The portraits of former CEOs

When I was walking into the lobby of our main headquarter building in my previous company, there was an area where portraits of former CEOs were on the wall. We had every CEO or chairman’s picture back to when company was founded. The company’s focus was very executives heavy.
In the heart of change by John P. Kotter there is a story where the new executive team decided to remove all the pictures of old CEOs and replaced them with the pictures of their customer’s stores. Soon after the new pictures were up, several leaders mentioned that it is about time to focus on the customers and thereafter this become the talk of the company. It seems that little change made a big difference in their attitude toward customer service.
Perhaps next time you see your CEOs portraits – you can suggest a different type of art.

Visual view of Obama's stimulus plan

I am a big fan of creating information visualization problems in purposeful,understandable, and beautiful ways. While creating some of our own reports this way, Charly mentioned that there is a nice treemap visualization on A breakdown of Obama's stimulus plan. The treemap boxes are proportional to the size of the proposed cost of each program.



The ones in this posting were created with IBM’s free Many Eyes tool. It is a very simple tool to create many types of information visualization. It gives you opportunity to look at things differently and uncover hidden aspects of data with one glance.

Do something different!

How would you persuade people to call and get help to fix their financial situations? With the game changing in the market - many companies are running expensive ads to attract customers to call and buy their financial packages.

Why not instead hire celebrities to answer the phone randomly once in a while. This will create a buzz and will gravitate customers to call for help. When people see something they like (including a celebrity), they give you their attention. The unknown loan salesman is a mystery; however, the celebrity clearly can sustain your attention. You are watching them on TV or read their email (if the celebrity is your CEO etc) all the time and this is a proven pattern.

Invite Celebrities in your company (CEO, CFO, xxO etc) to answer the support calls once is a while.

Why not?

Real-state market

When real-state price is falling many investors/buyers tend to wait until it falls further. This hurts the economy. As a result the market falls further because some people need to sell at lower price.
Why not, create a new deal that you sell at today's price but contract with the buyer that in a year or two if the house price index has fallen by a certain percentage (you keep that in an escrow but collect interest) then you refund that % to the buyer. There is no point in waiting. The market moves in a self organized way (not by government intervention) and the market stops falling and you may not have to refund anything. This could be a new type of contract which creates possibility of win-win situation.

Reverse Living

I've been too busy changing job and starting things from scratch in the new company. Things like using open source development tools, getting back into creativity mode and working closely with business. I should say that I miss seeing my friends and should have a better plan to meet with them. I also feel younger in a reverse living fashion. As Roger von Oech says:

"Reverse Living":

… The life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, and get it out of the way. Then you live for twenty years in an old age home, and then get kicked out when you’re too young. You get a gold watch and then you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement.

Your pick?

You are presented with 2 options of picking a bottle of wine in a restaurant. One is going for 20$ and the other one goes for 30$. Which one do you pick? What if there is a third choice for 40$?

Last week I provided estimate to our users in a range, 4-8 weeks, 4 being the probability of have something to deliver. User’s understating was that we are going to finish in 6 weeks!

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