Nice tea box

Love how this Embassy Suites used this beautiful Tazo tea box to display their less expensive Bigelow tea bags.

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I don't think they really want to sell this

Up at Sam's this nice Range Rover was in the parking lot with a for sale in the windshield, but no phone number. I can't help but wonder if one spouse wants to sell and the other does not. "Yeah, I took it up there and put the sign in the window. I don't know why no one has called. I guess we should keep it."

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SMG FORUM | Quick Overview

One of my favorite conferences for the last three years has been the annual Service Management Group Forum. It's an opportunity to listen to top-notch industry experts share their wisdom about creating the ultimate customer experience, network with other business leaders, and challenge myself to make more of an impact in my own profession. As always, I walked away with some valuable lessons and actionable ideas, and of course, this year I thought, "Hey, I could get an observation paper out of that."

But my first drafts were nothing more than boring book reports. So and so spoke, and they said, "Blah," and I thought, "Wow." It wasn't keen insights worthy of an observation paper; it was more like the dry transcript from a court reporter. So I've gone back through my notes and looked for rare ah-ha's, patterns from one presentation to the next, and points of contradiction. And that's what my next couple of posts will focus on sharing.

In the meantime, here are a few of my favorite quotes from the conference:

“Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence… and having it last into your absence.”

~ Frances X. Frei

"We are striving for perfection, but we'll tolerate excellence."

~ Jeff from Chick-fil-A

"Raving fans are guests who come often, pay full price, and tell their friends."

~ Jeff from Chick-fil-A

"Human beings aren't horses"

~ Daniel Pink

"Collaboration is not a natural process. You have to demand it."

~ Jim Wright CEO of Tractor Supply Company

"The purpose of a business is to get and keep customers."

~ Peter Drucker via Jack Mackey

"Different" by Youngme Moon

This is a great video that makes me want to read the book.



What's your criteria for a great business book? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

OSCAR NIGHT PREP | "A Serious Man"

A movie about nothing, without all the humor of a show about nothing. It felt a little like the Saturday Night Live skit spin-off movies, meaning it was a clever idea that works well for a short, but falls short when stretched to a full length motion picture. There were a couple of captivating scenes, including the first of the movie which was an intriguing Hebrew folk tale with Fyvush Finkel in the role of a dybbuk.

The Coen brothers do a beautiful job of staging 1967 through the various scenes and characters including plenty of block constructed buildings, a doctor who smokes, and gorgeous Coupe de Villes. However, I felt no investment in any of the characters and the plot doesn't go anywhere. Which is actually the point I think they were trying to make. In my favorite scene of the movie, Rabbi Nachter tells an offbeat story of a dentist who finds a message on the back of one of his patient's teeth. His conclusion to the story provides a nice summary to the movie itself:

What would happen? Not much. He went back to work. For a while he checked every patient's teeth for new messages. He didn't find any. In time, he found he'd stopped checking. He returned to life. These questions that are bothering you, Larry - maybe they're like a toothache. We feel them for a while, then they go away.

The stunning visual transportation back to the 60's and the quirky subplots were just enough to rank it above District 9 but below Julie and Julia on my list of 17 movies to see before the Oscars.

1. The Hurt Locker
2. Inglorious Basterds
3. Precious
4. (500) Days of Summer
5. Up in the Air
6. Up
7. Star Trek
8. Avatar
9. Julie and Julia
> A Serious Man
10. District 9

WHAT ABOUT YOU?

• Did you see the movie? If so, what did you think of it?
• What else have you seen that is Oscar-worthy?
• What movies do you want to see before Oscar night?

Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

OSCAR NIGHT PREP | "District 9"

I really had high hopes for District 9. It sounded like a intriguing premise, and I had read some promising reviews about the picture when it came out. Unfortunately, high expectations often lead to disappointment, and that's what happened here. Except for three big distinctions, it was surprising similar to Avatar in that it was a sappy, moralistic tale about humans treating yet another race as sub human animals that need to be controlled and potentially exterminated. Oh, how many times must we hear how bad we are? We get it already!

The first big difference is that instead of amazing 3D special affects, District 9 was filled with a sloppy mix of regular action movie shots and faux documentary style camera work with comments directly to the camera and even blood spatters on the lens. The main character kept switching from mimicking Michael on "The Office" to channeling Officer John McClane from "Die Hard." The problem was by the time I figured out what which role he was playing off of, they would switch to the other. Quite distracting.

Another difference was instead of having to rely on only one pedantic voice over as in Avatar, District 9 offered a wide range of judgmental perspectives in the form fabricated experts being interview for the mockumentary portions of the film. At least in District 9 they did less preaching and more filling in of back story.

And finally, instead of a tight, albeit predictable and didactic story line, District 9 only provided a sketchy plot replete with gaping holes and unnecessary innuendos. Why was it important that Wilkus worked for and was promoted by his father-in-law? How come the humans conducted over 20 years of medical experiments on the aliens and continued to study their advanced weaponry but left the mother ship totally alone? And speaking of advanced weaponry, if Wilkus could operated them within 18 of mutating why couldn't the aliens use the weapons themselves to prevent being bullied by the jarhead stereotypes?

So, other than that, it was just like Avatar. They both even had really cool exoskeleton body armor robots. Although, that was a minor difference as well, because in Avatar it was the earthling engineers that developed it, where in District 9 it was the product of the aliens, so advanced and so smart that they quickly evolved into prawns crawling around dumps eating cat food once they met mankind.

At least I have a new bottom feeder for my forced ranking list of movies from my list of 17 movies to see before the Oscars, which is good because I liked Julie and Julia, and I kept feeling bad for it being on the bottom; however, I'm very comfortable with District 9 taking that role over.

1. The Hurt Locker
2. Inglorious Basterds
3. Precious
4. (500) Days of Summer
5. Up in the Air
6. Up
7. Star Trek
8. Avatar
9. Julie and Julia
> District 9

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

• Did you agree with the critics and like it more than I did?
• What's been your favorite movie leading up to the Oscars?
• What do you still want to see before the Oscars?

Leave your comments and views in the comments section.

Measuring Learner Emotional Reactions

Campbell Soup has invested the last 2 years studying what customers want by conducting focus groups at the neurological level. Think of it as part packaging design, part consumer survey, and part "Lie to Me." After years of traditional research techniques, they came to the same conclusion as many retailers, "Buyers are liars" meaning that the answers customers gave in surveys didn't correlate to more sales.

This new scientific approach measures customer biometrics for emotional responses hoping to discover key triggers that actually translate into more soup being sold.



This innovative plan of attack got me thinking. What if you could do the same type of examination with learners in the classroom? Could you shape training and content to make it more sticky and to make learning more effective?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

• Do you think this "Neuromarketing" will lead to an increase in sales?
• Could you use the same methodology in understanding how learners take in information?
• If so, how would you structure such a study? What would you hope to learn?

Leave your thoughts in the comments section below.