Rants Raves Ramblings & Reflections

Active Lurkers: How Idea Lovecats Demonstrate Engagement

March 18, 2010

Many of us bloggers look at the disparity between the number of visitors to our blogs and the number of comments on our blogs, and weep shake our heads. Why is the ratio of unique visitors to commenters 683 to 1? Or 389 to 5? Or 200 to 0? What are those other 682, 384, [...]

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Useful research, if you are a gang member

March 1, 2010

Oh how I love empirical research– the chance to answer burning questions, with real data, so that you can act more effectively. Consider this new tidbit of info that I picked up over the weekend: Full beer bottles break with less force than empty ones, so if you are going to hit someone in the [...]

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What Keeps Women From Moving Up the Ladder? Not “experience”, but corporate laziness

February 24, 2010

This just in from Forbes Magazine — yet another article about why “women” don’t get promoted. (hat tip to my friend @ShaunRSmith) Orit Gadiesh and Julie Coffman, in Why Women Don’t Make It Up The Ladder summarize several of the arguments that are advanced to explain why so few women, relative to men, get promoted [...]

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Why So Much Anger at the Girl Scouts?

February 22, 2010

Ever since I poked the beehive back in August with my post about Walmart and Girl Scout cookies, my blog and I have been receiving angry comments from people who just hate the Girl Scouts. It’s one thing to be angry at Walmart, but the Girl Scouts? I don’t understand… Why is there so much [...]

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Fix the Brand of Men’s Figure Skating: Send Out the Clowns, and get me Johnny Weir

February 19, 2010

The ‘Brand of Men’s Figure Skating’ is broken. The brand lacks coherence, it isn’t compelling, and sometimes it isn’t even attractive. And it’s all because of what those guys wear. In an ideal world, the Brand of Men’s Figure Skating reflects a hearty frisson between between the brand’s two defining attributes: Athleticism & Artistry. Althleticism [...]

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Ponies in the Snow

February 10, 2010

Heaven help you if you are a business that I care about, even if your business is no business of mine. I just finished up a 24-hour email exchange with the folks at the Virginia Camp where my daughters and I do our mother-daughter riding weekends, and where they’ll be going to camp this summer. [...]

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Does the iPad Signal a Change in Apple’s Core Brand & Identity?

February 2, 2010

If products reflect an organization’s values and an organization’s identity, does Apple’s new iPad tell us something about where Apple as a company is headed? And, if that’s where Apple is going, do we all want to go there too? Here’s a proposition: Apple as an organization is changing, from an organization that’s “about” creativity [...]

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How Layoffs Have Evolved: From “Office Space” to “Up In The Air”

January 25, 2010

In the decade since its release, the movie Office Space has dramatized the corporate best of work-life dystopia. In Office Space, we’ve got the Lumberg, the red stapler, the TPS Reports, a bad case of the Mondays, a little flair, and of course, “the Bobs”. Oh, the Bobs, those clueless, bumbling, omniscient consultants from corporate [...]

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Authentic Twitter: Are exclamation points unprofessional?

January 20, 2010

Exclamation Points: An Authenticity Issue Last week, I got a bit of crap from I was chided by one of my colleagues for sending a 4-line email with three (three!!) exclamation points. This colleague also pointed out that I occasionally sprinkle my tweets with exclamation points. This is a problem. These exclamation points, s/he explained, [...]

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What’s going on at my favorite Starbucks?

January 13, 2010

There’s something going on at my favorite Starbucks. I’m not quite sure what it is. But there is new evidence today that this Starbucks is somehow special/better than the other 3 in my town. Before I tell you about that, I should probably explain that there are 4 Starbucks within a 2 mile radius of [...]

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