New Direction

I just got back from PCBC and found the speakers, like last year, to be rather inspirational. However, instead of inspiring us to be creative, or even to be remarkable, or to do better, they were inspiring us to do something better. Not just biuld houses (or widgets), but to do something to make the world a better place.

It seems like most companies in the building world that want to make the world a better place have taken the approach of building "green" or something similar. Makes sense. But can't say that this really resonates with us. What resonated at PCBC were companies liek Jones Soda and Life is Good that suggested bigger ways of impacting the world. Life is Good doesn't just donate to good charities (which they do), but they run lots of fund-raising events that have a impact far bigger than their company alone could have.

I am not sure what we should be doing, or what we could do, but I feel confident that there is a better direction we could be heading -- and that it could be highly beneficial for our community while also benefiting our company. I just need to figure out what it is.

As the guys from Life is Good were fond of saying, they were looking for something. I think we are looking for something. While that doesn't seem like a big shift, I think it is a major step forward to realize that something is missing. As the old saying goes, the hard part is knowing what you don't know.

Drug platforms - for cats...

Why doesn't someone invent a trasdermal patch to deliver pet medicines so that we don't have to fight with a cat to give it a pill? J&J or Alza - are you listening?

Newspapers and Statistics

I know that most people don't understand statistics. I mean, if they did there wouldn't be a lottery. But I generally expect better from respected media sources like the NY Times. This Sunday's paper featured an article that was based entirely on a presentation at the International Builder Show about the home of the future. Architects and Builders were surveyed and in rather unscientific fashion, some themes were isolated that looked good in a graph. One rather impressive graph showed that 62% of respondants felt that the demand for custom homes with dual master bedrooms would increase by 2015. (62% said that it would increase or increase sinificantly). Through the magic of poor journalism akin to playing "telephone" this has been converted into a cover story claiming that 60% of custom homes will have dual-masters by 2015.

The article went on to present all sorts of reasons why people would want dual masters and the social stigma against it. Judging on the 160 comments posted to NYT website, it seems that they have hit on a chord -- a lot of poeple seemed to think this was just a great idea.

Never mind that very few homes have dual masters today or that a significant increase might be from 5% to 7%. Not exactly front page news or worth ruminating about the reasons.

The strange part is that since the media has so much sway over people, I wonder if we won't just see 60% of homes with dual masters in the next few years?

In case you are interested, the actual presentation is available at: http://www.nahb.org/fileUpload_details.aspx?contentTypeID=3&contentID=51299&subContentID=93019 -- Figure 23 on page 31.

Virtual Cheese

On July 4th 6 or 7 years ago I was in a rather slap-happy mood. Hanging out with my wife's cousin Julie, I came up with what seemed to be the most preposterous dot-com company that I could imagine... virtual-cheese. The idea was that we would not manufacture anything, but that people could come to our website and buy our virtual cheese. I didn't expect much in the way of sales at first, but with the buzz that would be created in the media, some large company would come and buy us out for millions. I felt confident that I was on to something real, but everyone else thought I was joking, and for that matter, that I kept the joke up for FAR too long.

Obviously once the dot-com bubble burst, it didn't seem like an idea worth pursuing (granted, it wasn't an idea worth "pursuing" even if the bubble hadn't burst).

Well, two things have been in the news recently that makes me think I should have stuck with it.

1) Check out www.cheddarvision.tv. Some cheese makers in England decided that people might want to watch their cheese be "made" on the internet and that it might drive real-world sales. Not a bad idea, but if you check out the site you'll see that making cheese is akin to watching paint dry - only much slower.

2) Scion is providing virtual cars to one of the on-line virtual worlds. Presumably, they are hoping to convince teens that driving Scions in the virtual world is cool and that will translate to real world purchases. But can it be far off for all major brands to look for placements in virtual gaming - why not buy Kraft Mac & Cheese in the on-line world?

Since Scions are apparently "selling" for about $1, I don't see why I couldn't have a buisness model that sells virtual cheese. And once the standard virtual world market is exhausted, maybe we could branch out to market to Webkinz, or Club Penguin (hey penguins love virtual cheese). Gotta expand and keep the shareholders happy. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

The down side of management

When I was a management consultant, it was abundantly clear that managers frequently lose all control by attempting to micro-manage every process. They gave so many directives and so many requirements that it was not possible for their teams to follow all of the directions all the time.

Functionally, every employee had to decide for themselves what priority to give to each assignment – which items to follow closely and which could be ignored. As a result, every employee was making management decisions and the managers, by default, were shirking all responsibility.

I’ve recently become aware of a further extension of this problem. My wife recently started working in a large urban hospital and in her manager’s attempt to control employee scheduling, she has created a situation where employees cannot schedule their own vacation time –it is assigned.

The problem comes because she, and presumably most other employees, already knows that there is a weekend, months from now, when she will not be available to work. Because there is no system to request that time off, she has been advised by everyone working there to simply to call in sick when the weekend arrives.

As a result, the hospital will need to manage an emergency staffing situation, pay excess overtime or temporary staffing costs, and worse, likely be under-staffed. All of this could be avoided if management understood that the cost or pain in providing employees some input up front would avoid more costly “emergency” coverage and related problems in the future.

The ironic part s that the founding mission of this hospital is to provide appropriate preventive care across the community so that more costly emergency care can be avoided!

If only they would apply the same logic internally.

Blogging as Marketing

I've come across two items recently that struck me as the eventual downfall of blogging. 1) Seth Godin (whom I think writes an interesting blog and interesting books) suggests that all CEOs write a blog to communicate with customers and give actual feedback on how things work at their companies. 2) A marketing group that was presenting to us about increasing awareness for a community in which we build homes suggested that we utilize blogs to reach potential clients.

These both seem, in abstract, like reasonable ideas -- but they seem to be heading down the same slope that has rendered product reviews all over the web useless.

To be fair, the marekting group was very clear that all posts to blogs should be clearly identified as a person who was representing the community and Godin wasn't really suggesting that CEOs will write their own blogs, just musing that it would be brilliant if they would do it.

It would be nice if true openness and honesty existed throughout the web and you could/would trust what you read there. It was believed that the annonymity of the web would provide the perfect environment for people to be open and honest, but instead it has created an environment that permits liars to make all sorts of claims hidden behind a mask of pretend honesty.

Perheaps the next generation of the web will be different.

helpless & fortunate

I recently learned that a good friend from my childhood (who coincidentally now lives near us) was just diagnosed with lymphoma. The cancer has progressed far and has spread through her entire body. She began chemo yesterday and I can't even begin to imagine what she and her husband are going through. She and her husband (who is a wonderful writter) are keeping a blog that is chronicalling their experience and emotions as they move through this horrible episode. Quite by accident, they began their blog at just about the same time that I started posting here. Reading their entries makes me realize how trivial the concerns in my life seem -- and make me so very thankful that I have the luxury to think and write about politics, or whimsy or a myriad of stupid topics that will never really matter - not the way things matter when you face serious issues like cancer and children and family. I'm sending all the positive energy out that I can to help them cope with this reality and I am hopeful that there will be a good outcome. If you are interested in reading about their experience, you can find their blog at http://luchalee.wordpress.com but be prepared for a very sobering, paifully sad, but hopeful column.

Med Students

It was pointed out to me that a guy that I know put together a few spoofs on the Real Men of Genius commercials. They are all about Med School and they are pretty funny - not the best production values, but not too bad all things considered. You can check one of them out at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2792206638207066274&q=med+student+asker&hl=en

The other ones should be available from the side bar on the right.

The National Western

So I attended the PBR bull riding at the National Western Stock Show a couple of days ago... First of all, the riders (and bull fighters that protect the riders) are pretty impressive in person. But I was far more struk by the crowd which seemed like a pretty good representation of middle America. Its has been a while since I've been so acutely aware that I am an East Coast Liberal. I felt as though the experience should have been fairly insightful, but as of yet I have not found the deeper meaning. Perhaps more on that later.

Taking the Plunge

Okay so I finally decided that I ought to starg blogging... Not that I have any particular objective, but since I've detached myself from the more recent digital revolutions -- and terms like RSS or Firefox meant nothing to me, I figure that it's time I get plugged back in. So look for further ramblings and thoughts comming soon.