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Trust Issues
While I’d like to claim otherwise, I have some very significant issues with trust in my life. I find it difficult to place enough trust in others in just about any situation. I typically drive myself to activities (meetings and camping trips). I always bring my own supplies (be it a tent for camping or a beverage at a meal). I try my hardest to keep a back-up plan ready to go (keeping standby credit card and my cell phone handy). It’s draining, really, and it’s not the way I want to live my life. But for whatever reason, I…
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How Relevant is your Brand?
When I was recategorizing my posts last week (as part of my grand re-design), I came across one of my more interesting articles from last May regarding calculating your “Google score.” Today, I want to revisit that concept, but expand it to a broader audience and application. The question you should be asking isn’t “what’s my Google score.” It’s “how relevant is my brand in online media?” There are as many different ways to find information online as there are opinions on pizza toppings. But some are more important than others. Rather than try to calculate a composite relevancy score…
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Feed Me!
Last week, I really wanted a BLT. I kept thinking about the BLTA Croissant that Red Robin has on the menu, and I couldn’t get the idea of having such a tasty sandwich out of my head. Unfortunately, pay-day isn’t until tomorrow, so running out and paying the $9-some-odd for the sandwich was out of the question. Instead, I went to Safeway to pick up an avocado ($0.50) and a bun ($0.59). I already had the bacon and lettuce at home. What you see here is my take on the BLTA Croissant – a BLTA on blue cheese and pepper…
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Work Ethic
On Monday I talked about last weekend’s bridge project from the context of communications within the workplace. But that illustration is so rich I just can’t leave it alone. Working on any project with multiple people and personalities will almost always lead to a self-lesson on work ethic. Last weekend was no different. We had to get up at o-dark-early to get ready for the project. By “we” I mean my dad and I. The plan was to meet with the rest of the Scouts at 7:30 before carpooling to the park, and I wanted time to get a shower…
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Bridge to Somewhere
On Saturday, I had the opportunity to work with some Boy Scouts who were preparing Trojan Park for a huge camping trip next month. There were a total of 8 participants from my unit, and I saw another 60+ people working various projects around the park. My team ended up helping with a trail clearing project – to support some Sea Scout vessels that will be at the camp out, we needed to cut a trail from the park to the Columbia River where they’ll be docked. We started out with a tractor cutting the grass towards the river. It…
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Traces
No one moves through this world without leaving something of their selves behind. It might be a memory, a change in the landscape, or a tradition – everyone builds some kind of legacy in the time they have on this earth. The same is true for other things in this world, too. Creatures leave behind proof that they’ve wandered the earth. Glaciers carve and re-define the landscape. Man-made machines and devices likewise create a legacy of their own, passed down through the generations. The fact that even our most habitual transitory actions today can have an effect on the shape…
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Burger King
It’s rare these days to see something truly innovative on television. We see remakes of TV shows. Remakes of remakes of TV shows. Movies that are merely updates of classic scripts rather than new stories. Even “classic” commercials are brought back up from time to time. Unfortunately, this lack of uniqueness has translated to the market as a whole. New products tend to be knock-offs of products that entered the market a generation ago. The new iPad, for example, is an improvement on the 5-year old machine I’m using right now to write this blog post … it’s nothing we…
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Ten Reasons eReaders Will Never Replace Paper Books
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love my eReader. It holds almost 200 books so far (of which I’ve read maybe 20) and has space for several hundred more without even adding external media! It’s truly a revolutionary device, but I would never go so far as to swear off my old-fashioned printed books. Call it nostalgia, call it stubbornness, call it whatever you want – I’ll never give up on the thick tomes that weight down that shelf in the corner of my room. They mean more to me than just their storied pages. But for all of you…
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Me, Too!
When I first started consulting, my boss talked a lot about “ante in” product offerings. These are the kinds of things you are required to offer your customers in order to be taken seriously in the market. With iPod and Zune leading the market, anyone else who wants to sell and MP3 player needs to offer a rechargeable battery, a color screen, and basic in-player playlist control. If these are the only features they offer, though, it’s not enough. These are the features we expect them to offer, so we’ll gloss over that description to seek out what truly makes…
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The Accidental Consultant
A couple of summers ago, I found myself in the small office of a tech start-up asking questions about my ambitions as a consultant. I had finished business school almost a year before, but my age still betrayed my actual skills as a marketer and started these kinds of questions with just about everyone I met. “Why marketing?” “Why consulting?” “Why start-ups?” Before that day, though, I hadn’t given any real thought to the answer. I’d craft an explanation around the mission of a particular business or explain that I was looking for something more challenging than a traditional job.…