This article relates how a Comcast VP started using Twitter to track down and resolve customer problems, after a lot of bad news began appearing on blogs and websites.

But in portraying this as a big success, with social media mavericks working inside the enterprise to really solve customer problems, the article is missing the larger point: these companies (in this case Comcast, but substitute anyone else you like) are so bloated, bureaucratic, inefficient or corporate that the regular system can’t work. This is the problem resolution system that is available to the greatest majority of the customers, those who don’t know what Twitter is, who don’t start anti-Comcast blogs, those vast majority of customers who have either surrendered entirely or who only have access to the resources the company offers them: a toll free number to call. If Comcast (or equivalent) can’t solve problems that come in that way, they shouldn’t be lauded when customers are driven to the brink and complain in other channels that Comcast isn’t really and truly supporting.

While it’s great that there are motivated and creative folks at Comcast that are pushing the envelope of how to reach and support customers, it smacks of elitism to be applauding this thin veneer of problem resolution when what it reveals is the rotting timbers of the support infrastructure.

(__)                     
(oo) Fresh                  
 \/  Meat

From 2001 to 2005, FreshMeat was a semi-regular email column about the relationships between business, culture, technology, products, consumers, and so on. As this blog found its voice, it gradually replaced FreshMeat as our outlet for the same sort of commentary.

This is a jump page for archived FreshMeat issues.

4/29/05 – Push to Talk
1/04/05 – Total Recall
7/26/04 – License to Shill
4/05/04 – The More The Merrier
12/23/03 – Pun Americana
6/30/03 – Livin’ La Vida Luxa
5/21/03 – The Houses of the Wholly
2/18/03 – She Blinded Me With Silence
11/07/02 – American Girl, Mama Let Me Be
8/05/02 – Free Agent Irritation
4/06/02 – Get Down Off the Shelf
1/16/02 – The Name of the Game is the Name
12/07/01 – Why The Cleaning Lady Won’t Do Windows
11/21/01 – A Load On Their Mind
11/09/01 – Beaming Up Scotty
10/30/01 – Got Zeitgeist?
10/04/01 – Everyone Remembers Their First Time
9/28/01 – If I Had A Hammer…Would Everything Look Like A Nail?
9/18/01 – Take Pictures, Last Longer!
9/04/01 – Cleaning Up On Aisle 5
8/27/01 – Reading FreshMeat Declared Safe!
8/17/01 – We Love to See You Smile?
8/09/01 – Every Product Tells a Story (Don’t It?)

8/01/01 – Blue Hawaii, or Viva Las Vegas

Note: TurnSignals (PDF) – originally sent out by fax – was an antecedent to FreshMeat.

The Loft store in Tokyo has an entire section that offers a huge range of reusable grocery store bags. Do the Japanese values around “choice” and “sustainability” collide? Does it make sense within that culture? Does it make sense to outsiders?

I had an uncomfortable reaction along the lines of “Oh, crap, something else to buy.” It seemed to contradict my expectations of restraint in a product category that carries a meaning of “sustainable.” Of course, that may not be the meaning that these bags have in Japan.

I saw this sign earlier this week in Colorado Springs. Turns out that yes, it’s a real place

.

What are the two things people don’t like doing on a regular basis? Why, washing their Vehicle and washing their Dog of course. Both are time consuming and messy. So I created a professional, clean and fun environment where you can bring your vehicle, dog or both and get them clean.

The New York Times describes business partners who complement each other.

When the Lamp Dude and the Academic decided to go into business together, it had all the makings of a minidisaster. He, after all, could remember every Grateful Dead show he ever attended. She, on the other hand, was more interested in women’s issues and public policy. She is analytical and reflective and thrives on team-building. He is a free spirit who prefers to work solo.

Still, that did not stop them from trying to build a successful home furnishings company – and 13 years later, they have more than done it.

“We fill in for each other’s strength and weaknesses,” said Margaret A. Traub (a k a the Academic), 48, president and chief executive of Adesso, the company she and Lee Schaak founded in August 1994.
Ms. Traub, a civil rights activist, was born and bred in Westchester County, N.Y., and she attended Harvard.

Mr. Schaak, 43, the company’s long-haired Hawaiian-shirt-wearing chairman, grew up in St. Paul and went to the University of Colorado, where he spent as much time on the ski slopes as in the classroom.

“It was a major concern, going into business together,” he said. “Peggy and I are so night-and-day different in every way, so I knew it would bring many extra challenges to the table. And who needs extra challenges? We have enough normal challenges as it is.”

Still, they maintain that their different personality styles actually help them with their business.

“Even if we don’t agree, we trust each other,” said Ms. Traub, who is in charge of operations, finances and marketing, while Mr. Schaak runs sales and product development. We know that we each have nothing but the best of interests for the company and each other,” she said.

I admire and envy people like Traub and Schaak who can find those opposite-type-folks where the whole ends up being greater than the sum of the parts. I would rather have a business partner who complements (and challenges) me, than someone who is my clone. And of course, personality style is only vector to explore those complements.

Midnite Sun & Cruise? What the heck does this business do? It’s not a travel agent, or a place to take a cruise. It’s a tanning salon. A place you visit before you take a cruise? And what kind of sun is Midnite anyway? Very confusing.

Diego asks for ideas for the next course he might teach (co-creation anyone?). If you’ve got ideas, add ’em here or at his site (see previous link). I’d like to see a class about innovation and persuasion. As Roger Martin talks about there are some very different mental models (my phrase, not his) in the worlds of design and business. Indeed, some systems inside organizations serve as antibodies to hunt down and destroy intruders in order to keep the body healthy (oops, metaphor overload here)…rejecting processes and ideas that could be innovative. How does design thinking as a process begin to address that? The design challenge (as Martin sorta says) is not only the problem itself but the means to move the solution through the organization to where it’s championed and adopted.

That’d be a fun course.

Last night we went to Stanford to see Roger Martin

from U of Toronto’s Rotman B-school talk about Business and Design. This seems to be the identical talk he’s been giving this year at other events, as many of the slides looked familiar just from blog browsing.

I took a lot of notes but I’m probably not going to type up a summary of the talk if others have done so. For now, I’ll point you to other summaries such as this one (scroll down to “The Highlight of Day One: Roger Martin-Designing in Hostile Territory”), here, and here. You can find his slides from a previous presentation here. Yesterday’s presentation included a final slide that talked about how businesses can become more creative and innovative, essentially by transitioning from a traditional firm to a design shop, at least in part. He identified several categories of change.

In the Flow of Work Life, move from ongoing tasks and permanent roles to projects with defined terms.

In the Style of Work, move from defined roles and waiting til its right to collaboration and iteration.

In the Mode of Thinking, move from deduction and induction to deduction, induction, and abduction (where you ask what might be)

In Status, move from managing big budgets and stuff to solving wicked problems.

In Attitude move from “only what we have budget for” and “constraints are the enemy” to “nothing can not be done” and “constraints increase challenge and excitement”

There wasn’t a ton of shocking new material in his presentation, but it’s a mostly clear framework that explains well. I was definitely reminded a great deal of the presentation that Tom Mulhern and I did back in 2004 at About, With, and For on Buttoned-Down Creativity.

It was a mostly-talking presentation, with a lot of big images that supported stories, so the slides are hardly stand-alone, but maybe worth a quick visit. I think Mulhern and I could have gone further and written an article or two; we still could, of course, because I think we had some good ideas and a more tactical and sympathetic approach than Martin is taking.

At the interactive cities summit

, I noticed a frequent reference to people working on projects. Many of the people who gave presentations or shared their examples seemed to be involved in projects, and in many cases, projects of their own choosing. They had an idea for something that would further the dialogue of technology and urbanism, and they built it, and set it up. This idea of project seemed to come from the world of art more than the world of work.

Projects were not something that were awarded or assigned, they were chosen.

This was a refreshing perspective for me. Of course, my time is spent on “projects” all the time (i.e., move my blog to a new host, put my India pictures up on flickr, etc.) but those are ancillary projects. My thing is my business, my gigs. Others, I’m sure, think about their job and their company. At some point, we think about our career. But do some of us ever think about these projects? Do we want to? Is it a choice, or a tendency?

It really challenged my whole notion of work and took me out of my comfort zone.

An interesting piece about Levi’s historian and archivist also mentions that

The Society of American Archivists maintains a directory of 300 to 500 companies with archives. Elizabeth Adkins, director of Ford Motor Co.’s archives and president-elect of the Society of American Archivists, said that some will establish an in-house collection for legal reasons, as well as for public relations and marketing purposes. Others will do it to track the progress of their business over time.

“It helps them to know what’s been tried before, what the brand’s historic strengths are and how to build on it,” Adkins said.