Tag: SouthWest Airlines

Fun as motivator

Cyndi Lauper and Sheryl Crow both touched on “wanna-have-fun” theme.

(Girls just want to have fun, All I wanna do).

The upcoming Olympic in Brazil should be a fun place (certainly more than polluted Beijing).

Fun ranks up there as one of the highest motivators.

It’s wired in our fabrics.

Pure fun. Wholesome fun. Grand ball. Sight, sound and scenes.

Smoke machines, sound machines and special effects.

Googlers are seen each year in the Mojave Desert (Burning-Man Festival).

CES in Las Vegas kicks off each year in January.

Kids open their electronic toys Christmas morning. Fun, fun, fun.

“I got this feeling that I am not the only one… .”

Men are fated to toil the ground and tame the beasts.

But after hard times comes harvest times.

In a Korean’s novel (Please Look After Mom) we find a landscape utterly foreign yet familiar. Agrarian culture, with everything done by hand, in transition to a bustling Seoul subway where an aged senile country mom got lost.

Yet, even in this bleakest of portraits, we still find some romance, and occasional laughters.

Fun.

I often found people chuckled in the midst of drinking.

Apparently, there were fun injected into the blood stream besides alcohol.

My friend’s favorite has been Seasons in the Sun. “We had joy we had fun”.

Fun doesn’t belong to but is often associated with youth.

Everyone can and should have some fun. Even at work.

Wait not for Halloween or Valentine.

At Zappos, they set up desks deliberately in the hallway, so co-workers are forced to “bump” into each other. Gone are the cubicles. The wall came tumbling down.

Now, just collaboration, not competition.

Southwest Airlines associates wear shorts and shirts, sing FAA regulations in a way that draws out a smile in each passenger. Fun culture retains great talent.

It adds healthy numbers to the bottom line.

Know the motivators like the back of your hands.

Work them into your HR policy. Practice them at the front line and in the back room.

Then people wouldn’t need to wait for Happy Friday or Happy Hour.

They are happy at work. It boosts up morale and team spirit.

I love to work with workers who are not grumpy. Unless it’s at Disney Animation.

Jobs’ off switch

Steve Jobs hated the on-off  switch. Perhaps more so because it was a relic of electricity (Edison) and automobile manufacturers (Ford). He did not like old wine in the same wineskin, given our always-on Cloud Service in  A/C data centers.

Apple chose North Carolina as a site to store music, video and the rest of its customers’ files. The FCC recently allowed the roll-out of White Space, wi-fi on steroid, also in NC.

Who needs the on/off switch! It had some utilitarian legacy (activate and deactivate) when hardware used to rule.

Now, software eats your lunch.

Of BMW’s  thousand components, a large portion are software-controlled. From Buggy to Beamer, the engineers have made a giant leap.

Jobs was quoted as saying (this was counter-intuitive and anti-academic):

“if Ford had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said,

faster buggies”.  In short, it’s categorically different with revolutionaries.

Think different!

No on/off switch.

Just the dial.

Circular motion.

The experience economy.

Control the product from end-to-end to make every touchpoint with the customer an iSee! (Disneyland).

Progress , like time, waits for no man.

If you keep standing on the track, you will likely get run over.

Not a single word in Jobs biography states directly that he was a  futurist. Yet he could intuitively sense what was coming – his biography itself was well orchestrated (momenti mori) and ironically open-sourced (counter-culture life style, but proprietary business model).

In fact, religious zealots did take a shot at him for his views.

I wonder if those people secretly borrow an I-pad from friends to touch and feel (where is the on/off switch?).

I wonder what their legacies are as opposed to Jobs’?

And their destination : paradise or purgatory?

Jobs took his son to a business meeting (antennaeGate) mostly for I-phone IV damage control . “It would be a two-year worth of Business School  education” said he.

His biography, which offers more than a two-year worth of B-school, is a must-read for technologists, marketers and culture critics who want to understand the Valley ethos.

When arts (music in this case) found new venue (I-pod) and revenue (I-Tunes), it is unchained melody for the mass (unbundled as singles not whole album).

Be spoiled with IT 3.0 (cloud and social media) but also be thankful sitting on giants’ shoulders

An image evokes in my mind was that of Cinema Paradiso, where the kid got a ride home on the bike’s frame, wearing his mentor’s hat and chatting up as a fee for the ride. However long, enjoy the ride. That’s our reward . As Southwest Airlines would say, please collect your items to ensure faster turn-around at the gate.

Team building

I invited a new classmate to join our volleyball team. Thought I kill two birds with one stone: we could use a tall guy, and I couldn’t bear seeing him unfriended during recess. Turned out he couldn’t play well, but we got to be friends for life.

We pitched in to buy a professional ball. Took it out for a test-drive.

Before I even got my chance at that spanking new white ball, it bounced to the street, ran over by a car, and voila! Memory of shared disappointment.

But Team!

Then we went out and had some lunch. The neighborhood gangs there just walked up and started to punch each of us to the ground. Back then, one of our oldest classmates had a brother in the army. He went home and took out an M-16 to scare away the hoodlums. Team!

Later in life, I have always been a team player: my brother got married, OK.

I would take care of mom, heck with my broadcasting career! Team.

The Boat People died at seas? I stood up and joined two other graduates. Together, we rolled up our sleeves, and spent our summer in hot, crowded and often times, violent (due to cramp living) prison-turned-refugee camps.

Team!

When it was my turn to lead, a joint Chinese and Vietnamese team (historically at war as nations) I made sure we spent a lot of time around food,

sharing meals and sharing deals. Team.

Families broke down because they forgot that Team came first.

Great teams just don’t happen by accident.

It needs everyone to commit to a common goal, and yes, it needs to define clearly who it is competing against (Apple vs IBM, MCI vs ATT or Samsung vs Sony).

Team needs various personalities to achieve optimal results.

But personality conflicts cause headaches.

Team leaders should embrace diversity of opinion, temperament and  ( emotional and social) intelligence.

Let conflict boil to the surface. Team’s fiber could withstand some strains and be made stronger as a result.

You know your team is fully functional when it moves as a unit: each knows his/her SWOT. Team leaders are not always right. They just know how to draw out the best in each member.

Team has its learning curve and maturity as well.

Even the best team can’t stay together forever. When you get teary at goodbye, you know you had a good team experience.

I would trade a B teammate over a A lone wolf any day.

No wonder Southwest Airlines consistently outperform its nearest competitor.

People who work there seem to and do have fun. They sing to, they smile at and they serve you as if each flight were their last. Because of this, we have yet seen SW last flight since their opening day.

We did not choose our families. But team does pick you as much as you let yourself be changed by it. Nothing worthwhile is accomplished without great teams. And no rewards greater than that of a team bringing home the first prize. Esprit de corps. That’s what it is all about. The high-fives or the tap on your shoulder when you are down and out (World Cup Final).  Come on! Focus! Next play!

Ask my tall classmate whose first handshake ends up lasting a life time.

Something to learn

IT workshops and seminars are happening on a weekly basis here in Saigon.

Monsoon season is almost over. Except for some cigarette vendors, the Sheraton  downtown could trick you into thinking you were somewhere else, like San Francisco.  Lunch was ready for a group of  CSO‘s and Software testers, uniformed attendants mingled with pony-tailed guests.

Something in the way he moves (my friend, that is).

This was his second time organizing software testing conference.

Forever curious, always testing, probing, “jazzing” his way in hope of “bumping” into the unexpected.

How do you debug something you have never used?

Put it through imaginary scenarios.

Use the parameters and practices.

Niche on top of niche.

That’s how one thrives in a “me-too” market (for instance, India now considers to open its retail market to MNC’s). Another “me-too” market with logo, look and label.

India will be the most populous country on Earth in the next century.

Watch out, retailers.

Follow the money.

Something to learn.

The IT talent pool there are unquestionably top-rated.

The question is, who is going to be number 2?

When India itself looks to outsource some lower-value activities so its engineers could focus on McKinsey‘s level, where would it place its chips?

Malaysia seems to “get” this as shown in its laser-focused software parks and tight coordination between academia and corporate entities.

Thailand has realized that more could turn out to be less.

Back to Korea, back to Singapore and Taiwan.

Expensive? Yes.

Quality? Also a Yes.

You get what you  pay for.

Something can’t be manufactured overnight like curiosity, creativity and connectivity.

I read somewhere that the British Intelligence Service made a job offer for who ever could hack into its  system.

Again, why not use the talent that is out there.

In our digital age, anywhere-anytime connectivity opens up tons of opportunities for both the good and the bad.

Never a boring moment.

7 Billion  people in motion.

Key board got tapped.

Cursors blinking and moving, one word at a time.

Thoughts are formed and sentences completed.

New age, new idea.

Something to learn, to test and to share.

Facebook promised to “blow us out of the water” when it unveils the new Facebook. I hope someone inside Facebook did a study on the New Coke.

It’s a historic brand mismanagement.

But then, because of New Coke, we now got Classic Coke.

Coca Cola still rules. Something to learn from. And that is, brand endures even when challenged. When it comes to people, it’s character and not charisma. No wonder companies like SouthWest Airlines just kept growing , methodically and efficiently year after year (per Collins). It would not be far-fetched to say the 10,000 hours that are required for an individual to acquire a new skill set, is also applied to companies as well. Something to learn and learn well, time after time, day in and out to develop second nature.

A billion bucks!

Twittering to the tune of a billion bucks?

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2009/tc20090924_956402.htm?campaign_id=related_AK

And the deficit changed slightly to the tune of 1.29 trillion bucks.

Since when we are anesthetized to these huge dollar figures?

But I must give it to the Lab geeks who came up with new inventions: copying over the distance (fax), texting over the phone (SMS), Voice over IP (Skype) and Facebook/Twitter (user-generated content).

During the Tiananmen Square incident, protesters tried to send and receive fax documents.

And last summer, in Iran, people twittered. Signs of the time.

Tech and social change.

And the Beatles albums got remastered.

“All we are saying, is ‘give Peace a chance'” (Lennon Legend).

It’s not that we are lacking the means for social discourse but we certainly lack the will.

Tribal societies just hunt for enough food (no Frigidaire) and the rest of the night, gather around

the fire, to hear the Chief telling his folklores.

Definitely those fairy tales lasted longer than 140 characters. And I bet you any of the people in that community could recite those tales from memory, their version of soundbites . But they wanted to hear it again and again from the Chief. It’s assuring, like a child who needs to be tugged in . Somehow, in the darkness of night, they believe tomorrow will be the same, safe and secure.

Well, today, you can’t even walk out of a check out line without double-checking your receipts (because the line items

might have been charged with the older and higher prices by the computer, while the sign advertised a lower amount).

Supply chain, bar code, algorithm fluctuation (just like airline price change).

We have mutated way past the smokestack era. And it depends on what your view of the future is,

a Billion bucks for Twitter might be too low an evaluation. You see, it’s the Southwest Airlines model for Narrow-Casting. Citizen news, where it happens, while it is happening. No microwave (truck) nor microphone to make news.

Just twitter. I am sure YouTube will soon limit their video length to accommodate the Network effect (more video, the higher value of the network).

We, worker bees, buzzing and pollinating  user-generated content, 140 characters at a time, to a tune of a Billion bucks. By the time the bottom billion joined in, a billion bucks will have been too low an evaluation.

Whoops! I have just passed 400 words. Old school! Forgive me. My first tech sales was a fax machine, then “brick” phones with separate batteries. And way back then, the Chief used to ramble on way past bed-time. What’s the hurry? Isn’t information (hence knowledge) supposed to be infinite. I got it. We are still operating on old assumptions of network and spectrum scarcity. A agricultural-based Malthusian view  as applied to the information age.  When Twitter gets properly IPO’ed, it might have enough cash in their war-chest to increase data rate to 150 characters. I will then be much happier.