Corner Office This interview with Gary E. McCullough, president and chief executive of the Career Education Corporation, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant. The Lesson of the 38 Candy Bars (Published NYT: August 8, 2009) Gary McCullough Every Sunday, Adam Bryant (NYT) talks with top executives about the challenges of leading and managing. Q. What’s the most important leadership lesson you’ve learned? A. The biggest one I learned, and I learned it early on in my tenure in the Army, is the importance of small gestures. As you become more senior, those small gestures and little things become sometimes more important than the grand ones. Little things like saying “please” and “thank you” — just the basic respect that people are due, or sending personal notes. I spend a lot of time sending personal notes. I’ll never forget one of the interactions we had with my commanding general of the division in which I was a platoon leader. We were at Fort Bragg, N.C. We had miserable weather. It was February and not as warm as you would think it would be in North Carolina. It had been raining for about a week, and the commanding general came around to review some of the platoons in the field. He went to one of my vehicle drivers and he asked him what he thought of the exercise we were on. To which the young private said, “Sir, it stinks.” I saw my short career flash before my eyes at that point. He asked why, and the private said: “There are people who think this is great weather for doing infantry operations. I personally think 75 and partly cloudy is better.” And so the commanding general said, “What can I do to make it better for you?” And the private said, “Sir, I sure could use a Snickers bar.” So a couple days later we were still moving through some really lousy weather, and a box showed up for the private. And that box was filled with 38 Snickers bars, which is the number of people in my platoon. And there was a handwritten note from the commanding general of our division that said, “I can’t do anything about the weather, but I hope this makes your day a bit brighter, and please share these with your buddies.” And on that day, at that time, we would’ve followed that general anywhere. It was a very small thing, and he didn’t need to do it, but it impressed upon me that small gestures are hugely important. Q. What’s the best career advice someone ever gave you? A. I believed early in my career that if I just worked hard, put my head down and did my job, everyone would notice and good things would happen. And in fact, that’s not true, necessarily. You can do your job and you can toil along in anonymity without anybody noticing for a real long time. I was among the last people in my class who came into Procter & Gamble to be promoted to brand manager, and I would attribute part of that to the fact that I just wasn’t very savvy politically. A mentor taught me that no one could micromanage my own career better than me. And so I won’t say that I became more demanding, but I certainly began to have more of a plan around things that I felt I needed to do to grow, and I was more overt stating what I wanted or what I needed. I think it’s an implied contract. You know, when you work at a company, you owe them a good day’s work. The company owes you a fair salary and growth opportunities. I was giving my best effort but I didn’t think I was getting, in some cases, all the return. So I started asking for it, not in a rude way, but in a way that it implied a quid pro quo, so to speak. Q. Talk about how you’ve handled failure. A. There was a point in time in my career where I was told point blank that I wasn’t going to be promoted, that I didn’t have the skills to go on to the next level. And when you’re faced with a situation like that, there’s two ways you can respond to it: You can accept it and you can move on, which I think would’ve been the easy thing to do, or you could seek to find out why people had that belief and convince them that you can do the work. I chose the latter. I think when you’re faced with that, everybody has to dig in to look at themselves and say, “Am I here to make something happen, or am I going to believe this to be the case?” There are some things that are within your control and that you’ve got to drive to make happen. And there are some things that are outside your control that you can’t. When they said I wouldn’t be promoted, I basically said, “Tell me what I need to do.” And I focused like a laser beam on those things and I delivered those. Q. What has surprised you most about the top job? A. One is the breadth of topics or issues that you’re confronted with on a daily basis, and you have to be able to go from one thing to another to another, and sometimes it feels like they’re completely unrelated. In some cases it’s a snap decision. It’s got to be, “This is how we’re going to proceed, move forward” versus taking time to really contemplate the question. So if you’re not comfortable with dealing in gray areas or you’re not comfortable with deciding with 75 or 80 percent of the data you would want to have, then this is not a job that people should aspire to. I think the other piece is just the demands of the various constituents. You know, you have employee demands, I’ve got a board of directors that has demands. There are investors, there are analysts and shareholders and so on and so forth, and they all require time and attention. So marshaling enough time so that you don’t feel like you’re giving everybody short shrift is really tough to do. The other piece is the fishbowl nature of the job. It’s relentless to some degree, in that respect. Q. How do you make sure you’ve got the energy to do all that? A. I think part of it’s just genes and disposition. I’ve always been an early-morning riser. I like to get up early. I like to get a workout in because that gets the blood pumping to face the day. So a couple times a week, I’m up at 4:45 or 5 at the latest. Q. How do you hire? A. When I’m hiring, particularly at the senior levels, I’m looking for a couple of things. One is demonstrated leadership — has somebody shown that they have mastered the work, that they can lead people and lead organizations? I look for intelligence — business intelligence — and I’m not talking book intelligence. I’m rarely swayed by people who were 4.0 students at the best colleges and universities. I’m just talking about basic smarts. You do recruit for raw intelligence because if you don’t have it, you don’t have it. You either do or you don’t. But I’m also looking for some street savviness. I’m looking for the ability to work with other people. Teamwork’s important to me. I grew up playing on teams. I’m not a fan of people who are “lone wolves” at the tops of organizations, because they don’t do a good job of working with me and with the organization in many cases. So I ask them to tell me about a time when they were in, say, a leadership situation where something simply would not have happened had they not been there, and what they did to influence the action. Questions like that tend to be pretty open-ended. Q. It’s hard to test for those intangibles up front. A. Yes it is, which is why I want to spend time with people. At the levels I’m hiring for, I want to have a meal with you. I want to meet your spouse. They should want to do the same thing with me and with my spouse, because you get a sense for who people are when you get them out of the business environment. I’ll tell you another quick story. There was a woman named Rosemary who long ago retired from Procter & Gamble. Rosemary was a cafeteria worker, and at the time at P. & G., we actually had a cart that would come around at 7, 7:30 in the morning. They would ring a bell and you’d go get a cup of coffee and a doughnut or a bagel or something to start off your day. And Rosemary had an uncanny ability to discern who was going to make it and who wasn’t going to make it. And I remember, when I was probably almost a year into the organization, she told me I was going to be O.K. But she also told me some of my classmates who were with the company weren’t going to make it. And she was more accurate than the H.R. organization was. When I talked to her, I said, “How’d you know?” She could tell just by the way they treated people. In her mind, everybody was going to drop the ball at some point, and then she said: “You know you’re going to drop the ball at some point, and I see that you’re good with people and people like you and you treat them right. They’re going to pick up the ball for you, and they’re going to run and they’re going to score a touchdown for you. But if they don’t like you, they’re going to let that ball lie there and you’re going to get in trouble.” Again, I think it’s those intangible things. I had taken the time to get to know Rosemary and know that her husband’s name was Floyd and know the thing that they did in their off-time was bowling. So, it is all those little intangible things that you see, not when you’re sitting around a table in a conference room, but what you see in other ways. Q. What’s your approach to time management? A. When people ask me for time, they generally don’t need the time that they ask for. So my assistant asks people, “How much time do you need?” and, “What are the outcomes?” If they say an hour, we cut it in half. If they say 30 minutes, we cut it to 15, because it forces people to be clearer and more concise. By doing that, I’m able to cram a number of things into the day and move people in and out more effectively and more efficiently. Sometimes there are things that people come in to discuss because they want face time, or because they’re unsure, or they want me to make a decision so they can say that I made the decision and hide behind that. And so those things don’t work very well. Q. Are you a gadget person? A. I live by my BlackBerry, as most of us do. I do make it a point on Friday night to turn it off and I don’t turn it on again until Sunday morning. I do that for a couple of reasons. One is, you have to try to separate at some point during the week. Anybody who needs me, whether it’s a board member or one of my leaders, they know how to reach me if something comes up that’s a crisis. The other reason I turn it off is because when things come in, if I respond, then I’ve got people in the organization who would see that I’ve responded on Saturday morning at 8 a.m. And the next thing I know, I have a response to my response at 8:15 and so it goes. And I want people to have a life. Q. How do you find out now in your position what people throughout the company are thinking? A. The more senior you get, the harder it is to really keep a pulse on things. I tell people that coming to my office is like going to the principal’s office. Nobody wants to make that walk if they can avoid it, for the most part. I call people and say, “Hey, can you come talk to me?” They bring all their staff books and things, and I literally want to have a conversation. So I walk around and I ask questions. I think the best way to do it, to figure out what’s really going on, is to travel to the other company locations that are away from the corporate headquarters and have town hall-style meetings. I send out on at least a quarterly basis, sometimes more frequently, e-mails to all employees. I help them understand what our results were, as an organization, what some of the issues are, what some of our priorities should be. I’ve gotten responses back, sometimes from only 50 employees, sometimes from as many as 200 or 300. And I do my best over the course of a couple of days to respond to every one of those e-mails. So I’ve actually got people in the organization who I’ve established dialogues with over the course of the last couple of years, who will send me notes that will say, “You know, have you thought about this?” or, “You should know this is going on in our company or in our location.” And I treat every one of those pieces of information with a great deal of respect. I protect their anonymity, and it gives me a good picture of some things that are going on that I otherwise wouldn’t know. Q. What do you think business schools should teach more of, or less of? A. Having gone to business school — this is going to sound terrible but I’m going to say it anyway — I didn’t learn that much at business school. It was a great way for me to transition from the military to the private sector, and I learned basic things, like buy low and sell high. I learned that sometimes it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And I made some lifelong friends, which was all good. I think I’d ask them to be mindful of teaching about leadership. If I was going to teach a course, that’s what I would teach, about leadership, about playing nicely in the sandbox with others, about being more collaborative, and I would ask them to teach or to impress upon people that when they graduate, it does take a little while to get a job like mine. I can’t tell you the number of young people who think that they’re going to end up with a job like mine after a year or five years. It just doesn’t work that way, and I think if people could come out of business schools with a more realistic sense of how things really operate in organizations, and that there is a bit of dues-paying that has to happen, we’d all be better off. So managing expectations is something that I’d ask those people to really think through. Q. What’s your two-minute commencement speech? A. I would tell people that the race ultimately doesn’t go to the fast. It goes to the strong. It goes to the resilient and it goes to the people who are well prepared. I have my own kids, and I tell them that when I walk into a room of more than five or seven people, I know that I am not the smartest guy in the room and I’m very, very comfortable with that fact. There are people who are off-the-charts smart, and that’s great. That’s good for them. I like to surround myself with really smart people, as I said before. I will outwork, and have over the course of my career, about anybody. If you’re clear about what you want, if you’re strong, if you’re resilient, if you’re well prepared and you’re willing to work — I mean really work — then good things can happen. I’m a guy who never planned to be in an office like this, and that was not my goal coming out of business school, believe it or not. And so, it surprises me that I’m in this role and in this job. I think when you’re too focused on the top job, you can get derailed somewhere along the way. A version of this article appeared in print on August 9, 2009, on page BU2 of the New York edition.

I met Zach P from National Lampoon at a Digital Hollywood (digitalhollywood) Conference in LA.  We got to talking about speakers and life philosophies, and he mentioned this one.  I had read it a while back in Forbes or Fortune magazine, but thought I would post it to my Blog.  Enjoy. ‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says This is the text of the Stanford Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.  Source:  Stanford Report, June 14, 2005 I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together. I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle. My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes. I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now. This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Thank you all very much.

Being in sales, I understand you don’t sell everyone.  But once in a while you have a conversation with someone, and just think "what a &^%$ idiot!"  Today I had a conversation with someone after speaking with his boss who thought VAG was a great idea.  More important, I was referred  by someone who knows the company very well.  This guy was a jerk.  I look forward to the day when VAG is sold for a lot of money and their business tanks.  With their attitude and closed mind, it will be only a matter of time that they fail.   The sad part is his boss has no idea that many people also think the company has a cool CEO and a real SOB for their head of sales and business development.  I predict he will not last.

This is a beautiful photo by Tomas Loewy. He wrote the following: “I really, really had that feeling at that moment you WERE the happiest person in the world. You couldn’t believe it, although you believed it. You never expected it to be this big. You (maybe) dreamed of it, but it was overwhelming. I felt that, I loved it, and that’s why i photographed you in your unique emotional state. Many years of hard work and whatever else came with your track to where you were/are then and now … released in one single moment.” #TheLifeCube #ENVISIONTheLifeCube #artartatburningmanartatburningmanbm2013bmartburningman2013burningmanartburningmanburningmanlifecubeskeeterTheLifeCubeThe #buringman #BM2013 #Burningman #thelifecubeartprojectatburningman #lifecubethelifecubeprojectlifecubeprojectAngelinaChristina #lifecubeproject #lifecubeproject #wishcube #skeeter #brc13 #blackrockcity #lifecube #artburningman #lifecube #scottcohen #TheLifeCube #BurningMan #tomaslowey

LIFE IS GOOD!  We were able to secure a flat bed truck from a local dealer today.  This makes Gordy very happy.  It will be so much easier to bring the pre-assembled panels out to the playa now.  In addition, I am juggling the Early Admin passes.  It has been a bit of a challenge, but in the end, everything will work out just fine.  Yesterday I was able to get through most of the stuff on my list – still a few things to do/get…but what’s the worry — we do not leave ’til sunrise on Sunday! Kickstarter has been great to work with.  There is one supporter we have not been able to track down, and I have been going back and forth with their customer service.  Not perfect by any means, but the platform did provide a way for friends and family to make contributions to and connect with the project. Please Please – If you read this, and you’re not going to Burning Man, send your wishes and I will make sure they get deposited into The Life Cube. #artatburningman #bm2012 #BurningMan #TheLifeCube

Dear Supporters of TLC V2 project on Kickstarter:  I do not think it is possible to thank all you enough. Today we were listed as one of the most popular projects on Kickstarter.  It has been a super-positive experience to receive such overwhelming encouragement, caring thoughts, messages and emails as we move to the end of the road to raising funds, and approach the time when I leave for Reno, then Tahoe, and finally Black Rock City, where we will complete this part of our journey.  Please please send your wishes to thelifecube@gmail.com (Subject:  Wish for Life Cube).  You are all fantastic and I greatly appreciate your support. skeeter Artist, The Life Cube #art #TheLifeCube #Cubelifecubelifecubeprojectlifecubelifecubeproject #Burningman #artatburningman #wishcube #bm2012 #skeeter #artartatburningmanartatburningmanbm2011bm2012BM2012BurningManburningman2011BurningMan2011artburningman2012burningmanartburningmanburningmanlifecubeskeeterTheLifeCubeThe #TheLifeCubeV2 #BurningMan

Last year there were over 100 people that helped with design, pre-playa build, playa construction, burn, and clean-up.  There were over 600 supporters that donated money to our project (many who never heard of Burning Man but wanted to offer support to the art), and 1000s celebrated the burning of The Life Cube at Burning Man in Black Rock City.  There were tons of photographs taken by friends.  We sent out picture books to the financial backers of The Life Cube at Burning Man and thought I would share.  If you would like a  copy of the book, feel free to email or contact me on Facebook. Love, skeeter #art #TheLifeCube #burningmanburningman #thelifecubeartprojectatburningman #artatburningman #bm2012 #skeeter #BM2012 #blackrockcity #TLCV2 #lifecube #artburningman #TheLifeCube #TheLifeCubeV2 #BurningMan

ENVISION: The Life Cube – Rendering & Isometric Views http://thelifecube.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/envisionthelifecube-rendering-isometric-views/ ENVISION: The Life Cube – Construction & Framing Plans http://thelifecube.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/envision-the-life-cube-construction-framing-plans/ ENVISION: The Life Cube – Elevations http://thelifecube.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/envision-the-life-cube-elevations/ ENVISION: The Life Cube – Kit of Parts http://thelifecube.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/envisionthelifecube-kit-of-parts/ ENVISION: The Life Cube – Proposed Construction Details http://thelifecube.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/envisionthelifecube-proposed-construction-details/ ENVISION: The Life Cube – Color Rendering http://thelifecube.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/envisionthelifecube-colorendering ENVISION: The Life Cube – 3D Video #art #ENVISIONTheLifeCube #blackrockcity #artprojectatburningman #artburningman #artatburningman

The Life Cube Blog/Website (www.thelifecube.org) needs to be updated and made better (organize the content, add digital wish-sticks, upload stories, videos, and pics). 2013 is a year we plan to create urban installations of Life Cubes. Contact if you know someone that might want to volunteer to help communicate what TLC Project is all about and share the vision. Thanks for your interest and continued support. Much love, skeeter #BM2013 #thelifecubeorg #skeeter #blackrockcity #wwwthelifecubeorg #artburningman #TheLifeCube

Amazing customer service yesterday from REI, EMS & Amazon. Mediocre from B&H, and terrible terrible really bad from Best Buy. It is amazing after all these years how some companies are so good at eCRM, and some have not a clue on customer service and have such a poor social media strategy. After all the screwing around going to Best Buy, finding out they had a poor selection and no knowledgeable sales staff, and then finding that the cost was more than buying online – this became an easy choice. On the other front, REI and EMS both got money from me. Their customer service was outstanding. Easy return, total expert staff — can not say enough good things about both of them. I also had the most unpleasant experience with Best Buy. In fact, just as I am writing this post, I finally received a call from customer service. This was bad! This was really bad. I would have paid more to get the camera from a store. I loke electronic stores. I like to be able to go in, see and touch products. I want to talk to a sales person – hell, I am happy to pay a little more for the piece of mind to get to play with something before I buy — The folks at Best Buy DO NOT GET IT!!! So — at the end, I ordered from Amazon. But when placing the order – it processed it to be delivered on the 24th – but the confirmation came back on the 25th. I went to the site, clicked to chat and the customer service person went in — found the problem, apologized, offered free shipping and a guaranteed I would have it before I leave town. So at the end of the day — I experienced the best and the worst with regard to customer care. I expect that Best Buy will fall the way Borders did — it is fine to be more expensive — and many will pay for the service, but you need to have service. REI and EMS have hired young professional people. They are available at all sorts of weird hours. Sure, I could have found what I bought for less money from some other online retailer – but piece of mind and the ability to go to the store is a good thing. Those are my thoughts and observations. #EMS #customercare #bestbuy #ecommerce #customerexperience #borders #customerservice #AMazon #REI

The ‘Evolution’ of Advertising – Fri Jun 29, 5:04 PM ET CANNES, FRANCE "Evolution" was the watchword at the 2007 Cannes Lions last week, as 11,000 delegates from the ad industry gathered in the South of France to celebrate creativity and contemplate how the business and the award shows that honor it will evolve in the future. The Dove viral sensation "Evolution" took top honors in both the Cyber and Film categories, pointing to the colliding worlds of consumer-powered digital distribution and brand building. It’s the first time in the festival’s history that the same execution won in both categories. "It’s a big idea, beautiful execution and a powerful story for Dove to tell," said Bob Scarpelli, jury president of the Film and Press Lions and chairman and CCO at DDB Worldwide. "We believe in the power and the goodness of the idea." While the spot’s viral history–it began as an Internet video before being shown a limited number of times on TV–wasn’t the key factor in the Grand Prix discussion, Scarpelli, who prior to the festival encouraged organizers to recognize viral entries in the Film competition, noted that its viral beginnings were considered. "The jury thought it was the best advertising in the whole show," added Brazilian judge Celso Loducca, president of Loducca Publicidade in Sao Paulo. "It doesn’t matter that it got started on the Internet." In the double Grand Prix winner, the ad industry has a helpful guidepost to navigate the future where consumers will choose the brand messages they interact with and often power the distribution of. Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto, used time-lapse photography to show the transformation of an average woman into a glamorous billboard model using beauty stylists and Photoshop enhancements. Since Ogilvy uploaded "Evolution" to YouTube last October, it has been watched 3.7 million times. Dove "Evolution" won out over three more traditional TV spot gold winners in contention for the top Film prize: "I Feel Pretty" for Nike by Weiden + Kennedy in Portland, Ore.; "Paint" for Sony Bravia by Fallon London, in which explosions of color paint rip through an empty apartment building; and "The Power of Wind" for Wind Energy Initiative from Nordpol+, Hamburg, Germany, which visually represents the wind as a giant whose power is misunderstood. Thor Santisiri, chairman and ecd of TBWA\Thailand, said Dove represents an idea that can travel well beyond the single execution. "It’s a bigger idea for a bigger brand," he said. "It’s not advertising for a product. It’s a huge brand idea." In total, the Film jury awarded 12 gold Lions, 17 silver and 50 bronze. The U.S. took four gold, six silver and 16 bronze. U.S. gold winners were Coca-Cola’s "Videogame" from Wieden + Kennedy in Portland; Volkswagen’s "Safe Happens" campaign from Crispin; and Nike’s "I Feel Pretty," which won two gold honors, one for best use of music and one in the clothing, footwear and accessories category. The Titanium and Integrated Lions’ jury, led by jury president Alex Bogusky, CCO of MDC’s Crispin Porter + Bogusky, awarded the Titanium Grand Prix to Crispin’s Burger King-branded Xbox video games. Rather than give them away as a promotional exercise, BK turned them into a revenue generator, charging $3.99 for them. It has sold over 3 million copies. "Creatives from all over the world will look at it and say, ‘I wish I had done that,’" said Titanium and Integrated juror Colleen DeCourcy, chief experience officer at JWT in New York. The Titanium and Integrated Lions jury also singled out another effort that began with a product enhancement with its Grand Prix choice for Integrated campaign. The top prize went to VegaOlmosPonce in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which helped Unilever not just market its new body spray, Axe 3, but create it. In addition to the top prize, the jury awarded three Titanium and three Integrated Lions. "If you cook some marketing right into [product development], you can do good things," said Bogusky, who explained that the choices send a signal that the future of marketing communications can be enhanced by greater and earlier collaboration between agencies and their clients. The festival’s other awards competitions honored several entries that moved beyond interruptive messaging to find new ways to engage consumers. Rather than focus on typical online brand sites and initiatives, the Cyber jury sought campaigns that attracted consumers to them and encouraged them to spread the word in the manner of "Evolution." While Ogilvy used the hopeful message that women need to question society’s preconceptions of beauty, "Heidies 15 Minutes of Fame" from FarFar in Stockholm, Sweden, tapped sex appeal and user involvement to attract a following by showing a pair of underwear-clad models staging a "takeover" of diesel.com. The Cyber jury took an even more radical departure in giving R/GA a Grand Prix for its work on the Nike+ application, which straddles the world of product design and branding. R/GA also won a Titanium Lion for the effort. Tom Eslinger, interactive CCO of Saatchi & Saatchi and Cyber jury president, said Nike+, which links the iPod to a chip inserted in Nike shoes to track and share runs, represents the future face of advertising. R/GA developed the technology that uploads the running data to a social-networking Web site it also built. "It’s product design meets viral," said Eslinger. Many agency executives said the changing nature of media made classifying executions very difficult. In the year-old Promo lions, for example, jury president Geraldo Rocha Azevedo, president of integrated solutions at Neogama BBH in Brazil, said the jury "could not come up with one conclusive definition." However, nowhere is the blurring of the marketing world more acute than in the Titanium competition, which has been recast several times since it was created four years ago as a way for the festival to award "breakthrough ideas." It was reintroduced as an integrated award in 2005 and revised last year so that the entries were not restricted to a specific number of executions and types of channels used. Other Titanium Lions included Tap Project, a Unicef effort by Droga5 to raise money for clean drinking water, and "Earth Hour," a Leo Burnett campaign in Sydney, Australia, for the World Wildlife Fund that dramatized energy conservation by encouraging residents of that city to turn off their lights for an hour. While much of the delegation and jury members acknowledged that the definition of the Titanium and Integrated awards is unsettled, Bogusky noted that the jury is "trying to solve some of the confusion" with the two Grand Prix winners, BK games for innovation–innovation being what then-jury president Dan Wieden in 2003 was originally looking to reward–and Axe 3 for integrated campaign. "Titanium doesn’t mean the best, it doesn’t mean best of show. It’s a sanctuary for these ideas that don’t fit anywhere else," he said. The first Agency Network of the Year award went to BBDO Worldwide. Saatchi & Saatchi, New York, was named Agency of the Year. Smuggler in New York took home the Palme d’Or. — By Kamau High, Brian Morrissey and Eleftheria Parpis ADWEEK

I’m going to work on a company Dave Moore (CEO 24/7 Media) started a while back.  The company, Ad-Diction, centers around people watching commercials and playing games to recall the details.  Strategy and ecconomics to be worked out.  I have hired Andrei, who I worked with at Game Trust, to redesign the Web site and look at the backend.  I’m setting up meeting with advertsisers, agencies, brand managers, CMO, VP Marketing, and folks that run game portals.  Below is an article Dave emailed me. More marketers seek attention of online-game lovers Advertisers are increasingly interested in reaching the diverse group of Web users who solve puzzles, play word games and decipher mind benders online. The New York Times  – By Louise Story Published: January 24, 2007, 6:21 AM PST Casual game sites have learned how to play the ad game. The sites–which offer puzzle and strategy games–once focused on selling the actual games after the dot-com bust drove many advertisers away. But these days, they are becoming popular marketing spots as they begin to accept more branded messages. Last year, advertisers spent about $150 million buying space on casual game sites or in the games themselves, up from $74 million in 2002, according to DFC Intelligence, a game industry research firm in San Diego. This is all possible, of course, because advertisers are increasingly interested in reaching the diverse group of Web users who like to solve puzzles, play word games and decipher mind benders online. In December, about 65.9 million people played online games, which include puzzle games and action video games. That was up 13 percent from December 2005, when 58.4 million clicked online for a quick round, according to comScore Networks, an Internet research firm. While traditional action games still draw more men than women, casual games are more popular with women and offer the kind of friendly online experience that ad executives say companies want to be associated with. Big Fish Games, a casual game site known for its game Mystery Case Files, for example, says about 75 percent of its visitors each month are women. And, according to Forrester Research, about 51 percent of people over age 30 play online games. "The gamer is actually a much more of a mainstream consumer than you may think," said Shar VanBoskirk, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. "Consumers are really filtering out advertiser messages, and games are one way that they’re actually still engaged." Redefining "free" PopCap Games, a company known for the Bejeweled puzzle game, is testing ads in the premiere versions of its games. Like many online games, PopCap’s are available in two versions–a free basic version and a fancier version for a fee, which it calls premiere. Traditionally, Web surfers tried the fancy version free for an hour before deciding whether to buy it. Now, under a test PopCap is running with its game Zuma, consumers can download the fancy version and play it without ever paying–if they are willing to see ads. AOL Games, a unit of Time Warner, is testing ads in the one-hour trial version of its deluxe games, said Ralph Rivera, vice president and general manager of AOL Games. About 95 percent of people who try games do not end up paying for the deluxe version, he said, and AOL would like to reach those users in some way. "Within AOL, games is only second to e-mail and IM as far as time spent per user, so you’re talking about a very highly engaged audience," Rivera said. "Any time you have a highly engaged audience, you have advertisers who are looking to get in front of that audience." Big Fish Games charges for downloads of games and also carries about 200 free puzzle and strategy games online, with ads. Starting last month, visitors who clicked on their first free online game of the day got a Sponsor Select pop-up screen giving them a choice of ads for that game. About 25 percent of the people who play games on Big Fish have chosen to pick their advertisers, according to AWS Convergence Technologies, the company that operates Sponsor Select. Choosing a sponsor On Tuesday, for example, visitors could select either Better Homes and Gardens, Orchard Bank MasterCard or Windows Live Search to be the sole advertiser in the first game they played. The rest of the games they played showed them a variety of ads. "You’re going to get ads no matter what," said Paul Thelen, chief executive of Big Fish Games. "The advantage of Sponsor Select is it’s more likely to be relevant to you."  Big Fish started offering free games online a year and a half ago. Four years ago, after the dot-com bust, it was not possible to make much money from ad-supported games, Thelen said. Now that is changing. While Big Fish still makes most of its money from user-paid downloads, its fastest-growing revenue area is its advertising. Whereas advertising in games used to be specialized, involving a lot of negotiation, the growing number of ad options for casual games is making game advertising more accessible to brands that once focused on traditional advertising, ad executives said. "You don’t have to be as adventurous or as bold to make it happen now," said Art Sindlinger, vice president and activation director at Starcom USA, a Publicis Groupe media-buying agency. One appealing aspect of casual games is that players often start friendly dialogues with each other, and brands can associate themselves with that community building, said Saneel Radia, vice president and group director of Play, a gaming division of Denuo, which is part of the Publicis Groupe. "If you look at the communication on a board of pool in Yahoo Games, it’s, ‘Oh, where’s your family from?’" Radia said. "Go to XBox Live, and it’s, ‘I’m going to crush you.’" Some advertisers have taken casual gaming a step further, creating their own casual games–sometimes called advergames–and posting them on their Web sites.  When the Dodge Caliber came out last spring, the Chrysler Group, part of DaimlerChrysler, posted five casual games on its site, and one called Caliber Buzz was played three million times within a month, said Vanessa Kelley, manager of cross-brand gaming at Chrysler. Online games are now a regular part of Chrysler car debuts, she said.  "It’s the wave," Kelley said. "These people don’t watch television all that much. They are online. They’re playing games." Entire contents, Copyright © 2007 The New York Times. All rights reserved.