Consultants to leaders
Posts tagged ‘That Ain’t Right’
In London, the most over-monitored city in this sector of the galaxy, BT has announced today it will proceed with behavior targeted ads at its broadband user community. We have been following this service trial (called Webwise) over the past year and were interested in seeing the final outcome.
Continue reading ‘BT’s Big Brother Ads Will Go Live.’ »
About a year and a half ago we switched from our long term carrier to an alternative provider. We did so because we were constantly frustrated by errors on the bills, electronic bills which were routinely late or not available (sorry sir, we’ve had problems with our website,… sorry sir, you will have to call the website technical support…ad nauseum) and finally the frustration of dealing with a call center that did not have a clue about service, but were good at staying on a script.
Seems like these complaints are still about. We just noticed a posting by Dick Waugh over at the Owen Sound Sun Times which is all too familiar to many of us. We feel your pain.
Customer Care—is anybody out there? Does anybody really care? Press 3 to get stuffed!
Dear Palm Treo 680,
It’s over. It’s you not me!
I was a loyal Palm user for over 10 years. I’ve owned the following Palm products;
I was a dyed-in-the-wool user and probably caused dozens of my friends to buy Palms when they were the only real PDA on the block. No, I’ve used other PDAs but really liked the Palm OS and they way they operated seamlessly with my desktop. I also appreciated the flood of third party applications which were well priced and for the most part worked flawlessly. Relationships change, however…
Continue reading ‘Treo—Bye-o’ »
Seems like the FCC has a little bit of ’splaining to do. They sort of, ummm…, paid the US telcos a little too much money from the Universal Service Fund (USF). We reported on some shenanigans at the FCC a while ago and it seems it continues to provide more entertainment value. It appears that they have given out $970M more than they should have.
For about a month last year I got up to 10 calls a day on my mobile from some guy named Boris who wanted to sell me some moving services. Boris hung up every time I answered so we never did develop a close relationship. Now it seems I was not alone in being plagued by these idiot recorded calls. Read the story here.
Yesterday I received an email from a business colleague who normally is laid back and sedate. The email oddly was typical of a “clip and ship” email that he forwarded to a number of his contacts. The essence of the email was that the mobile industry was going to release the entire database of mobile numbers to telemarketers who would immediately flood you on incoming calls. I doubted the accuracy of the information but my friend is not someone who panics so I proceeded to do some due diligence.
Continue reading ‘Do Not Call - Do Not Scam’ »
So
me of you may remember a company called Eftia OSS Solutions (order provisioning & fulfillment, problem management, telecom circuit & asset inventory management, and telephone number tracking) which operated from 1997 through about 2006. The company was the investment darling of a number of high power VC firms who funded it to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The company had a meteoric rise to fame prior to 2000 and then the orders “fell off a cliff” as James Bagnall said in his January 2006 article in the Ottawa Citizen.
Old news I know, but the remarkable thing I discovered recently is how someone from Estonia has commandeered the whole website that Eftia operated and is now running it as an advert. We were adding domains to our Telecom Search Engine and the domain popped up in a search as a live link. Being too curious for my own good I followed it.
Continue reading ‘Invasion Of The OSS Domain Body Snatchers’ »
Memo to: Ministry of Buzzwords
Subject: Just stop it!
Recently I was listening to a radio broadcast where some management guru was espousing on his latest suggestion to all those who are deep into employee leadership. He was rattling on about how it is so bad to give employees feedback as its focus is so last week. So he recommended that we all use his latest suggestion called (wait for it) feed-forward!
Wow, was I enlightened. In my humble world I would have called that setting objectives and expectations which, in my experience, is best done by offering suggestions for achievements and altering behaviours. What’s with these folks that need to create new buzzwords for stuff we already have words for?
As a consultant I know it is important to differentiate your unique process or service offering, but creating buzzwords is just not the way to do it. Now feed-forward is not a new buzzword, but it is one that we should have dropped from our language, at it relates to leadership, a long time ago.
I don’t know about you, but I have reached my tolerance limit for buzzword creation.
