How We Spend Our Time – Tweet of the Week

My Tweet of the Week:

Very cool graphic! RT @dbarrowcliff How do you spend your day? This is how Americans spend their’s (sic): http://snurl.com/ors6w
12:53 PM Aug 5th from web

Customer Satisfaction is All About the Context

Let me state right from the start, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I know there are some pretty smart folks who spend a lot of time thinking about customer satisfaction.

I have had a working theory for awhile, which I am constantly revisiting, that it is extraordinarily difficult to (1) accurately measure ‘customer satisfaction’ (however you define it), and to (2) effectively report on customer satisfaction.

Tweet of the Week – from Mumbai, India

My pick for Tweet of the Week, from Naeem Chudawala who tweets under @naeem151287 from Mumbai, India:

Aspen Ideas Festival – A Look Back

I have been trying for a few days to try to bring you some follow-up from the Aspen Ideas Festival that Netting It Out wrote about a couple of weeks ago.  The Aspen Institute has done yeoman’s work in providing us with a rich set of videos and other materials from this week long event.  You can see what any reporter/blogger is up against, with this a line up like this:

The View from Sun Valley

If you aren’t on the exclusive invitee list for Herb Allen’s annual super-secret annual gathering in Sun Valley, Idaho, then Reuters MediaFile blog is probably the next best place to be visit.

Some Thoughts on High(er) Education

I have been thinking about higher education, and the higher education industry, lately. After having had two parents in the education industry (grammar, high school level) for a total of some 50 years, having gone myself to several different colleges in the past 20+ years, I am now in the midst of putting my two kids into/through college.

Conferences of Ideas

First we had the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, apparently in its 39th year, then Herb Allen’s annual super-secret confab in Sun Valley, TED, SXSW (which is not to say that that these are all equal), and now we apparently have the Aspen Ideas Festival underway.

Happy Bloomsday.

Another Bloomsday has snuck up on me, as it does every year.  This most famous of literary days – celebrating the single day in the life of Leopold Bloom wandering around Dublin depicted in James Joyce’s book, Ulysses – has special meaning for me.

When my wife, Nancy, and I were married and planning our honeymoon in Ireland, we each committed ourselves to reading Ulysses before we married.  It was not so much that we felt that Ulysses would provide any special guide to our honeymoon in Ireland. Rather, I think we felt that as much as our getting married was (and has proven to be) a turning point in each of our lives, that committing ourselves to some Irish literature, and one of the more challenging reads that there possibly can be – before we were to meet Irish relatives of mine that we had never met – was an appropriate complement.

So, if you are looking for something really special to do, here is one suggestion.  Commit to reading Ulysses, then Richard Ellman’s biography of the same name, James Joyce, and, finally, perhaps, NORA: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, Brenda Maddox’s biography of James Joyce’s wife, Nora.

Or, if you prefer, just lift a Guinness somewhere, sometime today (preferably after 12 Noon wherever you are) to one of the greatest writers who ever lived.

Happy anniversary, too, to Ron and Nina, special friends for as long as I can remember, and who made a special commitment to each other 30 years ago today.  I think of them every Bloomsday.  Happy Bloomsday to all.

New Feature: Tweet of the Week

Tweet of the Week:

“You can’t really throw anything away, because there is no ‘away'”, @nelderini.(Thank you, Chris Nelder.)  You can read more of Chris Nelder at http://www.getreallist.com/.

And here you were worrying that this blog might never go existential on you.

David vs. Goliath

In the latest article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, How David Beats Goliath , in the May 11th issue, Gladwell once again offers up some pithy observations and insights, this time on the sometimes advantage of effort over ability. Much of the article talks about how TIBCO‘s Vivek Ranadivé used the full court press strategy with his daughter’s basketball team to overcome many more skilled opponents.