Monthly Archives: February 2009

Lateral Moves

When most people hear of Career Development, they think of a promotion. But as it has been said: Up is not the only way. I’ve been doing some research on the benefits of lateral career moves as part of my work in the area of Career Development.  I found these excellent videos at the Stanford’s Entrepreneurship site of Carol Bartz. Carol was recently in the news when she was appointed CEO of Yahoo! after a very successful run at Autodesk.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=10

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1410

(WordPress doesn’t allow embeds from these sites…but they are well worth a visit!)

This is good design!

netflixlostdvd1
Recently I reported a lost DVD to Netflix . They asked me a few questions on the website and they sent the next one in my queue right away. That’s good customer service. What’s a DVD between friends (particularly when one pays 15 dollars a month to the other!)

So a few weeks go by, I find the DVD and mail it back.  I get an automated notification. Someone had thought this scenario through and designed the right feedback mechanism.

Thinking through things is good design.

(I am particularly impressed with this one, since I am working on automated notifications at work!)

Using Tasks for ToDos

Tasks in Calendar view

I recently read a post via Scobleizer that GigaOm declared that Google was out of BIG ideas since it was working on a Task app. While I do somewhat agree with that thought, I am, like many others, looking for that perfect app to externalize all the to-do’s doing the macarena in my head every day.

Today someone at work suggested one way to at least put the Task panel in Outlook in my face everyday. It’s quite simple really if you use Outlook 2003. Go to your Calendar>View> Taskpad. Maybe that will help!