That’s why I so delighted to announce my friend’s new project: Happy Birthday Muffin (no comma).

Celebrate a birthday with a muffin, beautifully packaged and personalized for the birthday boy or girl. Simple.

In keeping things really simple, I like how they’ve packaged everything up into a single price — so no extras for shipping, and they pay sales tax out of their price.

I ordered my sister-in-law a muffin for her birthday yesterday and she was delighted (or so she said in voicemail). Frankly, I was surprised it got there in time. I ordered mid-day Thursday and she had The Muffin on Saturday. Sweet! (Literally)

Anyways, I’m going to put a little graphic on the front page of my blog to show my support. Why not give it a shot?

I thought it was refreshing.

Remember, we manifest our experience with the words we choose.

Ice cream.

1. I read a partial transcript, so I don’t know if he did it every time

Image courtesy of 1loud.com

No, not that. I don’t care what town you come from.

I want to know your heart.

Do you hold your heart in a place of trust? Or in a place of fear?

Everything is an opportunity, and it’s a real shame when fear rules. We miss some amazing opportunities.

I learned this first hand when starting Where’s Your Heart? Foundation. It turns out, non-profits are governed at the state level. States regulate from one of two perspectives. Some states trust that people want to do good, and put structure in place to make it easy to follow rules and partner with those who try to give a little back. Other states, New York included, come from a different place.

Born out of fear, they assume people who start foundations are trying to “get something” from the system. They regulate heavily, with good intent — to protect consumers, but make it extremely difficult for people really trying to do good to do so. They miss a great opportunity. And, if headlines in NY are any indication, they don’t seem to be doing such a good job even with the over-stifling-regulations.

That’s not what got me writing though.

In many homes both parents work. Or, both parents aren’t always around. In some cases, parents need help they don’t even know how to ask for. Social media presents an opportunity for kids to interact with their teachers on their own terms, which means the teachers can build trust and keep an eye on things. They can partner with parents to protect their kids. That is, unless you come from a place of fear.

It turns out, NY doesn’t trust their teachers any more than they trust their philanthropists. And, they can’t be bothered to educate them, or figure out some sort of buddy system to keep things above board. Instead, NYC is just going to ban teachers from connecting with their students.

I guess is better this way. Then they can honestly deny seeing the online bullying that seems to affect so many young lives.

I feel bad for the good teachers who are punished because of the few rotten apples.

I’m going to share an insight.

I beg that you listen.

You see, every time I get into my room it takes me like 10 minutes of cursing you before I get settled.

Don’t get me wrong, but I love your hotels. The brands are clearly demarcated so I know what to expect when I arrive. When I speak to customer service they know what they’re doing and it’s like having a conversation with a real person. A lot of companies can learn from you.

But, each. and. every. time. I. get. to. a. new. room. I. want. to. scream.

My insight?

UNCLUTTER.

You have so much shit clogging up your rooms. Coffee machines and books and telephones and more books and clocks and keyboards and pens and paper.

All shit.

All killing the visual calmness that I need after traveling, or spending a day with clients.

Though, the worst are all the little love notes you leave. “To save the environment put your towels on the rack.” “If you want breakfast, leave a note on the door.” “Do not disturb.” “Please disturb and make up my room.”

Guess what?

I stay in your hotel so often, my wife should have a copy of her rules on cards so I remember what to do when I’m home.

I get it.

You’re talking to a guy who knows the ins-and-outs of your programs to maximize points/rewards. Don’t you think I remember how to tell you if I want my towels cleaned? Or, if I need to block adult content on the TV?

Why is the only little piece of paper that I can’t find the freaking channel listing?

How about if you put the lobby phone number on the emergency evacuation plan, so I can call downstairs with my mobile when I need to? Then, you can get rid of the phones.

Why can’t the people who clean my rooms leave it the way it is, so I don’t have to clean up the clutter every freaking night?

Back on point.

I wish you had an “uncluttered room” option, where the only thing left on a counterspace was the remote control (and the channel listing).

And, for the love of God, please stop making me move furniture to get to the outlets by the bed.

Thank you,

David

PS For extra credit, please leave the remote near the bed. I can assure you the only place in the room I don’t need the remote control is when I’m standing by the TV where you always leave it.

But, call me stupid, and I’m going to get angry.

Whitney Houston dies, and Sony uses it as an opportunity to make more money. OK, while I think it’s a vile policy, it’s a reasonable reaction (from Sony’s perspective). It’s not a big price hike for an individual customer, but multiplied by the millions who likely have purchased her music the last few days could have a big impact. Let’s face it, they’re not the only company to raise prices when they know they have you by the balls.

What pisses me off, is that when caught doing this, instead of simply apologizing for a bad business decision, they say it was some “random mistake” that has been fixed. I call bullshit. It wasn’t random. It was a deliberate change, without really thinking through the “new transparency” provided by social media. Own it. Apologize. Learn. Move on. Don’t freaking lie.

Then, another of my favorite companies AT&T blogs about how the success of AT&T’s products is consumers’ problem. Here’s how I read this situation. AT&T launches a data product. People buy it. The product manager sucked. They didn’t anticipate demand, actual usage scenarios, or underlying technical impact/architecture. Now, they’re whining about how much bandwidth people are using and saying they can’t meet their commitments and instead of owning up to it, throttling those customers who signed on for exactly the terms that AT&T is failing to deliver.

This is false advertising at its best. Get the customer in under one premise, create a product that is difficult to leave, then change the terms.

I’ll leave you with another story I heard the other day. A bank we all love to hate (I know, be more specific) entices new customers with 30,000 “free” miles if they open a new account. Then, at the end of the year, without prior disclosure, customers receive tax forms for a gift of $750 dollars! Most NY-ers would owe some $400 or more in taxes on that gift. (There’s even one guy in NY who would owe $765 in taxes on that gift.) Not even sure where to start on that one. 30,000 miles, these days not even enough for a single free restricted ticket, and this bank places a value of $750 on that gift? Then, without disclosing that this is a taxable event, they get customers to move business accounts over (not something trivial to do, or undo). Without explanation or warning, the IRS form shows up in the mail adding stress to an already stressful situation (tax preparation).

The bank’s response?

“We can take the miles back.”

Holy bait-and-switch batman.

Where’s the integrity? WHERE’S THE INTEGRITY?

I would like to say that I’m going to stop doing business with companies without integrity only I’m afraid I’d go hungry, be disconnected, and living on the street. That said, I’m definitely not using the diner in Tribeca again who felt they could add a few dollars to the credit card receipt after I signed it.

For whatever reason, it seems that we’re lost and can’t even see it.

I’m going to fight it by being even stronger in my integrity, not because it’s the right way to live, but because it’s the only way to live. I hope it rubs off on others.

I’ve gotta get back to my real job, but thanks for letting me vent.

A generation ago, our employers provided a second home. A second family. A second school. We’d get a full time paycheck, with benefits. We’d have a choice of career development, and almost guaranteed employment. Our co-workers were our neighbors, and our friends. They were our extended family.

That’s changed. Many jobs go to freelancers. People who don’t get benefits. People who don’t cost the company much more than the hourly wage they’re being paid, unlike you and I who cost the company approximately twice what they pay us in salary.

While some companies offer career development opportunities, it’s not nearly what it needs to be. We, “the people”, need to be careful. Unlike in the past, career development has become our responsibility. It’s on us to go get training, to get further experience, and to network. And, not only is it our responsibility to make time, more and more often it’s our responsibility to bear the costs of our own career development.

Enter Apple’s new university / education push. They’re targeting traditional schools (K-12 today), but there’s a huge opportunity here. I can go to iTunes and take a class. May not seem like much. In fact, we’ve been able to do it for quite some time now. I believe that Apple will finally start to improve this platform for education. I hope that their passion around this topic infects some creative minds to start bringing some innovation around career development into the iTunes community.

There’s a lot happening here. MIT recently announced a whole lotta free online courses, but there are commercial and “open-source” opportunities too.

Don’t believe that Apple’s announcement yesterday was only relevant to people with children in school. This is another opportunity to get mind-share in the enterprise as even people with paychecks realize that we need to take responsibility for our own career development, and need a community to helps us do just that.

To that, I have to just one observation to make:

As a culture, we don’t pick our mates by saying “Wow, doesn’t feel so good to the touch, but I really like the person inside”, so why would I pick a laptop that way?

A quick summary: Thursday Verzon put a $2 fee on customers who pay their bills with a credit card one-bill-at-a-time. While this move targeted very specific customer behavior, there was a general outcry on social media. Between the outcry and an FCC investigation to the move, Verizon backed off the plan in just a day.

A New York Times article today wondered why they didn’t just “ask customers what they’d think”. Really? The author makes a good point though. What they should have done was explained more about what they were doing, why they were doing it, and who would be affected.

Transparency.

It’s affecting everything. A couple of years ago there was a big scandal in the UK because the government was (essentially) cheating on expense reports.

I’m off point. Maybe I’ll get back to that, as I think we assume companies have the transparency they need internally. (They don’t. In fact, most times they have the data but don’t/can’t use it the way they’d like, and we think they should. That’s fueling the trends around data analytics, master data management, and complex event processing.) Wouldn’t it be great if they simply sent a good explanation to all customers who would have been affected by this change based on their payments for the last 3 months, explaining the situation and helping them avoid any fee in the future? That’s too much effort. What I see in what happened is lazy business. Companies do something that’s relatively small in the big picture, and get away with it because it’s too hard to fight. This has been accepted because customers haven’t had a voice to wonder out loud.

Personally, and I have no special knowledge of the situation, I think some team in Verizon had an internal (performance/cost) number to meet, and thought this would be a good way to do it with minimal service disruption.

Is there so little slack in the system that Verizon needs the money from this fee?

Individual credit card payments are more expensive for them to process. If you spin this well, they were simply trying to ensure that customers who did not need the flexibility of paying month-by-month with a credit card, didn’t have to pay for the priveledge.

Isn’t that what the airlines said about paying for baggage? When the airlines started charging for bags, they didn’t lower fare prices. They said, to avoid a general fare increase, we’d rather that people who use a service pay for it. Therefore, if you don’t have bags to check you don’t pay for your bags to fly.

What’s the alternative for Verizon?

1. They can raise everyone’s prices, or
2. They can stop taking credit cards for individual payments

And, by the way Mr FCC, you do realize the IRS doesn’t take credit card payments for just this reason. It costs a lot to accept a credit card payment.

Why are these their options. Why can’t things just stay the way they are?

This, for me, is a burning question and something that fascinates me in the current business climate. (I probably shouldn’t have taken so long to get to this point; it’s the reason I’m writing this article.)

There has been so much cutting, in people, in service, I wonder how things don’t just collapse in on themselves. But, we’ve gotten so used to cutting, to squeezing. Last year’s “let’s just push a little harder” level of work, is this year’s standard. It’s like temporary cuts are all permanent, and companies are still looking for places to squeeze. Ask most white collar workers. We’re working more hours, under more demands, with less provided by the company to help us get our jobs done.

So why does Verizon need this fee?

Status quo isn’t good anymore. Companies are micro-managing their fiscal picture, and nit-picking the pleasure out of everything. The pleasure of being an employee, the pleasure of being a customer. All for what? Why? I don’t thing it’s an issue of greed. It’s an issue of priorities. Consumers want cheap, and vendors say yes because they feel that if they don’t someone else will. You can do cheap for a while, but it’s not sustainable. You can play the numbers, but if you’re not accepting reality the cliff you fall off is just higher when you do fall.

Prices are way up. Wages have been stagnant for years. Our businesses are unsustainable, and employees are unhealthily trapped in between it all — being the consumers whose consumption expectations are driving businesses, their employers, to keep cutting.

Verizon needs this fee because it’s one more place to squeeze, without accepting the unsustainable reality we’ve created with all the cutting that’s happened these past few years.

2012 is going to be very interesting, as I believe this is the year something significant breaks.

Happy new year.

Makes me chuckle to see inbound emails from the site:

What do Sears, The Gap, and Friendly’s all have in common?

They’re sucking wind right now. All closing retail outlets. In fact, there were two articles on the front page of the NY Times Business Section today about this. It also listed a bunch of restaurant chains, including Friendly’s, that are in Chapter 11 (bankruptcy).

It got me thinking. Not too hard, mind you.

What they have in common is that their business model is around a homogenous product, efficiently mass produced, and sold to people who are trained to conform by marketing.

That’s so old school.

Today, the trend is about personalization. A personal connection. Perhaps social media has driven this, though I believe there’s more to it.

You know, I was in a coffee shop earlier this week and had a bit of a “conversation” with the barrista. If I wanted a to go cup (which I did), I couldn’t stay and drink my coffee. But, if I wanted to stay, I couldn’t have the to go cup. It had nothing to do with sales tax, which in NY is now different if it’s to stay or to go. I’m not sure what it was about. The shop was mostly empty, so I wasn’t going to be taking a seat someone else might use.

Last week, I walked into Edward’s. I’ve joked that I’ve outsourced my kitchen to Edward’s I eat there so often. In any case, I was in a rush. I walked in and ordered dinner and a drink before I even had my coat off and without looking at the menu. The bartender gets called into the kitchen by the cook, and when he comes out (he’s relatively new) he looks a bit confused. Tells me the cook won’t cook my burger until I confirm that I don’t want the special (shrimp tacos). He knows how much I like his shrimp tacos.

Old school service. New school service.

It’s no longer about mass marketing undifferentiated products (and by products, I mean item + service). It’s about a personalized experience and a personal connection. Sears, The Gap, and Friendly’s may not get it. I bet the companies that replace them will.