Where does the time go?

One of my very favourite songs is ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ by Sandy Denny. It has a haunting melody and wonderful words. When you listen to it there is the sudden question again about where has the time gone. It seems that way when Advent begins and Christmas is soon to be upon us.

It has been busy this last month, no let me put it another way, it has been flipping nuts. Busy at work, busy at volunteer positions, busy on credit union system work, and whatever else can fit into 24 hours. It doesn’t seem to slow down. Someone asked my recently about email and how we ever got along without it. One could say the same about a fax machine or a photocopier. These technical beauties have only speeded up what we start to where we finnish. The work is the same, the time to complete is measured not in days but in moments. Our time to reflect on any given subject is not done without effort and our work ethic creeps in so quickly if we think we are reflecting excessively. More gets done but the engine, us, remains the same. Maybe that is why music is such a relief. It does breakdown that invisible inertia that causes us stress. It stops us, if only for a few moments, to reflect in another dimension. If nothing else it gives us the must deserved break without any guilt.

Tomorrow I fight off the historical boxes of ‘stuff’ in the storage room to find the Christmas tree. No crowds to fight, no saw to cut the trunk, no needles akimbo, just true plastic and lights, ornately assembled and stowed away in the ‘original’ carton somewhere in the basement. Ready to quickly give one a hernia because of its weight, it will be dragged upstairs to its holy place in the corner of the living room, close to a wall outlet. Within minutes of plugging the lights of the tree into the electrical grid, Christmas will dawn, sans pine smell. Once again the magic of the season will start. Usually we never put the tree up this early. We are still the old ‘keep the tree up until the 12th day of Christmas’ types so putting it up this early is creating some new family history. But when Fleming arrives from Saskatoon on Tuesday and Nils from Copenhagen on Wednesday it will be the key sight when they step in the front door. That part of Christmas, being with ones’ family, then begins. There is more, always much more, about Christmas. Before you know it though you will be asking yourself, where does the time go?

More Cowbell

Sometimes you step into something that becomes a bit surreal.

Last week I tiwttered about listening to an old song that had a cowbell, asking about any other songs that had cowbells. There were some responses with one stating had I ever seen the SNL “More Cowbell” piece. I hadn’t ( if I had I would never have tiwttered that question! ) and quickly found it. In fact there was a fair bit about cowbells. There is even an iPhone app called More Cowbell.

To get the ultimate experience with the tragic little device here is some ultimate cowbell usage. The Olympics are coming here in 2010. Now there will be excuse not to have a cowbell on the downhill races.

The moral of this story, never be afraid to ask a question on Twitter. It will lead you to a mountain of totally useless information.

Just getting there

Had a call today from my nephew up in Williams Lake. He is doing pretty good with his business and enjoying life. At 26 he appreciates his bachelor life. He said he would be coming down when our sons come home for Christmas. So the three of them who grew up together will have time to re-connect. They spent just about every summer together when they were kids. It is amazing when you realize how little they see each other now and how far apart they all live. Then the event of Christmas brings them all together. You begin to realize how important that time of year is for families.

On my way home today I stopped in a light shop and bought two lamps. One for the desk and the other a bedside table light. The proprietor mentioned that as you get older you need twice as much light as when you were younger. That must be the problem with us older people, we live constantly in the dark!

In a book I am reading (Telling the Truth about History by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt & Margaret Jacob) there is this statement in the introduction:

Relativism, a modern corollary to skepticism, is the belief that truth is relative to the position of the person making a statement. It has generated a pervasive lack of confidence in the ability to find the truth or even to establish that there is such a thing as the truth. Relativism leads directly to a questioning of the ideal of objectivity, because it undermines the belief that people can get outside of themselves in order to get at the truth. If truth depends on the observer’s standpoint, how can there be any transcendent, universal or absolute truth, or at the least truths that hold for all groups for many generations?

In today’s world, particularly with the recent financial events of the world, it would seem to be extremely important to understand that maybe we cannot ‘fix’ the basic economic model. It will work in some form or another. Maybe we need to understand that unless we have some absolute or universal truth to understand, those who hold only relative truths defeat the ability of many of us to fully articulate our ideal of objectivity. If the time for change is now then all the reasons for change need to be the constant dialogue of all participants. I am tired of listening to the same old record and drinking the same old kool-aid.

Long time, no post

It seems that the last few weeks have been the busiest I have encountered for a long time. I just look at how many times I have not been home for supper and it sort of freaks me out. Hence the extreme delay of posting anything to this blog.

Tomorrow is a huge day as to what course the most powerful nation in the world will take. I don’t want to state my political persuasion here, not being a citizen it won’t amount to much anyway. What we do need to see is someone in the White House that will begin to deal with the problems that all of us here on Main Street are dealing with. Here is hoping that whoever the winner, the course of history will change and we can look back to seeing this as the beginning of solving the mess we are all in.

In the last month the world has seen some major upheavals in the financial markets. It scares me to say the least. It is interesting to see all those bulls suddenly become bears (barren?). At least no one is saying I told you so. They were all drinking the same kool-aid. There is ample use of the word ‘toxic’. Seems that is the wattered down version of ‘poison’. Poison in the Oxford English dictionary means “A principle, doctrine, influence, etc., which is harmful to character, morality, or the well-being of society; something which causes harm; something which is detested.” It is the last word definition that is beginning to come into play somewhat. But we haven’t arrived at actually detesting this circumstance. If we do then we can manage the change. We seem to only be band-aiding what the poison has done and not necessarily taking the antidote.

I believe that antidote involves sacrifice, hard work (sweat equity instead of just paper equity), gratitude for our station in life (we aren’t going to bed hungry) and re-capturing and living some ideals and beliefs that have meaning in our lives. Maybe we realize now that we can’t bowl alone. That we have become disconnected from family, friends, neighbours, social structures like churches, clubs, sports clubs, community organizations and the like. We are people that live in a larger society and that our values need to go beyond just the physical accumulation of goods. Maybe tomorrow will be the start of something for all of us.

The Challenge of Consumerism

Now that the financial system seems to be re-shaping and reforming, what can that mean to us, the little guys. Most of us have had it pretty good these last years without much financial pain and certainly not lacking in needs or wants. There is a growing voice that the economy’s future will be decided by what the consumer (you and me) will be doing. Will this insatiable need to buy more and buy often be limited? Will we truly be able to live within our means and keep our minds on purchases that are needed and not wanted. I would hazard a guess here. If anyone of us was to move tomorrow we would find our household absolutely full of stuff that is no longer needed or wanted. Just plain stuff.

We are creatures of habit and not easily changed. Some habits will not change until they become life threatening. I wouldn’t suggest that this day and age is life threatening but when you expect a lot of rain you usually make sure the roof isn’t leaking.

Last month when we were down on Commercial Drive we went into a shop that sold 3rd world items. At the back in a pile of a number of books we found an updated version of a cookbook called “More-with-Less” by Doris Longacre. We had originally purchased this cookbook back in 1976 and could use a new copy to replace our current copy which was falling apart. Here is part of the foreword to this newer edition:

When More-with-Less Cookbook was first published in 1976, Doris Longacre wrote of world shortages of food and of North Americans consuming too much of the world’s resources – money, calories, protein, sugar and processed food. We have not learned.

She is right – we have not learned. Will we have to take another 30 years to learn or are we going to really do something different this time? The problem is that we don’t know anything different. These are the economic cycles that will always exist.

Sick at home

I would like to thank some of the people I work with for passing on this flu/cold bug. It is such a delight to be bed ridden, hacking your lungs out, bored to tears.

It isn’t so much that you don’t feel well. It is the boredom that sets in when you can’t do anything. The medication seems to help but I think it works more from that resounding memory from your childhood when your mother said, “take your medicine and you will feel better”. As a child you believed your mother, as an adult you believe the memory. Another benefit of marrying a nurse is the wonderful care you get as a patient. It sometimes is worse than your mother. I keep hearing this voice that men are such babies when they are sick. No we aren’t babies, we are just plain sick. We don’t go to doctors and when sickness appears it is big and it is real. There is going to be some feedback from the family on this one.

Yesterday was CU Day and from the emails just read it was a resounding success, again. Probably about 10% of the membership showed up. Nala and her daughter from Currency were there. Sorry I missed everyone. Now its back to bed with my apple juice, kleenex and radio. I gotta get better because this boredom is killing me.

Whew! it’s over

I just finnished my 1 hour presentation at the 2008 National CU Lending Conference in St. John’s Newfoundland. It went well and of course you think you need to add more to your presentation until you realize you have 10 minutes left to cover about 20 minutes of material. The crowd was friendly.

It has been very enjoyable to be here. I hadn’t realized the history of this city, the beauty of the rugged terrain and the most amazing people on earth, Newfoundlanders. And you don’t have to go very far to be close to salt water. This is the kind of place that you will always want to return to.

Tomorrow it is back to the other side of the continent. I have been away for a week now living in hotel rooms and eating restaurant food. This may be exciting to the younger crowd but traveling is somehow loosing its glitter. I feel very honoured to have been chosen to speak at two conferences and meet people from both the American and Canadian credit union movements. It seems everyone has the same opinion about what is happening in the financial markets. Credit union will be ok and we don’t have to worry. That opinion was voiced by everyone. It does feel good to be part of a movement that did not contribute to this financial meltdown, that there is integrity in what we have done and what we continue to do. And with a growing number of younger people getting involved it can only get better.

Heading out, back east

I am sitting at the Vancouver airport waiting for William to show up at Gate 77 for our flight to Chicago-Indianapolis. Everyone is looking forward to the Symposium which will definitely prove to be a winner. If all conferences were like this it would be a real joy.

The financial crises continues and has me worried on a number of accounts. First banking problems do not get ‘fixed’ by a quick infusion of funds. For those who were around in the ’80s it took time to crawl out from that financial hole. Problems tend to be systemic and are not fixed that easily. When you deal with money and lending, trends tend to be the norm of the day, not instantaneous solutions by simple costly cash injections. Problems in this industry tend to be like tips of icebergs, it takes time to see the whole picture. Secondly the culture of our society in the last 25 years has been one of spending and borrowing. Saving has taken a very low priority. When I hear the ‘experts’ say that the economy will seize up with lack of credit facilities it makes one wonder how much equity there can be when everyone is leveraging what they can borrow for continue. Where is the equity equivalent here? You don’t need to borrow or borrow so much when you have some sort of saved cash reserve. That seems to be the problem, saving or building equity doesn’t happen overnight. It needs to be a way of doing business and a long term approach.

BarCampBankBC 2008 is over

It was a pretty incredible weekend with my brain aching a bit. William Azaroff and Tim McAlpine are to be congratulated for doing a ton of work to get this going. We had a lot of fun preparing and were a little nervous about the things that one does not need to worry about. It all went very well.

When I think about all the different BarCampBanks I have attended, what was the difference with this one? In some ways it was the same. The quality of the dialogue, the energy and passion made by people attending, the challenges served and accepted, what we talked about and what was shared. I was able to get some videos of people who had never attended an event like this. The first one is up on YouTube, Cheryl Doerksen from Currency. This is the usual reaction, excitement about something they had no idea about. It is pretty neat to be able to see this over and over again. You can find more searching YouTube with the tag bcbbc08

Start of the weekend

Just waiting for Mr. McAlpine to pick me up with all the gear for the BCBBC. Hope it is all there. We will probably run out of buttons and T-shirts.

We are meeting up tonight with William, Brent, Denise and Mark, Jeffry, Andrew and Morris and probably others we don’t know about. It has been exciting getting ready and now to think that it will be going ahead. As Tim mentioned, just from comments over a lunch to see this take shape. This will be the 4th BarCampBank I have attended and probably about the 7th BarCamp. One gets used to how things happen and what to expect process wise. But it is always the people and the discussion that give BarCamps a unique colour all their own. I see Jim Bruene has signed up which is super. Lots of credit unions from the Lower Mainland which for me is really a dream come true. IF something like this can be instrumental in establishing a new form, a new process for dialogue and discussion it will be monumental.

I am sure whatever anyone expects will easily be surpassed. Brent and others will be contributing online throughout the day so those not attending can get some flavour of what is happening. My trusty Nikon and newly arrived Texas Flip Mino are fully charged waiting to record the moments for posterity. I envy those who have never attended for all that adrenaline they are going to be using up. Fasten your seat belts, full speed ahead.

One excellent presentation

Today I was at the Doxim seminar at the Waterfront in Vancouver. Jeffry Pilcher was there and delivered his 11Cs of Breakthrough Branding.

I don’t know how many presentations I have sat through in my lifetime. Does anyone? With 30 years in business though it is in the hundreds. Every once in awhile you attend one that puts the others to shame. Today Jeffry’s was in the Top 10. The material was great, the presentation was awesome and above all, the passion about the subject was real. It was outstanding.

The most interesting C for me was Culture. He spoke of how it had to permeate an organization from top to bottom. He gave examples of how this was done. To me culture is like the heartbeat of company. Without it even the best of plans and intentions will usually amount to nothing. The easiest way to find out is have someone who has never visited your branch come in and sit and watch the activity of the staff and the interaction with the member/customer. Ask them what they thought. They will tell you very quickly what they observed and what they felt. If it is there people will notice it. You don’t measure culture, you experience it. Jeffry brought this to play in what he said. It was neat.

If you ever get a chance to attend one of Jeffry’s speaking engagements don’t hesitate. You will not only learn something but he will put into words and patterns what you probably have been thinking about all along but just weren’t able to articulate it as well as this gentleman.

Financial meltdown

While driving home tonight I heard a Texas professor on the CBC talking about what has been happening on Wall Street these past few days. He spoke of a model that was broken and not working. He then mentioned the return to an older model where banks would hold their mortgages until the person having them repaid them. What a novel concept! To actually know the person you are lending to and to hold the debt with a charge on the property for the full amortization period!

For all 66 years of the credit union I work for this is the model that they have and it has served them well. Oh it isn’t glamourous and you can’t grow by 10% per year but it is safe and it is secure and after the last few days that is what a few people on the street didn’t consider very important.

Where it goes from here is anyones guess. The last bad economic time that we had with depleted housing prices, inflation and loss of jobs was the early 80’s. That would mean that anyone who is 40 years old or less didn’t live through that time as an economic entity i.e. too young to have a job. No one wants a return to those times. The problem is that a younger generation has lived in a constant growth and prosperity era. What goes up sometimes comes down. I wonder how most will manage if indeed it does get worse. Aesop had a fable about the tortoise and the hare. It is always interesting to see who won that race.

The miscellaneous Sunday

This morning Marjun and I decided to head down to Commercial Drive. For those that don’t know Commercial Drive it used to be an Italian community when I grew up, well it still is, but it has changed to a very eclectic type of neighbourhood. It had the Fringe Festival years ago and is made up of small, unique, independent businesses. The Starbuck and Subways of the world may exist but wouldn’t thrive in this community.

We took the Skytrain down and had brunch at Wazubees. A great little, well not so little, restaurant that serves good food. Your coffee always comes with a small glass of water on a metal tray. Replenish the fluids you know. After brunch we headed dow to the Fair Trade Shop to pick up a kilo of raw sugar. I’ve become addicted to this stuff over the years. It is brown and not granulated. Marjun picked up a set of the World Community cookbooks there. It is a set of three cookbooks which includes our old favourite “More with-Less”. As we headed back to the Skytrain we ran into the Azaroff and Cottingham families. It was great to see them and we had an ever too brief visit. That is what makes the Drive so different, the people you see down there and usually the people you run into down there.

We said goodbye to William, Amy and Ivan and headed into the Audiophile (used CDs and LPs). This is one of my favourite places to find hard to find music. (Zulu being the other one). Within 5 minutes I had three great finds.

• Sid n Susie Under the Covers – a Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs compendium of some 60’s pop music. They keep the memory of the music in a new age pop style.
• Elliot Smith’s – Figure 8
• 10,000 Maniacs – Campfire Songs

Back to the Skytrain, heading home, we stopped at the Rupert Station and a bicyclist was just getting in the door when it started closing in on his front wheel. There was an attendant standing at the other door who stuck her foot in the door to keep it open. He politely asked if he could get in. She shouted out “No, get the next one.” I figured it must have been the end of her shift and she wanted to get home or she was pissed off at someone and this poor guy was going to be her target. If the Skytrain was a commercial enterprise I would stop buying its product. Free market principle. But this is a public transit system so what is the alternative? Funny there was a small poster on the train that said “Please keep the Skytrain clean, it is your Skytrain.” Yeah sure.

audio.jpg

Another BarCampBankBC advertisement

Tim and William have done recent posts about BarCampBankBC which amply speak of what it is about. I can only repeat what they have already said.

This will be my 4th BarCampBank and one that hopefully will start “to foster innovations and the creation of new business models in the world of banking and finance.” in our geographic area and beyond. This direction is long overdue.

I have repeated numerous times that the ability and opportunity for financial institutions to create new products and services has never been better. All of the building blocks are there. The only hampering item is ourselves. We have created structures that make it difficult to foster innovation. We fail to keep our eyes focused on the end event and get caught up in the mundane and minuscule processes. Yes the devil is in the details but that should not be the excuse to limit our ability to be creative. This event is going to have some very interesting people attending. There are a few that I don’t see listed that will also be mentioned.

• Tim McAlpine – the creative genius of Currency Marketing.

• William Azaroff – the man behind Change Everything at Vancity.

• Morriss Partee – the New Englander whose CU Everything is a wealth of knowledge for CUs.

• Nala Henkel – another smart cookie from Currency

• Nancy Zimmerman – one of the most energetic and outspoken bankers I know, and she has heart.

• Stephen Akhurst – a very intelligent Central 1 consultant, he puts together the Innovation Awards for CUs in BC.

• Denise Wymore- Watch out when she starts talking about her pet peeves.

• Matt Vance – who wouldn’t like anyone from Bellingham?

• Boris Mann – the Drupal guy who makes things happen.

• Tripp Johnson – don’t know Trip but know about the Gonzo Banker people.

• Wendy Lachance – Coast Capital’s mobile expert.

• Kate Dugas – the other half of Change Everything at Vancity.

• Andy LaFlamme – another New Englander whose points of view are articulate and insightful. (Don’t get him and Morriss together for a Guitar Hero event!)

• Brent Dixon – one of the most creative people I know of.

• Dana Dekker – he was the force behind MACUs success.

• Roland Tanglao – if you want to know anything about mobile phones ask Roland.

• Caleb Chang – Caleb wears Hawaiian shirts on Monday, need I say more?

• David Drucker – a GUI expert and an ex-Bostoner (Bostonite? some one help me here).

• Laurel McJannet – she is from Verity which says it all.

• Mark Sadowski – Anyone from New Mexico has to be mentioned.

• Jeffry Pilcher – if you want to talk to Jeffry make sure all your ducks are in a row.

Who is missing? Ron Shevlin, Charlie Trotter, anyone from the Garland Group, Christian Mullins, anyone from Indianna or the Carolinas and a number of others.

Seriously if you haven’t attended a BarCampBank before this is your chance. You will not regret it. Don’t let the $35 registration fee paint it as a non-event. You will come away with some truly invaluable insights you won’t find anywhere else. It is an international event.

TGIF

Another week has passed and the events continue.

Our youngest son returned to his home in Copenhagen last Saturday after a great one month visit. As well, a friend returned home to Powell River who had been boarding with us since January while going to school at UBC. It is always an adjustment in a home when the total inhabitants decrease by 50%. Our oldest son and daughter are here for a visit for the next 2 weeks and after that we are home alone again. At least I won’t have to watch or hear the PS3 with Grand Theft Auto blaring away. That is another story.

The iPhone is working out very well. The phone has been dropping calls once in a while out here in the Valley but in Burnaby-Vancouver there hasn’t been any problems. The ability to have one device deliver all of the applications you connect with is really unbelievable. All of us at work have now had iPhones for a month and the glitter still has not worn off. There is only one minor issue, the inability to have your SMS mesages use ringtones instead of the stock alarm sounds. The best and most used downloaded programs for me would be:

• Evernote – Great synching with your Mac desktop.

• Comic Touch – Just add some humour because who doesn’t need it.

• Exposure – decent Flickr app.

• Jott – very usable app with the notes feature.

• BoxOffice – never have to look for a newspaper to see what movies are playing.

• Stanza – the best book reader. Great classics for free.

• Shazam – I finally know the names of some songs after hearing them for years.

• Facebook – a very decent interface.

And the two best!

• Twitteriffic – much better than any other Twitter client.

• OmniFocus – the absolute best program for to dos, projects, etc. Done in the GTD style with synching to your desktop.

As it turns out there are 10. There are a few more that are useful at times and of course the web sites that have a great iPhone interface.

I have started planning for the two presentations I am doing next month. It is always amazing when you start thinking about what you will say, how you will present it, thinking that there ins’t enough material. Then you get started and you have to hack it back because there is too much material. You could probably spend an infinite amount of time always tweaking the end result. One talk will be at Forum Solutions Partnership Symposium in Indiana. The other is at the CUCC 2008 National Lending Conference in St. John’s Newfoundland. After looking at all the other speakers I feel like a lightweight in a heavyweight division.

I have just started a book by Susan Jacoby “The Age of American Unreason”. In it she analyses of the intellectual condition of the US. She does not pull any punches. It has some great writing with inventive and sharp cynical humour. Rationalism at its best.

Have a great weekend everyone! The dog days of summer are upon us.

It just makes one wonder

This is the stuff that drive me nuts.

Credit Union Central of B.C. merged with Ontario Central to form Central 1. Here is something from their homepage:

When the merger took effect on July 1, 2008, the combined organization had more than $7.5 billion in assets, with 475 employees based at offices in Vancouver and Mississauga serving nearly 200 credit unions with some 2.8 million members

Good stuff. But when I click on the following

C1 __ Central 1 Credit Union-1.jpg

I get this message:

eCentral:
Our server has detected that you are not using the MS Internet Explorer browser.
Unfortunately, this service is not available for your type of browser. Please use Internet Explorer (version 5 or newer) to access this service.
Explorer can be downloaded for free at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.asp. Sorry for any inconvenience.

That means Safari, Camino and Firefox don’t work. If you have a Mac good luck.

You would think an organization this size would create web pages that wouldn’t have to have Microsoft as the only company that could produce a browser to use the site. Yep $7.5 billion in assets with all those employees (who never use Macs) serving 200 CUs with some 2.8 million members (who never use Macs). I thought those days were over. The ones where you had to get Microsoft tattooed somewhere to get a job. There must be a good reason, right?

Small is beautiful to some

Ron has a blog post about the downside of being small. Great post with some definite statements about how small is not the panacea for everyone.

First, small and large are relative terms. They are labels we place upon items in order for us to gain some semblance of order. What is small to some will be large to others and the opposite, what is large for some is small for others. Remember the end of the film Men in Black II?

There is another aspect of an organization’s size that is of a prime concern. How it is managed. You can have any size FI and if it is managed well size, though a consideration, is part and parcel of many other goals and strategies. A badly managed organization doesn’t need size to fail.

Small to me means keeping the organization flat, tight, and productive. It means being able to move on a dime. It means ‘fighting’ with 3rd party suppliers that create expensive products that would force you into a strategy or product that is not even a 50% solution. It means quit ‘whining’ and do what you are supposed to do. Small means have staff meetings where the contribution is from everyone so you formulate objectives that are understood and agreed upon so you don’t need a marketing department to push anything. Small means you don’t have to structure meetings to decide on the colour of the toilet paper in the washrooms. The list could go on and on. It is important that the term small does not get translated in the terms most employ. Small by its nature in today’s society looked upon as an anomaly because so much that we are shown (big) is the antithesis of small. That is why I think ‘small is beautiful’.

Ron and Jeffery are right. You need more coming in that going out. A very simple rule of business. But not all mergers have delivered that ideal and so merging sometimes clouds the issue of what is really necessary – changing the management to at least begin to move forward. Sometimes I have seen mergers to build larger empires of senior management. FIs live and they die, nothing continues forever. Try as you might there may be conditions and reasons that are no longer available or valid to continue.

It would be very easy for the Board to say “we need 10% growth and nothing else matters!” Piece of cake. But when they say “we want at least 5% growth, keep the community happy with at least a 7% dividend, make sure donations are 7% of net income, be sure to continue to contribute to the social capital of the CU and the community, and deliver innovative products that are useful, as well as no line-ups in the branch, etc…well that gets a bit more difficult to manage. Keep the bottom line healthy and you can realize all and more of these goals. That is the tough part. Fine tuning all the aspects of what makes you successful. Growing in all of these aspects makes for a difficult and at times impossible situation. But man is it ever rewarding and satisfying when everyone contributes to making it happen. The biggest enemy of being small? Thinking small.

Innovation and where it comes from

People ask me how we handle development work at the credit union. There is no simple answer or formula that one can recite as to how ideas flourish into a product, a process or a service. You wonder if they sometimes appear out of thin air.

Today was a prime example. Our e-statement project is finished, done, complete. Next Wednesday the interface will be in place for actual use by the members. All the components were developed in house except for the web site interface which was done by Central 1’s MemberDirect people. What does it do? It puts a link on the web site to a monthly PDF which is an exact duplicate of what the members have been receiving in the mail in paper form. For all the benefits it saves money and paper. But then as we talked about it, something happened.

Why not have a link for an up to date, real time PDF statement? If it is the 10th or 20th or whatever date in the current month, why not just click and a PDF created on the fly and delivered. Your transaction of 1 minute ago would be included. That means besides the depository of a few years of statements on your account, you could get a real time version statement anytime. As all of the methods and code were built, it looks like it would only take a half a day to do that. That means before Wednesday of next week this added feature will part of the launch.

But where did that idea come from? From a simple suggestion that with our ability to trigger real time transactions we could move that forward to being part of triggering real time statements. Was it valuable? I spoke to a few people and yes it was valuable. In fact it would make some businesses very happy in reconciling their accounts on a daily basis. The beauty of the whole function is that we aren’t using an outside supplier to do this on a month-end batch basis. What has been built is real time in-house the ultimate IT mantra. Expanding what we can do in real time gives us the idea for another product. If statement processing had been done by a 3rd party we would have been stuck in thinking in a ‘batch’ mode and never contemplated doing it differently.

I believe that innovation comes from dynamic thinking. Thinking how something can be done now and not later is important in what you have to offer. In today’s instant age much is possible by keeping everything fluid. It is important that you work in the environment you want to live in. There is always another step. If I ever have to get into a lifeboat I want a life preserver now, not pink plastic water wings later.

Batteries, hamsters and daisies

This morning my MacBook Pro started to freeze up. There was no response to the keypad or trackpad no matter what. I tried booting about 6 times all with the same problem. Dug out the CD and rebooted but again it didn’t work. Holding the ‘C’ key down wasn’t being seen by the Mac so it started to boot from the hard drive again. The only solution left was to take the battery out and let the machine ‘die’ from a complete lack of power. After putting the battery back Voila! everything is back to normal. It wasn’t that scary as I did have a current backup I could get to.

I wonder if sometimes life could be like that. Brent’s post today talked about him feeling like a hamster. I don’t know about you but his words rung pretty true. You tend to just get stuck with all the noise around you. Then you realize most of this crap is not life threatening, it is just noise. I just wish I could remove the battery and get a quick restart but that isn’t going to happen. You need to take care of what needs to be taken care of, just slow down and become human again instead of machine like. We need to remove ourselves of the A + B algorithm that becomes our existence and get outside and pick a few daisies. So if you get to do that today make sure you are barefoot and don’t step on the worms!

Why I love Twitter

Morriss recently wrote about the 4 stages of Twitter which was as close as it gets to emulating the stages of experience with this product. I hadn’t realized how long I had been on it and then thought about why, after e-mail, it is the one thing that is always checked.

At first it seemed that the community that would built up around Twitter, with you deciding who to follow and who is following you, would be limited. How many of your face-to-face friends would actually use it tended to be few if any and wasn’t everyone on Facebook anyway. But a community did build and it reached beyond any geographic location that you could imagine. Now you can see people responding to each other were you know you were the conduit in getting them followed or following each other. How many people have you interacted with because of someone else’s introduction to that individual?

There also seems to be a grouping of like minds. I have never asked or heard of anyone’s political persuasion, not that it would matter. There is not much knowledge about age or generation. In fact unless the person blogs and has posted the link you really don’t know much about them. Some post frequently, others rarely. There is a link or a connection to each person that proves to be different with each post. There is a unique insight when someone updates you on what is taking place in their life or their thoughts at that specific instant. There seems to be a common bond that is unexplainable. That unknown connection is why I love Twitter. It is an amazing way to communicate with some amazing people.

At the same time I am always somewhat hesitant on what to post. When compared to what some post, mine seem like drivel. Once in a while you can contribute which is satisfying. But one also needs to say what one doesn’t like. I really don’t like it when someone posts 6 or more times, right in a row. Thankfully everyone has a specific icon so when that starts you can quickly pass through the stream. It is also hard to follow a thread of thought when someone posts a short cryptic message to some unknown @person. If it sounds interesting you can click on @person and hope there is something there to understand. There is tinypaste if you want to go beyond 140 characters but it is rarely used.

Finally it is great to hear what music someone is listening to or where they are but I really don’t want to know that you have arrived at Starbuck’s and are having a double non-fat latté. Sorry but I don’t drink coffee and it irks me that I can’t be sitting across from you with a tea.