Anonymous

If you call me (at work or at home) and the caller id number displayed is Anonymous, I don’t answer the phone. Most of my friends react the same way.

If you don’t have the confidence in your company or service or your brand to have it displayed on callerid, then you might consider a trying different communications method.

A caller id of Anonymous is a self fulfilling prophecy.

 

The Butterball Hotline

We’ve been cooking turkeys on Thanksgiving for literally hundreds of years.  The FOOD Network has devoted a week to showing people how to prepare Thanksgiving Day feasts.  Thousands of cookbooks can tell new cooks how to prepare turkey.  The internet search on “how to cook a turkey” returns over 90 MILLION results.

And yet year after year, the Butterball Hotline is swamped with callers asking questions that are answered everywhere.

What does this tell us about human nature?  About how people learn?

You’d think that after years of answering turkey questions, the Butterball folks could include a pamphlet with their turkeys that would provide all the answers.

And yet somehow I have the feeling it wouldn’t make a dent in the number of calls.

Taking a Page from the Disney Playbook

This past weekend was spend re-cabling our Data Center.  The hours were VERY long, but in the end it was worth it. 

I’m hoping to take a page from the Disney Playbook.

At Disneyland, all the cast members are trained to pick up litter and properly dispose of it.  The reason for this is twofold.  First it keeps the park clean.  Second, it provides a deterrent for those visitors who might be inclined to litter.  It’s tough to be the first to throw litter on a spotless walkway or piazza.

I’m hoping our spotless cable runs, neatly tied, labelled and tucked away, will help remind us all to keep the data center spotless.

We’ll see if Walt was right.

What is Your Pace of Innovation?

This article by Fast Company shows how Toyota and Nissan are challenging electric car (and infrastructure) startups like Better Place.

Unfortunately for us, our North American manufacturers are mostly working on improving mileage for existing gasoline engines (some hybrid models and the Chevy Volt being exceptions).

Makes one wonder whether we’re being ambitious enough in the face of Global innovation.

What is the pace of your company’s innovation?

 

 

Networking is disruptive!

Just yesterday I was complaining how futurists’ vision of completely internetworked appliances hasn’t yet come true. Today I tripped over an example of how networking can be completely disruptive to a business – in this case any business that manufactures GPS systems.

It’s coming from Google.  And it’s free.

Now the question of the day is.  How will YOUR business be disrupted by competitors who use networked technologies?

We’re not networked yet

Twice a year I’m reminded that despite all of our technological advancements, we’re not completely networked yet. I can talk to 300 million people on Facebook with the click of a few buttons, yet twice a year I still have to wander though our house and practice the ritual of manually changing our clocks back to the correct time.

As I fumble with the buttons on our wrist watches, wireless phones, kitchen appliances, alarm clocks, thermostats, wall clocks and our car clocks, I’m struck by several things.

1. Each year the number of clocks seems to grow. By my count we have 31 devices in and around our home that display time (without counting wristwatches!)
2. Only half of our clocks seem to show the same time.
3. It’s 2009.  Why do I still have to do this?

I’m not complaiing because I’m the one changing the clocks.  I’m wondering why it’s still necessary.

All of our networked devices, seem to transition pretty seamlessly.  I woke up this morning and my laptop beamed the correct time – as did our cable boxes and cell phones.  Even two of our bedroom clocks made the journey without manual intervention.

But all the rest had to be switched manually.  (Note to me – You forgot to change the water softener and the landscape light timers).

Wasn’t it more than a decade ago that technologists were predicting a time when all of our appliances would talk to each other and “phone home” when preventative maintenance was required?  What happened to that vision?

Let me introduce you to a new equation that will, for now and evermore, be used to describe the technological advancement of the world.  Here it is:

DNR= ND/TTD

In english, it’s Dave’s Networked Ratio = number of networked devices that automatically adjust time/total number of devices that display time.

At our house it’s:  8/31=.322

We’re only a third of the way there folks.