… don’t look at your wrist, unless you want to show your age. According to a survey from the unlikely source of a small US investment bank cited in the Guardian, only 10% of US teenagers wear a watch every day and two thirds never wear one at all. The implied argument is that telling the [...]
We talk a lot about efficiency without always being very clear what we mean by it, which is perhaps one reason why efficiency all too often collapses into economy. Efficiency implies taking the same ingredients and combining them more effectively, which means that it comes from new ideas rather than new ingredients (though, of course, [...]
Indexed is a very simple site, for fans of Venn diagrams and other graphic representations – it justs consists of index cards with little sketched graphs on them – like this one: And plenty more besides.
Like many things, the principles of how to run a help desk seem staggeringly straightforward, which makes it all the odder that it is usually done so abysmally badly. Joel Spolsky sets out how to run a software helpdesk – but most of what he says seems much more generic than that: Almost every tech [...]
John Pederson – of whom I had never heard until this graph caught my eye – makes an interesting point about schools. But what he says seems just as relevant to other ponderous organisations, such as government departments. It doesn’t matter how much <Insert School District Here> grows (or plans to grow) over 5 years [...]
There is nothing quite so dated as past ways of imagining the future. Perhaps unavoidably we seize on what seems to be of the future but in our present – and extrapolate mercilessly. Given the conistency with which that becomes ridiculous not very many years later, it’s pretty clear that that is a bad technique. [...]
Is it a bad idea to start a new division to focus on customers? Techdirt thinks it might be: It’s no secret that some companies aren’t particularly responsive to customer concerns and requests, but, still, most companies at least try to position themselves as having an overall "customer-centric" focus. Apparently that’s not true of Lenovo, [...]
Jorge Luis Borges is famous for the classification of animals supposedly to be found in the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge: those that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained, suckling pigs, mermaids, fabulous ones, stray dogs, those included in the present classification, those that tremble as if they were mad, innumerable [...]
Our approach to customer service is often described – not least by me – as a lagging indicator of what commercial service providers were doing five or ten years ago. Nice to see the opposite, for a change. As the Guardian reports, manky cards may be on their way out from travel agents’ windows: The [...]
Project Match is a Chicago based outfit which focuses on welfare to work – both doing it, and doing research on doing it. One of their current schemes is Pathways to Rewards, the goal of which is to promote family and community stabilization by providing the structure, support, and incentives for the leaseholder—and all other [...]