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Is your Web site polite?

14. April 2009

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HOW PEOPLE APPLY THE BASIC SOCIAL RULE OF POLITENESS TO COMPUTERS There is a well-known documented fact about human behavior: People will tell you what they think you want to hear. For example, if a waiter asks how his service was, people are more likely to give him a positive response. If a 3rd party asks [...]

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Are we born storytellers?

7. January 2009

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You can find wisdom in the most unlikely places. I found this gem in a research paper about Warren Buffett by Michael Mauboussin of Legg Mason Capital Management (in which he references Nassim Taleb’s book the The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable). Humans have a near insatiable desire to link cause and effect. [...]

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Optimists among us

4. January 2009

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Talk of the recession is, well, everywhere. And it can get depressing. So, where are the contrarians? Who’s looking for (and telling others about) the silver lining in this grey economy? Who’s trying to describe an alternate reality? Well, here are a handful for you to consider. Graeme Thickins, in The Clear and Simple Solution to the Current [...]

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A letter from the corazon

2. January 2009

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Regular visitors (read: my mom) might remember that I took my son to Peru last summer. What follows is a vignette from our visit to some impoverished villages in the high Andes. I wrote it as part of a donation drive for Comunidad, a non-profit whose board I sit on. At first glance, you could be [...]

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6 ways to increase your “employability”

8. November 2008

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The headlines say it all: NYTimes: Jobless rate at 14-year high WSJ: Labor data show pain across economy AP: Running on fumes; GM could soon run out of cash By these accounts, we are headed toward a period of significant unemployment or are already there. Either way, if you don’t already, you will soon have a number of colleagues, [...]

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Market recovery

6. October 2008

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At the exquisite Thai food blog of photographer Austin Bush, I found this video of the Samut Songkhram market, which is set up over the town’s railroad tracks! Watch how the vendors quickly get back to business after the train passes. Could this be a lesson on how to cope with disruptions in business? See the [...]

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Is “it” in you?

25. September 2008

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My wife, who is a teacher at St. Paul Schools, has been working with Karen immigrants for the past couple years. These folks come from Burma, but have been chased through the jungles by the Burmese Army for more than 50 years. To a person, the Karen people my wife has met all have stories [...]

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Social media: What’s keeping you from wading in?

15. September 2008

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There’s a fair amount of hand-wringing on the part of marketing execs over what to do with social media (aka Web 2.0, Social Web). It’s on the news and in the papers, so the CEO hears about it and asks the CMO, “should we be doing that?” And so the lukewarm potato gets handed downward [...]

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The human junglew

12. August 2008

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I never would have step foot in the Amazon rainforest were it not for a failed trip to the mountains two years ago with my daughter. We went to Cusco, with the hope of making it to Machu Picchu, but instead met up with a case of soroche, or altitude sickness. Except for the World [...]

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Some things you don’t see every day

31. July 2008

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Ad campaigns starring strange men in shimmering tarpaulin suits. Manhole cover advertising. Grass advertising. Scholarly books at Starbucks. Urgent appeals against public urination. (The sign reads: “PLEASE Respect the house of God! Don’t paint this wall. Don’t post bills. Don’t urinate on this street. Thank you.”)

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