Post sale of Dimestore Media , Madeleine & I have been traveling a lot, with plans to travel even more in the years to come. Madeleine’s mom recently was notified that she is going to exhibit her art work in Paris. Since I had heard about Open Skies and have been looking for a better airline to fly business class, I suggested that we try Open Skies. So we booked our flights, and they booked theirs. Problem is that Madeleine forgot that FeedingNYC, the charity I work with to deliver food to the shelters in NYC is the Tues before Thanksgiving. So, I contact Open Skies – not an easy thing to do. I also send an email. I get a response on Twitter, saying that they will have someone contact me to help. Now, given that we purchased 4 round trip tickets, that we did it direct with no travel agent, and that they could expect to get a lot more business from me, you would think they would help make the change on the return (this is over 2 months in advance. The answer from their call center was “not unless you pay a penalty and a change fee” — total cost: approx $500! Well, I might end up paying it – but this is a perfect example of short sighted business behavior. Months or years from now when they are wondering why business is not so good, or why customers are not that loyal, I will send a link to this post to the CEO and head of marketing.  Failure of customer service to use good judgment to court future customers is dumb. Companies pay millions of dollars to create a brand, and all that money and branding is damaged by a failure to understand that sometimes you help a customer by doing what is right. Open Skies are you there?  Are you listening?  You can be sure that between the 500+ friends on Facebook and 255 followers on Twitter http://twitter.com/DIMESTORE and my BLOG, and all my contacts will hear. 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Amazing how smart or stupid marketers are.  If I was spending $2-3 Million for a spot, soon as it ran, it would be on the Internet.  Bud was easy, FedEx stupid, and Bridgestone should have been a bit more prominent. More important is the lack of quality and taste.  Most of the ads are mediocre, and many lack good taste.  Help me, please show some smart, well orchestrated, brilliant ads in the 2nd half.

I brought a camera and took a few pics, but most of the time, I just handed my camera to a friend or someone who was around and let them take photos.  There are a ton of other pictures and some movie footage coming from others as well, but even so, I thought it was time to sort through what was on my camera and post some pictures now.  What a fun time! This slideshow requires JavaScript.skeeter #art #TheLifeCube #burningmanburningman #thelifecubeartprojectatburningman #artatburningman #bm2012 #skeeter #BM2012 #blackrockcity #TLCV2 #lifecube #artburningman #TheLifeCube #TheLifeCubeV2 #BurningMan

Partying on the Cube version 1.0 and many more photos are now available on Flickr! I also created a photo pool called “The Life Cube” if you’d like to add your own photos of you enjoying the Life Cube so we can share them together. #thelifecubeprojectlifecubeproject #flickr #lifecube #photos #BurningMan

This AM I rec’d a Google Web Alert for: "natasha cohen": The End of America? | BU Today – During a question-and-answer period after the speech, Natasha Cohen (CAS’12) asked Bacevich how internal change might be brought about. … Turns out it is my daughter Natasha Cohen (smile).

Dave has a tradition of swimming with his friends the number of laps that you are old.  Dave celebrates his 56th birthday this week and I was invited to join.  He is in amazing shape.   Triathalons, marathons, swims around Manhatten, and now training to swim the English Channel.  Anyway – I made it.  Photo is on the side.

Andrei sent this to me while we are working on  (soon to be re-named) Ad-diction.com from YouTubers to get ad money share By Tim Weber Business editor, BBC News website, Davos More clicks will soon mean more money for YouTube contributors People who upload their own films to video-sharing website YouTube will soon get a share of the ad revenue. YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would "reward creativity". The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film. YouTube has more than 70m users a month and was recently bought by Google. The offer applies only to people who own the full copyright of the videos that they are uploading to the YouTube website. Founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen made $1.65bn with YouTube The company, which Google bought in November last year for $1.65bn, was currently working on "audio fingerprinting" technologies to identify copyrighted material, Mr Hurley said in a session on social networking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Speaking to the BBC after the session, he declined to give further details, saying that YouTube was still working out the technology and processes involved – both for the rewards system and the video clip advertising system. But he confirmed that the various features would be rolled out one by one over the next few months. "There won’t be one big release," he said. The audience of the YouTube website will not have to put up with overly long "pre-roll" adverts. Mr Hurley said a clip of three seconds length was one of the options, although the details had not been worked out yet. Other video sharing sites such as Revver already split advertising revenues with users uploading original content, but only YouTube has managed to attract an audience measuring in the tens of millions. Mr Hurley said the fact that YouTube had not had a revenue sharing model was one of the reasons for its success, as that had allowed the website to focus on its key strength, making it easy to share videos with others. YouTube has repeatedly clashed with film studios and music publishers over copyrighted material that has been uploaded to the website. The company says that it is quick to remove copyrighted material on the site that has been brought to its attention. Since the takeover by Google, YouTube has also negotiated a string of deals with large media groups, which also involve some revenue sharing. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/6305957.stm Published: 2007/01/27 16:26:48 GMT © BBC MMVII

So I went with the CEO and Founder of lead fusion for breakfast, oatmeal and grits – but a look at the menu of this chef/owner restaurant makes this a must go back. Randy Gruber has quite an interesting selection – some highlights include a salad with a fresh oregano lemon vinaigrette, grilled Portuguese spiced shrimp on fennel radish salad and diced avocado with lemon, pan seared calamari steak with crispy capers, garlic, lemon, parsley and baby grape tomatoes , rigatoni with broccoli rabe, Andoulle sausage, garlic, pine nuts, chili flakes, white wine, cram roasted tomatoes. Mains include a pesto grilled halibut over lemon thyme risotto with grilled aspergus and tomato basil salsa, pan seared sea scallops with red lentils, sauteed spinach and orange carrot ginger sauce, a seared duck breast and Israeli couscous with golden raisins, dried cranberries, pine nuts, sauteed string beans and fig sauce. And last, sides including polenta with vanilla clove honey and caramelized onion mashed potatoes. Ummmmm. Got go got to go back.

The clock is ticking to switch. Yes, me, one of the first 100,000 blackberry users will probably move to Apple someday in the future.

My good friend Steven C sent this to me and 2 others with a note about learning sales from us. He is one of the most terrific sale people I know…and let’s face it folks, I’ve said it before, I am just a sales guy. Anyway, good read and information. Harvard Business Review – HBR Blog Network Seven Personality Traits of Top Salespeople by Steve W. Martin June 27, 2011 If you ask an extremely successful salesperson, “What makes you different from the average sales rep?” you will most likely get a less-than-accurate answer, if any answer at all. Frankly, the person may not even know the real answer because most successful salespeople are simply doing what comes naturally. Over the past decade, I have had the privilege of interviewing thousands of top business-to-business salespeople who sell for some of the world’s leading companies. I’ve also administered personality tests to 1,000 of them. My goal was to measure their five main personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and negative emotionality) to better understand the characteristics that separate them their peers. The personality tests were given to high technology and business services salespeople as part of sales strategy workshops I was conducting. In addition, tests were administered at Presidents Club meetings (the incentive trip that top salespeople are awarded by their company for their outstanding performance). The responses were then categorized by percentage of annual quota attainment and classified into top performers, average performers, and below average performers categories. The test results from top performers were then compared against average and below average performers. The findings indicate that key personality traits directly influence top performers’ selling style and ultimately their success. Below, you will find the main key personality attributes of top salespeople and the impact of the trait on their selling style. 1. Modesty. Contrary to conventional stereotypes that successful salespeople are pushy and egotistical, 91 percent of top salespeople had medium to high scores of modesty and humility. Furthermore, the results suggest that ostentatious salespeople who are full of bravado alienate far more customers than they win over. Selling Style Impact: Team Orientation. As opposed to establishing themselves as the focal point of the purchase decision, top salespeople position the team (presales technical engineers, consulting, and management) that will help them win the account as the centerpiece. 2. Conscientiousness. Eighty-five percent of top salespeople had high levels of conscientiousness, whereby they could be described as having a strong sense of duty and being responsible and reliable. These salespeople take their jobs very seriously and feel deeply responsible for the results. Selling Style Impact: Account Control. The worst position for salespeople to be in is to have relinquished account control and to be operating at the direction of the customer, or worse yet, a competitor. Conversely, top salespeople take command of the sales cycle process in order to control their own destiny. 3. Achievement Orientation. Eighty-four percent of the top performers tested scored very high in achievement orientation. They are fixated on achieving goals and continuously measure their performance in comparison to their goals. Selling Style Impact: Political Orientation. During sales cycles, top sales, performers seek to understand the politics of customer decision-making. Their goal orientation instinctively drives them to meet with key decision-makers. Therefore, they strategize about the people they are selling to and how the products they’re selling fit into the organization instead of focusing on the functionality of the products themselves. 4. Curiosity. Curiosity can be described as a person’s hunger for knowledge and information. Eighty-two percent of top salespeople scored extremely high curiosity levels. Top salespeople are naturally more curious than their lesser performing counterparts. Selling Style Impact: Inquisitiveness. A high level of inquisitiveness correlates to an active presence during sales calls. An active presence drives the salesperson to ask customers difficult and uncomfortable questions in order to close gaps in information. Top salespeople want to know if they can win the business, and they want to know the truth as soon as possible. 5. Lack of Gregariousness. One of the most surprising differences between top salespeople and those ranking in the bottom one-third of performance is their level of gregariousness (preference for being with people and friendliness). Overall, top performers averaged 30 percent lower gregariousness than below average performers. Selling Style Impact: Dominance. Dominance is the ability to gain the willing obedience of customers such that the salesperson’s recommendations and advice are followed. The results indicate that overly friendly salespeople are too close to their customers and have difficulty establishing dominance. 6. Lack of Discouragement. Less than 10 percent of top salespeople were classified as having high levels of discouragement and being frequently overwhelmed with sadness. Conversely, 90 percent were categorized as experiencing infrequent or only occasional sadness. Selling Style Impact: Competitiveness. In casual surveys I have conducted throughout the years, I have found that a very high percentage of top performers played organized sports in high school. There seems to be a correlation between sports and sales success as top performers are able to handle emotional disappointments, bounce back from losses, and mentally prepare themselves for the next opportunity to compete. 7. Lack of Self-Consciousness. Self-consciousness is the measurement of how easily someone is embarrassed. The byproduct of a high level of self-consciousness is bashfulness and inhibition. Less than five percent of top performers had high levels of self-consciousness. Selling Style Impact: Aggressiveness. Top salespeople are comfortable fighting for their cause and are not afraid of rankling customers in the process. They are action-oriented and unafraid to call high in their accounts or courageously cold call new prospects. Not all salespeople are successful. Given the same sales tools, level of education, and propensity to work, why do some salespeople succeed where others fail? Is one better suited to sell the product because of his or her background? Is one more charming or just luckier? The evidence suggests that the personalities of these truly great salespeople play a critical role in determining their success. Steve W. Martin teaches sales strategy at the USC Marshall School of Business. His latest book on sales linguistics is Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology: How to Penetrate the C-level Executive Suite and Convince Company Leaders to Buy. #Harvard #HBR #sales #topsalespeople

HEALTH JOURNAL APRIL 5, 2011 The Sleepless Elite Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done By MELINDA BECK Melinda Beck explains why for a small number of people getting a full night of sleep is a waste of time and the reasons behind it. For a small group of people—perhaps just 1% to 3% of the population—sleep is a waste of time. Natural “short sleepers,” as they’re officially known, are night owls and early birds simultaneously. They typically turn in well after midnight, then get up just a few hours later and barrel through the day without needing to take naps or load up on caffeine. They are also energetic, outgoing, optimistic and ambitious, according to the few researchers who have studied them. The pattern sometimes starts in childhood and often runs in families. While it’s unclear if all short sleepers are high achievers, they do have more time in the day to do things, and keep finding more interesting things to do than sleep, often doing several things at once. Nobody knows how many natural short sleepers are out there. “There aren’t nearly as many as there are people who think they’re short sleepers,” says Daniel J. Buysse, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional group. Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr. Buysse says. The rest end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of U.S. adults who get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, according to a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To date, only a handful of small studies have looked at short sleepers—in part because they’re hard to find. They rarely go to sleep clinics and don’t think they have a disorder. A few studies have suggested that some short sleepers may have hypomania, a mild form of mania with racing thoughts and few inhibitions. “These people talk fast. They never stop. They’re always on the up side of life,” says Dr. Buysse. He was one of the authors of a 2001 study that had 12 confirmed short sleepers and 12 control subjects keep diaries and complete numerous questionnaires about their work, sleep and living habits.One survey dubbed “Attitude for Life” that was actually a test for hypomania. The natural short sleepers scored twice as high as the controls. There is currently no way people can teach themselves to be short sleepers. Still, scientists hope that by studying short sleepers, they can better understand how the body regulates sleep and why sleep needs vary so much in humans. View Full Image Matt Colins Normal Sleeper Most adults have normal sleep needs, functioning best with 7 to 9 hours of sleep, and about two-thirds of Americans regularly get it. Children fare better with 8 to 12 hours, and elderly people may need only 6 to 7. Wannabe Short Sleeper One-third of Americans are sleep-deprived, regularly getting less than 7 hours a night, which puts them at higher risk of diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and other health problems. Short Sleeper Short sleepers, about 1% to 3% of the population, function well on less than 6 hours of sleep without being tired during the day. They tend to be unusually energetic and outgoing. Geneticists who spotted a gene variation in short sleepers were able to replicate it in mice—which needed less sleep than usual, too. Related Sleep Videos What Is a Good Night’s Sleep Worth to You? Worth It?: Sleep Tracker Elite Using A Sleep Monitor To Track Healthy Sleep News Hub: Why Some Couples Sleep in Separate Beds “My long-term goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate the sleep pathways without damaging our health,” says human geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California-San Francisco. “Everybody can use more waking hours, even if you just watch movies.” Dr. Fu was part of a research team that discovered a gene variation, hDEC2, in a pair of short sleepers in 2009. They were studying extreme early birds when they noticed that two of their subjects, a mother and daughter, got up naturally about 4 a.m. but also went to bed past midnight. Genetic analyses spotted one gene variation common to them both. The scientists were able to replicate the gene variation in a strain of mice and found that the mice needed less sleep than usual, too. News of their finding spurred other people to write the team, saying they were natural short sleepers and volunteering to be studied. The researchers are recruiting more candidates and hope to find more gene variations they have in common. Potential candidates for the gene study are sent multiple questionnaires and undergo a long structured phone interview. Those who make the initial screening wear monitors to track their sleep patterns at home. Christopher Jones, a University of Utah neurologist and sleep scientist who oversees the recruiting, says there is one question that is more revealing than anything else: When people do have a chance to sleep longer, on weekends or vacation, do they still sleep only five or six hours a night? People who sleep more when they can are not true short sleepers, he says. That All-Nighter Feels Good—Temporarily Sleep deprivation makes most people grumpy. It’s sometimes used as a form of torture. Oddly enough, it can also bring on temporary euphoria, according to a study in the journal Neuroscience last month. Researchers had 14 healthy young adults stay up all night and all the next day and then compared their reactions with 13 subjects who had slept normally. In one test, sleepless subjects asked to rate a series of images uniformly saw them as more pleasant or positive. “We saw this strange lopsided shift,” says lead author Matthew Walker, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California-Berkeley. Brain scans also showed that the subjects who had pulled all-nighters had heightened activity in the mesolimbic pathway, a brain circuit driven by dopamine, a neurotransmitter that typically regulates feelings of pleasure, addiction and cravings. The boost of dopamine after an all-nighter may help explain why sleep deprivation can alleviate major depression in about 60% of patients, although the effect is only temporary. “As soon as they get recovery sleep, all that mood elevation is lost,” says Dr. Walker. Could the sleep-deprived brain be somehow compensating for the lack of downtime with a surge of dopamine to keep on going? Scientists don’t yet know. Earlier studies have also shown that sleep deprivation amplifies activity in the amygdala, the primitive emotional center of the brain, and reduces it the prefrontal cortex, where higher, more rational thought occurs. It may be that the brain reverts to a more basic mode of operating when it is sleep deprived, Dr. Walker speculates. Alternatively, he says, “we know that different parts of the brain are more sensitive than others to sleep deprivation. It may be that the prefrontal cortex just goes down first.” Although the feelings of euphoria sound great, Dr. Walker warns that operating more on emotion than reason can be very risky. “You are all gas pedal and no brake,” he says. That can be dangerous, indeed, if you are in a job that requires both long hours and difficult decision making To date, Dr. Jones says he has identified only about 20 true short sleepers, and he says they share some fascinating characteristics. Not only are their circadian rhythms different from most people, so are their moods (very upbeat) and their metabolism (they’re thinner than average, even though sleep deprivation usually raises the risk of obesity). They also seem to have a high tolerance for physical pain and psychological setbacks. “They encounter obstacles, they just pick themselves up and try again,” Dr. Jones says. Some short sleepers say their sleep patterns go back to childhood and some see the same patterns starting in their own kids, such as giving up naps by age 2. As adults, they gravitate to different fields, but whatever they do, they do full bore, Dr. Jones says. “Typically, at the end of a long, structured phone interview, they will admit that they’ve been texting and surfing the Internet and doing the crossword puzzle at the same time, all on less than six hours of sleep,” says Dr. Jones. “There is some sort of psychological and physiological energy to them that we don’t understand.” Drs. Jones and Fu stress that there is no genetic test for short sleeping. Ultimately, they expect to find that many different genes play a role, which may in turn reveal more about the complex systems that regulate sleep in humans. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Leonardo da Vinci were too busy to sleep much, according to historical accounts. Winston Churchill and Thomas Edison came close but they were also fond of taking naps, which may disqualify them as true short sleepers. Nowadays, some short sleepers gravitate to fields like blogging, videogame design and social media, where their sleep habits come in handy. “If I could find a way to do it, I’d never sleep,” says Dave Hatter, a software developer in Fort Wright, Ky. He typically sleeps just four to five hours a night, up from two to three hours a few years ago. “It’s crazy, but it works for me,” says Eleanor Hoffman, an overnight administrator at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York who would rather spend afternoons playing mahjong with friends than sleep anymore than four hours. Sometimes she calls her cousin, Linda Cohen, in Pittsburgh about 4 a.m., since she knows she’ll be wide awake as well—just like they were as kids. “I come to life about 11 at night,” says Mrs. Cohen, who owns a chain of toy stores with her husband and gets up early in the morning with ease. “If I went to bed earlier, I’d feel like half my life was missing.” Are you a short sleeper? For more information on the genetic study, contact Dr. Jones at chris.jones@hsc.utah.edu Write to Melinda Beck at HealthJournal@wsj.com #sleep #sleepless #TheSleeplessElite