Lawsuit Limits

What makes a corporation a responsible social entity? My opinion is that it starts with how the treat their employees - all of their employees, and not just the top level of management. The next is how they treat their customers. Are they people they provide goods to real flesh-and-blood folks, or are they numbers in a cost-benefit analysis?

Can we get an idea of a corporate philosophy of a company by how much they talk about civil lawsuits and how they would like to see tort reform efforts take place? Maybe.

I'm not a big fan of limiting lawsuits and trying to keep consumers from trying to have a day in court. A civil justice system is supposed to set the standards for our society, and if the average ordinary citizen doesn't like the results of the cost-benefits analysis that many large corporations follow when assessing risk, then they should bring a suit.

This article looks at why the corporate complaints are getting listened to a little more than in past years: Robin Hood is alive in court, say those seeking lawsuit limits

There are businesses who care about their employees and happy customers.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal noted that Costco shareholders might be getting harmed because the company treats employees and customers so well. I think that is a myopic view, especially considering the much lower turnover rate of employees at Costco. And happier customers.

I was visiting with my parents last weekend, and they actually mentioned Costco a couple of times, and how much their like their food, and the way they prepared some of their items at the store. When ordinary consumers start conversations talking about how much they like a store, the store must be doing something right.

Can MSN compete when there's no competition?

Microsoft seems poinsed to take on the world of search, making blogs, news, and web sites its target. Ready to launch this summer, can MSN carve a niche that needs to be filled. I'm not sure that bloggers really need MSN.

Things they never taught me

Why is it that lessons learned the hard way are often the ones that stay with us the longest? It's so much easier learning from the mistakes of another. Things such as "never start your business two weeks after the Yellow pages ads need to be submitted when your business relies upon that advertsing as a primary way of gaining new customers."

This list is priceless: Michael McDonough's Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School. It's scope goes way beyond designing.

Techno Lawyers need Apply

I've been wondering lately if lawyers are going to soon outnumber software engineers at Microsoft.

With 600 attorneys working in the legal department, and at least 3 dozen current law suits pending, they're a mighty litigating group.

Meanwhile, I purchased a monitor at a corporate surplus sale on Tuesday for $10.00. It was the last piece I needed for a linux server system that I'll be setting up (for my own personal use) at home, to help me figure out if I like Linux. I don't know if I'll need much of a legal background to run it correctly.

The largest new force for education in China

Sometimes it's difficult to remember how powerful cartoons can be. Here's an example to put them in perspective.

There are more than 95 million children under the age of 5 in China. A Bejing publisher has been awarded the rights to bring "Noddy" to them. The cartoon character will be used to inftroduce children to language skills. See: Noddy motors into Chinese market

Things not to do to your web site, part 3

Third in the series, this one is as important as any of the others. OK, I know, that sounds like a variation of the first rule or warning I gave, that when you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing. A slight variation of that is when you prioritize everything, nothing comes first.

Avoid being everyone else.

This one isn't the first step that you would take in putting together a business plan or marketing plan,. but it is a vital one. What is different about your company? What is unique? Can you state it in a single statement?

Interestingly, you can apply a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) to a nonprofit, information-only site, too. It's not a mission statement or a motto. What is your site's USP?

more keywords

On Saturday, I discussed keywords a bit in the first of the things not to do to your website. I came across a good article this evening which has more good points on the subject: Seven tips for writing better keywords

Things not to do to your website, part 2

Don't hide in plain sight when you want something back from your customers.

If you want someone to share their name, address, telephone number, and credit card number, you should make that information easily available to them. Let your customers know who you are, and build a level of trust.

Credibilty is a very important part of succeeding when you want to engage in commercial activities on the web. I heartily recommend a visit to the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility There are some great suggestions there. Keep in mind that you have a couple of purposes behind disclosing information about yourself to your potential customers. One is that you want to prove that you are trustworthy. The second is that you want to have people believe in your expertise.

This page from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox is also worth looking over: "About Us" -- Presenting Information About an Organization on Its Website

Things not to do to your web site, part 1

Learning by your own mistakes is a mistake that you should avoid, if you could.

It's much easier to learn by the fumbles and foibles of others. I've decided that the few hundred errors I've learned since the mid 90s might make good fodder for this blog. It's salvation to realize that what you are doing is wrong. Much better than continuing to do it incorrectly. Learning that you are making mistakes, or how to avoid those of others, is good.

One of the most important rules to keep in mind when it comes to the birth and care and feeding of your web site will be repeated here more than a couple of times. It goes like this:

When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing.

Today, I'm going to write about that in terms of something I've seen referred to as keyword flooding. There was a time when keywords were an important part of every web site. You would use a meta tag in the head section of each page, and include a list of words in there, separated by commas. Those words would be words that you expected people to use to find your site, or that you hoped they would follow and find your site.

How would having these "keywords" help people locate your pages? Well, a search engine such as Altavista would come along and index those keywords and associate them with your online endeavor. Altavista liked keywords, and indicated that people should use up to 1024 characters in their keyword list. That would fit a lot of words.

But, there are problems with keywords. One of the more interesting articles I've found about the weaknesses of the meta tag and keyword approach is Cory Doctorow's Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia.

The search industy seemed to catch on the the problems described by Boing boing blogger Doctorow (the article was written back in the pre blog days.) A clear indication of the decline and fall of meta tags was the recognition of their demise by Search Engine Watch commentator Danny Sullivan, in Death Of A Meta Tag.

Most people who developed the habit of writing a list of meta tags for their web sites continued to do so. I do, too. But, I no longer try to make the big, big, lists of the past. Keep it to a handful of words, normally the words around which the page was built. When you build your site for a particular market, one of the most important things you can do is know your market, and your targeted audiences, and build the site around the ways that they will use to find the site, and include on the site words that they expect to find.

Those keywords will likely be in the body text of the site, in the description, in headlines, alt-text, the site title, and others.

What does this have to do with the rule I cited above, "when you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing?"

Well, I've seen people put what looks like half the dictionary in their meta keywords tag. Every word that they might believe someone would use to find your site. It does not work like that! Under the old rules of the keywords, every word was important, bt less important if there were more words. By including so many words, you diffuse the value of each word.

So? How important is this tidbit of seemingly useless information if keywords are no longer used?

Maybe they are, and maybe they aren't. People have been claiming for quite some time that Google no longer uses them. But, only the scientists working at Google know for sure.

And Google isn't the only search engine on the web. People do use different search engines. Yahoo used to serve Google results. That has recently changed.

On the Yahoo page How do I improve the ranking of my web site in the search results?, we see this: "Use a 'keyword' meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page. "

It appears that the reports of the death of meta keywords are not true. At least for now.

But use them carefully, and don't consider them an opportunity to show off how many words you know about a specific industry.

fear of flying

My father travels quite a bit more by plane than I do. He told me that he has taken to driving instead of flying when the trip is 300 miles or less. He said that the hassle at the airports really isn't worth taking a plane.

There's a brute force, everyone is a criminal, mentality settling in that is fairly well described in articles like this one: Fines Against Passengers Draw Fire.

treading down the sword

I enjoy reading books about other cultures, though I wonder if it's wise to read books about one thing, such as martial arts, and try to adapt their philosophies to another, such as business.

I've been skimming through a translation of Miyamoto Musashi's A Book of Five Rings. It's difficult to read the whole thing in one sitting. There are a lot of small sections, and it reads like a bunch of blog entries.

One of my favorites was called in the translation I'm reading "stomping the Sword." I found an online version (linked above), which gives it a slightly different name, but a similar translation. Are there folks who practice business in the same manner, and with the same passion that a samurai from the 1600s did?

I suspect that it does happen.

Here's that section:

'To tread down the sword' is a principle often used in strategy. First, in large-scale strategy, when the enemy first discharges bows and guns and then attacks, it is difficult for us to attack if we are busy loading powder into our guns or notching our arrows. The spirit is to attack quickly while the enemy is still shooting with bows or guns. The spirit is to win by 'treading down' as we receive the enemy's attack.

In single combat, we cannot get a decisive victory by cutting, with a 'tee-dum tee-dum' feeling, in the wake of the enemy's attacking long sword. We must defeat him at the start of his attack, in the spirit of treading him down with the feet, so that he cannot rise again to the attack.

'Treading' does not simply mean treading with the feet. Tread with the body, tread with the spirit, and, of course, tread and cut with the long sword. You must achieve the spirit of not allowing the enemy to attack a second time. This is the spirit of forestalling in every sense. Once at the enemy, you should not aspire just to strike him, but to cling after the attack. You must study this deeply.

The evolution of digital thought

I didn't start out as a nerd, intrigued by circuit boards and technology. But I did have a thirst for knowledge when I was young, and read everything I could get my hands on.

I've got a couple of degrees, though none of them have anything to do with computers or technology. Then I found myself entranced by databases filled with information, and it was a quick slide towards geekdom.

A friend helped me build my first computer. Now my world is littered with used computer parts that friends somehow believe belong in my hands. Must be the smile on my face when they give that spare graphics card, or network card or dvd player.

Every so often, I get to take a collection of those bits and pieces and make a machine out of it. And I can't help but think of Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer prize winning book, The Soul of a New Machine. The Wired article I point to is a look at the twenty years since the book was written. Anyone interested in project management or starting a small business, or working in the technology field could find a lot worse ways to spend their time than read the original. After you've done that, I'd recommend revisiting the link from Wired.

I also felt a bit of the same excitement, following a link from blogdex, in reading A History of Apple's Operating Systems. Makes me want to break out the old system seven machine I used for a while.

Rewarding Fridays

To every week ad beginning and an end. I'm excited about getting started on Mondays, and thrilled to make it to Fridays.

I've been thinking that a reward incentive plan for Fridays is a good idea. Not happy hour at the end of the day, but something, anything that acts as a pat on the back for a job well done, and a week of fine, fun-filled effort.

One of the nice things about Friday is the ability to spend sometime over the weekend thinking about it. If I come up with some good ideas on how to implement this plan, I'll post them here over the next couple of days.

Defining and Revising Measures

There's an old saw about supervision and running a business that goes, "You can't manage, what you can't measure."

But what is it that you should be measuring? How do you come up with a grasp of the difference between success and failure?

One start is to carefully define your business objectives. What did you write in your business plan? Your marketing plan? Do you have one of either? If not, consider putting one of both together. If you haven't reviewed your plans in a while, consider taking them out, dusting them off, and seeing how you might need to update them.

I was thinking earlier today that it's easy to get stuck in a rut, to buy supplies from one vendor without checking to see the prices offered by others because you've grown comfortable with the relationship between you and your salesperson.

Likewise, it's simple to go forward with business as usual, without checking the cost of doing business.

One of the most difficult things there is to do is to take a step or two, or three back. The day-to-day concerns sometimes obscure the bigger picture.

How much of a profit should your business be making? What types of benefits should it be able to afford you? How do you know that your customers are happy? Consider ways to define the measures you use.

NASCAR and the Fortune 500

An old time favorite, it's hard to believe that it's been a little more than a year since Slate ran Fortune 500, Meet Daytona 500 - What NASCAR can teach us about business. Interesting stuff, it examines the role of cooperation in competition. Highly recommended.

The problem with problems

The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.

-- Carl Jung

Note to self: Painful but true, and something to carefully reflect upon.

Work is hard, learning to work should be easy

I remember training someone once, and telling them that, "work is hard." I'm not sure what impression it made initially, but I wanted to impress upon them that sometimes it takes an effort, and commitment, and an ability to rise to challenges.

I've trained quite a few people, actually. I'm getting better at it as I go. I try a number of approaches in showing someone how to accomplish a task, and have learned better to figure out whether or not I've gotten through to them and achieved some type of understanding.

Recognizing that different people learn in different ways is a good start. Some folks need discussion, and others want printed manuals. There are those who have to experience something first hand, and get those hands dirty in the process. Demonstrations, combined with discussions, and hands-on learning tend to work well for a number of tasks.

For instance, if I want to teach someone how to use a computer program for the first time, I'll set some goal, or a series of goals, and break the training down into a number of tasks. The repetition, and frequent usage can help the person gain experience and confidence.

I'll start by telling them what we are going to do, and explain the steps in the learning process. First, we'll start by me showing them how to perform that task by myself, with them looking over my shoulder. Then they will try it out with me telling them what to do step-by-step. We can discuss the process, and the reasons for it some more during that stage. Then, they try again, with me just watching, and present to answer questions if they have any.

Then, we repeat as necessary. The next day, we go over it again, just to make sure that they feel comfortable.

Work can be hard, and training someone to work can be hard, but helping someone to learn how to work can be easier if you have a good method to follow. The one I described works for me.

Tiger and the Oscars

One of the best things happening on Oscar night were the commercials. And one of the best of those was Tiger Woods playing a groundskeeper, trying to get rid of a bothersome groundhog. The story line was based upon the movie Caddyshack, a homage perhaps, to Bill Murray's nomination as best actor.

The scruffy looking Tiger ends up getting a little help capturing the rodent with the help of an exterminator who plays the song "I'm Alright" to lure the critter out of hiding. He tells Tiger that, "It works everytime."

As for the winners of the night - Congratulations New Zealand.

It's not all fun and games, evidently

An article on the challenges of Game Development goes into depth, and provides a perspective that you might not have expected. Game development is work.

just who are these people writing oline?

The Pew Internet & American Life Project takes a good look at online users, writers of blogs, webcam operators, and the demographics of content creators.