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Quality and Innovation

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  • Authentithesis

    If you’ve read any of my other posts, especially the most recent one on authenticity in customer service, you’ve probably gathered that I have a high degree of respect for personal authenticity as a dimension of quality. After all, according to ISO 8402, quality is the “totality of characteristics of an entity that bear upon…

  • Getting to Great: Authenticity in Customer Service

    A Facebook friend wrote a status update yesterday that caught my eye. He was ranting about an interaction he had with a customer service rep, saying “Does ‘customer service rep’ mean liar nowadays? They B.S. so much they should be in politics. And returning phone calls? Forget it.” His experience, as well my own recent…

  • Zen and the Art of Social Media Blackout

    In May, when I decided to disconnect from checking social media and email over 500 times a day to write Disconnected: Technology Addiction & the Search for Authenticity in Virtual Life, I had no idea how contemporary the idea of disconnecting from social media would become. Give me your Droids, your iPhones, your Twitter feeds…

  • Quality, Expectations, Value & Harrisonburg Bars

    I met a guy named Brent at the Artful Dodger in Harrisonburg, VA last Friday. He’s behind @hburgnews on twitter, so I started following him, and through his tweets found a neat blog post detailing one person’s experience with Harrisonburg bars: In Vino Veritas: A Meditation on Value by Andrew Jenner, posted on February 11,…

  • I’ve Converted to OrderTopianism

    Yesterday was really a fantastic day for me. In addition to starting it off right with a total solar eclipse at 2:11am ET, January 15th will go down in history as the first time I placed an order using OrderTopia. It will definitely not be the last time! OrderTopia is a social, cloud-based ordering system…

  • Disciplined Creative Time

    I think every blog has at least one post that says “sorry I haven’t posted in a while.” Today is that day for me. I started professor-ing in August and have been on the Manager’s Schedule (huh? what does that mean? — see http://atomic-temporary-5081318.wpcomstaging.com/2009/08/14/makers-meeting-managers-meeting) ever since. By the time I get to Maker’s time, which is…

  • Maker’s Meeting, Manager’s Meeting

    In July, Paul Graham posted an article called “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule“. He points out that people who make things, like software engineers and writers, are on a completely different schedule than managers – and that by imposing the manager’s schedule on the developers, there is an associated cost. Makers simply can’t be as productive…