Uptime.

Cost aside, why do people buy certain products over others? Why do you prefer to deal with some people over others? What are you striving for when you produce work? The answer to all of those questions is quality, which seems a harder concept to nail down than you think. A recent article by Seth Godin pointed out the confusion surrounding quality and looked at it from a manufacturing and a design view point.

I don't manufacture anything but I do produce, so I look at it from a personal view point in the way I go about getting to my end objective or piece of work and the needs to have a quality control about it. A factory that requires no end quality assurance guarantee has been set up with quality manufacturing and is so much cheaper to run than continually fixing something once it's built. This is the thinking people need to apply to anything they produce, rather than continually going back to the client and tweaking whatever they have delivered.

Phillip Crosby in his book from 25 years ago, "Quality is Free", figured out "why spend all this time finding and fixing and fighting when you could prevent the incident in the first place?" So back to the simple, deliver what you are say you will deliver and the quality of your work will not be questioned. The latest list of favourite quality brands in America showed how much easier it was to be a manufacturer like Mercedes Benz or Apple, with only a couple of service providers like Amazon in the top 20.

David VanAmburg, managing director of the ACSI, describes how much easier it is to actually make something. "Service industries tend to score lower on the Index than products. Products are far more reliable and easier to quality control than services, which more typically involve the variability of the human element. With the exception of Amazon, all the very best-scoring companies – the ones that get an 85 or greater – are manufacturers.”

From a design view point, your work has to have the insights and thoughts your clients are after so that they are delighted by the end result and become advocates for the quality of service you provide. Without harping on the fruit factory, Apple does this better than most and users become zealots about recommending the products. Sometimes the hardest part is getting to that nirvana of "zero defect" that manufacturers talk about and that service companies strive for but can never hope to achieve.

For a technology company that guarantees a 99.99% uptime, to increase incrementally and get to 100% uptime is going to cost a fortune, so instead they need to concentrate on how their people interact and work with their clients because that 99.99% means nothing if you can't deliver a quality service in face to face business. No one cares that the servers are always up if the service attitude is crap and your web interface sucks. No amount of PR regarding uptime will get around the lack of quality service from the staff.

The issue with quality is the concept is in the eye of the beholder, before purchasing, during purchase and after delivery. So for you to deliver quality work no matter what you do, you have to exceed expectations of your customers and maintain that standard over the life of that relationship. Difficult to do at the best of times, so why are you trying to please everyone when you can work with your advocates and supporters to produce quality. The more a product is diluted the more likely the quality is seen as reduced.

It costs 8 times the amount of revenue to get a new client as to keep an existing one, so why dilute your quality and chase rainbows without a pot of gold at the end. You are in command of your quality control and as Philip Crosby so aptly put it "Quality is free but it is not a gift".

West of the Wall.

That jaunty little ditty by Toni Fisher referred to the Berlin Wall and the sadness it caused to a city and a country. Erected in 1961, cutting off millions from their friends and family, to this day is part of the psyche of all German people determined for that never to happen again. The "Wall" has often been used in business analogy when talking about security and corporate governance and the protection required for those agendas. The issue of course is the "Wall" was built on cultural ignorance, insensitivity and ultimately ineffective, so we need to be careful in the business usage today. Even after the Berlin Wall came down, we continued the analogies with "Chinese Walls" protecting companies from the evils of sabotage, espionage and the occasional cup of coffee with friends from competing companies.

I lead with the above to show that there are still situations in today's business where companies try to wall their employees from what they see as either competitors or concerns of proprietary and intellectual intelligence being compromised over a cup of java. Do you have friends in competitive companies? Do you have friends that work for companies still ringed in paranoia? Are you really a spy to be avoided? Does your company trust you?

I wonder when companies, with such strict adherence to legacy policies look at hiring new employees, do they do so with a controlling view or do they hire on trust and skill factors? In the business world it should be for the latter, so why brick them in with a wall of insecurity and old thinking. If people really wanted to find out relevant competitive information it can be easily attained with technology available to everyone today. As is often the case, companies from the Americas seem to be the ones most engulfed in their own paranoia, as if they believe all those CIA movies with "our Tom".

People nowadays don't stay in roles as long as they used to and next week those in competition could be working for a partner organisation, which would bring up the question of wether it was now alright to meet for a coffee or lunch? As trite as that may sound, it is often the case and shows up the idiocy of short term thinking. The worse case scenarios entail friends staying at competitive companies for years and years and losing contact because of that walled in thinking.

The egalitarian, inclusive, mateship view we have of our Australian lives, precludes us from ever being involved in a "Wall" environment, unless you include the "Rabbit Proof Fence", so why do people put up with it at the workplace? I have a particular friend this applies to and if neither of us decides to move roles in the next few years we will indeed lose contact and in the great scheme of life, that is a tragedy.

The "Wall" went up almost overnight and cut through the heart of a nation for decades. Even in the small business community we work in, it's hard to imagine we have learned nothing in the meantime.

Trust me, I'm a Doctor.

A thousand comediennes feasted on that line but the tacit approval and trust given experts was a by line of past society. There were particular people and occupations that engendered trust by their mere position or standing as a so called experts. It wasn't the people close to you like Aunty Jean who you asked about that pain in your side or your friends where you should spend your honeymoon and you never asked your parents anything? Generally people kept to the "expert" concept of who they should consult and trust but things have changed dramatically in the last decade, especially in the virtual world.

There have been countless studies on the fact that people now trust peers and strangers more, and that social sites have become the arena of the new "experts" as pointed out by the Neilsen Global Online Survey in 2009. What a recent Pew Research Centre study has uncovered, is all this trust and confidant dialogue between friends, acquaintances and strangers has a medical reasoning behind it. Seems our brains release what scientists have dubbed the "cuddle hormone" or oxytocin whenever we relate and engage across any social landscape including the virtual one.

According to the research, regular social site users, especially Facebook, are twice as likely to trust people than other Internet users. That warm feeling you get when someone "pokes" you or sends through a "like" is relatable to the release of oxytocin and wraps you in a blanket of trust, even though you may never have met some of those people you are engaging with.

Trust is a strong foundation upon which nations have built economies as shown by countries like Germany, Sweden and the US, with a trustworthiness factor far outreaching countries with less defined economic models. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak a professor at Claremont college in the US points out that many nations didn't flourish economically until they agreed on areas of trust across things such as weights and measures. So this hard wiring to connect across nations and people is behind the success of the social sites which make virtual relationships seem as real as, well as real ones.

"When we believe that someone trusts us, we trust them back, and this alters our behavior: It makes us more generous, for one". Ultimately, oxytocin is, Zak says, "the social glue that adheres families, communities, and societies while simultaneously acting as an economic lubricant that enables us to engage in all sorts of transactions".

The reason that sites like Facebook have doubled and tripled in less than a decade shows the desire for many people to reconnect even if it doesn't involve face to face. So the worry about lack of face to face relationships as the Pew study found, "has little validity to concerns that people who use social networks experience smaller social networks, less closeness, or are exposed to less diversity." so many articles and research papers have now found that people have even more social ties than they did two years ago and that social isolation is not as great a concern as first thought.

So Mr Zuckerberg, thanks to the "cuddle hormone" we trust you more than the Doctor.

F.O.C.

The above three letters are my favourite in the alphabet when used to get my attention for products and services. They will always get me to look twice at a buying opportunity and consider my want over my need for a product. "Free Of Charge" opportunities used to be sought out and highlighted as milestones given by companies wanting to "get you in". That was before the web decided a lot of things should and would be free like information, marketing, publishing along with opinions and privacy. Yet some things may seem freer than others and some things come with a conscience.

I've been sitting in the cafe for about 90 minutes with the remnants of a cupcake and a couple of coffees in front of me that have been brewed beyond taste. Why? FOC WiFi of course. Free with some caveats and obligations open to abuse. How long can I sit here using the free network access? How many cups of coffee pay for my stay? What's a cupcake worth, 30 minutes or 10 minutes? The waitress rolls hers eyes in a way I interpret as buy another coffee you free loader or vacate the seat. So my predicament remains as my conscience is pricked to make a move or buy another of yesterday's cupcakes.

I'm not as concerned for the global players like Starbucks and McDonalds but the local guy on the corner paying for the WiFi is a different matter. How much does he make out of a coffee or how much does he pay his staff? Not much on either account, so I keep buying coffees. Yet somewhere I must cross a line where I have truly paid for my seat and the WiFi. From a personal view, ten dollars usually makes me feel more at home and comfortable taking up space on the WiFi band width.

Yet there is another consideration I take into account and that's the occupancy of the cafe whenever I hook into their network. Empty and I'm happy to sit on a coffee for a long time as I'm helping out perceptually that it's worthwhile coming inside for anyone walking by seeing customers inside and the justification that the owner has already paid for the WiFi anyway, right? A full cafe makes me want to continually have a full coffee in front of me as now the cafe is working on turning over of tables and I don't want to look like that freeloader.

So taking into account all of the above, my calculations on time spent on FOC WiFi works on supply and demand and keeping a rough track of my purchases. Having said that I can buy a month's worth of connection for the iPad for around $20.00 and I surely drink more coffees than that in a week so maybe the cafes should be consider highlighting FOC WiFi without making you think twice about sitting on one cup for an hour?

Steve Jobs wants to turn the whole world into a free WiFi zone and if that happens, cafes will have to do more to entice customers into their establishments. A good cup of coffee would be a start.

Footprints.

I'm off the Mexican food. I'm also off the pea and ham soup, not to mention legumes as a whole. Yes I'm considering my emissions output as the talk of carbon footprints and taxes overtake traffic and real estate water cooler talk in Sydney. I work in the travel industry and know the challenges, not the least pertaining to airline traffic and the perceptions regarding carbon emissions. Interestingly enough, airlines have not been targeted by the government in the top 500 polluters list.

So what are the facts regarding aviation emissions and who are the airlines not doing the right thing, or at least attempting to find solutions? Brighter Planet a carbon accounting and offset firm has studied more than 9 billion passenger departures to try and target the good, the bad and the truly ugly in energy efficiency per passenger mileage. Factoring in fuel economy, seat availability and distances travelled for more than 130 million flights over the last decade they have found the most efficient airlines to travel.

Surprises are always fun and in this case it involves one of my favourite subjects to write about, international carrier Ryan Air, who along with Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific topped the rankings as the most carbon efficient airlines globally, while others like SAS, Lufthansa and Swiss filled out the bottom ranks. Guess you don't have to pay top dollar to save the planet, according to Michael O'Leary of Ryan Air. Ranking first or second for efficiency in load factor and seating density gives Ryan Air a huge advantage over its rivals. Along with more efficient and newer aircraft Ryan Air are the benchmark to gaining the smallest airline footprint or skyprint.

Those efficiencies can mean a lot of difference to CO2 emissions if we compare two airlines across the same route from LA to New York where JetBlue with smaller aircraft and better load factors is three times more efficient than Qantas. This brings in arguments for corporations often targeted with reducing their own carbon footprint, where simple changes to flying more efficient airlines within corporate monetary guidelines can gain reductions of up to 40% in emissions. By studying two large US companies over 300,000 flights to come up with the 40% reduction using carbon efficient airlines, Brighter Planet made the point even more understandable when they equated the reduction to the equivalent of eliminating 74,000 flights.

So what are you or your company doing about this dreaded footprint? Is it a political football being kicked around? Do companies understand or even care about their footprint? Do you? Who is right, Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott, or is the truth hidden somewhere in all the political hype? The biggest problems seem to be understanding and agreement on measurements and how to accurately predict what your footprint will be and how you can best influence it without having to go off your favourite bean burrito.

The carbon tax issue causing so much discussion at the moment, hinges around understanding and enunciation of a problem centered around marketing and selling the resolution. We all want to save the polar bears but on an individual basis it seems very difficult to make a difference or even to understand the problem. When was the last time someone showed you what a ton of CO2 looked like and how it was produced by you or any of the 500 top polluters? How does the carbon trading scheme work? Can't we find a more efficient way to stop industries polluting, other than taxing or fining them? Can't we just plant a bazillion trees to suck up all of that CO2?

If we can't get simple answers to those questions, how are we expected to enjoy our Mexican food?

Successfully Succeeding.

It's a word meaning many things but mostly attached to significant personal achievements. Success in business often refers to bottom line, career advancement and profile awareness. Unfortunately in life, success is often linked to that same business thinking, making it difficult for many to see themselves as successful if the work side of the equation was not adding up. Too often you work in large enterprises with no real influence on the outcome of the company or its products making it difficult to measure success on a personal level which carries over into the most important part of your life outside the work environment.

So maybe you just need to redefine some of the success parameters and give yourself a break. Did I have a successful night's sleep, was it a successful bowl of cereal and did I succeed in putting my shoes on the right feet? Okay you can go overboard and denigrate the definition but the point is success varies so much that we should not be looking at other examples and other people to constantly measure our own success. Is a barrier to your success others with a privileged educational background, having too much money and being special in some way and so succeeding more easily?

If you think that then the trick is finding similar attributes from the success of others and then seeing if any apply to you. Everyone has the capacity and capability to be successful on some level and most people would agree you are successful if you or your work have had a positive influence on others. As a bright guy once said, "try not to become a man of success but rather a man of value", Albert Einstein. So it's less about the money and more holistic in its interpretation. After all, I'm sure you would not classify the corner stoner, successful just because he sells a lot of drugs and drives an expensive car.

Success is measured across many areas from health, spiritual, emotional, career as well as financial. It's a list that needs more categories if work is seen as a barrier for you to find success. Without getting back to the right shoe on the right foot, success can come from what many consider soft areas, such as when you give back, mentor and have a positive effect within your work environment. When people you have helped achieve success, you by virtue of that success are also successful.

So think hard about your success and celebrate the milestones to keep up your enthusiasm for more. Winstone Churchill, a man known for achievements put it succinctly when he said, "Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm".

To laugh often and much;

To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;

To earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;

To appreciate beauty;

To find the best in others;

To give of one's self;

To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;

To have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation;

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived -

This is to have succeeded.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Paper Chase.

Twenty years ago, I remember reading how technology was going to make my business paperless. I was fascinated how this was going to occur, especially when we had just started printing itineraries and tickets on the newest technology, dot matrix printers, integrated into airline reservation systems after many years of handwritten and typed documents. At least the bane of mothers and white shirts, the carbon copy was on its way out but paper continued to play a large role. I remember the shift in mindset from the original PDA, pen and paper to the first electronic PDA and tree huggers around the world started to rejoice.

That was many years ago and the rejoicing was pre emptive, especially if you look at the reems of paper for sale at Officeworks today. Yet it didn't stop people talking about the paperless office, so I love it when I hear about organisations and institutions looking to cut down on paper and find interest in their methods to save the trees and the huggers who have been in depression for the last two decades.

The town of Cornelius in North Carolina is one such tree hugger heaven, having decided to use the local government facilities as an experiment to cut paper out of the town forever. What are they using to replace paper, well iPads of course. According to the local Herald Weekly paper, the town passed out iPad 2s to commissioners at a recent board meeting, and plans to use the devices for sharing agenda packets, budget information, and everything else you need to run a small town, without printing any of it out. If small government institutions, who thrive on packets of paper to show their importance in documentation can achieve the unthinkable, how far away is my office?

Obviously not as far away as I think, if I look at another tree saving example. Commercial pilots for American Airlines who regularly carried 15 plus kilos of manuals, safety check lists, log books and the occasional Robert Ludlum tome into the cockpit are replacing all that paper with, of course, the iPad. This new computer flight bag enables pilots to access information on digital flight systems for preflight and in flight checks along with performance manuals always kept up to date automatically.

Alaska Airlines are also using the system and have named the operation " bye bye flight bag". As with other airlines looking to use the light weight iPad, they are petitioning the F.A.A. to get rid of all the paper used in the cockpit, which would account for close to 30 kilos of weight when taking into account both pilot and co pilot. Maybe the airlines will let me bring on an extra couple of kilos of onboard baggage?

At this stage both airlines need to send in proposals on the full benefits to efficiency and safety in using the iPad instead of the paper manuals but it surely must be only a matter of time before this trend gains global acceptance. With over 250 aviation apps on the pad from companies like Boeing and Garmin, plus the very expensive subscriptions to flight maps and manuals, pilots globally will leave those big black bags at home and stroll on board with the new iPads enclosed in some fancy airline casing to make them seem even more important and authoritative. Then when they are on auto pilot, everyone likes "Angry Birds".

So achieving that paperless state may be just around the corner for me, as long as I can carry a small pad. No not paper but aluminium and glass.

I Remember When?

I work in an industry often thought of as cutting edge when it comes to technology, after all we did have the first online aggregators of information in the airline reservation systems, 25 to 30 years ago. So having been around before those systems and being a bit of a geek I feel I worthy enough to comment on what else might be on your technology Christmas list.

With most of what we use today, not being around around 10 years ago, 25 years ago could almost be last century, come to think of it, it was last century. High definition everything, GPS, Wi-Fi, E mail, Google, YouTube, iPod, iPhone, Kindle, Wii, Facebook, Twitter, Android, iPads, online music, streaming movies, Linked In, NFC, clouds and the list goes on and on. Innovation is producing so much change it's hard to keep up, not just for my industry but for for any industry hoping to take advantage of efficiencies.

In the "old days" innovation came but once a year and stayed around to help out for years. Think about the fax and how long it was the object of desire for offices and then became a staple for all, with no competitor in sight, I still see one in the back of the office now. Go further back and think of the typewriter and the scene is the same. For the history challenged out there, a typewriter was just beyond stone tablets when compared to correspondence today. As each new innovation came along, it was supposed to kill the previous one.

That didn't happen because innovation built on previous technology and even though TV and then DVDs were supposedly the death of Cinema, Cinema kept reinventing itself with 3D a prime example of that fork in the road, with both paths still relevant. The phone fell off the wall and into our hands and onto our PC via Skype, books fell off the shelf and into our E readers and the mailman stopped delivering letters but we still got them by the inbox full.

So what does the future hold? To a certain extent it will hold more of the same, slightly similar but different. The phone will morph fully into the handheld PC and wallet we all want but still make phone calls, more books will end up online but the printed word won't disappear, streaming of media will increase but TVs will remain, although size will increase and composition may see just a pane of glass hanging on your wall in the future. Music like most things retail will continue to move from the stores to online, trees will be happier because documents will end up digital and garage space will make way for the cloud.

Sure size will matter as we become more mobile but I'm not sure that futurist, Ray Kurzweil's prediction that the phone will eventually be the size of a red blood cell will get past the masses. How will I dial the number? The real trick for the future of technology will be the user acceptance that whatever they buy will be obsolete in no time flat and to not get too attached and disappointed but be aware of the next best thing coming round the corner.

Replacement, not the same but similar is the catch cry of the future, because in the end, none of us like too much change.