Kansas.com Blogs
via Does McLeland know what he’s talking about?.
State Rep. Joe McLeland, R-Wichita, said at a forum Saturday that USD 259 had $252 million in fund balances as of December. “Schools have a lot of money,” McLeland claimed. But more than $242 million of that total, or 96 percent, is school bond and capital outlay money that can’t be used for other purposes. The remaining $10 million consists of student fees for textbooks and grants — which also can’t be used elsewhere. Either McLeland, chairman of the House Education Budget Committee, doesn’t know what these funds are for, or he was being deliberately misleading. Which is worse?
McLeland also said at the forum that he would introduce a bill this week to prevent districts from transferring general fund money into restricted funds. Most such transfers go to special education funds. State and federal statutes mandate that districts provide special education services, but neither government adequately funds them. As a result, districts are forced to transfer money in order to cover the shortfall.
Categories: Miscellaneous
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September 20, 2009 7:30pm
What Service Customers Really Want – HBR.org
It’s nice working for a company that’s ahead of the curve.
Superior customer service can be an essential source of strength as companies emerge from the recession, but managers need to understand the extent to which the consumer landscape has shifted. Weakened brands, customers’ easy access to information about vendors, and the erosion of barriers to switching among competitors have combined to create a much more challenging environment for service, whether it’s outsourced or delivered in-house.
Evidence shows that customers will no longer tolerate the rushed and inconvenient service that has become all too common. Instead, they are looking for a satisfying experience. Companies that provide it will win their loyalty.
Our recent research demonstrates that when customers contact companies for service, they care most about two things: Is the frontline employee knowledgeable? And is the problem resolved on the first call? Yet those factors often aren’t even on customer-service managers’ dashboards. Most service centers continue to measure time on hold and minutes per call, as they have for decades. Such metrics encourage agents to hurry through calls—resulting in just the kind of experience customers dislike.
More than half of the customers we surveyed across industries say they’ve had a bad service experience, and nearly the same fraction think many of the companies they interact with don’t understand or care about them. On average, 40% of customers who suffer through bad experiences stop doing business with the offending company.
Categories: Leadership
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Adding random quotes to this blog is easy, albeit there are a ton of widgets and plugins to do the same. First, I have a quotes.txt file that has every quote I want to use. It’s saved on my desktop, then uploaded to the server whenever I add new quotes. Each new quote is separated by a hard return (go to brokenmod.com/quotes.txt to see). To pull a random quote, I insert a simple line of code in my blog’s sidebar:
php $file = "quotes.txt";
$quotes = file($file);
echo $quotes[rand(0, sizeof($quotes)-1)];
Uploading new quotes can be a pain with Windows XP's firewall settings because it prevents FTP connections. Therefore, I created a quick and easy script to upload any new changes to the quotes.txt file to the server. First, I created a file called "quotes.ftp":
open ftp.brokenmod.com
username
password
send "c:\documents and settings\david\desktop\quotes.txt"
quit
Then I created a file called "quotes.bat" that disables the Windows firewall, uploads the quotes, then re-enables the firewall before ending:
netsh firewall set opmode mode=disable
ftp -i -s:quotes.ftp
netsh firewall set opmode mode=enable
quit
Now anytime I update my quotes.txt file on my desktop with new quotes, I just double-click quotes.bat and the new quotes are automatically sent to the blog.
Categories: Tech
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September 19, 2009 6:00pm
How to Handle the Pessimist on Your Team – Management Essentials – HarvardBusiness.org.
Every team has at least one pessimist.
Turning Negativity into Productivity
Dealing with a pessimist on your team can be a frustrating and time-consuming experience. Attempts to ignore or counter frequent negative comments may simply incite further negativity. Good news: by being proactive you can help the pessimist change his behavior and enable your team to achieve greater productivity.
1. Create awareness. This is best done by pulling the team member aside and explaining how his comments are received. The rule when giving this type of feedback, says Jon Katzenbach, author of Wisdom of Teams and founder of the Katzenbach Center at Booz & Co., is to “be at least as positive as you are negative.” Explain why the person is valued on the team and make clear the impact of his behavior. For example, you can say, “When you make negative comments, the team gets stuck and we aren’t able to move forward.” Kramer points out, “This kind of conversation can be useful from a diagnostic perspective.” Once you understand the underlying reason for the pessimism, you can provide additional support or information if it’s needed.
2. Reposition negative statements. Negativity can fester and eventually kill a team’s momentum and motivation. Don’t let negative comments linger. Ask for clarification or more information about what the speaker means. For example, if a team member says, “This project is never going to make it past Finance,” ask the speaker to explain why she thinks that. Better yet, you can ask for alternative solutions: “What can we do to make sure the project does make it past Finance?” You can also ask team members to use “but statements.” Ask them to follow skeptical or critical sentences with “but.” For example, your team member could say “This project is never going to make it past Finance, BUT it’s worth laying the groundwork now because next year, Finance is apt to approve more tech projects.” It’s helpful to model this type of behavior for the entire team. Offer your own constructive criticism while providing an alternative solution.
3. Involve the whole team. It can be damaging to single out a team member in front of the entire team. Peer pressure is a far more effective tactic. According to Kramer, “Sometimes social sanctions work better than leader sanctions.” Set team norms and ask everyone to observe them. Goldsmith suggests that individuals ask themselves before they speak, “Will this comment help our customers? Will this help our company? Will this help the person or team we’re talking about? Will this help the person we’re talking to?” As Goldsmith points out, “Honesty may be the best policy except when it’s destructive and unhelpful.” Once you’ve agreed on norms, ask the team to hold each other to them. This approach can be used when you’re not the team leader as well. If a fellow team member is regularly negative, you can appeal to what Kramer calls “the collective wisdom” of the team by modeling positive behavior and using peer pressure to show the pessimist a more productive way of contributing. Of course as a peer, your influence is limited and you may need to talk with the team leader if your attempts to redirect the pessimist don’t work.
Categories: Leadership, Miscellaneous
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HarvardBusiness.org
via Why Leaders Need Stories: A Lesson from Don Hewitt.
There are three reasons why a good story can be a useful leadership tool:
To inform. We all want the facts, but if a leader wants the facts to matter he needs to add a little seasoning. Stories can take raw data and give it life. For example, why not use a spreadsheet to tell a story about rising sales, or declining quality? Use the data to make your points. Then, flesh out that explanation with stories about the effect on individuals, teams and the company as a whole.
To involve. If you need to get people on your side, you need to involve them in the process. You need to engage their interest. For example, if an executive needs to persuade people to support an initiative, she can describe how the initiative will benefit the customer but also emphasize how it will improve the lot of employees, too. (More customers, more sales, more revenues, more jobs, more opportunities for promotion, etc.)
To inspire. Employees become jaded; there is only so much “importance” they can absorb, even when their jobs are at stake. So it falls to leaders to find ways to inspire their teams. Stories are the ideal vehicle for inspiring people because successful ones can dramatize the human condition. A story about a customer service representative who drove to the house of a customer to rectify an error, or a sales person who drove through a raging blizzard to close a sale, can quickly become the stuff of corporate legend. These stories give sustenance in times of travail, and say to an employee faced with long odds, “If he can do it, so can I.”
To add to this article, leaders need stories to create a culture, or even a culture change. Think about a leader in your past who has shared a story of amazing triumph or disastrous failure to a department or organization. The story tells will always paint a picture as to what is needed by everyone in the company, whether it be personal sacrifice, accountability, experimentation, or the ability to break rules when bureaucracy creates needless hurdles.
Categories: Biz, Leadership
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HarvardBusiness.org
via Should Work Make Us Happy?.
According to Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton, we are living in a unique era, when we are encouraged to seek happiness through work. The idea of work as a source of fulfillment has been around much longer (championed by Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century), as has work as a source of meaning (articulated by Victor Frankl in the 1940s). Yet work as a source of happiness is something else. De Botton believes that while work has been important in all societies, it is now so closely tied up with our identity that the first question we ask new acquaintances is not where they come from, but what they do.
In his new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, de Botton interviews a range of workers, from rocket scientists to biscuit manufacturers to accountants to artists to find out what makes jobs fulfilling — or soul-destroying. One of the most disturbing discoveries he makes is that most of us are still working at jobs chosen for us by our sixteen-year-old selves.
Categories: Biz
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Another reason AT&T sucks -
Boing Boing Gadgets
via Carrier cant stop hackers stealing customer info.
“They can’t seem to secure my account,” Mitnick told The Register. “And then instead of doing something about it, they try to kill the messenger and want to boot me off their network when all I want them to do is to secure my account so no one gets access to my phone records.”
Mitnick said the cellular account has been repeatedly breached over the years, despite a wide range of countermeasures he’s followed to prevent the attacks. In recent years, he’s committed the password to memory and has deliberately not shared it with anyone or kept it stored on a computer. …
“There are so many ways into these networks,” he said. “They have to take some responsibility, not just silence the people that are filing complaints.”
Categories: Miscellaneous
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Gina Trapani
via Forget the Business Card. Just Google Me.
It’s pretty simple: Google is the new business card. Professionals who want to remain contactable, even as they hop jobs, want to stay high up in web search results. Updating a personal blog is the labor-intensive way to do this; setting up a LinkedIn or even a Facebook page can also get someone with a unique name high up in search results.
For people with a common name — or a name similar to someone with a stronger Internet presence — Google Profiles comes to the rescue
Categories: Biz, Tech
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