Look (and Listen)

A recent discovery of mine is Miro, a vodcast player. It is open source, utilizing code from Firefox and VLC. Its also a bittorrent client. I really like the fact that it has nice browser functionality that can be configured in a similar fashion to Firefox. Another thing that drew me to this player was the amount of HD channels it listed out-of-the-box. Shows I enjoy watching include: Tekzilla, CNET, Earth-Touch and the now-defunct Food Science.

I know iTunes can do podcasting, but if there are things I can use that don't have Microsoft or Apple associated with them, I usually try to use them. For instance, I use QuickTime Alternative, Real Alternative, and VLC with various free codecs instead of Windows Media Player. I don't need to sync to a mp3 player and rarely encounter wmv or wma files (even if I did I'd transcode 'em).

It's the Holidays

One of the messages in one of the seasonal cards I'm sending says:
"Joy, Hope, Peace, Faith, and Love. I wish all this and more for you during this holiday season and throughout the new year". I'm modifying that to say to each of you,

Joy, Hope, Peace, Faith, and Love.
I wish all this and more for you
throughout each year.

Have a safe and and positively eventful holiday!

12/20/08 puzzle embedded ap

Future Trends and Shepard, part 2

There was discussion about lifestyle trends, ethical consumption(voting your dollars, monetization (time is more precious than money)and work trends.

LIFESTYLE TRENDS
Simply, a commodity identity continuum. That is, does this (or any) product define me? It's probably why people brand shop.

ETHICAL CONSUMPTION: VOTING WITH YOUR DOLLARS
Causes people are willing to spend money to support: bloodless diamonds, free range poultry and beef, oil free products, dolphin free tuna, etc.


MONETIZATION: TIME IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN MONEY
services and entrepreneurs who provide a way for others to save time. There was a reality series on Fine Living Channel that covered this. Simply, someone picks up and delivers back your dry cleaning; Merry Maids; personal shoppers. While they are doing these things, you can be doing something else.


WORK TRENDS
This category was divided into three areas, recruiting, retention and leadership development.

Under RECRUITING they listed five categories of potential employees:

• Creative Class -those who are motivated to a job based on being able to work with other cool and talented people
• From Ethical Consumption to Ethical Careers - for them it's not about the money
• Free Agents - project-based contracts and talent scouts
• Recruiting the Network people are looking for teams, not just individuals.
• The "Retired" Workforce was as interesting to me as the first group. They said that 75% of boomers do not plan to retire but move from "had to do" to "want to do" jobs in retirement.

There were two books mentioned as must reads: A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink (of which we own 64 copies) and Thinking About The Future, by Andy Hines ( the actual presenter) of which we own none. There was also a web site mentioned about value surveys.

These two blogs just about cover my notes from this ninety minute session, so you can see we heard a lot during that time.

Again, questions and discussions are expected.

Future Trends and Shepard

Aaron and I attended the “Future Savvy: Trend Impacts and Organizational Readiness”, audio seminar in the Carnegie Room yesterday afternoon. It was the first time I’d done this, although I’d participated in webinars before. This was interesting because I had the feeling that it was a new experience for the panelists as well. It also seemed as if the panelists were hearing the information presented for the first time with the listeners, even though it was stated that the material in its entirety had been available for review prior to the broadcast. That being said, here are my notes.

The first slide (handouts), “Values Change Over Time in a Predictable Way”, used Maslow’s* needs hierarchy as the basis using poor (*survival), middle income (*belonging) and affluent (*self-actualization) as the groups, and the values associated with these groups as traditional, modern, and post modern, in the same order. So poor countries have traditional values, middle class countries have modern values and affluent countries have post modern values.

The second slide had “Three Clusters of Values” which were too numerous to list here – ask me for my handout.

Now these slides can be used with economic classes within a country as well. Looking at the clustering of values within each economic class is designed to help us market to, adapt to, customers within these clusters, and perhaps predict what they would like. Yes, there are things not considered here like the age of the people within the clusters. Yes it is very possible for a 70-80 year old affluent to have traditional values if he/she was raised by parents or grandparents of the pre-post depression era. Yes, it is possible for 30-20 year old poverty people to have affluent values based on what they have been exposed to – so there is a lot of fluctuation here. The bottom line though is to keep in mind how values can affect behavior, needs and wants.

Part 2 dealt with moving your organization to where you want to be in the future. This is something we can use here. Shepard. What do we want to be really good at as far as internal and external customer service is concerned? How can we be more involved in system wide initiatives (serving internal customers)? How can we be more involved with customer service:

Using the matrix presented (my handouts will help with this) let’s see how the job help center fits, or the homework help center fits.

To be really good at the job center, how much staff time do we need to commit to preparation and actual customer time? Should we participate if we have a pattern of small group (1 or 2 people) participation or is it ok to do 1-on-1? How to get everyone up to speed so that even if we are not in the class mode, we are capable of providing better job seeking tips/help to impromptu customers?

We will be working on these issues for the next few weeks. It will be interesting to see how this process helps to get us all to the next level as a team and as customer service leaders.

PS, I expect you all to have a whole bunch of questions about this post, not the least of which would be, What are you talking about?!? Bring them on and let the dialog begin! (G)