OverMatter

Alexander Movies

Alexander the Great conquered the known world with a deft blend of diplomacy, propaganda, military tactics, strategy, and logistics, yet the Alexander (2004) movie and the Alexander the Great (1956) movie combined have approximately 10 seconds total of reference to any of those things. Arggh.

Land Grab: What If Wal-Mart Got in the WiMax Business?

"If Wal-Mart decided to get in the WiMax business, nothing could stop it from becoming almost overnight the equal any of the big telcos. Buy the licenses, install the equipment, light a few more fibers, start a marketing campaign on TV, in stores, and by direct mail, and before anyone would know it, $50 billion or so in shareholder equity would be drained from BellSouth, SBC, Verizon et al, and transferred straight to Wal-Mart intergalactic HQ in Bentonville, Arkansas." (PBS | I, Cringely)

Also see: Dan Sherman: Walmart Communications - A Look Into the Future

Peter Drucker On Leadership

Forbes interview

Seinfeld Dictionary

The Seinfeld TV show gave us a whole new vocabulary to talk about concepts that otherwise had no name.

Let's Try Freedom

Just found the blog of Robert Hayes. He has some thought-provoking stuff. Some posts to check out:

World Library Transfer System

Political Affiliation And The Idee Fixe

It's Going To Be Condi In 2008

Travelers Are Not Always Tourists

This Vodkapundit post brings up a great perspective shift in the Red vs Blue state debate and also notes that "the reader comments added to my post just below are a facinating read. Many of them are first-person accounts of time in Berlin, before and after the Wall. Most of the writers are American military veterans who were stationed in Germany during the Cold War."

One of those comments: "historians will look back at 1989 as one of those pivotal years in human history. That year, the Warsaw Pact countries broke from the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall came down, and the dictator of Romania was overthrown (and killed). Within 2 years, the Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of a failed system."

Be sure to check out Vodkapundit - Ten Fifteen Years After and Wills_World_Commentary

More comments and perspectives at: Weekend Pundit: Experience Tells, Mudville Gazette, Let's Try Freedom, Jeff the Baptist: Military Travels, baldilocks: Who Sees the World?, baldilocks: Wow! Fifteen Years, and dustbury.com: That night in Berlin

That last one brough back memories of crossing the border via subway back in 1986 (the subway was built prior to the War and you could take the subway from West Berlin under East Berlin and from there go through to East Germany via a border control checkpoint). The chill of uncertainty - in both passing into and out of East Germany (and via the utter everyday familarity of a subway!) is still very fresh in mind.

The Man Behind the FedEx Logo

"The power of the hidden arrow is simply that it is a “hidden bonus.” It is a positive-reverse optical kind of thing: either you see it or you don’t. Importantly, not “getting the punch line” by not seeing the arrow, does not reduce the impact of the logo’s essential communication. The power of the logo and the FedEx marketing supporting the logo is strong enough to convey clearly FedEx brand positioning. On the other hand, if you do see the arrow, or someone points it out to you, you won’t forget it. I can’t tell you how many people have told me how much fun they have asking others “if they can spot ‘something’ in the logo.” To have filled in the arrow, or to somehow make it more “visible” would have been like Henny Youngman saying “Please take my wife” instead of “Take my wife. Please.” Punch lines that need to be explained are neither funny nor memorable." (The Sneeze - Half zine. Half blog. Half not good with fractions. )

500 Greatest Songs of All Time?

RollingStone.com

The Lean, Green Service Machine

"In 1998, the leading PC maker [Dell] began investing in a customer service initiative that uses artificial intelligence (AI) software to automatically provide its telephone-based service agents a series of increasingly “educated” and specific responses to give to customers who are having problems with their computers. Gone is the frustrating interaction in which the first question the agent posed was the inscrutable “Have you tried reloading Windows?” Instead, agents are ready to ask relevant troubleshooting questions that quickly address and resolve almost any problem.

Dell’s returns from this AI system have been impressive: Today, 90 percent of customer issues can be handled in one phone call, and costly product returns from dissatisfied customers have declined. This service network contributed to a Dell cost-cutting campaign that reduced overall operating expenses by $1 billion between 1998 and 2003. Even though more complicated repairs are now being handled on the phone, average call times have been trimmed by 8 percent.

Dell is also learning from these interactions with customers by viewing every problem as a potential defect in product hardware, software, or documentation. By communicating call-center data to its engineering unit, Dell expects that any defects can be fixed in subsequent product releases. In other words, at the same time Dell is reducing the expense of customer service, it is using its customer service system to improve the quality of its products."

(strategy+business)

Some stories from the early days of Google

Andy Bechtolsheim puts up the first $100,000

Ram Shriram and the rest of the first million (for 10%)

For those doing the math, they made around a 5000+% ROI