Posted on by — 3 Comments

TiE Midwest – “Capital Efficiency for Growing Businesses”

I wrote an aricle about Mike Domek, CEO of Ticketsnow, Jason Fried, CEO of 37 Signals, Lucas Roh, CEO of Hostway. The conversation was moderated by Matt McCall of Portage Venture Partners and was hosted in Chicago by the law firm of Gardner, Carton & Douglas.

Matt led a truly inspiring discussion at the recent Chicago The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) event! Understanding how each of these guys built their businesses in a unique way is such a great story. What is also awesome is that it proves that there is no one right way to do it as Jason Fried of 37 Signals was radically different in his thought as he sat next to Mike Domeck of Ticketsnow.

All of these success stories are exciting to me and it made me realize how much fun it would be to be a part of a high growth company again.Matt led a truly inspiring discussion at the recent Chicago event! Understanding how each of these guys built their businesses in a unique way is such a great story. What is also awesome is that it proves that there is no one right way to do it as Jason Fried of 37 Signals was radically different in his thought as he sat next to Mike Domeck of Ticketsnow. These leaders also demonstrate that Chicago is capable of being the Silicon Valley of the 21st century. More on that in another post sometime soon.

All of these success stories are exciting to me and it made me realize how much fun it would be to be a part of a high growth company again. You can read my full summary here on the Wiglaf Journal, a Marketing and Strategy Journal which I contribute to. If this is your first time here, please subscribe to my RSS feed and come back sometime. Thanks.

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Dell Opens a “Blog”

Dell opened a blog at http://one2one.dell.com/ that no longer exists. I put blog in quotes because: It has moderated comments, no trackback ability and has numerous posts that are product pushes.

Here is what they should have done, one post admitting to mistakes of the past, saying we want to change, we want to listen and left it alone for like at least a week and let comments roll in. Then let those comments dictate what gets talked about next. Corporate blogging is about listening not PR. You must hire extremely senior, dynamic, highly skilled and understanding people with diverse experiences in life and a passion and understanding of process refinement for these roles. That would have gotten respect from the blogosphere. Rick Klau has a nice post on the topic of feedback.

Late last month, I purchased a new Dell, here is my unbiased review of it so far. It was written a week ago as a public service to both Dell and the blogoshpere. Maybe blog search engines need to reward those types of posts more, what do you think?    

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Is Burger King the New Starbucks? Part 1

I visited a Burger King today that had free wireless Internet access. The manager said they had had it for several months. He did not know if it was a national program, a test site or something completely random.

So I called the corporate headquarters and asked about it. An extremely nice woman said she would research this and get back to me. In the meantime, I’m asking for field reports from you. This would be a good customer acquisition and retention initiative that would be focused on customer’s needs. I’ll put up something more when I know about it.   

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Chicago Sun-Times, Where are the Trackbacks?

The Chicago Sun-Times has launched some blogs this year that allow both comments. BRAVO!!! I’ll reward them by joining their conversations:

Most Dissapointing Cub – Dusty Baker

Edit: Actually, the trackback feature seems not to work even though it is displayed and I changed the title of this post. This is most unfortunate. They should open the entire online edition to both comments and trackbacks.   

Posted on by — 3 Comments

IABC Poll Results and Worse Data

Shel Israel just posted an interesting poll that says many IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) members believe angry bloggers should be ignored.

While I don’t believe polls are always accurate or should be used in lieu of actual discussion, I do believe in the power of data to indicate facts.

If you visit the IABC Jobs section(I prefer the term careers because it at least implies actual development) you will see that it currently has 271 open listings. I don’t think Shel will be too happy to learn that if you apply the word “blog” as a filter you end up with only 3 listings or a mere 1.1% of the roles listed (at the time of this posting) even include the word blog as any part of the job description, monitoring or doing it, let alone a critical part of it. My research was funded by nobody and took far less time than their poll. 🙂 

Effective and progressive culture starts with the hiring process, knowing what you truly want, being open to new ways of approaching problems and why you need it. If people doing the wrong things hire people based on the wrong objectives the cycle sadly continues. It is time for a new era of C-level leadership in corporate America, one who is experienced in change and customer experience management, has an appreciation of diversity of opinion, understands that new metrics must be developed and 21st Century communications tools. The fact that Tom Peters wrote the foreword to “Naked Conversations” speaks volumes on my hypothesis. I can’t wait to join one of those companies in the 1.1%. Is the 1.1% the new 53,561? Maybe.

Posted on by — 5 Comments

My New Dell PC User Experience – Not Enough USB Ports

My Dell Dimension 8200 died last month – dead fan after 4.5 years – RIP – you can buy it’s old memory a valuable and rare RDRAM type here (sold it on ebay). I ordered a new Dell Dimension 9150, I wanted to summarize my thoughts both good and bad:

The Good:
– PC arrived in less than one week from the time I ordered it.
– PC came with a factory installed quiet and wonderful Western Digital hard drive. 🙂
– Sturdy case compared to some other brands I’ve seen recently.
– Tall tower with more internal expansion ports.
– New fan system is entirely different and whisper quiet now!
– New PC is much, much lighter.

The not so good, but not exactly ugly:
–     Dell got rid of the parallel port connection for printers so I had to buy a new cable from newegg.com – ironically they had a cable for $7 delivered. The “best” Best Buy price for any printer cable was $30+, who needs a Gold plated printer cable? Not me sounds like Best Buy isn’t focusing on the customers needs but on profit instead.  Fortunately I saw this in the design and ordered it and it got here first – this not only caused me to buy an unnecessary new cable, but it caused me to utilize another USB port.
–     Dell removed the old keyboard and mouse connectors such that they needed, you guessed it, two more USB ports.
–     I used up a PCI port to put in my USB 2.0 card from my old PC because I needed to, it’s sad that a new PC doesn’t come standard with enough USB ports. Please add more USB ports in the future models stock. How do you miss such a simple -3 plus nothing equals problem?
–     Silver is the new black apparently. But then why is the new monitor black when the new desktop is silver? I guess they didn’t get the memo in that division.
–     The express service code tag is way to small and white ink on a clear label on silver is not exactly the type of transparency I’m looking for from Dell.
–     The unit was shipped without the audio line in jacks set to on – this led to an hour of wasted time – both Dell’s and mine on an unnecessary phone call.
–     It was delivered via UPS, I can not think of company that has a lesser understanding of who the true customer is – the person on the receiving end paying the driver’s salary by paying for the shipping in the first place! This organization would do well to hire a Chief Customer Experience Officer that monitored the blogs for ideas (if they need help with candidate selection for the retained executive search, please let me know). If I had time, I might make this a Jeff Jarvis type blog about UPS, but I’m too busy with many more much more exciting things right now.

Any other questions? Please comment.