In a nutshell, the seat assignments I was given 3 months ago when I purchased my tickets were not honored and I was given a new seat assignment far away from my children. This kind of reminds me of a scene from a Seinfeld episode:

There are two things I don’t understand about this scenario:

• If an airline can give me a seat assignment when I buy my tickets, why do they change when I try to use the tickets?
• If an airline knows that I am traveling with 2 children under the age of 13, why would the seating system ever assign the adult a seat away from them?

The first question is one of those mysteries of life that may never be answered. I understand that the many people who purchase tickets for a particular flight purchase them at different times on different days, and so there are complexities in trying to get all of the members of a party to sit together, but isn’t the rule of “first come, first serve” pretty well accepted by 2012? If I buy my tickets before you do, and I select 3 seats together, and that doesn’t leave enough contiguous seats for you, well, that is tough luck for you. So, when I receive seat assignments for me and my children, I expect to sit in those seats. There are some exceptions to this rule, however, which brings me to my second question.

I believe there are some things in this world that trump free market dynamics like fare classes and loyalty program perks. One of those things is the welfare of children. I believe a software system that is designed to assign seats to people who buy tickets to fly on a particular flight, armed with the knowledge that certain passengers are part of a party and are under the age 13 and are flying with someone who is over the age of 13, and does not keep parties with children together is fundamentally flawed. Why wouldn’t the programmers code in logic to look for children flying with their responsible adults and give that party priority to have contiguous seating? Surely, on any and every flight, there are enough parties made up entirely of adults that, in the event that the given seating assignments fail to keep children with their parents, could be split up so that children do not have to sit alone. Seriously, isn’t it better to make two adults traveling together sit separately than to take an 8 year old children and make her sit away from her father and instead with strangers?

I know this is possible, and here is how I think it should work. Imagine a party of 3, one adult and two children, arrive at the airport one hour early to check in. They have seat assignments already, given to them when they purchased the tickets. They access the software to check in and enter the information identifying 2 of the passengers in their party as under the age of 13 (this information may actually already be known since most travel sites ask for names and ages of the passengers). The system should look to see if the original seat assignments are still available. If we assume that the seat assignments given at ticket purchase don’t really mean anything, then the system should look to see if there are 3 contiguous seats available. If not, then the system should look to see if there are any seats assigned to parties who haven’t checked in yet that do not contain children, and break those assignments. Using this logic, children and always seated with their accompanying adults, and only adults traveling together are separated.

I know it isn’t the end of the world when my kids have to sit apart from me on an airplane. I know that everyone suffers the experience I had this morning at some point or another. I know that most airline employees try and work these things out as best they can.

I also know that this is a fixable problem, and that implementing such logic in the seat assignment software wouldn’t be too hard and I have to believe that most people would rather have young children sitting with their parents.

If you’ve experienced anything like this, or you are frustrated with airlines lack of forethought with regard to seating children, please  do two things right now:

1. Share this post to your social network
2. Tell me your story in the comments

That is all I can say that is nice.

I have a lot more to say that isn’t nice. Where should I start?

How about just driving up to the hotel? The signage seems like it was made by a Republican presidential candidate, wishy-washy and prone to flip-flop. You want Registration? Well, you can go to the right, or you can go to the left. How helpful is that? If you take into account that going to left means you travel 95% of the perimeter of the place, not very helpful at all. I suppose there are two ways to get everywhere in the world, but I don’t really want to traverse the globe in one direction when I could have gone just around the corner in the other direction. Especially dragging my luggage because there are no bell hops.

Let’s talk about the pretty lobby now. Because the hotel seems to make most of its money operating historical and ghost tours, the lobby isn’t as pretty with 1000 people milling about than it would be with the normal amount of hotel lobby loiterers. Ever been to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa? The Stanley Hotel lobby is like the 10 yard semicircle extending out from the Mona Lisa, with a population density of 3 people per square foot.

How about the staff? I can’t say I totally blame these poor folks, because if I worked in a hotel that had 10,000 tourists hang around each day, taking pictures, wandering around aimlessly with their eyes on the ceiling, toting their kids and their Starbucks, taking pictures in your way, messing up the bathrooms, and generally just congesting the place, I wouldn’t be too energized to be friendly and courteous to the people who actually paid to stay in the hotel. And you know what? They aren’t. We had staff repeatedly and bluntly tell us no to our diva requests, like, “Can we have that table by the window instead of this one by the party of 25?” Or, “Can we get drinks out on the patio, since it’s got tables and chairs and a pretty view?” Crazy J-Lo stuff like that was met with an unadorned and unapologetic “NO.”

OK, but what about the rooms? Well, they are nice enough. Actually, ours had a huge closet. But here’s the deal. The building is old. It wasn’t designed to be sound-proof. So, it’s not. And by not sound-proof, I mean that I can hear every word of the relatively normal-volume conversation taking place in our neighbor’s room. I mean, people are allowed to talk in their hotel rooms, but when this happens at 4:00 AM, and I can’t really blame the people for, you know, talking, I only have the hotel left to blame.

The final straw for me is the blatant shilling of the fact that Stephen King was inspired by The Stanley to write The Shining. The Stanley sells bottles of Red Rum, and Redrum chocolate, and their breakfast menu boasts Redrum French Toast. I mean, I think I just threw up a little in my mouth while typing all of that. Right? Maybe the shtick here is what drove Jack crazy.

Estes Park (which really is a wonderful place) is not exactly teeming with nice hotel options, and I was pretty excited to stay at The Stanley after last year and that hole that we stayed in. At least the hole we stayed in last year has no pretensions about being anything but a hole. The Stanley would have you believe it is a grand hotel experience, but I think that is another one of their ghost stories.

Roger Bennett called Spain “uncertain” and tore down Sergio Ramos and Fernando Torres. He called attention to a tackle that Ramos had in his own penalty box by reminding the reader that the Italian forward Mario Balotelli also beat Ramos. Bennett also derided Torres for being out-muscled and then yanked in favor of Navas, somehow intuiting that Spanish coach Del Bosque preferred “to go strikerless than with that particular forward.” John Brewin called Spain “sloppy” and expressed boredom with the level of play, comparing it to to a friendly (a match with no implications at all). What seems to be missing from both articles is the fact that Croatia employed a specific strategy against Spain, namely play 8 men in defense and hope for a stroke of luck in the counter-attack. It is a strategy that played to their strengths: superior size and strength in the air.

True, the pace of the game was unusually slow for most matches, even though games involving Spain have more of a chance to display a seemingly slower pace, due to the fact that most teams facing Spain choose to employ the Croatian strategy of stacking the defense. In fact, it was the Croatian tactics that forced a slow pace from Spain. The Croatian defensive area was packed tightly with big bodies, making it difficult for the Spanish midfield and Torres to find any space to shoot. Instead, Spain patiently passed the ball around, looking for a break in the defense. I suppose they could have taken more shots, but Russia tried that in their last game to no effect. Spain chose to take the high percentage shot or look for the open pass. That’s smart soccer.

The Croatian offense was, in the first half, hardly effective, but some opportunities were created as the Spanish defenders pushed forward to help seal the ball into that end. Pranjic was able to make some runs that resulted in a cross to towering Mandzukic. As the second half wore on and Spain pressed even further forward, the strategy looked to pay off. It felt like Croatia had more shots on goal than Spain, but it is incorrect to suggest that Spain were not playing for a win. They just had a different strategy that resulted in fewer opportunities given that they were playing against a defensively oriented team.

Now, Spain has been using this same strategy for several years now, and they’re the #1 team in the world because of it. Their patience keeps them alive against counter-attacking teams (when many other teams with strong offenses suffer surprise losses) because they are the best at keeping possession of the ball. In other words, you can’t counter-attack if you don’t have the ball. So, in a way, Spain’s tactics are defensive, yet also offensive. That’s more than can be said of Croatia’s tactics, which are purely defensive. In fact, when you look at the match statistics, you actually find that Spain was the more offensive team, with more shots and more corners.

Regarding some of the Bennett’s specific criticisms on Ramos and Torres: While the Ramos tackle was made in some desperation, the replay clearly shows that Ramos got the ball and the Croatian forward Mandzukic hit Ramos with his foot. The tackle stopped a dangerous cross into the Spanish goal mouth, practically the only play Croatia has in it’s arsenal that poses a threat to Spain. As for Torres, he was playing against a stacked defense that was more concerned with keeping Torres off of the ball than actually playing the ball itself. Croatian defender Schildenfeld consistently obstructed Torres rather than play the ball. It is a tactic seldom employed by defenders so consistently, but also the kind of thing a slower defender must do when faced with a much faster forward. It speaks to Torres’ sportsmanship and experience that he didn’t express more frustration with the negative tactics.

In the end, Spain won in the same manner that they often win against tactics similar to Croatia’s. They won by sticking to their game plan, playing to their strengths, forcing the other team to rely on sporadic, low-percentage (yet exciting) opportunities, and passing the ball around until they find a way in to goal. My only complaint with this win is that it certainly appeared to me that Navas could have been offside since the pass from Iniesta was a forward pass.

I’ve been perplexed by the strength and tone of the backlash against Pinterest by some well-respected names in the the nonprofit social media world. I kept asking myself, “why are people being pins in the mud about Pinterest?”

Pins In The Mud?

Geoff Livingston recently wrote a post titled What’s the ROI of Pinterest? where he says,

“Let’s be honest here. Outside of driving traffic and Pinterest follower counts, most people don’t have any outcomes to offer. Pinterest is a huge experiment from the marketing perspective. Fewer people have real answers to the ROI question.”

Tom Watson also recently wrote an article for Forbes titled Pinterest and the Hype Factor where he asserts that,

“Clearly, we’re well in the “Pinterest for good” stage now – and it’s the intersection at which I’d like throw up a big stop sign.

I’m not at all convinced that Pinterest is an important platform for social ventures.”

Saya Weissman wrote an article for Digiday titled The Pinterest Brand Bubble where she includes some engagement figures for a few brands, and concludes,

“Clearly, if you pin it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will come. These are big brands we are talking about — granted, it is still early on in the game — these numbers aren’t looking so good.”

These articles aren’t just sitting out there on their own, either. Mavens such as nonprofilt social media goddess Beth Kanter and social business consultant and visual thinker David Armano are referring people to these articles on Google + and Twitter, potentially reaching a combined 450,000 people.

What happened to the days when new social networks were opportunities to experiment? Where is the advice that was once free-flowing by these same people to give these networks a try and see what works?

Luminaries such as Chris Brogan wrote a post about Twitter in the early days called 50 Ways Marketers Can Use Social Media To Improve Their Marketing  that is emphasizes with the words experiment, learn, and try.

TechSoup said, “More than most technologies, success in social networks depends on your sense of adventure,” in a post titled Should Your Organization Use Social Networking Sites?

Beth herself counseled people to experiment in her presentations:

They’re Not Pins In The Mud

If you’re not reading carefully, you might miss it, but these folks are not being pins in the mud. They may not be as straight-forward as they have been in the past, but I believe these smart thinkers are simply advocating the same thing they’ve always advocated: Have a measurable plan.

(And between you and me, I think they’re a little annoyed with the pinperts, pinjas and pinturus out there who have already formed “best practices” guides even though brands have been involved for a VERY short amount of time on Pinterest.)

A review of Geoff’s presentations reveals that he has always been focused on business outcomes, which is the point of his recent post, and somewhat hotly debated in the comments. He simply wants to know what quantifiable benefit the brands in Pinterest are receiving from Pinterest. Traffic is good, but it doesn’t equal a conversion.

You’ll notice that Beth even uses the words “eventually” and “see your social media strategy come to life.” I’ve heard Beth speak many times and she is a fan of experimentation, but measurable experimentation so that the failures you will inevitable have will be informative failures.

Tom is a little trickier in that he feels, rightly so in my opinion, that Pinterest, like Facebook, takes advantage of our social capital as prosumers, and essentially we do the work for the network. However, this is becoming the way of the world, and user generated content is becoming the tool of kings. We all win, most of the time, because we, as prosumers, get satisfaction out of creating and the networks provide a place for us to do so. Tom’s more pertinent point is that Pinterest offers little concrete benefits (list building, little integration with websites) to brands yet . The key word is YET. This is early days, and if the evolution of Facebook and its attitude toward business is any indicator, then those benefits are coming, and building a presence now will pay off in the end.

Saya advocates using the Pin It button first, so that brands can learn what kind of content from their site is pin worthy in the eyes of their consumers. Sounds like a learning exercise to me.

Pinterest may be the newest thing to get our attention, but the rules of the game haven’t changed. The steps you should take to enter and conquer a new social network still apply:

1. Identify your objectives for the network and make sure they are measurable objectives
2. Learn the etiquette of the network first by listening and watching
3. Identify the people in the network who matter to you
4. Engage with them first, before asking them for anything
5. Iterate on all of the above as you evaluate results along the way

There still may be some of you out there who are thinking, “Great, James, but what if it takes my brand six months to get any kind of strategy in place?” If that is the case, I feel sorry for you, but I know how it can be. I’d suggest the following. Personally take on numbers 2, 3 and 4. Then, set up a minimal presence on Pinterest and make it all about your consumers’ ideas for your brand. That could be a couple of things: repin their items that include your brand (possibly few and far between) or ask them what they want to see you pin.

As Geoff says in his post, the case studies that are meaningful have yet to appear. I, for one, eagerly await them to see what works for whom. Those best practices will form one day for real. For now, be smart, be adventurous, be methodical, and don’t be afraid to give Pinterest a try.

In case you didn’t know, a maven is a person who is a trusted resource about a subject who likes to share his or her knowledge. Generally, mavens have large networks of people who listen to them because of the expertise and their willingness to impart that knowledge to others.

Many entrepreneurs seek out mavens early on for several reasons. First, they hope to establish a relationship that the maven will talk about, building awareness for the new venture. Second, to get feedback on the product or service the new venture is offering. This makes perfect sense, since the maven is supposed to be somebody who really knows about a subject. The start-up shows the maven their wares, reveals their future plans, and listens to all of the things the maven has to say about how they would like to use/would use/wouldn’t use the product. The feedback is priceless, and the entrepreneur can go build a product that the maven will be happy to talk about.

The problem is, the maven is a trap. The maven is not like your typical customers (unless you’re building a tool for maven-types). Mavens typically have larger networks, and therefore a larger influx of communications from people wanting to know their opinion. Because of this, the maven has a higher degree of need to organize. Mavens also tend to communicate outwardly in a different way. I suspect that most mavens send outbound messages more often than regular people. This may not always be the case depending on the rate of change in their specific area of expertise, but I can say with social the rate of maven communication seems higher. I also suspect that mavens have a very different purpose for their outbound communications than regular people do. Mavens are communicating with the intent of educating others, which may lead to different needs for communication formats and lengths.

I originally had the idea for this post when reading a great article on Techcrunch about Plancast, the now dormant event attendance communication tool. The founder of Plancast, Mark Hendrickson, performs a postmortem in which he tells us the product won’t be developed further because he missed a very important concept early on, specifically that events are not good fodder for sharing. He clearly spent a lot of time analysing the situation and he cites a number of very good reasons. I think he missed one, though. I suspect that he designed Plancast based on maven feedback and thus missed the use cases for the rest (majority) of his intended user base.

You see, mavens, especially the social media mavens, have very different event calendars that most of us. They also like to tell people where they’re going (i.e. which conferences they’re speaking at or attending). For most users, Plancast became a listening platform, essentially “what is Socially Active Bob doing this week” as opposed to a way to plan what they wanted to do. For those that did use Plancast for planning their social calendar, they had far fewer events to “cast” than most mavens. The majority of stuff broadcast came from a minority of people. Heck, even mavens have issues using Plancast because they don’t want to commit too soon to what they’re going to do, because they have so many options and they don’t want to say they’re going to be someplace and then not show up.

I think Plancast was made for mavens, and there just aren’t enough of those to support a business.

Basing your product design on maven input is a good place to start, but ultimately, you need to gather feedback from the everyman customer (however that is defined for your business). This is the person who uses your product in the most common ways, with the most common frequency. If all goes well, customers who fit this mold will form the bulk of your users, and keeping them happy is the path to long-term success.

Doing so should not prohibit a maven from glowing about your product, especially if you can arm the maven with the kind of information that they love. Tell the mavens who talk about you who your everyman user is and what they need. Show the maven how your product fits the everyman’s needs. Any maven worth their salt will appreciate the opportunity to talk about how they understand the needs of the regular user.

If you’re at all active in social networks, you’ve probably come across the name Pinterest at least a few times. Pinterest is one of a few social networks that have a strong visual sharing focus, along with Tumblr, Instagr.am, Tout, and to a lesser degree Scoop.it, that are sweeping the consciousness of early adopters everywhere. Although Pinterest has been around for a few years (it launched in beta in 2010), the latter half of 2011 has seen dramatic growth in users and, as a result, traffic referrals to other sites. According to a new report from Hitwise, Pinterest has seen growth of 40% in the last 6 months.

For those that just haven’t had time to check Pinterest out yet, it is a site where you can create virtual pinboards for any and every category you like, and then you pin images that you come across on the web to the appropriate pinboard. You can also follow other people’s pinboards in Pinterest, so that the images they pin show up in a stream. You can comment on those images, like them, and repin them to your pinboards. For the advanced, you can create a pinboard and invite other people to help you populate it with images.

As a professional product manager, I can’t help but look at products and think about how I would improve them, so the rest of this post is about the things that I would change/build with Pinterest that would make it more useful to me as both an individual and as a company marketer.

De-duplication of pins across multiple people I follow

I imagine most people are following at least several people in Pinterest and chances are good that those people have some commonalities, meaning there is also a good chance that some of those people might pin the same image. Now, I don’t want to see the same image show up in my feed twice (or more, sometimes many more) times. I want to see the image once, and see that the said image was pinned by several people I follow. In this way, I can easily see all fo the interesting new images without having to scroll past the duplicates.

Group the similar subject boards of people I follow into subject-specific streams

As Pinterest grows, and I follow more people, I see a lot of duplication of subjects across those people. In fact, Pinterest’s own suggested subjects add to the phenomenon. I don’t mind the duplication of boards, but I would, for example, like to be able to see all of the home improvement pins from the people I follow without having to also see all of the social media info-graphics. If I had the ability to combine individual pinboards that I followed into single streams that I define, I could choose to view only home improvement images or social media info-graphics or whatever other stream subjects made sense to me. Of course, Pinterest should maintain the all-in-one stream, because there is some coolness in that kind of variety, but that should not be my only view.

Filters to see only pins that meet my criteria

In the same vein as the idea to create subject-specific streams, I’d like to be able to filter the stream of images I see so that I can increase the focus of the images in front of me. This would act like the subject-specific streams, but it wouldn’t necessarily be limited to a set of pinboards, and it could be a temporary view that was built quickly and discarded just as quickly. Of course, I will want to save some filter definitions that I can use them at will.

Algorithm-driven stream that shows me the things I’m likely to really like, based on what I’ve liked in the past

Facebook has been a big winner partly because they use algorithms to help people filter the massive amount of information that can come at them. I think Pinterest should go that route too, and offer a view of the stream that shows me just things I will probably want to interact with, based on items I have Liked, commented or Repinned in the past. If Pinterest wanted to get really fancy, they could build into the logic some historical knowledge, so that in 10 years from now, I could say, “show me the things I would have liked in 2012.” That would be pointless, but really cool nonetheless.

Pin-randomizer so I don’t see 75 pins from the same person in a row

I know it isn’t really Pinterest’s fault (but at the end of the day, everything that happens in Pinterest is Pinterest’s problem), but I hate seeing 75 pins from the same person all in a row. I know that people go on pinning binges, and they hit a site that has a vein of pinning gold, resulting in 75 images all pinned withing 15 minutes. I’ve done it myself. Still, Pinterest could help us out by forcing a little variety in there by mixing in some pins by other people in the same general time-frame. If this phenomenon is something that just bothers a few people, then fine, make it an optional feature that each person can toggle on or off.

Digest of new pinboards created by people I follow, with an option to follow them

As is usually the case with human beings, we don’t get things right the first time, and I have (gasp!) found the need to create new pinboards on my Pinterest account. I’m not the only one. I know this because, several times, I have logged on to Pinterest and been accosted by yet another picture of a cupcake recipe, even though I painstakingly went through all of the boards of the people I follow and unfollowed anything that remotely smacked of including cupcake recipes, so I must conclude that someone I followed has added a new board about cupcakes. Now, I don’t want to have to remove the cupcakes from my view when this happens, Rather, if I ever change my mind about cupcakes, I’d like to add those images to my view. So, instead of automatically having me follow the new boards created by the people I follow, give me a digest of the new boards created by the people I follow and let me browse through them and follow the boards I want to follow.

More positive follow experience

Currently, when I come across a new person in Pinterest who seems interesting, I am forced to do something kind of strange. I can follow that person, which means I automatically follow ALL of their pinboards, or I can select pinboards of theirs to follow but I don’t follow that person. Does this dichotomy seem strange to anyone else? I want to follow the person, and have that indicated to them, but I also want to selectively follow some of their pinboards. It is important that I be able to signal to the person that I am following them, because it is an act of good will and friendship. It is also important that I get to choose the pinboards I like because, after all, I’m the one who has to live with my view of Pinterest. I can achieve this in the current model, but I have to do it in a negative context because I have to follow the person and then UNFOLLOW certain boards. I have a negative psychic experience doing this. I would be a happier Pinterest user if all of my initial choices about a person were made in the positive context of picking things I want to see.

Tag other people in the pin description, and receive alerts of being tagged

There have been many times that, while pinning an image, I think to myself, “if only so-and-so could see this, he would love it.” I want to tag specific Pinterest users in the description of an image I’m pinning so they are sure to see it. They would receive a notification that I tagged them, and an easy way to navigate directly to the image.

Ability to moderate comments on my pins

There has been some complaining about negative commentary going on within the walls of Pinterest. While it is a free country that enjoys the right to freedom of speech, moderation of comments is hardly a new concept across the web. Shouldn’t I, especially if I am a business, be able to moderate the commentary on my pins so that the conversation stays appropriate? The honor system that works elsewhere would work here as well. Companies should follow best practices and allow the opinions of all sides, but hateful or vulgar comments need not be shown.

I’m sure more ideas will come to me over time, as I am also sure you have ideas of your own. Please feel free to add them into the commentary on this post. I would be happy to brainstorm with anyone on how to make Pinterest ever better for all of us.

In fact, these is some real darkness surrounding these books. When Larsson was a teenager, he witnessed the gang rape of a teenage woman and he was too afraid to try and stop it. The guilt over that failure stayed with him. Those close to Larsson say the books are an attempt to make up for his failure to act.Also, Larsson’s death at 50 is talked about in conspiracy theory circles due to his public scathing of white supremacists in Sweden. Many feel Larsson was assassinated.

My strange state of mind dealt partly with the specter of violence against women portrayed in the book and partly with the way the three books play out.

The first part, violence against women, is pretty easy to understand. That shit makes me angry and depressed. I don’t like reading about it in fiction or non-fiction. People who do it are only second to people who act violently towards children in the race to be the scum of the earth.

The second part is harder to explain. I thought about it a few days before sitting down to write this post. To put it simply, I feel like Larsson screwed up the second book somewhat and really screwed up the third book.

The first book, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, is a fine mystery. Certainly the main characters of Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander are incredibly interesting characters to live with, and the Vanger clan is fun to get to know. The site of the story is also nicely compact, and you actually start to form the mental map of Hedeby Island in your head. The mystery is fun to try to unravel, and sufficiently hard to solve as well. The best thing about the book, though, is seeing Lisbeth Salander in action.

This same trait is what saves the second book, The Girl Who Played With Fire, which I call a fine thriller. There is no mystery in the second book, which is disappointing, but the focus on Salander in action, and the extra-sensory connection she and Blomkvist seem to have, saves the book. The setting is a bit to broad to really reel you in, and the introduction of some really silly characters starts to break down the quality of the book. For example, the giant Niedermann and the boxer Roberto are ridiculous additions. One of the most impactful things about this book is the fact that these could be real people doing real things. A 7 foot giant killer who doesn’t feel pain is a joke and not necessary, and a boxing match with a world heavy-weight champion is silly.

The third book, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, is a sub-par political/courtroom drama. The overall lack of action in this book (Salander spends the majority of the book in a hospital bed) is one problem. The second is the ridiculous notion that Blomkvist could single-handedly outsmart the Swedish equivalent of the covert operations arm of the CIA. The cast of characters is confusingly long, and just about every bad guy is an idiot. There just isn’t enough reality in this book to take it seriously.

I finally concluded that I was in a strange state of mind because I was a little pissed off at Larsson by the end of the third book. I feel like the downhill slide didn’t do justice to the promising start he made. I also think he wasted the opportunity he had with one of the most intriguing characters ever created in Lisbeth Salander.

To be fair, these books were published posthumously, and I believe that editors don’t go as hard at words written by dead people, so maybe these books would have been better had Larsson lived through the editing process. It is rumored that Larsson’s partner will complete the remaining 7 books in the planned series. I can only hope she goes back to what made the first book so good, and she keeps it real.

According to Michael, some early signs that a company is evolving is senior leadership using social tools to communicate. I agree whole-heartedly. If I were to envision the chart showing how a company evolves, it would look like this:

The Y Axis shows the seniority level of the people using social tools internally at the company.

The X Axis shows the relative % of the company using social tools internally at the company.

The whole thing assumes time passes from left to right.

In other words, the use of social tools internally usually starts out with low seniority people, typically younger people, who use the tools to communicate with their friends and think the same tools might make their work lives better. As they begin to build internal communication communities at work, more people join in, including some more senior people. This groundswell usually involves free tools like Yammer, shared Evernote files, Facebook Groups, Twitter Aliases and Wikis.

Eventually, enough of a community forms that someone tells the senior VPs and C-levels that something is going on. Here is the key inflection point that determines if culture change is going to happen or not. At this point, the senior folks either join in, tacitly blessing the new communities and sparking a change in how every employee works, or they don’t join in, tacitly disapproving of the new communities and dooming the new community to stagnation in size.

As you can see, the chart suggests that once some senior folks get involved, the % of the company joining is continues to grow along with the seniority levels of those in the community. I’ve witnessed this inflection several times over the last 7 years.

The first experience was one of frustration as senior execs failed to get engaged. Despite several uprisings of new communities, nothing ever really took off, and I eventually left for more social pastures. They may have gotten better since then.

The second experience was different in that we were much smaller, yet there was still push-back about joining various communities within the company that came to be for specific types of communications. In the latter case, the community actually took a more aggressive stance, demanding that the senior folks get in there. It worked and now the company has a thriving communication culture internally. Even though I am not with the company anymore, I still maintain contact with these folks through some of those same internal tools.

The reason I have focused on internal communication communities is because that is where it all starts. If a company’s employees can work together in a more social way comfortably, then inevitably they start to communicate with partners and customers in a more social way. Another important aspect is the fact that these communities rise up from lower level people. These folks are more willing to experiment with various tools and processes to see what works. By growing up through the company, a certain amount of refinement takes place naturally before senior executives get involved. I think of it as rehearsal. When the community has been through a certain amount of rehearsal, it functions more smoothly and increases the chances of a good first experience for the senior folks, which can lead to the culture change spike. I firlmy believe that the spike is imperative for a company to become a social business.

Daily Science Experiment

We got a book called The Book of Totally Irresponsible Science, which we used to pick an experiment each day. Actually, we picked the experiment the day before and made sure we had the supplies we needed, then each morning we carried out our experiment.

This made each morning a little exciting because the kids knew we were going to do something messy or crazy. They looked forward to the process of reading the instructions, carrying out the steps and making a mess.

Some of the best things we did included: making a volcano, Mentos geyers and grenades, and turning milk into a stone. Others, like pumping up marshmallows, didn’t turn out so well.

Daily Dinner Planning

I also made the kids choose what to make for dinner each night. They took turns, and we would look through cookbooks to pick a new recipe. Then the kid in charge would have to make a grocery list. At some point later in the day, we would go to the grocery store, get all of the items we needed for tonight’s dinner (and our list of items for tomorrow’s science experiment) and then the kid in charge would lead me and the other kid in preparing dinner.

These simple little things actually occupied around 4 hours per day. In the case of dinner, it was time we were going to have to spend on that activity anyway, but putting them in charge of cooking made it more interesting. It felt like about the right amount of time, leaving us plenty of time to do other things like seeing movies or playing sports or finishing Christmas shopping, but filling up enough time that I wasn’t stressing for things to do.

Here are some of the best moments:

• Willy, The Avett Brothers and Ray Benson singing the gospel tune “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”
• Willy, playing guitar like a mad man at the age of, what, 200? The old guy can still play. Plus, I think that extra hole in his guitar allows him to make sounds nobody else can make.
• Lyle playing “If I Had A Boat.” I absolutely love that song.
• Natalie Maines filling the Erwin Center with her voice on “I’m Not Ready To Make Nice.” Wow, that woman can sing.

Now for some of the stranger moments from the evening:

• Kyle Chandler showing his face a total of, like, 2 times even though he was listed as an MC. What, did he provide MC services in the green room?
• The combination of Ray Benson and Lyle Lovett. While they both have smooth voices, could their styles be more different?
• The two women next to me consuming, wait for it, a combined 18 alcoholic beverages in the span of 3 hours. Uh huh, 1 beer every 20 minutes for each of them.
• The jackass who was so drunk he fell down the steps of the Erwin Center. I think people thought the concessions revenues were being donated as well.
• Joe Satriani playing his wordless songs. Who paid money to see Joe back in the day? You know, to see a 2.5 hour guitar solo? Not me, that’s who.
• Natalie Maines saying something to the effect of, “We didn’t know how you would look without your homes, but you look wonderful. You must have found showers.” Really, she said it. She can sing, but perhaps she should let the other chicks do the talking between songs.
• The Dixie Chicks sounding just like their record. Seriously, exactly the same. How do they do that? They were too perfect. It was kind of weird.

Overall, the concert raised more that $500,000. It was an amazing evening, and I was glad to be there.