Monday, October 31, 2011

Coming Clean

About once a week we see an article such as this one in The Toronto Star.

A high-profile player resigns after being caught out.

It is never what they did and got caught at that does it.

It is always the denial that they did it.

  • You seduced the president’s wife and denied it?

You don’t jump because you seduced; you jump because you were found out to have lied about whether you did or didn’t seduce.

  • You falsified the company’s books and denied it?

You don’t jump because you falsified; you jump because you were found out to have lied about whether you did or didn’t falsify.

  • You stole the cookie and denied it?

You don’t jump because you stole; you jump because you were found out to have lied about whether you did or didn’t steal.

Cliché alert: Honesty is the best policy.

If you did wrong, ‘fess up and keep your job/position/contract.

For one thing you’ll appear to be human, and humans love humans!

Talk to Me !

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Boosting My LinkedIn Connections

So by now most members of my contact list have received a phone call and two postal mailings from me; many have lunched with me.

I’d like to connect to them in LinkedIn.

LinkedIn requires I know something about a person before I can issue an invitation.

Something like their email address.

Heh heh!

The email address that The Prospector hands to me on a plate each morning.

I might set up a query in Access that throws up records which

(1) indicate that I am not yet Linked In and

(2) have a valid email address.

It’s a start!

The Database

.. will need a field that tells me whether

(1) I have asked for a connection (“A”)

(2) I have made a connection (“M”)

A better scheme might be

(1) The date on which I last asked for a connection

(2) I have made a connection (“M”)

With a date value I can revisit records in a decent sequence.

The Query

... would show those active records for which the status field does NOT read “M”, in ascending date sequence.

A simpler scheme would set the date to be in the year 2099 once I’d made a connection.

Or three years ahead so that I can “renew our vows”!

Talk to Me !

Friday, October 28, 2011

Just Call Them up!

It’s been 6 weeks since the firm has sent me any pick-up work writing Word/VBA code, and frankly I’m worried that I’ve said or done something wrong.

It’s been bugging me.

This form is not known for its great corporate communications. It is quite possible that someone, somehow, has taken offence and no one can be bothered telling me the gig is over.

A good friend has been bugging me ‘So, call them and find out!”.

I’ve been too scared.

What if they don’t want me any more?

Finally logic kicks in.

You Know What?

If they really are through with me, it’ll come out in the first 60 seconds, and I can say, calmly and politely “Thank you for letting me know”, and there’s an end to it.

If, on the other hand, it’s just a seasonal slow-down, then I can sleep again at night time.

I Called

It’s a seasonal slow-down. School started up yesterday; everybody’s back from vacation, ...

Talk to Me !

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Social Networking Automated!

I am feeling quite pleased with myself.

I have automated a large part of getting my social networking up to date.

Imagine if you will a database of contacts – about 350 companies and the same number of people.

That’s 700 contacts.

I’d like to (LinkedIn) connect with each of them and I’d like to (Twitter) follow them.

My proof-of-concept application - “Follow” - will work its way through my contacts database a half-dozen (or a dozen!) records at a time and determine the appropriate LinkedIn page for each contact, from which I can click on a button to follow them on Twitter, or click on a button to ask to be connected on LinkedIn.

I could automate that last part, but I’d rather retain some control over the timing.

The proof-of-concept takes a self-delimited string of names (,Shane Schick, Chris Greaves, David Webb, Cathy Nesbitt, Mona Albano, Brendon Cowans, Karen Granville Carole St. Laurent) and throws up a tab for each LinkedIn profile in my web browser.

Neat!

You can watch the video directly from My Videos Page (item #59) or via YouTube .

Talk to Me !

  • LF> Very cool. What if my contact manager isn't in Word? Can it read an Excel file or a .CSV?

Yes it can.

My contact manager isn't in Word either; it's an Access database.

The application (well, proof-of-concept, strictly speaking) is written in Word/VBA which can "talk" with Access, Excel etc.

I have a Word/VBA database interface that communicates with just about everything including dBaseIII files and Act!(v6) databases.

Just so you know, I ran the p-o-c from just a character string:

Dim strPeople As String

strPeople = ""

strPeople = strPeople & vbTab & "Shane Schick"

strPeople = strPeople & vbTab & "Chris Greaves"

strPeople = strPeople & vbTab & "David Webb"

strPeople = strPeople & vbTab & "Cathy Nesbitt"

strPeople = strPeople & vbTab & "Mona Albano"

strPeople = strPeople & vbTab & "Brendon Cowans"

strPeople = strPeople & vbTab & "Karen Granville"

strPeople = strPeople & vbTab & "Carole St. Laurent"

While Len(strPeople) > 0

Dim strPerson As String

strPerson = strsplitat(strPeople, vbTab)

If Len(strPerson) > 0 Then

Call LocatePerson(strPerson, ie, os)

Else

End If

Wend

Since I already know how to hook up Word to an Access MDB I didn't waste time doing that.

I wanted to prove that, given a series of personal (or corporate business) names I could throw up, in a manner of speaking, a series of tabs, one for each person.

  • FL> Just so I'm clear... one could feed in a list of company names and your tool, either as-is or with tweaks, would go out to LinkedIn and build a database of relevant LinkedIn contact info for each employee?

The answer is always ...

Yes.

This proof-of-concept level accepts a self-delimiting string (",Shane Schick, Chris Greaves, David Webb, Cathy Nesbitt, Mona Albano, Brendon Cowans, Karen Granville, Carole St. Laurent") and process it to the point of raising the LinkedIn profile page(s) in front of you.

I am pretty sure I have the skills to automate the follow-on stage, e.g. "Follow this person on Twitter", "Ask for a connection" - so why do it if I already know I can do it.

A more practical concern is that if I automate that end of it, I could blindly be following "Dave Web", the drunken downhill skier from Birmingham UK, instead of the Dave Webb I know, editor at itWorld.CA.

And therein lies a clue: I think that LinkedIn is being smart, and building the list by distance-from-M9C 2A6, which works for me, because most of my business relationships are face-to-face, local to YYZ. You, with your world-wide following/clientele, may find that the hits aren't quite so accurate. It's significant that the 8 I tested all came out 100% accurate.

I haven't tried it, yet, with businesses. Of course to "Follow.dot", they are just strings; it depends on how smart LinkedIn is.

The database end is also trivial, and I have to do that next.

  • I need two new fields in the table, "LinkedIn" and "Twitter".
  • Each day process 6 more records from the database.
  • If a field is empty, go look for it.
  • If not found, put today's date in their and revisit it later on.
  • If a contact is found/made, follow/link it and put the appropriate link in there.
  • After that first pass, just process the dated-fields in stalest-first sequence, or something.

Of course, even that wouldn't be a blind process; I ought not ask for a connection until I've made, say, three distinct contacts with the person.

Follow/link to a business is another matter; that can and ought to be automated.

I am now accepting beta-testers ..... but you beta be fast!

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Christmas Is Coming!

It is more than two months away, I know, but since my “touch” mailings go out every two months, it might be time to start thinking about Christmas messages.

I still have a carton of cards, snowy-scene, of the local church. That makes for a Christian-themed seasonal tasteful local effort.

I still have several cartons of DUCA cards .

This coming weekend I might gear myself to being able to print the flyer, and as well spit out a personalized card with its envelope. I’ve received compliments on my personalized cards before. It strikes a chord of automation in some minds. (“What a clever guy you are ...”)

Talk to Me !

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Where Have all the Followers gone?

With apologies to Peter, Paul and Mary , whose name popped into my mind this morning as I discarded yet another email alert from Twitter: “Joe Blogs is now following you on Twitter!”, with an exclamation mark to get me all excited.

DELETE.

But it made me think of how frequently I receive these email alerts, and Management Measures , so I waded back through my email folders (I have a folder for each month’s emails, “Trash201110, Trash201109, Trash201108 etc.” and made a quick tally of emails announcing my Devoted Followers:



Cumulative

Mar

14

14

Apr

22

36

May

11

47

Jun

20

67

Jul

25

92

Aug

23

115

Sep

33

148

Oct

20

168




Current


52

Now I had also received by email twitters statistics for the merry week of this, and in it I noted “Followers=51; Growth this week=2; Prediction next week=49”, and leaving behind the question of why a growth of 2 this week might lead to fewer followers next week, I pondered why, after 168 announcements of followers, I have retained only 30% of the camp.

The rest have de-camped, it seems.

“BeerGuy”, “SexyTeen” and “DeadMeat” along with them, I hope.

Twitter, of course, never sends me an email lamenting the loss of a follower, only another young hopeful who has been led to believe that by following me they’ll look good and land that multi-million dollar contract.

“Give up!”, is my message. I’m having enough trouble as it is landing a multi-thousand dollar contract, let alone boosting total strangers to vast riches.

How about you?

How many followers have you attracted and lost, and do you care?

Talk to Me !

Monday, October 24, 2011

Canadians Need to Be Patient

“Canadians need to be patient, because orders can only come from within the United States.”

Says the article in The Toronto Star .

I know that one can possibly, order through eBay, Amazon, and others of that ilk.

But it seems to me that there is a niche here for a Canadian entrepreneur to serve Canadians with a secure set of US addresses which would allow bleeding-edge technology Canadians to order by proxy.

Trust is involved, to be sure, but that’s true of any online business.

Imagine that you want to take advantage of the free CD, the latest camera, or what have you, but you are stymied by the “US-only” constraint.

You’d place your order, wait two weeks, (several months in the Star’s example) and take delivery of what you really want.

Beats driving across the border and prowling the malls in Buffalo, if you ask me.

And yes, this niche is a world-wide niche. People in Kenya, Australia, and India want these toys, too, and they want them NOW!

Talk to Me !

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Who Calls Who?

ME> Hi Victor. What's a good time to call you back (after 2 p.m.)?

HE> I’ll be in the office Thursday morning at 10 a.m.

Gone are the days when the third email would be from Me to He, with Me saying “OK, why don’t you call me at a time convenient to you after 10 a.m.

I have learned that, all too often, something crops up at HIS end and he doesn’t make the call.

So now I initiate the call; that means we have a conversation AND the project moves a step further ahead.

Today!

Talk to Me!

Friday, October 21, 2011

Dating My Clients

So there I am, minding my own business, wading through 15 contacts per day playing catch-up, and I notice that a record has dropped through the cracks!

I maintain three date fields in a person’s record:

(1) The date the record was added

(2) The date the record was last modified

(3) The date the person is due for a follow-up call

In several cases one or more of these fields are null.

A null date field means that the record may not show up when I ask to see “Which records are due for follow-up today?” or “Which records have not been modified (with new information) for the longest time?”.

So I took 15 minutes off work and drafted a bit of code which ran thus:

If the date-last-modified field is null, then set it to be TODAY less 6 months ago. That ism make it instantly-very-stale, forcing me to look at it closely on the next contacts run (tomorrow morning)

If the date-added is null, then set it to the date-last-modified. By the first piece of code, date-last-modified is never null, so date-added will be set, at worst, the most recent date of modification. Not perfect, but at least it is a value.

If the date-to-follow-up is null, then set it to be the date-added. That should force me to look at records which are added BUT might never have been contacted!

In many cases I’ll find that everything is on schedule, but in some cases I’ll find a person who has never been contacted, and I’ll rectify that immediately.

It worked so smoothly that I repeated the procedure for my “Company” and “Branch” tables!

Talk to Me!

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Staying Ahead of the Avalanche

There’s no other way to describe it, unless it’s ‘”Trying to make it to the beach before the huge surf wave dumps me”.

When I rose this morning my little contacts database told me that there were 14 contacts required “touching” today, and a further 102 were in the backlog.

My plan for touching a contact every 2 months is failing; I can’t keep up with the workload.

Why Not?

Management Measures.

It’s time for some figures.

I explore the database and check the Date-Last-Modified field on the personal records.

The earliest Date-Last-Modified is May 18th this year. That’s 17 weeks back, as I compose this draft.

I have 340 personal contacts on this list.

That’s above my goal of two years ago, which I had pegged at 300.

It seems that I’ve been able to maintain a steady rate of 340/17=20 contacts per week.

That’s certainly not ten per day, and most of these, recently, have been straightforward mailings.

If I tabulate the count of contacts-per-week against the week number I see this:

Wk

Ct

1

8

2

10

3

12

4

1

5

1

7

24

8

55

9

41

10

24

11

9

13

35

14

25

15

28

16

57

17

9

I Work in Spurts

Over the past 4 weeks I’ve contacted 35, 25, 28 and 57 people respectively. An average of 36.

The other spurt averaged 36 contacts per week, too.

My running average over the period works out to 23 per week; better than 17, but “Christopher can do better”, as my school report card said.

It seems that 35, or even 40 contacts per week ought to be doable.

If I make 40 contacts per week over 340 contacts, that means I’ll make contact once every 8.5 weeks, which ought to be about right.

In other words, my number of contacts is correct, and my goal of touching each one about once every 2 months is correct.

A New Goal

I just need to be more diligent in reaching my goals each day.

A running average of 23 per week is 4 per business day.

I need to double that to 8 per day.

Aiming for ten is a good idea, a doable stretch.

Catching Up

In the meantime, I need to catch up, to give myself breathing space while aiming for my goal.

I can do that by temporarily stretching my next-contact-date button from 2 months to 3 months.

To Justify that I HAVE to see at least 10, but preferably, 15 ENVELOPES waiting to be mailed out at the end of each business day.

P.S. So, obviously, I should drop ten, or fifteen blank envelopes near the printer each morning and churn out postals until the day’s supply is gone.

Talk to Me!

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Canada's New Anti-Spam Law

In “Canadian businesses face tough challenges with strict anti-spam lawGrant Buckler reports on the new measures to be implemented in Canada to cope with spam.

In theory.

In practice I believe that Bill-C28 will be applied seldom, and then only at great expense against mega-millionaire spam kings.

You and I don’t need to worry about Bill-C28. The lawyers are interested only in people with lots of money, millions of dollars.

So Sleep easy.

But do pay attention to what is required, because if nothing else, it makes for courteous business sense.

Opt in

Bill C-28 ... requires recipients explicitly to opt in to receiving e-mails and other electronic communications rather than simply requiring that they be given an opportunity to opt out ...”.

Most commercial mailing list providers stress this every time you breathe in.

Done Business

“If the sender of the message has done business with the recipient in the past two years, consent to receive commercial e-mail is implied. But since that implied consent now expires after two years, businesses that rely on it will now need a way of tracking their business dealings with people on their mailing lists and either removing their names from the list or obtaining their explicit consent to keep sending them messages before the two years are up.”

This is the more interesting paragraph.

My accountant says “Business is the exchange of two pieces of paper, one of which must be a cheque”, so in theory many of the people to whom I send an occasional email could have me chased by The Feds.

Even if I have supplied them with goods and services “that implied consent now expires after two years” so I ought to be confirming, every two years, that it’s still OK to communicate by email.

How to do that? Well, having lunch every two years as a minimum ought to be a good time to ask if it’s OK to send occasional emails.

“businesses ...will now need a way of tracking their business dealings with people on their mailing lists “. Well, for sure. But shouldn’t we be doing that anyway? Keeping track of each contact, with a time-stamp of each communication, whether we phoned, left a voice-mail, mailed a letter, met for coffee, and so on. How else would you know which contacts are getting attention?

“... removing their names from the list or obtaining their explicit consent to keep sending them messages.” Again to my mind this is a no-brainer.

The strict letter of the law may find a nit-picking loop-hole, but long before it gets to court, the CEO is going to have the executive assistant ask you to stop mailing postcards; they don’t have time to take you to court.

And any judge would laugh at the suit.

P.S. Here’s a simplified view of the bill.

Talk to Me!

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

How Many can You Follow?

If you’ve been following my saga on Twitter you will know that I’ve been puzzled about the vast numbers of people who follow me for no apparent reason, and the number of people I follow, for reasons that escape me after a month or two.

There are people I keenly want to follow, tweeps on whose every word I hang, but too often they get swamped out by a burst of activity from others who I’m following.

And how on earth did I end up following “BeerGuy”?

So I’ve Made an Executive Decision

Right now I’m following 50 tweeps.

That’s too many.

I will reduce that number by ONE at the start of each week, until I reach 40; then I’ll re-evaluate the situation.

Then I may reduce that number by ONE at the start of each week, until I reach 30; then I’ll re-evaluate the situation.

I rather think that following 30 tweeps; seriously following by being able to engage with them, is a commendable activity.

Trying to follow 300 is just plain stupid.

Talk to Me!

Monday, October 17, 2011

Check Your Stress At the Gasoline Pump

We met for the last time in a Tim Horton’s coffee shop near Lawrence and Victoria Park Avenue.

The meeting lasted an hour and ended when I got up and walked away. I’ve met her only once since then, ten years ago.

At the time I ran a car, and recorded my odometer reading each time I bought gasoline, recording also what I’d paid and the price per litre.

I charted my consumption, and interesting it was, too, for in those days I did some long distance trips as a relief for all the scooting around town delivering training.

Visit www.ChrisGreaves.com for this image! StressGas.png

I knew that the breakup was coming; tension was in the air each time we met.

I knew I had to end the relationship, but I didn’t know how.

Walking stiff-legged out of the coffee shop was not the kindest thing I’ve done, but it might have been the smartest.

Two years later I was using my gas readings as exercise data in class.

“Chris, why is there a peak there?’ came the question.

The peak in gasoline consumption reflects that in the weeks leading up to the breakup I was under stress.

When we are under stress we drive erratically; I’d been braking more, accelerating with ferocity, and I suppose generally behaving like an ape behind the wheel.

It’s hard to see in the image above, but in the two weeks immediately after the breakup, my gas consumption began to come down, and after two weeks, it plummeted down to its usual level.

I reason that the first two weeks after the breakup saw some stress shed from my life, but at the two-week point I KNEW she was gone, and the load dropped off like a sack of stones.

Record your gasoline consumption and plot the trend.

Then go back to those peaks and work out what it is that causes you stress.

And get rid of it.

Talk to Me !

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Check Your Stress on the Bathroom Scales

It’s no secret that I’m losing weight.

Indeed, the fact that I *AM* losing weight makes me more inclined to tell everyone about it.

Heh heh!

Visit www.ChrisGreaves.com for this image! StressWeight.png

You can ignore the scale on the Left-hand side. I’m using a set of scales that may not be correctly calibrated.

What counts to me is the DIFFERENCE in weight from day to day, and in the chart above you can see that in early September I am about 4 pounds lighter than I was last June.

I have been weighing myself daily for about five years now, and can stretch that chart to cover all five years.

I am fascinated by perturbations; what makes my weight spike at intervals?

The yellow marks are my daily recorded weight values; they fluctuate, quite naturally, by plus or minus two pounds per day.

So what counts is the TREND of my weight, which is outlined in red and also in blue; I use blue when my recorded daily weight is less than my trend, which is a running average.

(Blue is therefore the equivalent of a Gold Star, without the expense of buying gold stars!).

Observe the are bounded in green.

Just over a week ago, Friday 26th, my early-morning weight pegged in at 167 lbs. No cause for alarm, but why on that day? I was taking two days holiday, and was looking forward to it.

Don’t you think my stress would be DOWN that morning?

No. Weight is a function of stress; when we are stressed out we drink beer (calories) or eat ice-cream (calories); we eat to feel comfortable, and if we aren’t comfortable in our daily lives, we treat ourselves.

My guess is that in the three or four days leading up to my heavenly vacation, the PROMISE of a great time in the future felt like pressure in the present.

So Friday morning, before I set off, I had a peak at 167 lbs, brought about by snacking to relieve the stress of waiting for vacation.

Once on vacation I pig out on hamburgers, ice-cream, I treat myself to a can of pop, and generally disregard any heart-and-stroke advice for two days.

And look at how my weight starts coming down again, even though I’m eating what I shouldn’t!

Weigh yourself daily and plot the trend.

Then go back to those peaks and work out what it is that causes you stress.

And get rid of it.

Talk to Me !

Friday, October 14, 2011

The Personal Touch

I am asked how much time I spend on mailings.

The mechanical part (click on a button, choose a PDF, choose File, Print, choose “MakeEnvelopeFromSnapshot” and choose “PrintFrontAndBackOfEnvelope” takes less than 60 seconds.

Sometimes the printer gets all sulky and takes over two minutes to reset after printing one side of an envelope. (I learned long ago not to “batch” personalized letters.

The hand-writing part for a generic not takes less than 30 seconds.

But more and more I find myself spending three or more minutes reading my comments on the contact, reading press releases, trying to come up with SOMEthing that indicates I’ve spent some time thinking of what I’ve written.

Because I’m hoping that the recipient will spend some time thinking of what I’ve written.

Talk to Me !

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Anatomy of a Proposal

This is an appropriate time to write this up on two counts:

(a) I am re-reading “ Documentation and the Nursing Process ” by Lois White; I taught from this slim book about ten years ago and love it for its stress on Goals, Objectives, Deliverables, Measurement and Documentation.

(b) I have entered preliminary discussions with a chap who wants me to develop a system, but I am leery of projects proposed by individuals. All too often they want a full-fledged system for peanuts, and I can’t do that.

So here goes:

1: I want some cash NOW!

2: I don’t want to get jerked around

3: I want to offer only what I can guarantee as a short-term deliverable.

4: I want to proceed in small measured steps

5: I want to minimize the amount of work I do up front by me

6: I want to minimize the up front dollar investment by him

7: I want to minimize the risk for both of us.

My terms will be cash in advance; I don’t know this fellow, and I don’t know how adaptable he is.

Next: My Plan

Talk to Me !

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Does Staying-In-Touch Work?

“Alex, Chris Greaves is the script guru I suggested you speak with about your flyers. I met him at AIC, we keep in touch every once in a while. He’s not a web guy, but a MS/parser/automator guy who may have ideas on your project. Cheers, Carole”
  • Does Staying-In-Touch Work?

You Betcha!

Talk to Me !

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The U.S. Economy


Visit www.ChrisGreaves.com for this image! USEconomy_HPIM3972.JPG

I hadn’t realized how bad the economy was until I stepped into Arnot Mall, Horseheads New York last Friday morning.

Here we are, just before eleven o’clock and the mall is close to deserted.

Visit www.ChrisGreaves.com for this image! USEconomy_HPIM3973.JPG

And it is just as deserted in the other direction.

Many stores are empty, not closed.

A closed store has the lights off but the displays are evident. Closed stores have a black-cloth screen placed behind the window.

We don’t get to see an empty shell.

In the photo above, the five large window bays are given over to a display of trophies, but it’s not a trophy store; it’s just a display to fill in a long and empty storefront.

I estimated about 25% of the stores were vacant.

Visit www.ChrisGreaves.com for this image! USEconomy_HPIM3974.JPG

We moved into The BonTon (but JC Penney and Macy’s was little different.

It is eleven o’clock, one week before school restarts.

Where are all the mothers and teenage kids being dragged in for new clothes for school?

Visit www.ChrisGreaves.com for this image! USEconomy_HPIM3975.JPG

There’s no-one in sight, not a shopper, not a clerk.

One hour later, in conversation with a clerk in Macy’s, I learned that a new mall had been built and that "Many stores moved into the new mall”.

That might explain the closure of store fronts in this mall.

But it doesn’t explain the absence of foot-traffic both in and out of the large department stores.

Talk to Me !

Monday, October 10, 2011

Holiday Priorities

As I write, today is a public holiday. Everybody is on vacation, except me. I’m at work.

Since 1970 I’ve taken options to work on a public holiday and then take a day off when the shops are open. I slept in this mooring, rising after 9 a.m. and I sit down and realize that:-

(a) Today is Monday and I didn’t pre-post my 6 posts for this blog (I post them in advance now, and let them time-release during the week)

(b) Yesterday I did not spend the time working through a week’s accumulation of interesting-links-for-other-blogs

(c) Danny has emailed me a specific failure in one of my applications and

(d) There’s a backlog of personal email to be tackled.

That will do for now; you know what I’m talking about when I say “Four urgent tasks”.

Question is, how to assign a priority to each task; it’s a given that once I start a task I’m going to see it through to conclusion, but which task comes FIRST.

To my mind the best bet is the task that seems to offer the earliest completion. I don’t know what I’ll uncover with Danny’s bug; it could be a five-minute task, it could extend to a four-hour slog through code. But I know that releasing 6 Torontopreneur posts into the wild will take me 20 minutes, tops.

So that’s my urgent task this morning.

I can deal with any personal email within 3 minutes, even to the extent of muttering “There, there, what a pity; please tell me more”, so that’s second.

Danny comes third. It has to be done.

Fourth is wading through “clippings” file and drafting a blog item for each, doing a bit of research, finding or making an image and so on.

Is this the correct sequence? I’ll not know until the end of this day; but I do know that if I don’t set a sequence by priority, I’ll waffle.

Talk to Me !

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Just Not in Time

We approached the narrow stone-faced bridge on the north side of Bliss, NY with caution; we were in no hurry.

That gave us all the more time to observe the 53-foot trailer and tractor, minus part of its roof, which had been driven under the 12’5” rail bridge, severely buckling the trailer bed.

Pieces of aluminium were in the roadway, the driver was still in the cab, but on the phone, so we thought the incident had occurred only a couple of minutes prior to our arrival.

Embarrassing for the driver; will he lose his job? I hope not.

Visit www.ChrisGreaves.com for this image! JustNotinTime.png

How did he miss the three signs “12’5” bridge ahead” which we had spotted?

The third sign is clear in real life – not so clear in the screen snapshot from Google Maps.

Maybe the driver had entered from Garry Road and was distracted enough to miss the one sign he passed.

Had the dispatcher told him the height of his rig?

Was this a novel route for him?

Had he been TOLD to take this route for pickup and delivery?

Who knows?

What we do know is that much of today’s business functions on the “Just In Time” principle, where parts and material are expected to be delivered within a 2-hour interval.

Our driver will not be going anywhere fast.

1: For one thing the trailer will have to be loaded onto a flat-bed and carted away; a difficult job on a narrow village road deep in The Southern Tier .

2: Of course the police will be involved.

3: And there’ll be some report-writing taking place at a desk in Head Office.

4: The county engineer will need to be summoned for an on-site inspection of the bridge, to certify that damage is minimal and that the structure is sound.

5: Until then the railroad engineering department will not open the track above for freight traffic, which means that freight trains will need to be re-routed.

6: Which means that other lines and junctions in the region will become crowded or confused.

There’s more than a simple delay in a truck load of parts when an incident like this arises.

It can affect the local economy of the region for weeks!

P.S.

The Toronto Sun in “ Calls for a freer border ” claims “When we have delays at the border and we don’t receive, just-in-time parts and components to an (auto) assembly plant; that’s lost revenue of roughly $1.5 billion per hour,” said Nantais.

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Friday, October 7, 2011

Joe Who?

I’m inclined to discount the effort by restaurant management to make my dining experience more enjoyable by their insistence that the waiter introduce himself as “Joe”.

While I hope that he and I get along, there is an obvious conflict (or “disparity” if you will) that cannot be overcome when I’m ordering lunch at the Glen Iris Inn in Letchworth State Park .

I’m here for lunch; it’s a one-time deal, and if I ever do come back, chances are Joe will be long gone.

Joe, however, is here for a while, until he gets a better job.

In that sense, I am transient and Joe is permanent.

In my local diner ( The Montreal Deli ), the waitresses come and go on cycles varying from 2 years to 20 years. By comparison, I’m a permanent fixture at The Deli.

At The Deli we see each other at least once a week, so Joan, Eileen, Polly, Georgia and the rest of the ladies know and greet me by name, and I them.

We have a relationship that is not entirely business-like.

By contrast at the Glen Iris Inn, I’ll remain a total stranger to Joe throughout the meal, and long after I’ve started the car up the driveway out of the "Grand Canyon of the East".

“I’m Joe” works for me on my 3rd or 4th visit.

Anytime before than and it’s a lie.

And I hate it when businesses lie to me.

Talk to Me !

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Management Measures Trucks

23, 7, 4, 13, 1, 1, 13, 0, 14, 27, 3, 38, 3, 4, 13, 7, 38, 40, 1, 17, 15, 11, 2, 3, 2, 13, 2, 21, 11, 4, 4, 7, 6, 14, 1, 4, 1, 2, 3, 13, 10, 10, 16, 2, 24, 23, 4, 3, 1, 8, 23, 16, 2.

Visit www.ChrisGreaves.com for this image! ManagementMeasuresTrucks_HPIM3968.JPG

I’m sitting in a lawn chair out back of The Hampton Inn in Painted Post, NY state; right by exit 43.

Through a gap in the hedge I watch the traffic roar by at 6 p.m. Thursday August 25th 2011.

There’s a silence, then a growing roar as a semi-trailer approaches, flashes past me, and disappears up or down the highway. Cars and FedEx vans scoot by in the turbulence. Silence descends for another ten seconds.

I decide to log how many cars are on the highway compared to trucks.

The figures above represent the count of smaller vehicles between each prime mover. Thus, a large truck passed, then 23 cars went by before the next truck, then 7 cars went by before the next truck, and so on.

Now I need to be more precise in my definitions:

I’m counting engines-under-power. It isn’t a car or a truck if it is piggy-backed on a truck, or towed behind a camper-van or RV. Only vehicles that are supplying motive power are counted.

I define a “truck” as “any powered vehicle capable of towing a load of 53-feet or more”, so most of the heavy 18-wheelers are trucks. I include an empty flat-bed looking for a back-hoe as a load, and I include a couple of bob-tails looking for trailers to hitch up.

At 6 p.m. Thursday evening, one in ten vehicles is a truck, on this stretch of Highway 86.

If I include commercial vehicles, like the FedEx van or the plumbers utility, it’s more like 20%.

I suspect that late at night, around 2 a.m., the ratio is closer to 50%, for Highways 86/17 are an alternate route to the big I-90 toll road that runs across New York state from east to West.

Nonetheless, at this time of this day, 10% of traffic is trucks, bringing your cereal to your breakfast table.

P.S.

In the image above, taken the following misty morning, 3 non-trucks have appeared between the incidents of two trucks heading westbound up the hill.

Talk to Me !

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

How to Re-Use a Blog

Another typical and useful blog on re-use, this time from CopyBlogger: “ 12 Ways to Turn Your Old, Dusty Blog Archive into Cold, Hard Cash ”.

Co-incident with this I’ve been listening to yet-another-podcast interview of a bets-selling author who recounts advice he was given early in life:

“Write two pages a day, even if you’ve got no inspiration to write. At the end of the year you’ll have 700 pages, and there have to be a few gems in there somewhere”.

Makes sense to me.

So I continue to blog every day (well, OK, every day except Sunday) in this blog, and I blog in “Clear Thinking” and a few other blogs, and my home page is a blog and ...

Sure enough I have mountains of material.

I hope too that you continue to blog every day!

Talk to Me !

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

I Do

I was mailing out a flyer this afternoon.

It contained two, possibly conflicting, messages.

I say “possibly”, but one message flowed on from the other.

I realize now what I was trying to say:

“I do” – I do things for businesses, solve problems, develop systems and applications and so on.

As well as that I train; I offer over 300 modules of training on a variety of topics.

So here is my short message:

I do, and I teach people how to do what I do.

Talk to Me !

Monday, October 3, 2011

Cold Calls (Sales) vs. Cold Calls

I hear and read a great deal about the perils/fear of Cold Calling. “Cold-calling is dead”, and I’ve been known to say that, driven by The Prospector , my cold calls aren’t cold calls. See, as an example, Out-of-Town Contacts Trump In-Town! .

It’s time to clear the air.

Cold Calling to Sell is Dead

“Hi, my name is Chris Greaves and I was wondering if you want any computers programmed today” is just plain hopeless, even if it’s “driveways repaved” or “roofs re-roofed”.

Cold Calling to Start a Relationship is Alive and Well

“Hi, my name is Chris Greaves. I read your press release yesterday and wondered if it would be OK to send you, by mail or email, my comments on it?” works, providing, of course, that there IS a press release, you HAVE read it, and you do have some meaningful comments to make.

Because, of course, the President/CEO will probably ask ‘What’s this about?”, and you’d better be prepared to engage in conversation.

And isn’t that what you wanted?

Talk to Me !

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Sell to Sold vs. Sell to Unsold

There are only two types of people who will look at your wares/goods/services:

Those who are sold on them, and those that are not sold on them.

An example of the former is the prospect who needs Excel VBA training and knows it.

An example of the latter is the prospect who does not need Excel VBA training and knows it, or who needs it and does not know it.

In the first case, the web site/sales flyer/brochure can extol the benefits of your training and include a sign-up form. Much like the tell-me-more cards in a neat stack on the counter next to the laptop computers.

In the second case, we need to differentiate between the material designed to alert the prospect towards recognizing a need that they’d not been able to put a name to (“Gee! Now that you mention it, I DO spend a lot of time doing boring and repetitive tasks in Excel!”), and the fact that if the person flipping over your material has never used a computer in their life (“I was looking for a functional table, not a course on how to program table functions”).

1: Are you selling to people who already know that they want what you have?

2: Are you selling to people who need what you have but don’t yet know it?

3: Are you trying to sell to people who will never in a million years need what you have?

Talk to Me !