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Smartglasses Face a Blurry Future

At the 2012 Google I/O conference, the big “reveal” was Google Glass.  A team of Glass-wearing skydivers live streamed their descent toward the roof of the San Francisco Moscone center where the event was underway.  It was an awe-inspiring stunt, but Google Glass flopped due to a buggy and ridiculous user experience, and the project […]

Snakes on the Roof!

Every popular book or movie generally hues to a typical formula.  A hero faces a daunting challenge and makes a big effort to overcome trouble.  The reason this formula works is because humans are captivated by trouble and drama.  Jonathan Gottschall, the keynote speaker for the Digital Wrap Conference, documents in great detail the human […]

Keeping Score is Not the Same as Winning

Every major sports venue has a prominent scoreboard so that fans and participants alike can easily review the score with a glance to the outfield or upward at the jumbotron.  Knowing the score is a critical element in decision-making.  No point in running the ball up the gut in football when you are behind by […]

Get Busy Growing

“It comes down to a simple choice, really . . .  Get busy living or get busy dying.”               —  Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption Growing your business is a simple choice.  And if you are not growing, the business is in decline, whether you […]

Are your services significant?

Significant objects are worth more than regular objects.  At least that is the conclusion arrived upon by the significant objects project and its team of researchers.  Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, a writer and a journalist respectively, set out to prove that stories can increase the value of objects.  While it is tempting to view […]

Amazon Prime Lessons for Service Contractors

Everyone knows Amazon has been on a tear lately.  Here is their stock performance over the last 5 years as compared to the broader S&P 500.  Wow!  A big part of that success has been the Prime subscription program.   Amazon customers who subscribe to Prime to receive the following benefits: Priority shipping.  It varies […]

Whole Foods Whole World

I bet the grocers that had a bad day when Walmart got into groceries about fifteen years ago are having a really bad week now that Amazon has announced their intention to buy Whole Foods. The innovations Amazon is going to bring to grocery buying go well beyond low price and internal operational tweaks. Amazon […]

Real Deal Customer Service Saves the Day After a Flat on I-95

A flat tire on my boat trailer on Interstate 95 ranks high on my list of things that suck most in life.  Of course, it has to be on the traffic side of the trailer to really suck.  It sucked on Saturday morning at 8:50 when I heard the blowout and looked in the driver’s […]

Money for Nothing

In 1985, Marc Knopfler, the front man for the band Dire Straits, overheard a guy in an appliance store grudgingly admiring the MTV rockers performing on the store display TVs. Knopfler memorialized the reflections he overheard in the grammy winning, number one hit song “Money for Nothing” later that year. The song opens with the […]

Lessons in Customer Service from the Utility Company – NOT

It is fortunate for the utility companies that they are protected by high walls of regulation that prevent new entrants from competing with them.  I had to call customer service at Duke Power yesterday because I need to change the service at a location where I am now the personal representative of the owner.  I […]