Thursday, August 07, 2003

Norman Podhoretz. "Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with it apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence." How appropriate.  :) Comments11:08:55 PM

August 2001: Exploring the Blues. [Scripting News].  I copied this from the link he links to: ...... The key to being happy is to just want good things for yourself. Know what your inner self wants, really wants, and ask for it.    So many people want money. What they're really asking for is security. White picket fences. But I think very few inner children are satisfied with the fences. At one point in my life I thought I wanted money. So I got it. It took me five years to figure out that security is an illusion. Go ahead, get the white picket fences. I got mine! But until I was ready to grow again, to become more than my money-wishes had imagined for me, my world was black and white. My inner child threw a three year tantrum. "This isn't what I wanted!" screamed the little boy inside of me. So many people waste so many years trying to ignore the little child. Our parents told us to grow up. That really means stop listening to yourself! That's what our parents wanted to do, to stop listening to themselves. If they listened to their children they'd have to listen to themselves. A vicious cycle. If we're not very careful we pass it on to our kids.  I can't speak for *your* child, but mine now speaks very clearly to me. What does my little boy want? Love, play, creativity, fun, freedom, sharing. These things make me happy. Not scared of living. Thriving and accomplishing. Part of the world. Smiling and humming, rolling and flowing, deep and rich, even if something "bad" just happened. Material value doesn't show up in this equation. I don't look at my balance sheet for a clue to how happy I am. It isn't what you have, it's how much fun you have, that makes you rich. ...... I think it's pretty to think that way.  Pretty is a high compliment from me, by the way.  Like "cool" from a 10-year old.  It means I read/see it and like it and want to see/look more.  I find I have a hard time embracing the little girl inside me...and yet I'm all for a coloring session to de-stress or singing Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.  I've been more grown-up than a lot of adults since I was 4 though, so actually be embracing of seeking fun instead of security is a hard one.  Not that I don't logically agree with it.  I must be tired, my rambling isn't making sense. Comments11:07:22 PM

Don't Get Buried in Customer Data - Use It. A good deal of what my team does is develop customer- (or partner-) facing web sites. We collect a bunch of data, and we run several different reports. We're still discovering ways of doing "data mining" to spot trends, analyze usage, stuff like that. One of the handful of newsletters I get is Harvard Business Review's "Working Knowledge". If you're not one of those that's popped the $118 for a subscription to HBR--well worth the investment in your career in my opinion (or have access to it on Factiva), you can get some good summaries of some of the best articles from this free newsletter. Always something thought-provoking. Don't Get Buried in Customer Data-Use It "By the end of the decade, many marketers had come to believe that the combination of mass customization techniques, sophisticated database software, and the Internet would enable them to actually deliver on the promise of customized offerings to each individual customer. But that hasn't happened to the extent it should have, says Cleveland-based consultant James H. Gilmore, coauthor with B. Joseph Pine II of The Experience Economy (Harvard Business School Press, 1999), because "most practitioners have taken the concept of one-to-one marketing and bastardized it into CRM. They're using CRM tools to design better processes for a nonexistent 'average' customer, instead of customizing for individual customers." He cites the example of a major hotel chain that asks guests to complete a multiple-question satisfaction survey via their room's TV set during their stay. When one guest answered "extremely dissatisfied" to all the questions, he was not treated any differently when he checked out. Why? Because his answers went straight to a central repository where they were aggregated with other customers' responses and used to measure overall market—not customer—satisfaction. A more effective approach would be to feed his answers directly to someone at the front desk who could respond immediately to his needs and create a better experience for him. "A company's goal should be to learn more about what each customer needs so that it can close the customer sacrifice gap, which is the difference between what individual customers settle for and what each wants exactly," says Gilmore. Steve Cunningham, director of customer listening at Cisco, agrees that it's vital to listen and respond to individual customer needs and preferences. But he believes you must also pay attention to the aggregate data customer averages based on individual surveys." There's definitely more we can do, and I'm really looking forward to the flexibility some upcoming web services and tools are going to provide our team. [John Porcaro: mktg@msft] ------------ How to handle customer data is very interesting.  How to get it, how to use it, how to save it, and so forth.  Speaking of Cisco...I love their ads. Comments2:03:10 PM

"It's Time We Got Respect" [Daypop Top 40] I am a busy bee, but wanted to post this so I didn't lose it.  I like the term "tester."  And I like "usability professional."  Anyone that knows me does know I love to test.  My best friend was an editor and it's like that, only more fun.   I would like to study actual usability more so that I'm not just basing things on my opinions.... Too many dots...I know. Comments11:45:01 AM

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