Connect More Dots

Water Wednesdays

December 12, 2012 by Dan Myers 2 Comments

Keeping our world’s water supply clean has been a passion well before I even got involved with Blue Planet Network back in 2008. Nearly 5 million people die from water, sanitation and hygiene-related causes each year. A lack of access to clean water impacts nearly every facet of our life and we usually don’t even realize it…

There’s been an exponential increase in awareness campaigns by non-profits in the past few years highlighting the importance of clean water projects and encouraging donations. charity:water alone has raised more than $40 million dollars by inspiring everyone from children to Will and Jada Pinkett Smith to give up their birthdays and ask others to donate instead of receiving gifts. Individually as people, I believe we’re taking notice of the issue.

But, I’ve been waiting… and waiting… and waiting… for companies to connect themselves to clean water initiatives. I’ve been on the hunt for companies that understand clean water has a dramatic impact on their business – that they need to care about clean water not because it makes for a great PR story – but because it has serious ramifications to their bottom line, their entire purpose, and their very existence.

Think I’m overreacting? Imagine trying to enjoy your favorite cup of coffee from Starbucks if the company didn’t care to invest in water filtration processes. Making the water in San Francisco and the water from New York City taste indistinguishable from the other so your favorite brew tastes the same regardless of where you are in the world is no easy feat. The water used to brew your tall soy double pump vanilla latte with cinnamon sprinkles on top is only a drop in the bucket though. Between the irrigation used to grow the coffee beans, ship them to the U.S., roast, rinse, package and plenty of other steps along the way, those aromatic arabica pebbles of joy consume roughly 35 gallons of water for a single cup of coffee. The pride might be in the coffee bean, but I guarantee you water has value to Starbucks.

Source: The Wall Street Journal article “Yet Another ‘Footprint’ to Worry About: Water” by Alexander Alter

How many cotton T-shirts do you own? The water footprint consumed by each one is roughly 700 gallons of water. A pair of jeans, typically just over 500 gallons. And the water does not come out clean on the other end of this manufacturing process! The textile industry is one of the biggest users and abusers of our world’s water resources. Using the estimates of a textile industry expert from Hong Kong, global textile manufacturing produces approximately 132,277,000,000 pounds of textile material each year. That equates to 2,377,548,471,223,335,936 gallons of water - OR, MORE WATER THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLE FATHOM – consumed each year just in manufacturing textiles. So when you hear of 10% or 20% reduction rates, it is reason to celebrate!

Needless to say, I was ecstatic to hear Nike and Adidas have both been working with DyeCoo, who has completely eliminated the use of water in the textile dyeing process. Instead recycled CO2 is used to die fabric. A 100% reduction of water. Not to mention significant reductions in drying expenditures. Moreover, the elimination of water, 50% reduction in energy use, and 50% reduction in chemical use has cut the textile production costs by 30% to 50%. Cheaper and safer? Brilliant! I’m guessing we’re still short of mass-production in millions upon millions of quantities. The technology has actually been around for 25yrs. DyeCoo just had the bright idea of how to make it more affordable. For now, Nike announced its partnership with DyeCoo by unveiling the running jersey it made for Kenyan Abel Kirui to wear in the Olympics. Adidas is tip-toeing in the rink too with 50,000 DryDye t-shirts going on sale this summer.

The horses are coming so you better run. Change is on the way.

Filed Under: Adidas, Manufacturing, Nike, Starbucks, Water Tagged With: Nike

Business of Free

December 11, 2012 by Dan Myers 6 Comments

I would never actually call myself “a gamer.” The only gaming console I’ve ever owned is the original Nintendo, and I still have it! Yes, the Duck Hunt gun still works too. However, I do love playing games – I enjoy trying out different strategies or doing something unexpected. Mostly, I’m addicted to besting any challenge put before me. But I’ve found few games hold my attention long enough to provide an enjoyable challenge, so I’m always cautious when I let a new game in my life. If any of you game makers out there want to test if your games can sway a harsh critic, consider the gauntlet thrown. (My friend’s Kickstarter funded game Viticulture is up at bat next.)

But in retrospect, what I’ve ultimately recognized is that I DO enjoy games. I just don’t want to PAY for them. And especially not for video games. I don’t want to pay – with my time or my money – to only be mildly entertained staring at a screen. That point got me thinking: how do you put a price and valuation on being entertained? How do we do so when a vast world of online entertainment is available now for free?

The internet has made so many things free. You can read your favorite newspaper online, listen to your favorite radio station, watch a TV show you missed, play games, send letters, pay bills, even provide food for others (freerice is still around people!) …all for free… minus the cost of a computer and internet access provider. Thank you interwebz, I love you! But, my point remains, the internet has drastically changed our expectations and behavior in relation to the breadth and depth of goods and services readily available to those with internet access. The thought that you can make money, and LOTS of it, by giving services away for free seems nearly irrational.

Zynga , producer of online games such as Mafia Wars, Farmville, Cityville and all the other whos in whoville, has been described as an innovator and champion of social gaming. Zynga owns the top 4 games played daily on Facebook, and 3 of the top 5 games played on mobile devices. In fact, 30% of all smartphone users interact with Zynga games, amounting to 10 billion minutes spent each month. And of course, all of Zynga’s games are also free to play. Judging the value of entertainment is slightly easier when we have a common reference point such as cost, for example: do you think the latest movie is really worth the $10 admissions to see? But how much is FREE entertainment worth to you?

Well, Zynga raked in $1.16 billion dollars in revenue in 2011 alone. And has $1.6 Billion in cash and cash equivalents. Not too shabby! And yet, Zynga has seen its stock price plummet 75% in the last year, watched top-level executives flee, and recently announced the dismissal of 150 employees, the termination of 13 games, and closure of several production studios around the globe. Why?!? Zynga’s business model has been criticized up, down, left, right, A, B, A, B, start, and from every other possible direction. Is the business of free really sustainable?

I started wondering about comparisons to other business models that provide free goods or services in order to make money; in particular, businesses operated on a similar free model BEFORE the days of the internet. I found it difficult to identify any at all. Radio and TV programs, and the modern-day Hulu remain free to users, but paid for by a 3rd party (advertisers). While not revenue generators, police departments, public parks, and libraries are all seemingly free, except we pay for them with our taxes.

And then it hit me. In many ways, Zynga is like a street performer – completely dependent on high traffic areas, giving away entertainment for free, and hoping someone drops some change. Admittedly, this analogy isn’t quite synonymous. Most people only give a street performer money after they’ve been entertained – if they give any money at all – and even then, the best entertainers aren’t often rewarded. Instead, Zynga hooks you with free entertainment and hopes you pay to enhance the gaming experience.

A better comparison to Zynga can be found in the business of movie theaters. Did you know that if you go see a movie in the first several weeks upon release, the theater typically receives 0% – 10%, while the production movie studios rake in loads of money by taking 90% – 100% of ticket sales? Essentially, the movie theater is giving away an entertainment service for free the first few weeks of every film. Movie theaters aren’t really in the business of selling movie tickets, they’re in the concessions business. The sales of concessions, such as popcorn, candy, soda, hot dogs, nachos, and even ice cream, account for approximately 40% of a movie theaters profit – all optional purchases that enhance the experience! However concessions have become so synonymous with the movie experience that the thought of watching a movie at home has most of us reaching for the microwave popcorn. Which, by the way, you’ll find yourself paying about 600% more for at the theater.

Like the street performer and the concession stand, Zynga also makes its money off of optional purchases – paying for that larger red tractor, checking the strength of a word, or perhaps getting an extra hint. With nearly 300 million monthly users playing Zynga games, only 2.9 million pay for virtual goods. In other words, roughly 1% of users pay for optional items to enhance their experience. That 1% represents somewhere between 50% – 90% of Zynga’s revenue. Thus, the vast majority of Zynga’s business model relies on IF 1% of users decide to buy an optional virtual item. It seems dangerous to rely on so few people, and yet it also gives those 1% of people incredible power – Zynga better treat them like gold! In fact, Zynga does – identifying these users similar to how casinos identify their high-dollar players – they are “whales.” Why? Because a 2011 State of Gaming Review by Spil Games revealed that those who play free-to-play games actually end up spending $60 a month in micro-transaction to enhance the gaming experience. A single person spending nearly $720 per year on free games. To answer our question, we’ll call that $720 the price of free entertainment in this instance.

Critics say that Zynga’s business isn’t sustainable – that producing free social games isn’t working. Well, similar to movie theaters, Zynga isn’t really in the business of free entertainment. Zynga is in the business of concessions – in this case, the sales of virtual goods. And while you might think virtual goods seem silly, the global market for virtual goods is projected to grow to $15 billion in 2014, according to a report by In-Stat. Currently, nearly 10% of all virtual goods purchased around the world are from Zynga.

In full disclosure: I own a pitifully insignificant amount of Zynga stock, and I’d prefer to be invested in a company with a sustainable business model who’s value is going to grow… here’s a few things I think might help:

1) Create new virtual retail outlets with broader reach. Zynga has already started this process by building gaming sites and partnerships off of Facebook.

2) Increase focus on mobile. More and more people are spending time on the phones – it’s just too easy these days. Zynga has already captured 30% of smartphone users – increase that marketshare.

3) Rely far less on Facebook. Zynga signed an unfortunate deal agreeing to pay Facebook 30% of what it makes selling virtual goods on Facebook through 2015. That’s giving away 30% of the bread and butter! (News flash: the terms of this contract were just renegotiated 2 weeks ago, and starting MArch 31, 2013, Zynga won’t need to process purchases through Facebook Payments.)

4) Critics suggest making better games. Please do so! Or just buy them, as you did with Words with Friends and Draw Something. Develop a portfolio of games with a variety of formats that are more engaging and continually offer a unique result beyond the click and repeat format you used to build.

5) Design better virtual goods to sell. Ideally, develop virtual goods that are highly synonymous with the game and experience.

6) Create virtual goods that have obvious benefit, appeal, and value to more than 1% of users.

7) Provide virtual goods to people to unexpectedly have a moment to enjoy, thus increasing an awareness and understanding of the enhanced benefit of purchasing the items in the future.

8) Increase the number of virtual goods that include social incentive. Zynga sold virtual sugar beets in Farmville, and other items in Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker to raise nearly $3 million dollars towards relief programs in Haiti.

9) Apply behavioral data on how to cash-in on micro-transaction “whales” to other highly valuable revenue streams – such as legalized gambling perhaps. Another news flash: Zynga just filed its Application for a Preliminary Finding of Suitability from the Nevada Gaming Control Board. And inked a deal to provide online poker and casino games for cash money in the U.K starting in 2013.

10) And just to round us out 10 and because I think this is the way of the future: blow my mind with technology. Given the latest frenzy and spread of the Lotto and Powerball, I wondered why I can’t buy a ticket straight from my phone. Partner up to create Zynga Lotto, with proceeds donated to public health, safety, and education.

I actually started writing this post over a month ago before distracted by the recent death in my family. It’s interesting to see how several items on my list above have come to fruition in that short time. Happy free reading people!

Filed Under: Free, Games, Service Innovation, Zynga

Life Happens. Are you prepared for it?

December 9, 2012 by Dan Myers 2 Comments

I vowed to write blog posts with more regularity and frequency – OK, I told myself I’d post every day!! Then there was a death in the family, 4 hours later I was on a plane cross-country, and this blog was left unattended for weeks. I’ve felt the desire to apologize to you loyal 3 readers, but the only thing I can really apologize for is being unprepared.

I’m thankful that I and others were able to celebrate a dearly loved one’s remarkably full and long life. I recognize the loss of someone in anyone’s life is a heavy burden to bear. Though, not just emotionally, there’s a surprising amount of responsibility we have when we pass-away: funeral instructions, care of assets, settlements of debts, and any other final words or wishes we may want to pass on. If you’ve ever had to deal with the remaining assets of a loved one – you know it is an emotional challenge, sometimes a logistical challenge, and often a distribution challenge when deciding how to best split assets between multiple surviving family members.

While this post may touch on a melancholy subject, it is only a means to highlight the incredible speed at which our lives are changing and our behavior adapting. As the nature of our lives have changed over the years, so too has the nature of our death. In life, few people these days keep physical albums of photographs the way our ancestors did. Those are kept in our computer, on Facebook, or more likely on our phone or in the elusive cloud. But, our Facebook statuses, Twitter tweets, and bloggy blog posts all capture an immense documentation of our life – not just captured, but preserved! So what happens to this blog when I pass on? 20 years ago we might have asked what happens to an author or journalists body of work, not to mention their loyal readers? Perhaps an anthology was created or reprints made. Today, what happens to any bloggers body of work when they are gone? And what will their three, hundreds, thousands, or millions of followers do when no new posts come?

We’re now in an age where we have to recognize digital assets have real value. Furthermore, our digital assets are only going to continue to grow exponentially as we become even more reliant on technology and digital social media platforms to store or share our digital property. Instead of a shoe-box full of letters, I have an email account that holds up to 10 gigs of letters and conversations that tell a story from every facet of my life.

One estimate suggests currently, 375,000 U.S. Facebook users pass-away annually.[1] In a saga spanning now nearly 2 years, the parents of University of Wisconsin student Benjamin Stassen, have been fighting Facebook for access to their son’s account after he committed suicide at age 21. The inside perspective and personal understanding of their son’s life (and perhaps the reasons for his death) clearly hold intimate value. Yet, despite a court order to grant access, Facebook has refused, “saying they have received the order but it is being processed by their legal department.”[2] A strange question to ask, but do you think rights to privacy exist for the deceased? In contrast to Facebook, Google obliged the court order and granted the parents access to his email and accounts.

Access to information is one thing, but what about access to real currency floating in the cloud when we pass? What happens to those profiles on SecondLife, World of Warcraft, Facebook, Zynga, or whatever site pops up next where people buy virtual goods and credits with tangible currency? Or what becomes of a personal virtual retail store such as on Etsy when a seller passes away but people keep placing orders? Who will even know the passwords to the many digital assets we own? How many more digital assets vs. physical assets will the next generation own or have to deal with when it comes to ownership, access, and distribution?

A connect more dots axiom for you: challenges = opportunities. Dying in the United States is an $11 billion industry.[3] Some interesting services are bound to be developed!

By now, you’ve probably all seen or heard of friends leaving a final note on the Facebook wall of someone who has already passed, which speaks to our need to deal with loss and our emotions in this digital social lifestyle we’ve built. Could a service translate these digital memorials into a physical representation of how loved and missed someone is by people from all around the world? Perhaps an artful graphic of words highlighting what someone meant to others? Or maybe an automated service that will print and bound collections of photos, statuses, check-ins, and conversations from Facebook and Twitter telling a comprehensive story of someone’s virtual life and preserving 10,000 memories.

Just as a will or letter might have been delivered in the past, we can still connect with loved ones after we pass. ifidie allows you yourself to create a video or text message to your friends, family, and followers that will be published to your own Facebook profile for all to see in the event of your death. You appoint friends and family as trustees who are in charge of reporting your death. Once 3 trustees confirm your death, only then is your message posted.

Similarly but different, Deathswitch sends you an email periodically to confirm your liveliness. You can adjust how many failure-to-responds trigger your afterlife response to be shared. A free account allows for one single email containing anything from passwords, bank account info, final wishes, love notes, etc. to be sent to 1 recipient. But $20/yr affords 30 messages to 10 recipients and the ability to include attachments such as videos, pictures, or important documents.

As my family has struggled to trace back its ancestral roots, I can’t hep but think how digital assets and information will change how much we know about our families in the future. That information has real value – Ancestory.com has a $1.4 billion market capitalization. Soon there will be less gaps in historical information. There will be less guessing what the daily life of a great-grandparent was like, we’ll have tens of thousands of digital photos (with identities of the people tagged) and digital video that won’t decay and are easily reproduced, shared, and distributed.

As unfortunate as it is, death is an expected part of life. But so to are new births, friend’s birthdays, graduations of family members, weddings, and so many other little moments in our lives. Are you prepared for them?

Filed Under: Afterlife, Service Innovation, Social Media

Sound of Happiness

October 15, 2012 by Dan Myers Leave a Comment

I have something to disclose that tends to shock people: I typically don’t hear the words in music.

I have never sought to have this medically proven, but as example, my fiance once asked me to listen to the words to Dave Matthews Band’s Don’t Drink the Water. I thought the song was about sex, which c’mon, that seems like an entirely probable guess for Dave Matthews! The song is actually about the Trail of Tears and the extermination of Native American lives and culture. I can admit when I’m wrong.

I do however love to EXPERIENCE music! I grasp onto beats, melodies, and harmonies that combine to deliver a powerful whammy cablamy right to my emotional core. For several years, I built experiences around music for brands at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, TX. When I saw Coca-Cola’s brand activation during the London 2012 Olympics, I immediately became jealous and hopeful that they bring this one of a kind multi-sensory experience on the road. Look at this majestic fusion of architecture, design, music, and sport:

Olympic Park - Park Live

Credit: Scott Cawley/CC BY 2.0

Credit: Bonnie Alter/CC BY 2.0

The exterior is comprised of 230 plastic membrane pillows inflated with air, which rely on their intersections to provide stability and rigidity to the structure Unexpectedly, the entrance ramp takes you first to the roof nearly 650ft above ground-level before circulating into the interior of the building. Scattered along the walk up, sensors and speakers embedded in 40 of the plastic cushions, turn the entire exterior of the Beatbox into a customizable mixing station where every human touch changes elements of the music playing.[2]

The concept of designing architecture that can be changed and controlled as people interact and engage with the space is infinitely awesome and infinitely full of possibilities worthy of its own dedicated post. If you didn’t believe that sports was actually fused into the architecture, guess again – each of the 200,000 visitors created a unique experience for themselves and others by touching the sensors and playing deconstructed elements of the song “Anywhere In The World,” which included the pounding of a hurdler’s feet against the track, the strike of an arrow hitting a bullseye, the kick of a taekwondo athlete, and the tink of a ping-pong ball.

Inside the space, you celebrate with a free Coca-Cola in a recyclable, aluminum bottle collected as you leave. And since this is truly a multi-dimensional experience building upon itself, even your celebrations are celebrated. Sensors in 3 “Cheers in Celebration” stations detect when Coca-Cola bottles are clinked together, triggering 180 “bubble” lights hanging overhead to individually glow red and white as they expand and contract rhythmically in time with the Anywhere In The World soundtrack.[3]

Coca-Cola has long been associated with music – don’t be fooled, this is by Coca-Cola’s own design, and perhaps more important by the brand’s dedication to creativity and artists. Coca-Cola first invested in musicians as early as 1899 when singer Hilda Clark became the first celebrity model for the company.[4] As a brand that has continually innovated around music and opened happiness in nearly every corner and hillside across the planet, if you’re listening Coca-Cola… I’d like to teach the world to sing in exploratory modern harmony with the Coca Cola Beatbox experience visiting a city near you soon.

Filed Under: Architecture, Coca-Cola, Olympics

Medication Errors, Hamburgers, & Flying at 10,000ft

October 10, 2012 by Dan Myers Leave a Comment

In his book Oh, the Things I Know! A Guide to Success, or Failing that, Happiness, (yes that’s really the actual title) comedic writer for Saturday Night Live turned Senator for the State of Minnesota, Al Franken writes: “Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.”

There’s no mistaking that feeling of disappointment and dissatisfaction as a customer when we find a company has made a seemingly simple error – messed up the drive-thru order, shipped the wrong size of an item, or billed the wrong amount. We too often forget that every time we interact with a company, we’re interacting with people – products designed by people, processes enacted by people, business decisions made by people – and people make mistakes!

High Reliability Organizations (HROs) typically operate in environments where the slightest mistake can have overwhelmingly tragic consequences – think: a nuclear power station, NASA, or a Navy aircraft carrier. As a consumer of an HRO product or service, we expect perfection 100% of the time, and anything less is unacceptable.

In 2003, Kaiser Permanente, the largest health maintenance organization in the U.S, was looking to attract more patients and cut costs by building new hospitals to replace out-dated facilities.[BusinessWeek] The design firm IDEO was brought on board. One interesting problem Kaiser and IDEO identified: the seemingly unnecessary number of patients who were receiving improper medication – patients given meds at the wrong time of day, the wrong dosage, or the wrong medicine entirely.

In 2011, Doug Bonacum, Vice President, Quality, Safety, and Resource Management at Kaiser Permanente stated: “Each year, up to 7,000 people die due to medication errors in the United States alone. And we know between 2% and 6% of our hospitalizations result in a preventable adverse drug event. Our study of these areas has indicated that up to 40% of them are occurring in the medication administration process…. Not only do our patients suffer from an adverse drug event, but so do our practitioners who may carry an error with them for the rest of their lives. We owe it to our patients and our practitioners to create a safe, standard, and reliable way to deliver medications at Kaiser Permanente.”

Where do you go to find a safe, standardized, and reliable delivery method? Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun! McDonald’s of course! The business of fast food relies on delivering your order quickly and correctly. It is an industry where seconds and fractions of seconds matter. The customer’s time is valued. Time is sacred.

In 2004, a New York Times article discussed the innovations of McDonald’s franchisee, Shannon Y. Davis. Pull into the drive-thru lane of one of his McDonald’s off of I-55 near Cape Girardeau, Missouri and you’ll be ordering a hamburger from a call center more than 900 miles away in Colorado Springs. Why? By outsourcing drive-thru calls, these McDonald’s restaurants were able to reduce drive thru order time by 30 seconds. That may not sound like much, but consider this: drive-thru orders at these McDonald’s restaurants averaged 1 minute, 5 seconds. That is 58% faster service than the average order time of all McDonald’s in the U.S., according to data from QSRweb.com. Not impressed yet? They also handled 30 more cars – that’s 30 more sales – per hour, filled orders 30% faster, made mistakes on fewer than 2 percent of all orders (down from about 4 percent before), and cut overall labor costs by 1% (more than enough to cover the cost of the call center).

Where might we learn about how an HRO handles delivery methods? Flight school. Safely delivering a 900,000 pound plane full of people through the air to their destination is a rather complex task if you consider all the variables. Have you ever wondered why you can’t use any electronic equipment below 10,000 feet on an airplane? Why does the airplane intercom system usually chime when you hit 10,000 feet? What is so special about 10,000 feet? There’s an extremely large amount of variables a pilot needs to consider when taking off and landing. After reviewing a series of accidents, the FAA found that many could likely have been prevented if the pilots had not been distracted by each other, chatter from other crew members, or calls from the flight attendants to the cockpit with requests and reports on the passengers. In 1981, the FAA instituted the “Sterile Cockpit” rule to expressly prohibit crew members from engaging in non-essential conversations and activities during critical (and the most dangerous) parts of a flight, specifically: taxi, takeoff, landing, and all other flight operations conducted below 10,000 feet. The focus and attention of the pilot during these critical moments of a flight is sacred.

Questions: While there are certainly lessons to be learned from the fast food industry and the airline industry, are they transferable to our overly complex healthcare system and the business of running a hospital? Would a hospital administrator really listen and learn from a fast food restaurateur or an airline pilot? And why do nearly 7,000 people die in hospitals due to medication errors in the United States and thousands more medication errors occur in the first place? And how can we reduce those mistakes?

I visited Kaiser Permanente’s Sidney R. Garfield Health Care Innovation Center in San Leandro, CA to learn more. As it turns out, from McDonald’s, Kaiser learned how to innovate quickly, maximize the value of low cost materials, iterate rapidly, change configurations with ease, and fail quickly and fail often to get to better, stronger ideas. Observational research and personal interviews showcased how nurses delivering medications were involved in conversations while retrieving medication, deterred from their route to retrieve blankets for other patients, and engaged in a number of other distractions analogous to pilots before the Sterile Cockpit rule was implemented.

Solution: After what must have been hundreds of hours of research, design, development and likely hundreds of dollars in billable services, IDEO delivered a roll of tape and a reflective sash – not quite Miss United States and not quite elementary school hall monitor, but close! More importantly, IDEO delivered a new process and a new mindset to better deliver medications. They made the act of delivering medications sacred. The entire medication dispensing station was taped off to signify a “Sacred Zone” where a nurse retrieving medications was not to be interrupted or disturbed. Likewise, a nurse on medications rounds was to wear the reflective yellow sash over their scrubs to signify they were focused on a critical task, not to be distracted, and any questions or other tasks should be “outsourced” to a different nurse.

Results: During my tour of the Kaiser Permanente Innovation Center, I learned that interruptions during medication delivery were reduced by 90%, and medication errors dropped by 40 – 60%. IDEO helped Kaiser increase patient satisfaction, improve quality of care, and reduce costs by designing for the human experience instead of building new buildings.[BusinessWeek]

What do you find is held sacred at companies you interact with, either as an employee or as a customer? What activities should a company better design for the human experience? What audio/visual cues do you notice signify a sacred act? (We’ve got sashes and chimes, thus far.)

I am reminded of Google Search. Where other search engines crowd their search page with distractions of entertainment news or trending popular searches, Google holds the act of searching for the information you want completely sacred. With a clean white background, you’re visually reminded your sole task is to search for something, while Google aims to quickly and correctly deliver the information you seek.

Filed Under: Google, Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, McDonald's, Service Innovation

This is the beginning

March 15, 2012 by Dan Myers Leave a Comment

This is the beginning. And there is much to be done.

(Art Credit: Nan Lawson)

Filed Under: Inspiration Tagged With: Inspiration, quote

Water Wednesdays

Business of Free

Sound of Happiness

Medication Errors, Hamburgers, & Flying at 10,000ft

This is the beginning

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