Found on the BART. How do London Underground approach this? Why doesn't Network Rail give access to its datastream?

Respect to the BART (man).

It seems that tweeting the name of a recognized restaurant (in London at least) means you get autofollowed by OpenTable. Clearly some marketing idea being enacted here. Sounds like a great way to build a twitspam database.
 
This might be old news to real social media marketing gurus. I thought it was worth mentioning...

Proper advice (via www.fastcompany.com/magazine/05/dee2.html">FastCompany) on management and leadership from the man who set up Visa. I'm pasting in the whole piece as I feel it's all worth reading.

Dee Hock on Management

PhD in Leadership, Short Course:

Make a careful list of all things done to you that you abhorred. Don't do them to others, ever. Make another list of things done for you that you loved. Do them for others, always.

Associates:

Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.

Employing Yourself:

Never hire or promote in your own image. It is foolish to replicate your strength. It is idiotic to replicate your weakness. It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom.

Compensation:

Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can move the body and influence the mind, but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that is reserved for belief, principle, and morality. As Napoleon observed, "No amount of money will induce someone to lay down their life, but they will gladly do so for a bit of yellow ribbon."

Form and Substance:

Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral. Failure to distinguish clearly between the two is ruinous. Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future. Preserve substance; modify form; know the difference. The closest thing to a law of nature in business is that form has an affinity for expense, while substance has an affinity for income.

Creativity:

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a room packed with archaic furniture. You must get the old furniture of what you know, think, and believe out before anything new can get in. Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.

Leadership:

Here is the very heart and soul of the matter. If you look to lead, invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself -- your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers. Use the remainder to induce those you "work for" to understand and practice the theory. I use the terms "work for" advisedly, for if you don't understand that you should be working for your mislabeled "subordinates," you haven't understood anything. Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia.

Given a choice... Would you use the one on the left?

 

There's a lot of chatter right now about the Internet on your telly. There's also a lot of questions that don't yet have answers. The biggest question is fundamental: do people actually want to be able to access the web from their televisions? The answer here is "maybe" and I'll explain the reasons later.

But there's another question that (some) people seem to be confused about: "If people want Internet access on their tellys, do they want widgets & walled gardens, or do they want full Internet access?" The answer to this one is is easy: full access. End of story.

Everyone hates walled gardens. They don't work - ask AOL, or any of the mobile network providers. Why do companies still persist in this folly? We've seen this played out at least 3 times so far in the life of the Internet, and the error always comes from the same, flawed thinking. Walls exist to keep people and stuff inside or to keep people and stuff out. Neither of these concepts really chimes with the meaning of the Internet - which exists and has power simply because is open to all people and all content. You'd think most people would have gotten this by now, but I guess companies persist in this because their monetization strategies depend on enforced artificial scarcity. Such strategies are doomed.

I'll write more on this over the coming weeks. In the meantime, here's an article in the NYT that'll get you started on some of this.

Matthew Parris wrote a great column in The Times last week describing a novel approach to fixing "broken" organisations (and let's face it, aren't all organisations broken?)

His idea is this: in order to fix companies and make them work better, we should rethink how we review failures.

Instead of only bringing in the consultants and investigators when companies experience catastrophic failures (Baby P is the example he uses, but things like the Hatfield train crash, or the collapse of the banks, or the chaos at Terminal 5 would also serve) you instead choose a small, apparently insignificant, but nonetheless "wrong" part of a company's operation and zoom right in to see exactly what caused this failing. In his case it's a squeaky door at Derby station that never seems to get fixed, but it could be anything - a single lost package, for the Post Office, perhaps, a broken iPod for Apple. At Amberlight, it might be something like the loss of a video recording of a user research session, or a kickoff meeting at where we didn't have all the people we needed in the room. The point is that it's something small and incontrovertibly wrong, but at the same time something which most people would normally shrug off as "one of those things".

Once identified, you go through an extremely detailed forensic analysis of this problem, identifying exactly why it happened and exactly what organisational failings allowed it to take place. You move right up and down the hierarchy, identifying what didn't happen that should have or what did happen that shouldn't have. Was it training? Communication? Lack of empowerment? Unmotivated staff? Unclear responsbility? By doing this you will spot (and, one hopes, resolve) not just the squeaky door, but a whole range of issues that affect performance across the whole company.

I love this idea - it has transformative power for organisations. Very often it's not just that the details count - it's that lack of attention to these details is indicative of bigger problems.

I remember this rhyme from when I was young...

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Here's the article in full: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5679226.ece

"Estimated wait time is... 8 minutes. If you would prefer to hold without music, please press 1 now"

Brilliant.

Two common customer experience niggles nailed in one hit.

Now if only they'd have given me the option of a callback, I'd have been turning cartwheels.

This I saw on Gary Tan's blog. It's an ad (sort of) but a really good concept. Cleverly thought out too.