March 2009 Archives

Anyone who has flown Southwest in the past knows things are done a little bit differently at the airline. In fact, in the book Mavericks At Work, authors William Taylor and Polly Labarre discuss how doing things differently has not only made the airline one of the best out there, but it's also created an undeniably strong work culture. The people they hire believe in Southwest's goal of doing things differently, and the work they do on a daily basis reflects this. Case in point? The rapping Southwest flight attendant in the video below. Instead of simply stating the safety instructions in the typical way, the attendant mixes things up, and arguably gets more people to listen to the safety announcement than if they were spoken in their usual "serious" tone.

Southwest is a great example of how you can standout in an otherwise downward-spiraling industry (no terrible pun intended there) with an amazing culture and core values.

South by Southwest (SXSW), held in Austin, TX, seems to get larger each year, and 2009 was no exception. While I wasn't able to attend, I'll make sure it is on my calendar for early next year.

For people like me who missed the big event, Mike Rohde's sketchnotes are an excellent resource. Rohde takes "visual notes" at all sorts of events, including South by Southwest. It's great for people who don't take notes (but should), for visual thinkers, or for those who may have wanted to take notes during the event, but were otherwise occupied meeting, speaking, or even Twittering about what was happening at the mega networking event.

I'm not as familiar with sketchnotes as much as graphic recording or graphic facilitation, but these notes contribute to the type of visual learning that I love and find most helpful. Here are three pages from Mike Rohde, which show the major points Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, made during a talk at SXSW. Tony has been doing a lot of speaking lately and has done a great job turning the Zappos culture into a true story.

A month ago I posted an example of visualizing core values and how GotVMail has used this technique to make our core values as visible as possible. But then we thought, "Where do we show other important ideas about our company?"

So, after creating the original graphic for the center we decided to expand to include company goals, department goals, and personal goals. Getting these on the same page wasn't enough, though. Originally, we were going to print these "visualized goals" for each team member, for every quarter. We realized the extra paper was unnecessary, however, and and decided it would be more effective to integrate the info into our corporate wiki. With the document now posted on our wiki, updates are easier than ever, and the concepts stay fresh in people's minds as they visit the wiki each day.

As regular readers of my blog know, I'm a big believer in using graphics, pictures and other types of images to explain complex problems. We've used graphic facilitation experts in the past and every time I see their output I'm amazed at their work, and then faced with the brutal reminder that I cannot draw. It's is truly overwhelming the amount of complex information you can represent using simple graphics. In many cases, these graphics have a greater impact on the consumer/reader of that information.

In my never-ending quest to find ways to visualize information, I turned to @Google Talk, this time with Dan Roam. Roam also wrote a book this, but I've not read it, so that's still sitting in a pile of guilt somewhere. But in the video, Roam provides a set of simple tools that anyone can use to draw complex information. Well worth the 55 minutes it runs.

Unless you've been living under a rock over the past few months, it's clear there's a credit crisis that's been very costly for US taxpayers--in short, we've had to "save" companies too large to fail. There's a lot of debate about what could and should have been done instead of bailing out these companies, as well as discussion concerning what we should do now that we're knee-deep in this financial crisis. This kind of debate will only intensify with the latest stimulus package.

How we got here is pretty simple, from a financial standpoint: the cause was a combination of greed and complex financial instruments, which even senior people on Wall Street didn't understand. Credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations allowed risk-averse funds to invest in high return assets that were supposed to remove the risk. As people know now, this all fell apart and caused a global financial crisis.

The credit crisis is a complicated issue, which makes it the perfect candidate for a visual explanation, which can sometimes be easier to understand. Jonathan Jarvis created this video about the credit crisis, and it's nothing short of awesome. In just over 11 minutes, "The Crisis of Credit Visualized" explains--in a very powerful and interesting way--the actions that caused the crisis. The video is pure simplicity:

A more detailed whiteboard presentation about collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)

Last year, American Express did a photo shoot featuring me and David at our headquarters in Boston. The purpose of the photo shoot was to produce material for AmEx's various marketing campaigns featuring customers (they've done spots with PinkBerry, MusicDirect, and Jerry Seinfeld among others). Since we didn't know where and when they'd use the photos, it was interesting to get an email last week from a friend who attended an art exhibit and just happened to spot an AmEx information booth featuring some of the pieces from the photo shoot.

AmEx's practice of shining a spotlight on interesting customers is a bright idea. Regardless of where the pictures end up - in a campaign for either AmEx business or consumer credit cards - their presence gives each campaign life, and creates unique brand stories in a subtle way. It also strengthens the relationship with the customer/client, which then gets AmEx even more press (case in point, this post).

GotVMail has a program similar to AmEx's, called Tell Us Your Story. Through the program, customers tell us about themselves and their businesses. We then try to either feature them in our marketing initiatives or match them to reporters seeking interesting stories. So far, we've gotten some great coverage for our customers, including: SmallCellars.com, featured in PC Magazine; Babysitters.com, picked up by the Associated Press; and Small Business Majority on BusinessWeek.com.