To my meager blog follower base. I am sorry I have run out of steam on this blog. It is not that I don’t have stuff to write about. It is because I only want to write about Jesus Christ. I have lots of things to share there. Please check out my other blog The Overflow Life at http://theoverflowlife.blogspot.com/.
I apologize that I can’t give you more of my pithy wisdom here, but it ain’t there. Thanks for understanding.
I recently stopped at a Wendy’s. I like Wendy’s French fries, but now I was faced with a big sign staring me in the face telling me that the fries now have sea salt. First off, I think most guys like me don’t really know what that means and how it compares to table salt. Secondly, my exposure to sea salt is probably limited to when I accidentally gulped ocean water and nearly gagged on the salt.
Yet nevertheless I was intrigued by trying the fries with the sea salt. So the little slick branding worked. I wasn’t going to get the fries because it is usually a choice between the Frosty and the fries and I usually go with the Frosty. But the allure of sea salt sucked me in. It was a real coup to rebrand their fries. Rebranding commodities to differentiate them in business sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Where it doesn’t work is when it sidetracks an already good thing. When you have a dominant position in a brand, why change? You simply end up diluting your brand. I think marketers are an antsy bunch and they have to change something just to prove a point. However, commodities that are hard to differentiate? Brilliant! Whether it is real chicken breast vs. the chicken parts McDonalds uses. Or the value of sea salt, making the brand stand out can be really effective.
Ultimately, I could not tell the different between the sea salt and the table salted version, but it got me thinking that these fries have to be better. After all, they have sea salt.
Sorry for a long delay in publishing a new blog post. Was taking a much needed break in Tucson visiting my dad. Of course the weather was cool and it even snowed. But it was still a lot better than the weather in Cleveland. But anyway that is my lot in life. I will try to do better about posting for my legion of fans out there.
Last week, the new iPad was announced. Apple pulled a surprise by having Steve Jobs do the announcement. As you know, Steve Jobs is on another medical leave. So of course this continues to fuel speculation about what is exact status is and how he is involved with the company. Apple continues to be Steve Jobs’ company.
There is no question that Steve Jobs has been the face of Apple since its resurgence a number of years ago. There is also no question that he is the face of the continuous innovation at Apple. However, no individual lives forever and Jobs and the board are doing Apple potential harm by not parading a different face of the company. It should be the goal of every CEO to make themselves irrelevant. Your goal is to build an engine, not showcase the driver. I do not know what is happening internally at Apple as far as succession, but to the outside world, it is still Steve Jobs. A number of years ago, Bill Gates formally handed the torch to Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. Now Gates is certainly still involved, but the face of the company is Ballmer. Jobs needs to do the same thing at Apple.
Recently, the Central Laborers’ Pension Fund of Jacksonville, Illinois, put a proposal on Apple’s proxy asking the company to more specifically spell out its succession plan. The influential shareholder advisory service, Institutional Shareholder Services, backed the proposal. It was voted down by a 2-to-1 margin.
My understanding is that Apple has a very capable management team. What drives a company to allow so much control to go to one man? When that man exerts the kind of control and experiences the type of success Jobs has had. It is really up to Jobs just like it was up to Gates. Icon’s must remove themselves, they are not typically removed. Since Apple must outlive Jobs, he must take the initiative to kill his ego and his expectation of living forever (poor choice of words) and make his successor known.
My dentist had been getting on me from when I was in my early thirties to get my teeth fixed. One of the burdens of being an entrepreneur is the pressure manifests itself in multiple ways. I am a teeth grinder and when I am under pressure, it clearly is reflected in my teeth. Since I have had multiple high-pressure situations over the years, my teeth had reached a state where they required attention. As my dentist put it
“you can either fix it now or fix it in the form of losing your teeth”. He recommended Dr. Arnstine and so finally in 2005 I went to Dr. Arnstine to get my teeth fixed. Two years later, my braces finally came off. Over the course of those two years, I went to Dr. Arnstine’s office multiple times. Even after those two years, I have had to go sporadically into his office to replace a retainer, fix permanent lower braces, etc. See below the beautiful work that Dr. Arnstine and his team did.
This past week I had to go in because I had knocked off several pieces of my permanent lower braces. I went into a full waiting room as usual. What wasn’t usual was that I had to wait a half an hour to get in. Now, if this was a typical doctor’s office, I wouldn’t have been alarmed, but this was very unusual for this practice. Normally, I am right in after about 5 minutes. They had apologized for the delay because there were several emergency situations. So when you are used to a well oiled machine, it is strange when it doesn’t happen.
Dr. Arnstine was acutely aware of the delay. In fact, he knew exactly how long I had been waiting and again apologized. His normal average wait time he told me is 7 minutes and he routinely picks up patients because of how well he runs his practice. So here is my observations on why Dr. Arnstine’s practice is so successful.
I applaud businesses like this and it seems like they are rarer and rarer. If you are looking for a good orthodontist, you would be well-served to go to Dr Arnstine. You can find him here. This is an unpaid announcement.
After the Super Bowl, I got to ponder further the relationship between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Having lived in Cleveland for nearly 40 years out of my 51 years on this earth, I have observed much about these two cities.
There are a lot of transplants between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. I know personally three transplants and they walk defiantly with their Pittsburgh terrible towels. We give them grief jokingly, but secretly we admire the winning tradition and the fact that they have a team that consistently wins.
If you go to eastern OH say around Youngstown, you will find more Pittsburgh Steeler fans than Browns fans. The state of Ohio does not assure allegiance. However, none of those fans would even contemplate rooting for a college team in Pennsylvania. We are all Buckeyes when it comes to college sports.
The Browns have beaten the Steelers only once in the past 15 tries and that was last year when our team despite its record actually won. We gloated about that for weeks. Steeler fans don’t take nearly the pleasure out of beating the Browns because it just is expected. Reminds me of when I was a kid, I would sucker punch my big brother and then run away. Eventually he would find me and beat the tar out of me. I enjoyed the sucker punch but it was clear who was the stronger one (at least at that time).
I am hoping things will change eventually, but I am not holding my breath.
We have a tradition like a lot of people where we go to our friends house to watch the Super Bowl. We always look forward to the ads because there is always something new and different.
Maybe it was me, but the ads this year were not very good. The general theme seemed to be high tech or elaborate sets, or lots of themes that play on each other. In other words, complex and expensive. Paying $3 million for a Super Bowl Ad seems to mean you have to pay $6 million to produce it. Like the Kia ad where everyone seemed to fight over the right to drive it. Stupid and overdone.
By far and away the best ad had little to no technical complexity, was simple to produce and virtually everybody identified with it. In fact, the key thing is probably most everyone could remember it was a Volkswagon Passat being advertised.
The lesson – focus on simple and making it something your audience can identify with.
Over the past few months we've heard a lot about the estate tax. This opinion piece in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the estate tax summarizes the opinions of many of course unaffected by the tax. The writer, like many others believes the estate tax is a valid tax simply because it applies to so few. He says, "if you are fortunate enough to receive a windfall of money from a deceased person, then a portion of that windfall should be taxed and go to the government. No one likes taxes, but certainly this tax is one of the most fair. It applies only to a very small percentage of his estates." "Estate taxes opponents argue that the estate tax is unfair because it taxes people twice. Of course we tax people twice on lots of things, including our purchases and our income. The fact that something is taxed twice hardly makes it unfair." "Here's a tax that only affects those who benefited the most economically from government and society, namely the wealthy."
This remains to me to be the continuing effort to tax success regardless of its form. The argument that "we tax lots of things multiple times anyway" is again stating that is okay to tax the same things over and over again simply because one is successful. When you consider that by the time net worth is passed down, it will have been taxed at least 3 to 4 times, it is absolutely immoral. The argument that "it only hurts a few, therefore it's okay", is scary because it simply states that you should be taxed because you're successful. Finally, the argument that one somehow benefited from our government in his or her success in therefore should return that success back to the government is simply illogical and stupid. We constantly pay for the cost of government multiple times over. Most of estates belonged to small businesses that lack the liquidity to be able to pay the onerous estate tax and are forced to make poor decisions or make complex decisions to avoid paying it.
The bottom line – I have yet to hear one clear, sound argument that would support this immoral and unethical tax.
How much more can one take? While Pittsburgh is in the Super Bowl for the umpteenth time, our Cavaliers have lost 24 straight, our Browns are going through yet another coaching change, and our Indians are once again position for mediocrity.
When I wrote my blog on my poor, shriveled Cleveland sports heart about a year ago, I never dreamed it could get worse. But yet here we are with three losing sports teams. It is a test of intestinal fortitude. Fortunately, we have Cleveland State basketball, we have Ohio State football and basketball, and the endless abundance of high school sports. Our shriveled pro sports heart can get filled from other venues. Looming strikes in the NFL and NBA will not stop us from getting our sports fix. In fact in Cleveland, it may be a good thing because there will be no more pain.
I saw an interview with Julian Assange the founder of WikiLeaks last Sunday. In the interview, he completely defended the publication of classified materials as "freedom of speech". He even said that he went well within the bounds of the law that any newspaper publisher would follow.
In life, there are often things that we could do, but we just shouldn't do. WikiLeaks does not exist to promote some higher calling, but to bring down others. It appears to be a clear manifestation of an individual's ego and not some higher purpose of free speech. By publishing classified materials and threatening to publish other classified materials, I cannot imagine that anyone would think that good could come out of that. And we have already seen the damage that this can cause.
The Internet is a wonderful thing. We can make ourselves heard in a nanosecond across the world. But with that kind of power comes the need to have restraint. Just like in a conversation, we don't say everything that we could say but we exercise restraint in saying the things that we should say. The mark of a human being is being able to control his tongue. The Internet has the ability as an unmonitored conversation to wield great damage. WikiLeaks is nothing more than unbridled lack of restraint whose intent is to bring harm. It is particularly sad when such lack of restraint hurts innocent bystanders. It also serves to restrict the flow of conversation between the published parties which would seem to be the opposite intended effect.
It is hard to fathom how many decisions in business are made based on what the accountants and lawyers dictate. I recently experienced yet another situation where a poor business decision was driven by an accounting or legal principle.
Two years ago we ordered 15 subscription licenses from salesforce.com, a CRM company. We had anticipated that the business was going to grow and that we would use those licenses. It became apparent that our business was not going to grow and that we would not use those licenses. After a year and a half of paying for 15 subscription licenses, while using less than five, I refused to continue to overpay. The idea of the subscription is that you pay for what you use. I had used salesforce.com in multiple other businesses and our businesses had generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue to that company. Yet the answer I got when asking for relief was essentially "tough". I ordered 15, I would pay for 15. As an accountant, I am familiar with the fact that revenue recognition precedes good customer relationships. As a former head of sales in a public company, I saw firsthand how the pressure of recognizing revenue came oftentimes at the expense of good business. I told salesforce.com I would no longer do business with them and they now had lost a customer for life because of their shortsightedness.
I really get tired of seeing commercials with all of the legal gibberish that basically means nothing. It is solely a CYA maneuver. How much money and effort are wasted in good customer decisions because of CYA accounting and legal stuff? My goodness, half of drug commercials is telling you all about the side effects and not about what it does for you. Does anybody ever read a software subscription license, let alone understand it? It seems to only get worse every year. Our country could do so much better if we focused on customers and service and a little less on accounting and legal. Spoken by a reformed accountant.
I am a proud owner of an iPhone. I am amazed at this device. It does everything in one device that previously would have required multiple devices. I have my music, my book abstracts, my bible and commentaries, a GPS, home movies, etc., etc. However, occasionally things go wrong and you have to make an appointment at the Genius Bar. They Genius Bar is located at every Apple Store. The Genius Bar is the technical group that can fix your problem with your Apple product.
When you walk into an Apple store your confronted by all sorts of people. There are the runners, who make sure that you are guided to where you need to go but do not deviate from where you shouldn't go. There are the browsers who are always looking at the latest and greatest products in the Apple store. There are always people in the Apple Store and it always feels like it's an event when you go in. And that is intentional. They want to make it feel like there is always an event going on in an Apple Store. I remember going to the annual radiological tradeshow in Chicago and GE putting all sorts of staffers around the booth to make it look like they were really busy and there really was an event going on. Same kind of thing in an Apple Store.
The folks in the Genius Bar are usually young and kind of Hip. That is got to be an awesome job for a young techie. Basically you get the play all day long. Most times the techies in the Genius Bar are able to solve the problem. But even if they can't you feel like you just came from an event and therefore did not waste your time.
I first heard this story on my WSJ This Morning Podcast. Take a look!
Where was the mistakes made?
It seems like every institution wants you to join their frequent buyer club. It is great marketing tool. If they can suck you in to their system, they can keep plying you with offers that will continuously drive you to their store. A few months back, I got introduced to the My Panera program. So I now scan my little My Panera card every time I go in (which is frequent – remember this post?) First few times you go in, you are greeted with “Mr. Quigg, you have a dollar off your coffee” or “Mr. Quigg, you have earned a free pastry this time”. I certainly found myself using any excuse to go into Panera and use my newfound prestige.
However, frequent buyer clubs have gone too far. I was on my way home from work one evening this week and I knew I was on my own for dinner because Debsue was knitting that evening. I should have just gone home but I had a hankering for junk food (a too frequent occurrence) so after I pumped gas, I went into the gas convenient store and got a few slices of greasy pepperoni pizza. The attendant asked me if I wanted a frequent pizza buyers card. You can’t be serious, I asked. If I get a frequent pizza buyer card from a BP gas store, either something is wrong with me or I need to seriously think about my life choices. I mean this is a once in a lifetime experience – I may never buy pizza from a gas place twice in my life, let alone be a frequent connoisseur. People pump gas, then put their hands on those things (including me).
I maintain my selectivity on how much “clubbing” I am going to do. I do have my dignity you know.
