I’m not sure I like “4th party” as a description. We spent way too much time at the VRM West Coast Workshop wrangling over the naming of firs, second and third. But when you get past all that, this key idea is really something big: VRM is about enabling the first party. It is also…
Stereotyping is easy for all of us. Our brains are categorizing machines, shoving every thing we see and do into tidy little boxes within boxes. A stereotype that conjures fear is even more powerful, because nothing gets our attention faster than danger – this also is built-in our wiring. So it’s great to see more…
Indeed: Free trade is a game rigged so that global corporations can arbitrage over all sorts of cost factors, based on a patchwork quilt of labor and environmental laws, and nearly always choosing what makes the most money. Shouldn’t our core principle be doing what causes the least harm?[From /Ground: Protectionism and The Unions: Free,…
“It’s not a surprise if you’re paying attention,” says my wife. Of course, when it comes to new sexy toys from Apple, we want details and dates. We know it’s going to come… eventually. It’s fairly obvious that the Macbook Air was the first step. This is the product development process we’ve come to know.…
Some things that seem to be good are actually failure. I’ll use an example tech support pros will all know: A customer calls, you know the answer, you give it to them and it works, and everyone is happy. Simple, straightforward, case closed. Right? No. This is a failure. Simply put, if you knew the…
My wife and I founded Square Peg Foundation in 2004, the same year Craigslist Foundation had their first “Boot Camp for Non-profits.” That first Boot Camp was an amazing experience for me, and since then I have only missed one. As Craigslist Foundation describes it: Boot Camp is an inspiring and unique community effort that…
This just cracked me up… Markets are Hanging Up On Customers I just recorded my call with Apple Support to improve customer service: [Click to listen] How to hang up on a Mobile Me customer. [From ProjectVRM Blog » Markets are Hanging Up On Customers] Follow the link and have a listen. Truly amazing.
A few days ago, someone walked up to Michael Arrington and spat on him. For those who missed this news, here is an excerpt and link from Michael’s own blog: Yesterday as I was leaving the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany someone walked up to me and quite deliberately spat in my face. Before I…
When dealing with complex issues that spread across functional lines, a senior executive focusing on the issue can being important focus and coordination to the effort. But too often, people are paying more attention to the politics of Turf instead of the value of that cross-organization emphasis. I started thinking about this after reading a…
Robert Scoble posted details of this week’s blow-up over failing drives and censored forum posts: Seagate (maker of hard drives and storage devices) has been getting slammed on forums and blogs the past couple of days. Partly because they had a bad batch of hard drives and didn’t properly recognize or fix the problem quickly.…