma hurry. Don't let the Afrikaner police catch you!'' and "here she's singing a wedding song. Can you say the letter ! (the symbol for the click)." And my mother would pass her more beads and thread.

Ms. Makeba has suffered greatly before and during her exile. Before leaving South Africa, she and her band mates had been in a terrible accident with another car. The emergency medical personnel only helped the whites. Ms. Makeba's Black South African friends were left to die on the side of the road.

Human road kill.

Years later, she would return to South Africa a heroine. Nelson Mandela persuaded her to return after his release. He wrote this, in part, of her passing.

Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years.
At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us. (read the rest)

So, when I heard that Ms. Makeba died on Monday while singing in Italy, I pushed back my desk chair and listened quietly to the retrospective on her life. And remembered...dancing through Momma's kitchen, singing songs a far away woman had taught me to sing, with beads clicking in my hair.

Kindle Tweets

2008-11-12T17:44:00.004-05:00

...and no, I'm not talking about stale Halloween candy.

But here's a nifty new Kindle trick: Tweeting. I've figured out how to post tweets using my Amazon Kindle (which is relieving the premature curvature of my spine for all the biz books, magazines and HR, OD and brain/behavior journals I was lugging around like a Sherpa). Using the experimental functions, I created a bookmark for twitter and sign in. Then, I just posted as usual.

Circuit City Short-Circuits

2008-11-12T13:11:00.001-05:00

As many of you know, I love technology--the smaller the better. Oh, and pens (mmm, pens...), but I digress. So it should come as no surprise that some of my early dates with Garland, my fabu-hubs, were to Best Buy, Comp USA, Office Depot and the like.

Better than dinner and the movies. Yeah, Garland got off cheap.

So, I hate it when a tech retailer struggles. I also hate it when that bad feeling I have about a business turns out to be right. Circuit City, never a personal fave (and, people get this: I'm pretty catholic in my tech retail tastes...just give me stuff to covet) announced last Wednesday that “it will immediately close and liquidate 155 stores and lay off thousands of employees as it struggles to survive an increasingly dreary holiday shopping season” (read the rest of the WSJ story here).

Circuit City, the nations second-largest electronics retailer assured investors that it won't be closing, but that it “planned to reduce about 17 percent of its domestic work force, and slash operating, payroll and marketing expenses. Circuit City currently operates 721 stores and outlets in the U.S. as well as 770 mostly smaller locations in Canada, and employs roughly 55,000 workers including holiday help.”

I'll say it: Yipes! CC’s PR plate twirlers have got their work cut out for themselves in spinning this as one of those Martha Stewart "good things" in advance of the lucrative holiday shopping season. Second thought, with K-Mart ramping up a "buy lay-away" campaign (Lay-away is something I remember from my childhood...when we were poor) and Wal-Mart expecting banner sales, they may have seen the writing on the wall in choosing to weigh anchor and run.

In a (begin snark) brilliant move (end snark) to cut costs, CEO Philip J. Schoonover, thinking that floor sales in his company was something a trained chimp could do, decided to cut jobs--starting with his most senior, most experienced (read: most expensive) workers, leaving the stores to be operated by demoralized, dispirited, underpaid workers who were waiting for the next axe to fall (they didn't have to wait all that long).

Dumb. No, shortsighted and dumb.

The market's immediate response to the 3,400 employee restructuring? Customer defections due to poor customer service (that was me) with falling earnings for dessert. Here's my question: while Schoonover was making HR policy willy-nilly, where the sweet hell was his Chief HR Officer? This from the Circuit City website:

Mr. Jonas joined the company in 1998 as director of associate relations. He was promoted to assistant vice president of corporate human resources services in 2000, was elected vice president in 2003 and was elected senior vice president in 2004. Prior to joining the company, he was employed by Toys "R" Us, a worldwide retailer of toys, baby products and children's apparel, from 1985 until 1998, including serving in the position of director of human resources for the Babies "R" Us division from 1996 to 1998.

Seems like a skilled enough kind of guy, but what in the name of the Great Pumpkin would have had Schoonover make such a sweeping HR decision, seemingly, without consultation with (and, well, the cooperation of) his top HR pick. This seems to be the issue.

After the early successes of Jack Welch at GE with his Pareto Principle-based rank and yank mandate (the top 10% get raises, the bottom 20% get pink slips and the 70% in the middle get a continued paycheck), CEO's who had never spend so much as a week in the HR trenches began making sweeping HR decisions--decisions based on corporate earnings and not based on human capital management (got to find another term for that). Curiously, no one said a word when, at GE, the people in the middle began leaving in droves taking their knowledge assets with them, worried that the bottom of the barrel was rising fast, and the remaining staffers, fearful of collaborations with team members who could supplant then, began hoarding information and sabotaging one another. Morale is strangely low there and it’s only the high prestige and perks that keep people in the saddle.

HR leaders like the strangely silent Mr. Jonas could do well to smack their Chief Execs on the side of the noggin, yelling "wake up, stupid!" until they get their attention. Then they should point to the business plan and demand how the hairy hell the company is expected to reach those heights when CEO expectations for the HR function are so low. But, aw shucks, you can't be a champion of solid, far-reaching, business-focused people strategy if you're cravenly trying to protect your job.

Here's a home truth: Business plan minus well-trained, confident contributors equals an interesting idea. CEO’s with said interesting ideas should be shortlisted for re-deployment… maybe on the shop floor at Circuit City.

But, I have to say that we, in the HR field, have done this to ourselves. We’ve settled for MBA programs that don’t teach the value of a solid HR function (which includes guardianship, visionary, strategic, operational and tactical elements–not just the tactical), MRHM programs that don’t teach future leaders to scrap for a seat at the table (and one where they aren’t taking notes or arranging the coffee service) and a professional organization, SHRM, that is more worried about building its brand and stuffing its membership coffers than in building the profession in the minds of CEO’s and HR leaders alike.

But, sadly, what’s predictable and almost certain is that around the corner will come another CEO with his six shooter (ammunition: cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut) backed by a simple minded CHRO who will cower to keep his gig.

Great Quote...

2008-10-16T10:48:00.001-04:00

In these times of economic uncertainty, this timeless quote from Architect Frank Lloyd Wright is quite timely....

From my Real Simple Quotes newsletter

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

-Frank Lloyd Wright

Graduation Swag: My Shiny, New Kindle is Siphoning Money Outta My Wallet!

2008-10-14T09:22:00.000-04:00

In a small torrent of graduation swag, I was recently gifted by my family with a Kindle. Glorious! I just checked my poliblog for new action-lots-and have been busy on the Kindle portal lining up books to buy. Now, I could lie and say I was checking out the newest tome on brain behavior or human habits and thinking, but I'm getting the next Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter installment.

Life is completely grand!

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Need a Different Secretary...

2008-10-14T07:55:00.000-04:00

OK. I'm officially back from vaycay. Here's my unofficial secretary editing my most-recent document. It's not the poor typing skills I worry about (her last document was 27 pages of the letter "A" -- it's the attitude problem I find worrisome.

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Productivity 2.0 from Zen Habits

2008-10-13T17:23:00.001-04:00

Productivity 2.0: How the New Rules of Work Are Changing the Game | Zen Habits

For years, books and articles and blogs on productivity have been showing us how to be more productive: crank out the tasks, multi-task, work faster, be organized.

In short, they’ve taught us to be a good part of a corporation that wants more out of us. But that’s old-school productivity, or Productivity 1.0.

Today let’s take a look at Productivity 2.0: a new set of rules have changed everything for the workers of the world. Don’t crank out tasks — learn to work with a deeper focus. Don’t plan and hold meetings and form committees — just launch the software or product or service and keep improving it. Don’t spend time organizing — you’ve got more important things to worry about.

The Economy: A MadLib

2008-10-13T13:29:00.000-04:00

fine.
a nightmarish disgrace.
freakishly good.
magically delicious.

People aren't poorer, they just ___________________ (enter your selection here)

like eating mac and cheese from the box.
were going to downsize their house to a small walk-up apartment anyway.
are giving people--giving blood, that is.
enjoy watching channels 4, 6, 8 and 13 only.
wanted more family time
were looking for leisure time to read books...from the library...after having taken the bus to get there.

Besides, we aren't in a recession. This is better termed a ___________________ (enter your selection here)

time-out for profitability.
stock earnings hiatus.
return to Green Stamps and the Dollar Store.

Credit isn't tight. It's ___________________ (enter your selection here)

being carefully rationed.
a valued token of appreciation for people who can jump on one foot, fill out credit apps, and boil water for Ramen noodles at the same time.
been rendered invisible and clicking your heels and repeating "The economy is sound" will reveal it.
the grand prize for the winner of "Flavor of Love."

See? Isn't that better?

Cross-posted at the American Values Alliance

Brand Analysis for Presidents

2008-10-09T11:14:00.001-04:00

A very good article from AdAge on analyzing audience engagement and loyalty metrics for the presidential campaign.

Just like brands and media, engagement and loyalty metrics can be used to measure presidential candidates. The technique is more accurate than traditional polling because it measures what voters think -- as opposed to what they say they think. Our research shows that there are four drivers that define the "Ideal President" and they are:

Action: Does the candidate have a comprehensive, realistic, well-considered plan for solving the problems facing the country?

Compassion: Does the candidate care about all the people? (A nod and a note to one of our alert readers: Attributes and values approximating liking, bonding to and seeing the candidate as being "someone like me" and "for me" resides in this driver along with concern for people.)

Perception: Does the candidate have a deep understanding of the problems facing the county?

Resolve: Does the candidate have the strength and leadership to guide the country?

the rest is here...

Passikoff: Obama Wins Second Debate 116 to 110 - Advertising Age - Campaign Trail

The mistake many web "designers" still make.

2008-10-08T15:37:00.001-04:00

Making it look pretty for the sake of the current trend or style at the expense of not communicating the clients brand or not being usable at all.

Web Design: On Essence | 8164

“It looks pretty, but I’m not sure if our audience would feel it’s who we are.”

Design Is More Than Packaging - The New York Times

2008-10-07T11:05:00.001-04:00

One of the hardest things to convince clients of is that design is more
than just the pretty skin that is draped over a solution at the end to
make it look pretty. It is more than make-up or aesthetics. Design for
me, is a modus operandi, it is an attitude to problem solving that not
just compliments the scientific approach but it also
fuels the process. "Making it pretty" is not design, never was, never
will be. It's merely putting lipstick on a pig. Making it pretty is the
polar opposite to design thinking.

The first place I learnt design thinking was at the Caribbean School of Architecture. That way of thought is the most valuable skill I have in my lil' arsenal.

not Photoshop,

not Illustrator,

not Indesign or any other program that I know how to use.

The critical thought required to creatively solve a problem or to
deliver new ideas takes a whole lot more than pushing pixels. Disecting
a brief, distilling the elements and desiging an appropriate response
begins long before I fire up my tool of choice on the computer. The NY
Times article makes excellent points on the design thinking approach and
it's place in the workplace. Good to see that this is finally, truly,
hitting the main stream media.

Unboxed - Design Is More Than Packaging - NYTimes.com

“Design thinking is inherently about creating new choices, about divergence,” says Tim Brown, the chief executive and president of the design consulting firm IDEO, based in Palo Alto, Calif. “Most business processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives. Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then differentiation is tough. In order to innovate, we have to have new alternatives and new solutions to problems, and that is what design can do.”

Unions Want Congressional Pension Protections

2008-09-26T02:58:00.002-04:00

The financial bailout of the financial markets, a Hail Mary play to be sure, may cost US taxpayers in excess of $700 billion. That's about $2,500 McDonald's apple pies per American as one late night funster commented. It's also about 220 Rolexes or 175 Prada bags (I need to go shopping).

Already organized labor is positioning itself. Instead of wanting a piece of the $700 billion pie, it wants Congress to add money to the pot to protect employee pensions.

Jimmy Hoffa, Jr's Teamsters Union, which boasts over 200,000 retirees, fired off a missive to Congress this week asking for money to bail out union pension funds which were negatively impacted by losses in the investments that backed those pension funds. If one considers that most pension funds for large-scale employers rake in about 7% from their investments, the fact that these funds have been getting spanked in the markets is a terrifying thought to retirees, let alone active employees. What the Teamsters and other union want is for the government to skip the penalties they would normally impose on employers whose pension fund management decisions preclude their pensions from paying out as promised. Instead, they ask the Feds to give thees employers extra time to make up the shortfall cause by their tanked investments.

Teamsters and other unions also support limits on executive pay. But that's another post.

There's nothing there

2008-09-19T12:03:00.001-04:00

John Gruber writes the most insightful piece on Microsoft's new campaign, but most specifically what has been, and I agree, a fatal misstep.

Daring Fireball: There's Nothing There

The problem Microsoft faces today is that they have nothing to hang their brand on. Windows is Windows, so colossal it exists in its own orbit. (If anything, the problem Microsoft faces with Windows is the problem Apple faced a decade ago with the Mac, where the product seemed bigger and more important than the company that made it.) The consensus opinion regarding Vista is that it’s a massive six-years-in-the-making dud. Office is Office. Oh boy, spreadsheets and PowerPoint.

Are you a gatekeeper or a gatejumper

2008-09-17T00:09:00.001-04:00

Today, right now, in your business, are you a gatekeeper or a gatejumper. You must answer this question. The future of your business depends on it.

In writing Trust Agents, my book with Julien Smith,
we’ve started to realize six major traits that define a trust agent.
Part of what we’ve noticed through researching the concept is that
trust agents quite often make their own game. What do we mean? Consider
traditional mainstream businesses. They are the gatekeepers of what we
consider the standard, the typical, the recognized. It’s really easy to
look at this when you consider various media properties and their
online upstart counterparts. To that end, I’m going to start a list,
and I was hoping you’d be inspired to add your thoughts and ideas to
it. Maybe I’ll even go back and edit your ideas from the comments into
the main post. read more

Willing Slaves, Pretending to Have it All

2008-09-16T00:49:00.004-04:00

I was recently asked to weigh in on the topic of "women having it all."

What, of course, is triggering the increased interest we're seeing on the topic of "work-life balance" (don't get me started) is Sarah Palin's entry into the political race and her purposeful political branding as a "hockey mom" with five kidlings, a hubster and a full-time job.

I have to admit: I had to corral my gag reflex.

I'm often asked, as a speaker, to address this issue. So here's a little of the less "cleaned-up" version of my thinking on the topic.

We are--men and women both--on a treadmill in the workplace, trying to jam more into the average day than our forebears crammed into the average week. We’re information glutted with more raw data in the Sunday New York Times than was accessible in the entire lifetime of a person living just a hundred years ago. On the home front, the advances in technology that were supposed to shave significant time off our weekly chores have us now doing more housework than our great (and sometimes great-great) grandmothers. Voicemail, PDA’s, email and the like have allows work to leave a greater and greater footprint on our personal time.

And things--important things--are dropping out.

I heard from one friend--a man with a demanding job (really, a job he allowed to become demanding) answered his email on his PDA that one last time and his lady love...a truly spectacular and gentle human being, spiked the offending tech. Two points! She'd had enough of being a WINO ("wife in name only"). He was Missing in Action.

How We Got Here
In the late 18th and throughout the 19th, the aim of industrialization was to shift the largely agrarian workforce into wage laborers. Expanding on the need to produce which stemmed, in part from the Protestant work ethic (combined with the notion of Salvation by Works), this great project combined fear of God with fear of want. Wages were kept purposely low to ensure that workers returned the next day.

A class of Willing Slaves was created.

During the next several decades, workers began to revolt over long hours, dangerous working conditions and child labor. Days shrank to 10 hours and then 8, children as young as six were prohibited from work, locked doors (to prevent those slacking workers from hieing-off) were unlocked. Trade unions were formed to negotiate for better pay, benefits and working conditions and employment laws were passed to eliminate—at least in the sphere of public policy—the codified ill-treatment of workers.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, a non-agrarian, family was able to live relatively well on one salary and it became easier to acquire a house and car. These children of the Traditionalists (people born between 1925 and 1945) were the leading edge of the working Baby Boomers and, because of the post-war boom, were in high demand.

Fast forward to the 1970’s and it starts getting very unpleasant. Inflation mushroomed, gas prices exploded and so did the work week. Between 1977 and 1997, the workweek expanded by over 8% (43.6 hours to 47.1 hours a week on average). A 70 hour work week became de rigueur.

At the same time, anti-discrimination laws began to address gender and pregnancy discrimination. Good thing. Because of inflation, the single worker salary was just not enough to cover expenses or sock away a little extra for education or retirement.

In the mid-1980’s the term “work-life balance” emerged to describe the separation (or lack thereof) between work and home. This generation was dubbed the “Me Generation,” called “yuppies” or “yummies” (young, upwardly mobile professionals), “buppies” (Black upwardly-mobile professionals), or members of the “Age of Isolation.” Latchkey and shuttle cock kids were found to have increased attention deficits (over-stimulated and exhausted) and poorer diets. Our kids are getting fatter and (can I say it plainly) dumber.

And a new industry was born.

What concerns me in the discussion of work-life balance is that there seems to be little concern with whether the work we’re trying to balance is important. Sure, moving things from one side of the desk to the other in a particular workday and schlepping the kidlets to soccer/swim/tap/tai-kwon-jitsu seems laudable, but it that what’s really important? Oh, yeah, and can we make all of that work without factoring out personal happiness and satisfaction.

Talking with a group of women, I heard many explain that they had to sacrifice for their children. Why then, I asked, was it only women that are heard having that conversation? There are a few home truths to consider here:

Can women continue to do it all? Honestly, no. Our personal Kryptonite? "Bad mother/Bad housekeeper/Bad cook/Bad (fill in the blank)"—these words can stop a powerful woman at 50 yards. Rather than determining whether we’re doing the right things, we go like little "doing bots," hauling kids on endless expeditions to every social, sporting and school event imaginable; being the first one called when a younger (or elder) family member hits the skids; doing all the laundry/shopping/cooking/planning...and trying to do it all perfectly (if we don't just give up in despair).
While in doing-bot mode, we inadvertently (and almost unconsciously) teach our daughters that a woman's life is sacrifice and suffering. Just recently, a 14 year-old girl I met, in discussing harried her mother, vowed “I’ll never have children.”
Can men still have it all without women to take up most of the slack? I don't think so. Sad truth on this one...we, as women (the first educators of children) teach future generations of men what to expect from the women in their lives and teach future generations of women how to be those women...such that those expectations fall beneath their—and our—notice (like the air and the grass). If I had a buck for every woman I’ve ever heard who said “I wish I had a wife,” I could buy a Starbucks!
At the same time, I'd like to recognize what a treadmill it can be for men who would rather gnaw off a limb than not "provide for the family"--how that can drive them into being little "doing bots" in their own right.

What Does it Take to Have it All

“Having it all,” as defined by others, takes a whole lot of support.

What I don’t think we’re focusing on is whether people are doing work that matters or that’s workable. As the workday gets filled with ass-covering email tracking, cryptic voicemail deciphering, endless meetings (to “report in” to micromanaging bosses who are poorly deployed), we find ourselves doing less “real work”—work that fulfills strategic intentions and desired outcomes.

When asked “can you really get your two kids to all those events,” I’ve never heard a woman who has been able to say a clean “no—it’s not feasible” or ‘no, that’s too much for a school night” even though that’s their persistent complaint.

Leaders must be selected, placed and trained to better plan, support and counsel, becoming champions of their workers, committed to blasting barriers and garnering needed resources. They must be challenged to be better workload planners, using their prowess to determine how to best use people to fulfill on business strategy—rather than becoming experts at moving piles around. At the same time, in our families, we have to be more focused in the “bigger game” managing our overarching aims: a happy, satisfying family life; personal satisfaction and personal growth and health, well-developed children who can function well in society without becoming time, energy or emotional vampires.

My 2c on 9/11

2008-09-11T23:03:00.001-04:00

Felisa does not cry easily. When those planes struck those buildings in New York seven years ago it was only the second time in the two years we were together that I saw her cry. That was when the enormity of the attack hit me like a ton of bricks. I said to my self...this is going to change the course of history in a massive way.

The enormity of this act I think is even more incredible because of the physical scar it has left on New York City. As I watched Obama and McCain descend into this void of pain and nothingness I could not help but think of shrieks, and screams, bodies hitting the ground falling from over a quarter mile above ground. It was the most surreal day of my life. Everybody says it....

It was like watching a movie....

Now that the day is almost passed and I have soaked up quite a bit of the coverage I have a better perspective on things. The fear has dissipated somewhat and a new war rages thousands of miles away. Whether or not this war should have been waged, whether or not Saddam Hussein should have been removed from power, there are many, many families that miss a Mother, a Father, a Brother, a Sister.

Tonight that absence is felt like cold concrete against bare flesh. The absence of warmth in this world takes many a life and it makes many a life difficult to bear.

In the memory of those that died, may we be the presence of warmth in someone's life every day. I know this may sound sappy to many people. ---BUT--- May we honor the those that were snuffed out on September 11th 2001 by being the smile on a cold Monday morning, opening a door for a stranger, helping in little unseen ways. Submitting self to the greater good. Let us honor the absence of over 3,000 people by being the presence of love.

- yjtw

Ubiquity is HUGE!!!

2008-08-27T02:00:00.001-04:00

Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San
Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to
include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message
composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site,
searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally
copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar
sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and
pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really
sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.

It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.

Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of
the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are left
trundling between web sites, performing common tasks resulting in
frustration and wasted time.

Enter Ubiquity

The New TechCrunch!

2008-08-27T01:46:00.001-04:00

Loving the new clean look of TechCrunch.com for all the hoopabaloo that happened with his last design. I am not sure I liked it too much. For me what makes a site design memorable and appropriate is simply this.

If you were to take away text, would you know that this is a site about the business of technology. Seriously. Ask yourself that question. Design is not subjective my friends, design should be honest and true to the task @ hand.

How Puma Missed the Marketing Boat with Usain Bolt

2008-08-25T09:51:00.003-04:00

As Michael Phelps continued to win one gold medal after another before breaking the world record and taking home eight, Speedo and Visa were by his side capitalizing on all the free publicity for its brand. Even Nike turned the injury of China's hurdler Liu Xiang into a marketing opportunity by releasing an ad affirming the company would stand by its endorser. So what did Puma — a sportswear brand focused on speed and style — do when Jamaica's Usain Bolt became the fastest man alive?

Absolutely nothing.

continued

Monday Morning Melodies -- Adam and the Ants

2008-08-19T00:16:00.002-04:00

I've got 11 days left on this Master's Degree. So, to start the final crunch, here's some old school, punk style.

"Ant Music" -- an all-time fave.

Millennium Modules

2008-08-12T09:33:00.001-04:00

Millennium System Configurations
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Millennium System Configurations

2008-08-12T08:47:00.001-04:00

Millennium System Configurations
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Monday Morning Melodies -- Tribute to Isaac Hayes

2008-08-11T07:00:00.000-04:00

This week isn't starting off well. First, it was Bernie Mac and now we find that we've lost Isaac Hayes. He died Sunday afteroon after collapsing in his home.

Mr. Hayes was known for his sulty baritone, smoking orchestration and driving beats on such tunes as "The Theme from Shaft."

Here's a sample of what made him great.

Travel safely home, Black Moses. We'll see you on the other side.

Is the Brain "Plastic" and What Does that Have to Do with Business?

2008-08-05T10:54:00.003-04:00

Several months ago, I tapped out an article on change that mentioned the concept of neuroplasticity: that an injured brain can repair itself or re-map itself to regain or enhance thinking and brain function. Long the bailiwick of neuroscientists, this ability of the brain to generate surprising shifts in learning, thinking and acting, is now the province of business leaders and those who support them. A couple of books, The Brain That Changes Itself and The Mind and the Brain, both written by experts in the brain function/behavior game, discuss leaps in human capacity that are setting the world of brain science on its ear--blind children in India who are learning to see, deaf children and adults who are regaining capacities to hear that are challenging the notion of congenital deafness, people with hemispheric lobectomies (half their brains removed due to disease or injury) who are operating with minimal deficiencies in physical or mental ability.

Our "hardwiring" is more malleable than once thought.

Why this is an important consideration in business is that we've been taught that diminished brain function is a "given" as we age, that older generations are more "set in their ways" and that there's little we can do about any of it...that we're wired to resist change.

Perhaps not.

In business, I see people slavishly doing what they did before, producing diminished results over time. One maxim I operate under (rather than the mistaken belief that people who can't change simply don't want to) which tends to be a "truism" is that an early, long-standing history of success is the greatest predictor of failure in an instance requiring change. Starbucks kept doing what used to work, long after there was clear evidence that the wheels were falling off. We continued to buy and operate larger, less efficient cars long after it was clear that the price of a gallon of gas was never going to see a buck again. Why? Because it used to work so brilliantly. There was a dictinct payoff.

Harvard professor of psychology, Ellen Langer, in her book Mindfulness, laid it out pretty simply: mindfulness--good...mindless--bad. Looking through the prism of business: Operating on "autopilot" in our businesses and our lives can prevent us from seeing opportunities to shift before our mindless behavior leads us deeper into the weeds (where the crocodiles lurk). Her book, like the other two I mentioned earlier in thi blog post, can be dense reads, but are worth it to begin to understand that we're not in a battle just with our competitors: We're at war with ourselves.

Not My Fault. Oh?

2008-07-30T21:36:00.000-04:00

We've all heard this sorry chorus (and if we put on our Big Boy/Big Girl duds, we can admit that we've even said things like this):

That's wasn't my job
The customer didn't get me the information I needed
I was drunk, but I wasn't the cause of the accident
My hard-drive failed
I have a slow metabolism
It was the traffic
It wasn't me.

We belong to a culture of decreasing accountability.

That's why this episode of This American Life stopped me from my Saturday night's reading. When he was 18 years old, Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and More Than It Hurts You, killed a girl. He was driving--sober and straight--along a highway when she swerved her bicycle into the path of his car. There was nothing he could do to save her. He describes his "stomach-turning" behavior at points where he was more concerned about himself--how he might appear--than about the girl the car he was driving struck.

While there was nothing he could have done, Darin's story repeats this refrain: "the girl I killed." He's clear that, while her bike turned crisply into his lane, he was piloting the car that intersected with her and her bike. He was responsible, as the instrument of her death.

Life has become about "who did it" and "who's to blame," with biz owners, executives, sales reps, technicians, husbands, politician, and children taking sometimes draconian steps to avoid blame...or, better, to shift it to someone else. Jack Welch was lionized as a "genius" for his competitive stance "Be first or second in the market or begone." The detritus of Jack Welch's turn at the GE rudder gave us "rank and yank," an "HR system" based on the Vitality Curve wherein the top 20% get raises and promotions, the bottom 10% get the door and the middle 70% get to keep their jobs. To keep your job, one would have to be either in the first or second ranking. Those on the third rung are dispatched, regardless of their contributions. After several iterations, GE professional and execs, speaking privately, of course, have said that the chorus of "it wasn't me" is deafening, as people struggle to look better than their neighbor as the strongest players in the industry compete with their equally-stellar peers. The workplace culture has become increasingly toxic, with less collaboration, sharing of knowledge assets and mentoring? Who would want to be mentored if that mentor could "turn state's evidence" and become party to one's termination. HR staffers, under Welch's system, were reduced to ranch hands who conducted the annual culling.

I remember a course I took some years ago that served up a brutal take on responsibility. "Responsibility," they said "begins with being 'cause in the matter' of one's life." Here's the entire quote:

Responsibility begins with the willingness to be cause in the matter of one's life. Ultimately, it is a context from which one chooses to live. Responsibility is not burden, fault, praise, blame, credit, shame or guilt. In responsibility, there is no evaluation of good or bad, right or wrong. There is simply what's so, and your stand. Being responsible starts with the willingness to deal with a situation from the view of life that you are the generator of what you do, what you have and what you are. That is not the truth. It is a place to stand. No one can make you responsible, nor can you impose responsibility on another. It is a grace you give yourself - an empowering context that leaves you with a say in the matter of life.
-Werner Erhard

Claim no responsibility? You're a victim and have admitted that there's nothing that can be done.

Rubbish.

As a result of my participation in this program (drank the Kool-Ade as with a protein shot), I don't offer excuses--really stylized cover-ups--which are about me rather than a sincere apology and offer to make it right, which is about the person I'd fallen short with. No one has ever cared about my excuses and--here's the money shot--most of those excuses could have been avoided.

Not your job? Tell the boss that there's a gap in the job design rather than letting it be a surprise.
Missing customer info? Tell them so and that you won't be able to get then what they need in a timely way
Drunk and talking to the police? Suck it up and blow, hard, into the Breathalyzer
Hard-drive failure? Set up that backup you've been talking about and pretending wasn't a priority
Got a slow metabolism? Move!
Heavy traffic and you've got a meeting? Leave earlier. Most of us in Indy know where the trouble spots are on I465. Traffic is just an excuse.
Not you? Who else, then?

In an instance I got to hear a leader take responsibility back. Their company had deleted my text messaging ability, then my picture messaging, and finally -- Poof! -- there went my ability to make phone calls. After serveral calls, several reps and several hours, it was finally corrected. Then, I got a call from those people's manager. He had listened to recordings of the calls I'd made and was completely chagrinned: "That's not the kind of service we're committed to." He said, baldly, "We dropped the ball and sucked up a whole lot of your time" and promised to retrain his staff and to credit my plan for the days of lost service.

I was so stunned I couldn't speak.

Full Episode: Darin's piece is about 9 1/2 minutes into it.

There Are Things Bigger than Us All

2008-07-29T11:17:00.003-04:00

I saw this and couldn't stop weeping at the love and faith of these men and this big cat.

This is just right on so many levels.

Notes from the Productivity Industrial Complex

2008-07-28T22:11:00.005-04:00

My friend, Nwokedi, suggested I read this (below). Like the diversity workshops that were legion during the 80's and 90's, productivity discussions tend to focus on what's in the best interest of companies and not in the best interest of people. To take a deeper cut at that, they tend to focus on "getting things done" but not as much on "getting the right things done." Even the Covey workshops. the self-appointed Gold Standard of the Productivity Industrial Complex, doesn't have much to say about how a lowly employee, having happily sorted their tasks into A, B and C priorities, can prevail upon their leader to moving the C items off everyone's list. As workplaces continue to contract, workers are doing more, but very little job redesign is happening.

I’ll include my thoughts inline with the quoted text:

Alternative Productivity’s Tenets (David Allen):

“Productivity” is an Industrial Era economics term that applies to factories, machines, and economies. When applied to people it often has a dehumanizing effect and negates both individual differences and unique talents.

Lalita: Amen. I found myself concerned about the entire concept of "productivity." As an economic term, it refers to a ratio of outputs to inputs, like labor productivity as the relationship between results and the work that went into their creation. People aren’t machines and even a machine can’t simply be tasked to produce more without looking at upstream and down stream inputs and outputs as well as system capabilities. We are more concerned with equipment failure from being over-stressed than we are about burning out people.
If your productivity increases, but your pay stays the same, then you’re effectively taking a pay cut (same goes if you begin working longer hours for the same pay).

Lalita: This is a conversation I have with consultants constantly. One bragged to me about his hourly rate. When I asked him to calculate how many hours he was working this billing cycle and how much money he was getting, he quietly began scribbling (“I’ll show you.”). You can’t imagine the look of horror on his face when he figured out that his effective hourly rate was one-fifth his rack rate. We had a long talk that afternoon that shifted his world.
The 40-hour work week hasn’t changed since 1940 and is ridiculously outdated.
If you’re consistently having trouble focusing, it’s often because you’re focusing on the wrong things (i.e. things you’re not passionate about or things that aren’t best suited to your skillset).

Lalita: Trouble focusing may be a symptom of memory erosion as our plates get more and more full. People today have access, in one issue of the New York Times, to more information than was available to the average human being in an entire lifetime just a century ago. As hoards of new information are being fed in, other information is organized for long-term storage--even if that information is needed for short-term, immediate use. Add in stress, which has been proven to reduce retention and attentiveness, and it gets even...um, I forgot what I was writing about....*

Frankly, we aren’t experiencing a focus deficit: we’re experiencing too much garbage on the plate with little leadership support to move it to the trash where it belongs.
Increased productivity should equal less time on the job. If you’re getting more done, you should get more vacation time.

Lalita: Not sure how this follows as employers are able to set up, within legally-prescribed limits, any kind of work rules they choose. Besides, there is an important external driver pressuring leaders to produce more: stockholders. These “owners” are interested in one thing and than it increased revenue for their investment. Few leaders at the C-Suite level are willing to buck their boards or say “No mas” at stockholders’ meetings where initiatives are being put forth that will impact the footprint the job takes up in a worker’s life.
Most best-selling productivity gurus are working in the interests of large corporations and often advocate values and approaches that are not in the best interests of individuals.

Lalita: Working in the best interests of companies? Not if these productivity gurus aren't tying their programs to retention. As people run out of bandwidth, they leave. In droves. Over a decade ago, HR strategists started seeing an increasing trend for “downshifting” where career climbers chose to shift career tracks to paths that would allow for more time to engage in other pursuits (see how I didn’t say “work/life balance”—a term I despise...but that’s another post).

A rule of thumb for calculating the cost of turnover is to take an employee's salary and divide it by 30%. That, very roughly, is base cost of turnover for that one position. Add in a recruiter’s fee or executive signing bonuses, stock options or Golden Parachutes (like a prenupt for the C-Suite set) and the percentage continues to climb. In addition, it can take months for a newly-placed staffer to gain proficiency in a new corporate and departmental cultures and the expectations of the job.

Then there’s the matter of proof. Most productivity workshops have never been vetted for validity (measures the right things) and reliability (measures consistently over time). They "work" simply because the guru has collected anecdotal information from participants that says so.

Just a tad self-referential, no?
Increased productivity should result in greater carefree time, more vacations, and more time away from work. Most of the time, however, it does not.
We are living in a time and place that is more “productive” than ever before, but high levels of productivity aren’t making us any happier.

Lalita: Please. “Productive” is not the same as “effective.” You can be doing a lot of things, but not the right things.

You and I both know people who, during meetings, answer phone calls and respond to or send emails. By not focusing on the people in front of them, meeting durations balloon as topics are started and stopped over and over again. In addition, there’s the little matter of credibility. Doing everything else at a meeting but conducting the meeting is seen as incredibly rude, impacting future promotional opportunities and damaging key relationships.

Measures of effectiveness can easily been found in most process improvement initiatives with a clearly-defined outcome stated in advance and work to reduce variation around that stated goal. Not so in productivity workshops, which tend to operate at the tactical level rather than the strategic.
Productivity should be designed around our lives, not the other way around.

Lalita: Productivity should be designed around systems of increased effectiveness inside a value chain which should connect to desired outcomes which should connect to the strategic mission of the department, the business unit and the company.
The workforce is laboring for more hours and for less pay, taking fewer vacations, and generally burning out.

Lalita: Yup. In another entry I scribed, I detailed the differences in vacation for the major developed nations. The US leads the pack of industrialized nations in the lack of vacation time: That’s less than France, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Japan and Canada. A whopping 26% of US workers take no vacation at all. Many who do, spend more time with their Blackberrys than they do their families, fearing that if they’re too disconnected (1) people will figure out that they’re expendable and (2) the workload when they return will be insurmountable.
The best way to increase productivity is often to quit a lot of things.

Lalita: Good idea, but most leaders are unwilling to insist on job re-design or to challenge their leaders on the best use of their staffers’ time.
Productivity often poses as the self-development genre but it is not. Self-development and productivity are two very different things. What is best for us as individuals is often bad for productivity.

Lalita: Huh? People development and the resulting impacts on productivity are connected.
The societally scripted routes to success via productivity are failing us.
Products marketed towards busy people (e.g. “Productivity for Busy People,” “Cooking for Busy People,” etc.) only serve to reinforce the problem and often glamorize, excuse, and support the unnecessarily busy life and cult of hyper-efficiency.

Lalita: Is there really something “sexy” about scurrying about like a rat in a maze? Really? Telegraphing that you can't get meaningful work done in a humane way is glamouous? Indeed.
Hacks, tweaks, tricks, etc. have emerged from a productivity hobbyist culture, are largely insufficient at solving bigger life problems, and often do not increase productivity. These hacks etc. are vestiges of the largely "techie" demographic of the early (but self-reinforcing) blogosphere.
Early to bed, early to rise does not necessarily lead to greater productivity. Contrary to several blog posts advocating early rising as a means to greater productivity, the practice of early rising can actually be harmful.

Lalita: Cookie-cutter fixes assume that we’re all the same and have the same requirements. Not so. I get some of my best writing done late at night. Telling me to go to bed at 10 would have me running out the door with my hair on fire. However, an early bird who’s staying up late, can benefit from supports to get to bed at their earlier bedtime.

In a conversation with a fledgeling business owner, he asked me my opinion about something his "coach" (a marketing consultant who had decided--damn the skillset--to hang out a shingle as a business coach) had said. "Lalita, he told me to play business development CD's in my car while I'm driving." When I asked him what he really liked to do while driving he said "Listen to music." Guess what I told him to do? And I'm looking for his "coach" to suggest he stop treating his clients like they're all him.
More technology often leads to decreased productivity.
Hyper-focusing on productivity often gets in the way of the messy, circuitous, and discursive routes of personal development.
When most people speak of productivity in the office, they’re usually speaking about a specific kind of productivity: cubical-land, desk-job, information-worker productivity. The methods used to produce this kind of productivity often do not generalize to other contexts.
No productivity system can put you in a zen like, meditative, or mind like water state. A calm, focused, and meditative mind leads to greater productivity, but productivity systems cannot create a mind like water.
Too much productivity can turn you into a real tool.
Massive value creation often happens during times when no work is ostensibly being accomplished and productivity levels are ostensibly nil.
What makes people productive varies considerably from person to person.

Lalita: Huzzah! Truer words have not been written. Task -related productivity is the "booby prize." Figuring out the right things to do and then getting the barriers out of the way so we can focus on the most effective ways of doing those things--that's the juicy cherry.
Productivity is often a necessary evil: if you dislike your job, you’re going to need a water-tight productivity system in place to keep you on task.
Productivity should be designed around lives, not the other way around.

Randy Pausch, Author of "The Last Lecture," Has Died at 47

2008-07-25T16:46:00.000-04:00

Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science died today of pancreatic cancer at 47. He died in Virginia, having insisted on moving so that his wife and children could be closer to beloved family members after his death.

His academic achievements are many--he was co-founder with Don Marinelli, of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center and started the Building Virtual World course which he taught for a decade. He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow and did sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts. He authored or co-authored five books, including the book, The Last Lecture; over 70 articles and was the founder of the Alice software project. He topped the list of the World's Top-100 Most Influential People (Time magazine).

Aside from his academic credentials, his relationship with his wife, Jai, and his children, his other crowning achievement was his entry for Carnegie Mellon's Last Lecture series, "Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." In August, 2006, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a mean-spirited disease that is both pitiless and merciless as it eats up the life of the person afflicted with it. By August, 2007, he was told that it had mestastisized and that his time was short. Instead of putting his affairs in order and going on his last vacation, he went to the classroom. Here's his lecture.

Watch it, get your hands on the book, plaster on a broad smile about the beauty of your dreams and then get to work.

Some of my fave nuggets from The Last Lecture:

"The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They are there to stop the OTHER people!" — from The Last Lecture
"...when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody's bothering you to tell you anymore, that's a very bad place to be. Your critics are the ones telling you they still love you and care." — from The Last Lecture
"Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted." — from The Last Lecture
"It's not about how to achieve your dreams, it's all about leading your life. If you lead your life in a right way, karma will take care of itself. And dreams will come to you." — from The Last Lecture
"We're not going to talk about spirituality and religion. Although I will tell you that I have experienced a deathbed conversion. I just bought a Macintosh." — from The Last Lecture
We cannot change the card we are dealt, just how we play the hand." from The Last Lecture

Starbucks to Shutter 600 Stores. Is "Your" Fave on the List?

2008-07-20T14:26:00.002-04:00

In a cost saving move, Starbucks is shuttering 600 stores (click here for the national list), with job losses totaling in excess of 12,000. Long the ubiquitous coffee retailer, the java giant has noted that (1) McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts has been "eating their lunch" winning coffee tastings and now offering free wifi and confortable louges and (2) the retailer is no longer "special" with the now-jettisoned breakfast sandwiches, increasingly dirty stores, inconsistent brew and stores on every corner. In an effort to getting back to its core business and core market, returning Starbucks head roaster, Howard Schultz, has high hopes for the newly-reengineered, post-closure chain.

I'm sure that this is not the only changes the coffee retailer will be making in the near term. After the beans settle, I'm certain there will be other store closures. What has long bothered me about $tarbuck$ is that it says it is "really selling an experience." OK, but in truth they're using the Walgreens hedgehog (read Good to Great for an explanation) of ubiquity--being everywhere. Hell with the experience. Me? I would have closed those stores in Targets--the ones next to the pizza stands and bedraggle stoppers--and any other location that didn't have the customer feel "special." Because in not doing so, McDonald's, which is now offering free Wifi and cafe lounges, will continue to eat up their market share.

Just as an interesting point of reference, LA lost only two stores to my home city's (Indianapolis) seven, three are stopping operations in Sacramento and a whopping 10 in San Diego. Makes me wonder which set of miscreants was asleep at the switch to have green-lighted the opening of so many stores past the saturation point, particularly in overly-caffeinated San Diego. Even a fouth grader could look at market trends and see that Starbucks had been in trouble for quite some time--that market share would drop off the moment a cuppa joe cost more than a gallon of gas. Hope they get their marching papers soon.

As many of you know, I'm not a fan of RIF's as a way to "clean up" bad business decisions. As an executive coach focusing on business and people strategy, I know that workforce reductions should be the last resort after having made careful decisions along the way. You wouldn't want a doc who was amputation-happy, now would you? Didn't think so. Neither would one want company leaders who, ignoring reports of organizational "pain" (increased competition, declining revenues, changes in purchasing patterns), opt to make workforce cuts to clean up their messes without working to ensure that they've gotten to the root of the malaise.

Oh and promise not to cry if you see your store on the list.

Cross-posted at Smaller Indiana and American Values Alliance

Rush Appears on The Colbert Report. Lalita Dies in Peace

2008-07-17T06:55:00.000-04:00

Gerck! Thud. So this is what heaven looks like. Awfully quiet.

OK, so I'm not dead, exactly. But I am pretty blissful. After waiting patiently (not really) for most of the week, I got to see Rush perform for the first time on television in 30 years on The Colbert Report.

Love this group. Their cataloge of songs and amazing wall of sound perforances have them ranked fifth behind The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Kiss and Aerosmith in most consecutive gold and platinum albums by a rock band. They performed Tom Sawyer (here's an earlier version). Had it been Free Will, I might have melted into a puddle with a few smouldering dreadlocks on top.

Here are the lyrics to this song, written over two decades ago. Almost prescient as it contrasts who a boy is perceived to be and who he actually is. People I meet tell me that, in their business dealings, they're not who they "really are." I have to ask them, when are you going to give that up and just "do you?"

Tom Sawyer
A modern-day warrior
Mean mean stride,
Today's Tom Sawyer
Mean mean pride.

Though his mind is not for rent,
Don't put him down as arrogant.
His reserve, a quiet defense,
Riding out the day's events.
The river

And what you say about his company
Is what you say about society.
Catch the mist, catch the myth
Catch the mystery, catch the drift.

The world is, the world is,
Love and life are deep,
Maybe as his eyes are wide.

Today's Tom Sawyer,
He gets high on you,
And the space he invades
He gets by on you.

No, his mind is not for rent
To any god or government.
Always hopeful, yet discontent,
He knows changes aren't permanent,
But change is.

And what you say about his company
Is what you say about society.
Catch the witness, catch the wit,
Catch the spirit, catch the spit.

The world is, the world is,
Love and life are deep,
Maybe as his skies are wide.

Exit the warrior,
Today's Tom Sawyer,
He gets high on you,
And the energy you trade,
He gets right on to the friction of the day

What the Auto Industry Can Learn From Apple

2008-07-16T11:32:00.001-04:00


David Murphy

Like hundreds of thousands of people across the country, I stood in
line last weekend at the Apple Store in Newport Beach, Calif., to buy
the new iPhone 3G for my daughter after three unsuccessful attempts at
nearby AT&T stores.

Witnessing this exuberant demand for a new product made me
wonder if this feat could be repeated in other categories, such as the
auto business. What would an automaker have to do to seduce consumers
to stand in line to buy a hot new car? Here are some lessons from the
iPhone:

read more at Ad Age

GM CEO Promises to Restructure to Improve Company for the Long Haul. I Hope He Means It.

2008-07-15T07:34:00.001-04:00

This morning on NPR, I heard a report from GM CEO, Rick Wagoner. GM is restructuring to try to react to tightening market conditions. Last month, the auto manufacturer announced that it was shuttering 4 assembly plants and selling off or retiring many of its truck divisions including the Hummer brand. Today, they announced that they are trying to generate over $10 BB US through cost-cutting measures that include a 20% reduction in its 40,000-strong salaried workforce and the dramatic scaling back of salaried retiree healthcare benefits.

Wagoner admitted to trying to move the company into a position where it could do more than survive the current economic downturn (though this was an immediate and tantamount concern). He also discussed wanting to position the company (through RIFs and other cost-saving measures) so that it could move quickly and decisively when conditions began showing signs of improvement. This last bit was what struck me from the interview. Given the fact that the downturn coincided with the emerging move to cap greenhouse gases and reduce the proliferation of “petrol pigs,” Wagoner was right to want to use this unfortunate time on our economic landscape to advance the company.

You can listen to the report here. You can also go to the main link (if the one provided doesn’t open up the report).

The Happenning.....

2008-07-11T13:06:00.001-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen....it's finally happening.

Analysts Say Apple's Disciplined Marketing Is Behind Trend, not Just Vista 'Debacle'

Wonder If He Got a Gold Pen (or a gold mine): Bill Gates Retires from Microsoft

2008-06-27T15:50:00.007-04:00

Today marks Bill Gates' last day in his office digs at Microsoft. And while he will continue on as advisor and Board Convener (if we can add EVOO to the lexicon because Rachael Frelling Ray uses it over an over and over, we can come up with gender-neutral language), he'll focus his energies on his foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

A Computer in Every Home

Gates et al (see the picture of the original 11 Microsoft employees) didn't create the personal computer. However, their efforts were energized by their commitment to have a PC in every home. Mr. Gates wanted to facilitate communication between computers so that they spoke a common language and could easily pass information from one computer to another. Decades later, this vision helped to inspire MIT's One Laptop Per Child project, which seeks to put a computer into the hands of the world's poorest children (see Seymour Papert's groundbreaking Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas).

The Evil Empire
Not so happily, Microsoft was involved in one of the largest anti-trust suits in the nation for its anti-competitive and exclusionary practices. In May 1998, the U.S. Justice Department charged Microsoft with having operating practices that helped it maintain its monopoly in personal computer operating systems and Internet browsing software. This from NPR:

"The evidence presented in court today demonstrates that Microsoft used its
massive monopoly power to harm competition and to harm consumers," said Joel
Klein, head of the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, outlining the
government's case against the company in 1998.

In the HR world, Microsoft's use of its own recently-downsized staffers to return immediately to work...and do exactly what they'd been doing before, working in temp roles indefinitely, gave us a new term--"Permatemp"--and had HR departments scrambling to create policies to routinely release temps before they set down roots (or expectations) and limit their opportunities for direct hire.

Bill's Second Life

While he's ramping down from his former day job at Microsoft, Mr. Gates will shift his efforts so that he will be spending only one day a week at MS and the bulk of the rest of his time at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on eradicating poverty, illiteracy and diseases such as TB and malaria. And having traveled and consulted in malaria and AIDS riddled parts of southern Africa, I can tell you this: Maslow was right when he said that higher order needs become subsumed by efforts to handle lower order, hide-bound safety needs.

Africa and other parts of the developing world will simply not be able to add their unique contributions to the world if the people have to keep burying their children.

For all the promise and challenge of Mr. Gates' tenure at the helm of Microsoft, his has been a story of vision and passion.

Absolutely brilliant!

2008-06-26T10:00:00.002-04:00

One thing I like about Dyson is his age...it's very good to see more baby boomers in the public eye doing progressive, innovative stuff.

Back to the product. as he mentions light yet strong, I remember my very first design project at the Caribbean School of Architecture. Actually it was a design challenge to see who could make the strongest bridge out of balsa. I forget who won, but I learned so much from that project it has stuck with me to this day. So anyway, check out the video!

James Dyson on Engineering and Design

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Mourning a Comedian: George Carlin Dead at 71

2008-06-23T09:54:00.002-04:00

Learned that George Carlin--stand-up comedian, philosopher, actor, writer--has passed away in Vegas this past weekend. How very sad to lose someone so terribly funny.

I remember when I 'd first heard George Carlin. I was a child and he was appearing as a guest on some children's show out of Chicago. He was doing a children's version of the Hippy Dippy Weatherman and I remember shifting my noggin back and forth--like a dog trying to make sense of some strange sound: Look at the strange adults...wonder what they're talking about.

His use of language and slant on American society and politics were legend with his "Seven Dirty Words" which challenged the government's right to control what was said in the public airwaves. To say his humor could be "black" just doesn't quite capture it--his humor was smouldering tar.

Momma Needs a New Pair of Shoes...

2008-06-19T19:33:00.003-04:00

...but where the hell am I going to buy them?

In a stunning accounting of the fallout of this recession in the retail sector, Donald H has listed a staggering 2,179 store closings for this year. Here's a partial list:

Ann Taylor closing 117 stores nationwide A company spokeswoman said the
company hasn't revealed which stores will be shuttered. It will let the stores
that will close this fiscal year know over the next month.
Eddie Bauer to close more stores - Eddie Bauer has already closed 27 shops in the first quarter and plans to close up to two more outlet stores by the end of the year.
Cache closing stores - Women's retailer Cache announced that it is closing 20 to 23 stores this year.
Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, Catherines closing 150 stores nationwide The owner of retailers Lane Bryant , Fashion Bug , Catherines Plus Sizes will close about 150 underperforming stores this year. The company hasn't provided a list of specific store closures and can't say when it will offer that info, spokeswoman Brooke Perry said today.
Talbots, J. Jill closing stores - About a month ago, Talbots announced that it will be shuttering all 78 of its kids and men's stores. Now the company says it will close another 22 underperforming stores.The 22 stores will be a mix of Talbots women's and J. Jill, another chain it owns. The closures will occur this fiscal year, according to a company press release.
Gap Inc. closing 85 stores - In addition to its namesake chain, Gap also owns Old Navy and Banana Republic. The company said the closures - all planned for fiscal 2008 - will be weighted toward the Gap brand. [ ... ]

The list of top-flight brands shuttering some or all of their doors amazed me, particularly with the running commentary from the news pundits and economists on whether or not we're in a recession.

Some of my fellow consultants who butter their bread in the retail industry have been singing the blues for quite some time. Now I can see why.

Monday Morning Melodies

2008-06-16T19:42:00.000-04:00

Look out the window, people. It's going to be a lovely day!

Bill Withers ("Lean on Me"), A Lovely Day

NBC Luminary, Tim Russert, Dies at 58

2008-06-13T18:55:00.003-04:00

Garland and I turned on the TV, just to start catching up with the day's news when we learned that NBC journalist and political bright light, Tim Russert, had just died. Mr. Russert was the host of "Meet the Press" and a news executive who ran the Washington Bureau. He was at is office when he succumbed.

He loved politics as well as public policy and he was interested in everything. An astute interviewer, he was known to pin his guests down to get to the root of the topic as it impacted the life of the nation or our society. Courteous and genuinely kind, he brought something useful as well as interesting. Mr. Russert was the premier interviewer in television news.

He was one of Time's 100 Most Influencial People for 2008. I can't agree more. It was from Meet the Press as well as NPR that I learned to love the news. He cause me to move from skeptical to more thoughtful about the news. He knew he'd hit the lottery in life and he wanted to share his winnings with us.

Here's Mr. Russert's last go at Meet the Press before leaving for his last vacation with his beloved family. Classic Russert.

The Incredible Shrinking Laptop

2008-06-12T12:15:00.003-04:00

I'm willing to admit it: My laptop weighs a ton. It's like lugging around a two year old.

Give me a second. I'm going to weigh this thing...Oh, God! Sixteen pounds with my laptop, cables, backpack and the one or two books or mags I generally carry. My cat doesn't even weigh a whole five pounds. And at three and a half years strong, it's getting long in the bluetooth (could have resisted, but didn't). So, I'm looking for a computer--an ultramobile workhorse. Even now, I'm away from my desk as I post this, waiting for a meeting.

Vista worries me as it should. It was a poor roll out with device drivers not supported and other bits of Microsoft Weirdness (meaning, they beta test on paying customers). Except for the fact that my laptop (the HP Pavilion with the crystal clear screen and six hour battery life) is a Windows box, I'd gleefully get another. I just cant risk the squirrely Vista operating system.

So, in looking for a small computer, I'm working from a set of criterion that will be hard to get in one box:

Solid operating system
Works with my existing software (Quickbooks, Office Pro including Visio)
Facilitates podcast creation
Small form factor
Easy to read screen
Moderate cost
Did I already say solid operating system?

Trouble is: we're not quite there yet with the UMPC's (computers with less than three pounds). Here's what I'm looking at.

The MacBook Air, at $1,800, is the leader cost-wise. Though it's got the more solid Mac OS, it seems a bit like a Sony Vaio without the optical drive, fixed battery (instead of replaceable ones) and mono speakers. Might make a better bookmark than high-functioning computer, though I know Yorkali will read this with a disapproving glance.

The 1.6GHz chip is a little bit, well, pokey, but the heat output is low enough that you don't have to consider wearing a codpiece to use it (though us girlie types love the heat on cold days). It's got a full-sized keyboard and integrated 802.11n with solid performance.

So, unless I really need to put my computer in a manila envelope or use it at a murder weapon (you can swing it like an unwieldy hatchet), it just doesn't quite seem like a workable solution.

Then there's the offerings from HTC. One is the Shift, which is powerful enough to run most business applications, including Windows Vista, and has SnapVUE, a feature that lets the operator view common information apps (like calendar and email) without powering the machine up. It includes Sprint WWAN for connectivity, had lots of imput options and two resolutions and a full QWERTY keyboard. However, that keyboard is small (but OK for my little paws), has poor battery life and I've heard that the fan is kind of noisy. Oh, and that leather thingy on the bottown can't be removed as far as I can see. It's kind of a weird little tablet computer hybrid between smartphone and laptop.

HTC's other offering, the Athena Advantage, at first look, is like carrying around a brick. Still, it's geared towards playing media, working with documents or emails and web browsing easy. The screen is crystal clear (as you can see even from the image) and integrates Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. Shunning Vista, it runs on Windows Mobile 6. It has a built-in camera and a full keyboard. Note to self: this kind of keyboard doesn't work well for women with nails that extend beyond the tips of the fingers, making it hard to strike the keys. The speakerphone is said to be weak and though it can be used as a phone, I double-dog dare you to try it. You'll be in therapy by the end of the day (though you won't be able to use the Advantage to call for help). The Advantage costs around $1.599.

Asus as a new ultramobile, the Eee (nope, didn't stutter). It's tiny and relatively cheap at about $600, though an earlier Linux version suffered from short battery life , cramped keyboard and skimpy memory, the Eee 900 has a slightly bigger screen, touch pad and longer battery life. Still, there's not as much storage space as with the Linux version.

Tornado Kills Four at Iowa Boy Scout Camp

2008-06-12T08:58:00.000-04:00

In this morning's news, I watched a report on the aftermath of a Tornado that killed four at an Iowa Boy Scout camp. Over 40 were injured. I watched one boy, an older Scout, speak of radioing into his Scout leader to figure out what to do and how he ran to offer first aid and support to those who were injured and offered to help with the recovery of bodies from a flattened shelter.

I watched in horror and admiration.

I used to be a Girl Scout Executive at a council just north of here and one of my biggest fears involved exactly this--a storm in the midst of the night, with a camp (Talitha or Sycamore) full of girls, the phones out and....

OK. You get the picture.

In all the things we hear about our children--obesity, sullen anger and disrespect, low test scores, fearful futures--I'm heartened to hear about children who are everything we hope for.

Cross-posted at the American Values Alliance

Do not forget this day....Apple's iPhone is twice as fast for half the price.

2008-06-10T04:19:00.001-04:00

Today’s message is pretty simple: Apple is going for iPhone market share in a big, big, way.

Daring Fireball

If you have money in any form, buy Apple stock...now. This isn't just some Mac fan boy reveling in the afterglow of another great Stevenote, but someone who has gotten an intensely acute view of the immediate future.

Apple will be the next great global tech company.

Forget who has the greater share of the PC market. That metric is for saps! If Apple has it's way, the baby on the breast in Sub-Saharan Africa will be wielding a glossy black brick of 3G goodness.

My friends, Windows was just the beginning, Dell... a passing fancy. Jobs knows that these guys are beaten even though Apple currently only has a sliver of the global computer market. But for those who saw Monday's keynote, remember the image of the 3 legged stool at the very beginning. One of those legs is about to get very FAT.

While very few people worldwide can afford a computer, the real pool of black gold that is waiting to be tapped is mobile phones. Apple has realized that it's global dominance is tied not to beating up on Vista but spreading it's design DNA pollen globally on the back of the iPhone not the iMac. Apple's global roll-out strategy for mobile market dominance is nothing short of the same poetry with which it designs, builds and markets all of it's other products. Study how they did this with almost every product since Steve returned to Apple. It's simplicity is deviously disarming.

Create the market before you sell the product.

Make the consumer start sucking vigorously on the teet long before the milk is even there. How did they do this? Design, create and sell to the market segment with the most disposable income. Establish the product as a must have for the rich. Once the halo of I-gotta-have-it is sufficiently bright around the product (hence justifying it's existence) you sell it to everybody else for a song (pun intended). By this time you have made back your R&D money the back of the richest of the rich. You are now going for the jugular that's throbbing with the real life blood of revenue. The Mass Market. You have achieved critical mass in global mind-share now all you have to do is put a couple cracks in the glass ceiling of price and watch global dominance flood the earth. It is a small world after all.

So forget this old metric of PC market share. The mobile market is where the real moola is at. Cell phones are the platform of the future and every IT company worth it's salt knows this. But no one has a product like the iPhone. And for a long time no one ever will. Apple is just too many design cycles ahead of the rest of the field. So while the rest of the world copies this gleaming brick of techno-lust, Steven "Plainview" Jobs is drinking their milkshake. And his big fat straw is the iPhone.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Monday Morning Melodies

2008-06-09T08:05:00.001-04:00

It's going to be that kind of week. I'll need super powers to get it all packed in. I've got a little more than two months and I've finished my Masters, while operating my little empire, maintaining my relationship, supporting my widowed Dad and keeping the spiders at bay (they decided to move in when it started to pour a while back).

I need my Wonder Twin.

Here are two version of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" sometimes known as the theme song to Inspector Gadget, a show my brother, Rodney, and I used to watch when we shared an apartment the first time I was in grad school. We love this show and I love these versions of the Grieg classic.

LNB #053: Help! I Need Someone!

2008-06-07T15:00:00.004-04:00

I remember seeing the Beatles' movie, Help! when I was a kid. Love the lyrics, which are so brilliant:

(Help) I need somebody
(Help) Not just anybody
(Help) You know I need someone
(Help)

When I was younger, so much younger than today
I never needed anybody's help in any way
But now these days are gone
I'm not so self assured
Now I find I've changed my mind
I've opened up the doors

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being 'round
Help me get my feet back on the ground
Won't you please, please help me

In case you don't know the song (like, you're a Namibian goatherd), here it is.

I can almost hear the strains of this song on the phone when prospects call me to ask, sometimes convolutedly, for help ("I really don't need help, but if I did, what could you do for me?").

Where I see businesses get into trouble is knowing when to ask for information and when to pay for it. According to the SBA, businesses fail for several reasons, chief of which are lack of planning, capital and other resources. In this biz environment, operating without the key information needed is almost criminal, given the massive amounts of information available on the Net.

Michael Gerber, author of the The E-Myth Revisited, spoke of "working on your business, not in it," staying out of the tactical weeds and into the strategic mission and vision. To do this, Gerber spoke of the importance of creating systems that tied directly into those strategic aims. Burning daylight poring over website after website, looking for information defies our ability to be strategic and our ability to get the most out of our time. The Wild Hunt for information, particularly when you need it to be right and you need it right now, can be the greatest of all cul de sacs.

This week, we hear from Jim Patton of J Patton Consulting and his Prepaid Legal affiliation. What Jim offers is a business service that, for a monthly fee, allows members to pose real-life problems to legal, accounting and other professionals and get real life answers. One example he gave was the business owner who needed to let an employee go. That owner posted the question in the service and got back a checklist for terminations that allowed him to stay fair, square and legal.

Be sure to grab a copy of a copy of The Dip as well.

Listen Now: 24.40

GM to Close Four SUV/Truck Plants

2008-06-03T10:15:00.003-04:00

Finally, figuring out that gas prices, which were less than $1.50 in 2003 are not going to decline much from their record four bucks a gallon, General Motors Corp. has announced that it will shutter production at four pickup truck and sport utility vehicle plants in the U.S., Canada and Mexico starting later this year.

CNBC lists those factories along with the models they make along with the numbers of workers each factory employs.:

Oshawa, Ontario: Employs 2,900. Makes Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra
pickups. Likely to end production in 2009.
Moraine, Ohio: Employs 2,400. Makes Chevrolet TrailBlazer, GMC Envoy and Saab 9-7 mid-size SUVs. Closes at end of model run in 2010 or sooner if demand warrants. GM's last midsize SUV plant, meaning models won't be built any more.
Janesville, Wis.: Employs 2,800. Makes Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban SUVs. Also GMC Yukon and Chevrolet, GMC, Isuzu medium-duty trucks. Medium-duty production done by end of 2009. SUV production ends in 2010 or sooner if demand remains weak.
Toluca, Mexico: Affected line employs 250. Makes Chevrolet Kodiak medium-duty trucks; production ends by end of 2008. Other production at the Toluca complex will continue.

Eighty-five hundred people. I wonder how many of these jobs could have been saved had GM operated with a tab more foresight.

And the Hummer, that gas hog that puzzled everyone who didn't own an oil well, is up for sale or a dramatic revamp.

Monday Morning Melodies

2008-06-02T09:00:00.001-04:00

I know. I'm way too young to have experienced Bo Diddley, but I remember watching my mother putting on his records and rocking the house for years. It's from her that I got the love of old, old school and Miles, Herbie Hancock and Miriam Makeba who were the staples of Momma's repertoire throughout our lives. I'm still an old school girl.

Well Bo, "The Originator," died today at age 79. He gave us "I'm a Man" (remade by George Thorogood as "Bad to the Bone,"), "Who Do You Love" and much, much more.

Hey Bo Diddley in 1966. He's backed up by Norma-Jean "The Duchess" Wofford on the second guitar and the Bo-ettes, Lilly "Bee Bee" Jamieson and Gloria Morgan.

Who Do You Love, which starts

I walked 47 miles of barbed wire,
Used a cobra snake for a neck tie.
Got a brand new house on the roadside,
Made out of rattlesnake hide.
I got a brand new chimney made on top,
Made out of human skulls.
Now come on darling let's take a little walk, tell me,
Who do you love,
Who do you love, Who do you love, Who do you love.

Dang! No wonder I strolled over in the land of punk!

Star Trek's Pevney Dies

2008-05-30T15:07:00.004-04:00

The Trekkie in me mourns. Joseph Pevney, who directed some of the very best episodes of the original "Star Trek" has passed away on 18 May in his Plam Desert, California, home. He was 96.

"The Trouble With Tribbles"

In "Trouble" the Enterprise is infested with the cute, fuzzy vermin (who don't seem to like the Klingons).

"The City on the Edge of Forever"

In "City" Kirk and Spock travel back in time to the Depression.

Pevney directed episodes of such TV greats as "The Hulk" (OK, I have issues) and "Fantasy Island" (I really have issues).

The series, in its original run, was a failure. It was cancelled after three years and poor interest and has lived for the past 40 years in syndication, having spun off 5 additional series and eleven motion pictures, books, comics and games.

The series has taught me to fundamentally alter my relationship with failure.

It seems Apple is doing very very well these days.

2008-05-28T09:54:00.001-04:00

Apple’s retail market share is 14 percent, and two-thirds for PCs costing $1000 or more. Should I repeat those numbers? The share data is for first-quarter brick-and-mortar stores, as tabulated by the NPD Group. Apple’s market share is but one measure of success. Sales growth is way up, while Windows desktop PC sales are way down.

Daring Fireball

BUY BUY BUY!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The World Bank and the Gods of Lending

2008-05-22T06:38:00.001-04:00

Some Jamaican policy wonks will tell you this bank helped our country get into deeper unescapable debt. I don't know how true that is but I think this book will open the eyes of many undeveloped countries.

"A passionate, informed, and devastating first-hand
account from the front lines of World Bank operations. Students,
development professionals, and especially policy makers in Washington
should read this book." - Jeffrey A. Winters (Professor of political economy, Northwestern University and co-editor of Reinventing the World Bank)

"Recommended reading as a hard-hitting lesson on how not to run the Bank." - Paul Arlman (Former Executive Director of the World Bank (1986-1990) and member of the Dutch Treasury

Plaxo's Personal Card

2008-05-17T14:17:00.002-04:00

Big doings at Plaxo today! We are really excited to announce some of the biggest news in the history of Plaxo: We have just signed an agreement** to be acquired by Comcast, the nation's leading provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services (and our largest customer and partner).

Plaxo's Personal Card

Social Media’s wall St. cred is building ever so rapidly. Now even for the slightly smaller companies. Congrats Plaxo, you guys have truly come a long way!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

LNB #052: The Dip (pt. 2)

2008-05-10T17:16:00.003-04:00

This week, we cover ways to think your way through quitting. Knowing the answers to the key questions for your business or accountability, you can figure out pretty quickly what you should be saying "yes" or "no" to.

To remind you, in Seth Godin's little book, The Dip, he describes three key conditions when we get stopped:

The dip: a deep, wide break in the action. You just need to hang on and get to the other side.
The cul de sac (or dead-end): you can blow and blow and blow, but, little wolf, you'll never blow this house down.
The cliff: this looks like it will work, but it will run out of gas and land you back in the cul de sac with your Big Wheel.

Be sure to grab a copy of this little book. I'll be chatting about it for a few more 'casts.

Listen Now: 17:17

The Force is Stong in You, Young BizWalker

2008-04-22T12:29:00.006-04:00

For those of you who know me, I'm a pretty fine coach and consultant, who's gotten to write some of the guiding literature for the coaching profession and created and lead coursework in coaching psychology for such illustrious venues as New York University.

I'm all that. (Ask me sometime how long it took for me to be able to say that and know it for the unabashed, unapologetic truth that it is.)

That doesn't mean that stuff is necessarily any easier at Camp Lita. I love those coaches who say that they coach themselves. Ever see a dentist pull her own teeth or a doctor remove his own appendix. Didn't think so. Coaching's power comes from the interactions between an actor and an observer, and not from the perfection of a coach's life (that's called a Messiah, kidlets).

So, when I get messages out of the clear blue like this one from the hubster, I'm inclined to listen carefully. In addition to watching me work my business and live my life, he's been watching as I work to finish graduate school (Masters in HR with honors later this summer--then off to dive into a doctorate...I can sleep when I'm dead...I can sleep when I'm dead...I can sleep when....).

Being the stress kitten that I am (ain't gonna change it, either....just learning more and more how to make that way of being work for me rather than work me over), he's just got a different sense of how I work.

Something from Star Wars comes to mind. “Luke, trust the force”. Your innate ability and sense of excellence is one manifestation of your “force”. Learning to trust it will reduce your stress and worry many fold. I know, cause I’m there too.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

God, I love this stuff.

Monday Morning Melodies

2008-04-21T08:12:00.001-04:00

I love this guy. Before KT Tunsdall hit the scene with her ubiquitous hit "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree," there was Owen Pallett, his violin and a loop machine.

Fantasy (a cover of the Mariah Carey song)

This Modern Love (a cover a hit from British group, Bloc Party--also a fave)

This Modern Love (Not stuttering. Here's Bloc Party with the original. Very excellent!)

Peach, Plum, Pear (covering Joanna Newson's work)

Going to be an excellent week, people!

LNB #051: The Dip (Thanks, Seth)

2008-04-18T04:52:00.000-04:00

Marketing guru, Seth Godin's book, The Dip, forms the basis for this podcast (and several more to come). Seth describes three key conditions when we get stopped:

The dip: where the break in your action is so deep and wide that you can't move out of it with the resources you're expending. Kind of like the straight-A highschooler who never really had to expend herself...until she got a snootful of Calculus 115.
The cul de sac (or dead-end): staying here will keep you from doing something that will work for you and it will never, ever change. His suggestion? Get out as quickly as possible. Remember, the analogy of the kid on the Big Wheel? It was cute the first few times around, and then it never seemed to stop.
The cliff: you can keep this going for quite a while, but it runs out of gas and leaves you on the side of the road with no options. Kind of like smoking, that doesn't seem to really hurt anything--that is, until the doc gives you That Look, you know the one.

Be sure to grab a copy of this little book, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick). I'll be chatting about it for a few more 'casts.

Listen Now: 20:23

I'm Too Sexy for this Work!

2008-04-17T16:32:00.001-04:00

I saw this on Seth Godin's blog:

You can't hire that guy because he's not as good looking as George (Clooney). And you can't believe that speaker because he doesn't present as well as George. And that guy? He's short. Short? Well, shorter than George. And you can't trust him to make good decisions because his skin is much darker than George's.

You can't date her because she's not as good looking as Jennifer (whichever Jennifer you want to set as the standard). And her? Well, she stutters, and Jennifer doesn't. And Jennifer herself, of course, is not nearly as smart as George.

Jennifer and George may be extraordinarily good looking movie stars, but you don't get to work with them. By buying into a standard of expectation for what's normal (or great or very good or trustworthy) we shortchange ourselves every single day. (Read the rest)

Seth's right. Back in my HR days, I remember reps clearly making decisions on which resume to put on the top of the pile based in such (illegal) banalities as "He's cute" or "Her name sounds nice." That, by the way, is when my hair really started turning prematurely white. Seeking to draft an AA/EEO program to help "deal with this," I went to work gathering research on looks and expectations, the positive and negative Pygmalion Effects, and such.

Here's where I found myself scratching my noggin: Studies showed that CEO's were between 45 and 55, were traditionally good looking, worked out regularly, were heterosexually married to a pretty wife. More than their education or past experience, the researchers found that their presumed attractiveness was more of a constant. Their ability to succeed was, in part, predicated on the expectation that pretty people did well. Around that same time, where was a rash of CEO flameouts where they fell to earth like comets. Their good looks bought them all kinds of space, but didn't change gravity then they became less than lighter-than-air.

Remember the horribly ubiquitous Right Said Fred song, "I'm Too Sexy?" a novelty hit that was so successful, that they re-released it in 2007 (could Mac Daddy, Macarena II be far behind?). That, it seems, is quite a bit of what can be seen at networking events, as people, oddly, preen and stut their looks rather than their other...um, wares.

Monday Morning Melodies

2008-04-14T07:38:00.000-04:00

Getting the week started. Thought I'd send out a little love to Rachelle Ferrell, who can do some stunning things with her voice.

Autumn Leaves

I Can Explain

Bye, Bye Blackbird (with unrelated montage)

Have a great week--taxes and all--ya'll!

Boil Those Start-up Grunts

2008-04-10T18:12:00.003-04:00

Reading Fastcompany.com, I found a discussion thread, which began with this quote from Michael Arrington, the Editor of TechCrunch: “Startups should hire people who work 24 hours a day because there is nothing else they’d rather do. ”

Silly rabbit, that Michael Arrington! The notion that start-up grunts will work for slave hours AND slave wages indefinitely is, um, (choosing words carefully) dunderheaded.

Start-ups should hire people who will be with them--not only in those first heady days--but will stay for the long haul. The corporate memory that's lost when good people leave (especially those who were there in the greenfield days) is tremendous and irreplaceable. We don't even have a good calculator for Loss of Talent-Intelligence, but we do have a calculation for cost of turnover. Trust me: it's high and only those start-up managers who are tone-deaf to their HR gurus (or, not wanting to be bothered by those pesky strategic staffing types, just blew off having someone in that role in the first place) will ignore the impact of their expectations of staff both during and after start-up.

Besides, those who thrive on the crisis-driven thrash and crash cycle of your start-up won't be there long...and if they are, they won't be worth a steaming puddle of spit (a technical term from us HR and leadership development types). I don't know a lot of people from back in my college days who produced excellent results from cramming (and if they pulled it out, they were useless in short order).

Think it through, plan it well, treat your people like gods and rock on! If you can't do that, turn your business plan over to people much smarter than you and get out of the way.

Monday Morning Melodies

2008-04-07T07:28:00.001-04:00

Heading out to the gym. Weight's beginning to really melt (15 pounds), but I'm being an ingrate. I just want a bagel and a big cup o' joe. At this point, I am reminded that the nice Korean doctor-- (Dr. Young ki Park) the one who was smiling gently at me when he told me I could no longer have wheat, rye, barley, oats, corn, rice, mint, caffeine, milk and heavily spiced foods--as an acupuncturist was also standing in front of a rack of needles as long as my cat. His message was clear to me: mess this up and it won't go well with escalating treatments and more disabling pain.

Well, I haven't messed up, though this took quite a number of foods of the list and made business lunches a real pain (I opted for breakfast--more easy options).

So, here's some tunes from the fabulous Gap Band, Zapp and Roger to get your day started.

You Dropped the Bomb on Me (a college staple from the Gap Band)

Burn Rubber on Me (by the Gap Band)

More Bounce to the Ounce (by Zapp and Roger)

OK, now with more bounce to my ounce, I'm done whining and heading to the door.

Peace and chicken grease, people!

It Continues to be the Economy, Stupid

2008-04-03T14:52:00.000-04:00

The airlines are clearly struggling. House members are trying to figure out how Southwest Airlines could have for so long violated safety rules and how the FAA, the agency responsible for oversight, could have missed these safety violations. Planes have been flying with cracked fusilages (one of which cracked open in the 1980's, sucking a flight attendant out of the plane to her death), inspectors being told to "hush up" missed inspections of fusilages and rudder systems...

Horrible.

Now ATA, like many other low cost airlines like Aloha which pulled up stakes, are shutting their doors. As fuel prices keep going up and discretionary travel is drying up, the smaller players are going to continue to disappear, either filing bankruptcy or being absorbed by other businesses. Even the bigger players are feeling the pinch, particularly with domestic flights (they make more money from international flights). Fewer flights, more crowding and higher fares. What an unholy mix.

This from MSNBC on ATA's collapse:

ATA Airlines shut down operations and stranded thousands of travelers Thursday when an unexpected loss of key charter flights and soaring fuel costs forced the carrier into bankruptcy.
Once the nation’s 10th-largest air carrier, ATA entered bankruptcy for the second time in just over three years. The company had more than 2,200 employees, and “virtually all” were told that their jobs were gone, company spokesman Michael Freitag said.
Many passengers learned of the collapse at ticket counters, where advisories were posted in the handful of cities ATA still served. About 10,000 passengers flew ATA each day before operations were shut down, according to the airline.

Oh, and while I was tapping out this post, I read a report on NPR which extolled the failures of the newly revamped Heathrow Airport in London in doing the little things--say, like keeping track of baggage. Turns out they're having to send the mountain of misplaced luggage to Italy to be sorted and processed.

(sigh)

"The doctor will see you now. Be sure your webcam is turned on."

2008-04-03T12:01:00.002-04:00

Interesting article on NPR:

Doctor-Patient 'Web Visits' Spur Privacy Concerns - As more doctors go online to communicate with patients, two of the country's biggest health insurers have started reimbursing patients for the Internet visits. But critics say the online advising could lead to errors, and patient privacy could be compromised.

I think this is an excellent idea and, with the rise of Minute Clinics which are springing up at grocery stores and pharmacies, doctors need to consider the growing need for speed in getting treatment. Most doctors seem to be taking Scheduling 101 from beauticians, for example, who routinely overbook leading to long waits. Their clients--I'm loath to use the word "patients" because it fails to capture the market relationship between the provider and his/her customer--are expressing their frustration by seeking other forms of doctor-client contact.
Before one recent doctor visit, I found myself waiting mid-morning for over an hour. I was scheduled for a follow-up visit which turned out to be no more than "How are you feeling? I think we should continue the treatment as is. Come back in two months." No internet connection (which even my auto dealer has figured out to offer), no tea and the water cooler was empty. With travel and wait time, that took an hour and forth minutes out of my day.
This could also be a boon to communities where there aren't enough doctors to go around--that is, once, they suss out how they'll manage internet connections in these, sometimes, technologically depressed areas of the country.
Before, there was nowhere else for "patients" to go if they were displeased with customer service issues. All the doctors were doing the same thing. A different level of competition has now arisen in medicine--both the retail sectors and the internet will certainly change what has been a "given" in medicine--you'll get your treatment when and in the manner in which I want to dish it out.

Back After a Long, Hard Winter

2008-03-25T17:31:00.004-04:00

Many of you have written me, asking about my family which is, miraculously, quite fine. Dad's had a complete recovery, Garland's heart is less the worse for wear, my young nephew does not have cancer, my owie wasn't a melanoma, my heart is now fine, my digestive system is healing and my cat didn't die.

Though, barely, on that cat front.

What I learned for certain in the last 12 months is how very powerful I truly am. Though my business needed to be ramped slightly down to give me the freedom to be where I needed to be, I kept it going and am on the home stretch run towards my Master's in business (with highest distinction, thus far).

It's not the things that can stop us. Kids, there were plenty of things out there that can fit that bill. It was who-I-said-I-was-going-to-be in the face of each and every thing that happened since March, '07 that means anything--that and whether I lived up to who I really am at each turn. I remember yet another doctor coming to tell me that Dad's case was hopeless and me saying "I'm taking my father out of here on his way to being whole, healthy and well and he'll be cared for by people who love or are predisposed to love him." One doctor just stared at me, telling me that I wasn't being realistic. I suggested he find another patient because he was the one who didn't get it. Later that week, that doctor kissed me on my cheek in the quiet of the ICU. Just a little human contact in that dim hallway that enriched my life. I think he could see his daughter in me, battling for her own father's life. There was so much love in that hospital those weeks there and even more in the rehab center where Dad lived for the next two months before I took him home to live on his own.

He's working out three times a week now, bragging that he's got a "two pack."

I amazed myself and when I think back on it I want to cry for the times I didn't know if I had it in me---particularly when busses weren't falling out of the sky. When I didn't think I knew enough to start my business all those years ago, or get into graduate school, or land that client...

We are--every one of us--more than we know or can suspect.

Enjoy this piece from Bobby McFerrin--essentially a love song to Mary. He and his music are just plain beautiful.

Just Had a College Flashback

2008-03-04T22:02:00.004-05:00

This revelation hurt almost as badly as learning several months ago that the inventor of Ramen noodles had passed away:

All Things Considered, March 4, 2008 · Imagine a mournful horn echoing across thousands of fantasy worlds: E. Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, died Wednesday morning. He was 69.
Listen Now to the NPR report.

I remember holing up in the Off Campus Student lounge at Purdue on Sunday evenings with a character, some dice and several people--many of whom I wouldn't recognize in daylight.

I'll miss you, Gary G. What an incredible contribution to collaboration and imagination.

Been Watching Dunkin Donuts?

2008-03-04T20:00:00.004-05:00

I have and they're eating Starbuck's lunch. Now, aside from the "Doing Things is What I Like to Do" commercial that it'll take a jackhammer to uproot from my noggin, there's this one:

This is exactly what I've been thinking when I've had to go to Starbucks: "What the hell language is this and why are the barristas so insistent that I use it when all I want is a small cup of tea?" I laughed like a goon!

What Movie Most Inspired Me?

2008-03-04T08:18:00.004-05:00

"The Rocky Horror Picture Show" changed my life. When I went off to college, I was a very shy bookish girl from semi-rural Indiana. Late one Friday night, a dorm-mate suggested I go to the movie with her. I said "yes" and she got out spray bottles and started making toast!

This movie broke ground in a way none before had. It was the earliest winner in the midnight movie market and included incest, cannibalism, homosexuality and a host of other previously taboo topics that got people talking in college campuses around the nation. Though it was roundly panned by critics everywhere, in its 30+ years post release, it's still going strong and has made more than 100 times the initial investment. The movie helped launch the careers of Academy Award Winner Susan Sarandon, actor Barry Bostwick (played the mayor in Spin City), singer / actor Tim Curry (now in Spamalot) and made the singer Meat Loaf a household name (“Paradise by the Dashboard Lights”). Recently, it was recently included for preservation in the National Film Registry, a collection of only 475 films (as of 2007) by the Librarian of Congress.

What really got me thinking that first year in college was how the movie portrayed people who were pretty OK with themselves—they dressed and acted how they liked and weren’t held hostage by convention (or, um, normality). As a result, I loosened up quite a bit, started having fun with my fashion sense and choices in music and began enjoying my life while completing my degree.

I thank the makers of the movie and the stage play on which it derived, who were themselves mavericks. Because of my experience with this movie, I was able to consider interracial dating, refused to dye my hair when it started turning prematurely white (at age 25) and grew my hair into beautiful, thin, waist-length dreadlocks. I left a successful career and started a business 12 years ago to the tune of “you’ll never make it”…I’m still going strong.

I became a force of nature rather than someone who people just had to deal with (or not).

The movie was fun and freeing and made no sense. That, I think, was its power. That and being able to lob toast at a movie screen.

Naked Air Flight 402

2008-02-25T17:56:00.000-05:00

OK, before I head off to get some other work done, I just had to post this. Actually, I didn't have to...

A German travel agency has begin offering nude flights (note: not swinger's flights) from Germany to Travel agency. OssiUrlaub.de has already start taking bookings for a "trial nudist day trip from the eastern German town of Erfurt to the popular Baltic Sea resort of Usedom, planned for July 5 and costing $735."

And I thought offering in-flight cellphone use was going way out there!

The first app for crowdsourcing....

2008-02-23T07:07:00.001-05:00

What is this new fangled business term you ask...well you will be hearing a whole lot more about it in the coming months.

kluster is a place to harness the power of community collaboration to get things done. everyone has ideas, we provide a platform to get them out of heads and into the world… where they belong.

kluster |

Starbucks Hopes to Restore the Buzz

2008-02-22T16:28:00.004-05:00

Howard Schultz has returned as Barista in Chief six weeks ago. First thing on the menu? Staff reductions. This from Howard (emphasis added):

Dear Partners,
Since I returned as ceo six weeks ago, we have experienced a lot of change in a very short period…with our renewed focus on the customer experience and the return to our core—all things coffee--as evidenced by our decision to discontinue warmed breakfast sandwiches in U.S. stores by the end of Fiscal ’08; unprecedented Art of Espresso three-hour training for U.S. store partners on February 26; free Wi-Fi for partners and customers beginning in the Spring, and more to come. I hope you view these changes as positively as I do. Together, we have created a blueprint to transform the company, and I sincerely appreciate all that you have done and will continue to do every day on behalf of Starbucks.
I pledged to communicate with you about our efforts to improve the current state of our U.S. Business, reignite the emotional attachment with our customers and make foundational changes to our business; and I have done so in six previous emails. However, this is my most difficult communication to date.
As I have mentioned in previous communications, in order to reinvigorate our company we must continually analyze and review every part of our company operations. This rigorous look at our business will ensure that we are managing and optimizing our resources as effectively as we can in order to improve the Starbucks Experience.
We realize that we are operating in an intensely challenging environment, one in which our customers and partners have extremely high expectations of Starbucks. And we have to step up to the challenge of being strategic as well as nimble as our business evolves. Unfortunately, we have not been organized in a manner that allows us to have a laser focus on the customer.

Over the last several weeks, we conducted a thorough organizational analysis, which was, at times, very emotional and extremely stressful. But as I sit at my desk and think about my responsibility to over 170,000 partners and their families who rely on me and others to preserve and enhance our company, I know that I am responsible for ensuring the success of the company for the long term, which means that difficult decisions must be made. Personally, I continue to struggle with the outcome, because I realize how painful it will be for some partners.
As the result of our review, which was done with great thoughtfulness and respect for everyone concerned, organizational changes have been made. These changes will restructure the company, but they will also result in a decrease of both the number of positions and partners by approximately 600. This total includes the elimination of existing positions and open headcount, as well as the reduction of our current workforce. Within this context, approximately 220 partners have separated from the company. Nearly all were U.S. partners serving in non-retail support roles. We are thankful and proud of the contributions our departing partners have made, and we are committed to treating them with respect and dignity.
Today, we are announcing the following modifications to our organizational structure that are designed to strengthen our focus on the customer in our U.S. field operations, and centralize and/or consolidate many of our support functions to drive functional excellence and reduce redundancies:
U.S. Field Operations
Effective Monday, February 25, the U.S. field organization will begin transitioning from two divisions to four, with full implementation completed by March 24. The new divisions are: Western/Pacific, Northwest/Mountain, Southeast/Plains and Northeast/Atlantic.
Not only will this organizational structure create more capacity for our field teams, it will enable the company to align our leaders closer to our customers and partners. This will ensure a stronger level of support in partner development, coaching and accountability in the field. Establishing a customer-centric field support structure in the U.S. Business enables our field teams to focus on our partners, customers and our coffee.
Each division will be led by a senior vice president, reporting directly to the U.S. president. Within each division, partners supporting Store Development, Marketing, Partner Resources and Finance will report directly to their respective functions while still being accountable for results at the divisional level. These teams are being centralized to create an infrastructure with global span, capability and effectiveness. Senior leaders in the U.S. Business will provide specifics in their individual team Town Hall meetings that will be held later today.
Support Functions
The reorganizations of Starbucks support functions are designed to consolidate functional activities into teams that have a shared vision and goals to support the business.
The following support functions are being reorganized and/or consolidated:
• U.S. Store Development
• U.S. Licensed Stores
• U.S. Finance
• Partner Resources
• Marketing
• In-Store Experience
• Global Supply Chain
• Global Communications
• Partner & Asset Protection
As a result of these organizational changes, some partners may have new roles or new managers. Senior leaders in these areas will provide specifics to partners in their individual team Town Hall meetings that will be held later today.
Partner Care and Support
As I said earlier in this communication, while these decisions were necessary to move our business forward, I fully recognize the personal and professional impacts these actions have on individual partners, and we are committed to making the transitions as smooth as possible.
Once again, I would like to thank all of our dedicated and passionate partners for their numerous contributions to the company.
Onward,
Howard

Bad news for Starbucks partners who served the company well during it's mindless growth phase. Good news for Schultz:

Scientists Create Coffee-Making Robot - Scientists in Italy this week unveiled a robot barista named Justine. She's part of a European project to develop robots that can use two arms together.

Maybe he can get rid of those pesky barista's altogether.

Now, I'm not sure how this impacts Starbucks' immediate issue--Consumer Reports found that a cup of brew at McDonald's is preferred to a cuppa joe at the Bucks.

BYO Chopsticks to China

2008-02-20T23:46:00.003-05:00

This for those of us who are heading off to Beijing for the Olympics:

All Things Considered, February 20, 2008 · Environmentalists in China have a message to Olympic-goers in Beijing: Bring your own chopsticks.
Some environmentalists say that disposable wooden chopsticks are contributing to deforestation. China's government has recently slapped a tax on disposable chopsticks and urged restaurants not to use them.
Late last year, young volunteers wearing surgical masks staged a protest outside a noodle shop in Beijing.

The protest was organized by the China arm of the environmental group Greenpeace. It targeted a nationwide noodle shop chain, which Greenpeace says used 160,000 pairs of disposable chopsticks a day.

Greenpeace China's spokesman Wang Xiaojun says that's a waste of China's shrinking forests.

"To make disposable chopsticks," Wang says, "China cuts down enough forests each day to cover an area the size of Beijing's Tiananmen Square."

That's about 100 acres of forest.

The Effort to Counter Disposable Chopsticks

Wang says the campaign has so far persuaded 400 restaurants in Beijing, including the noodle chain, not to provide disposable chopsticks unless customers specifically ask for them.

The campaign includes enlisting the help of Chinese pop musicians to get its message across to young consumers.

One of them is Lung Kuan. She describes herself as a vegetarian and former punk rocker.

"I'd like very much to use my position as a public figure, as a singer, to really affect more people and let more people know about the environment," Lung says.

For restaurateurs, switching to sterilized, reusable chopsticks signals that their establishment has gone upscale. Lisa Li, a marketing manager for the Japanese noodle chain Ajisen Ramen says they switched over last summer.

"Our company puts health and quality first, so of course we're going to start with our eating utensils. You can see our chopstick sterilizer over there," she says.

But for cheaper eateries, using disposable chopsticks makes economic sense.

Less Than a Penny a Pair

Nearby, the Xie family runs a fast-food restaurant with lunches for the equivalent of a dollar or two. Xie Xiaoying says that disposable chopsticks cost them less than a penny a pair.

"Restaurants who use sterilized chopsticks often charge one to five yuan for them. But fast-food places like ours can't ask customers to pay for them," Xie says.

Industry advocates argue that disposable chopsticks are made of wood from trees that regenerate quickly, such as birch and bamboo. They point out that the industry creates around 100,000 jobs in China.

Environmental consciousness in China is still in its early stages. For now, environmental activists are urging customers to bring their own chopsticks to restaurants.

While that may seem hip and green to some, to others, it's just an inconvenience. Listen Now

Do you keep talking?

2008-02-16T17:59:00.004-05:00

I've noticed that people don't seem to want to take the hint when the call they're on with you is getting so old it's starting to grow hair. Subtlety doesn't seem to do it. In fact, I've spoken with bizexecs who think that the effectiveness of a call is directly proportional to how long it lasted. They seem tone deaf to the uncomfortable attempts to exploit an opening to end the call.

People seem to have trouble finding the end of conversations or sensing that the other person was ready to run. "If I can just keep her talking...."

So, how to you get off the phone before you consider stabbing yourself in the neck with that letter opener your kids made you for Father's Day?

I start my conversations by setting the context for the call: "Janet, I'd like about 5 minutes of your time to discuss XXX" or "Hi Jim. You want to talk about YYY? I have about 5 minutes for that conversation right now and then I'll have to run." Creating the context at the beginning of each call makes it easier at the end to jump off: "Janet, that's my 5 minutes. Gotta dash." If it's a very short call, I don't make room for smalltalk "Janet, remember, I only have that 5 minutes and I'd like to really focus on how I can help you."

Is the Law Strangling Creativity in the Digital Realm?

2008-02-15T00:19:00.004-05:00

Stanford professor and lawyer, Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to connect John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the "ASCAP cartel" to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our pre-digital intellectual property laws, revealing "how bad laws beget bad code." He includes some of the best remixes you'll ever see.

Is the Barack Obama campaign sparking meaningful conversation about leadership?

2008-02-14T12:58:00.001-05:00

I just heard from a friend (fellow LinkedInnie, Ray Miller) who recently attended a Barack Obama event in Ohio. He found himself blown away by what he experienced: a group of people of every strip, galvanized under a shared vision, masterfully delivered.

His telling of the events got me thinking--not about the politics of it, but about what seems to be a deeper conversation in the marketplace of ideas...and ideals.

The Democratic campaign has essentially, if nothing else, set skilled, competent management against vision and ideals. Now, I know this is a gross simplification, but follow me a bit further.

People seem far less interested in Senator Obama's particulars than they are in his ability to inspire them about themselves, their country and their future. He strikes me like a Sir Rickie Branson (who, like Obama, doesn't stand on the particulars: he can't even read a balance sheet). People will follow him anywhere, leaving his cadre of skilled minions to fulfill on that vision and ensure that they all get there.

Here's what I'm interested in finding out: Has Barack Obama's campaign shifted the conversation about leadership? Are you noticing an increase in conversations about vision in your work?

Are people talking more about what's possible than about what's probable or likely?

Thanks for looking with me.

Chime in here or at

Coffee and Conversation on Blogging for IABC

2008-02-13T07:35:00.005-05:00

If you're in the area later today, be sure to stop by new haunt, Tea's Me (at 140 E 22nd St. in Indy) for a Coffee and Conversation event on podcasting and blogging. An informal gathering sponsored by the Indianapolis Chapter of IABC the International Association of Business Communicators, we'll cover what the hairy heck (technical term) podcasting is, how it differs from blogging and the technical basics and how it impacts business strategy.

Should be a lively chat.

If you attended the event, be sure to post questions here and we'll discuss them. If you'd rather, you can email me directly.

Ciao!

What Can We Learn from Britney's Meltdown?

2008-02-12T08:54:00.000-05:00

Stop scratching your noggin. I'll make this question make sense here in a minute.

(Lalita praying: “Please, oh, please let me make this relevant to the business world.”)

Britney Spears transformed right before our eyes from clean-cut Mouseketeer to hard-working solo performer to one of Paris Hilton's "road dogs" whose undie plundies were MIA. Thing is, her decline was no great secret to anyone, except, perhaps her. As long as she was producing--something...anything--people were willing to tsk-tsk to themselves, turn a blind eye and cash those checks.

That's it for the social commentary part.

What has me thinking about Britney, besides the obvious, are the people I knew in the workplace who have had similar slides (and the clients who call me today for help with the heretofore unhelpable). They went from stellar producers, to expendable flotsam with little coaching or opportunities to change along the way--some in clear violation of other worker's rights.

Like the manager those years ago who, after taking a lesbian client and her life partner out to dinner and treating them to a trip to the sex shop to pick up wind-up penises…peni…(they weren't amused), decided that a lesbian worker at his home division, could be "converted" and began showing up at her home in the middle of the night. He lived an hour away from her. It was only when this woman began having serious emotional problems as a result that the company took action. She ended up drinking heavily all the way up to her early death from liver cancer.

What I'm thinking is that our litigious society challenges some people to do the right thing--to yell "Fire" when someone's career is starting to smolder. Moreover, I think that our general unwillingness to do things that might make us look bad can contribute to the blaze. We wait to call us HR types in when it's gotten messy, but not before.

Chime in here or at