Not the Easter Bunny I Knew

This YouTube clip aired on CNN while I running at the gym this morning. Since my work has blocked YouTube, I had to find it on another site. Here's the link to the clip. What a brave little bunny.

Being of the entrepreneurial mind-set, this clip makes me wonder what the market-place would look like if every small business treated their biggest Goliath of a competitor this way.

Damn Interesting

A friend sent me this link: DamnInteresting.com. A great name for a great site. Check it out.

It's a catchy name, and is exactly what it says it is: Damn Interesting. Wouldn't it be great if everything in life could be so clear?

Going Postal

The Washington Post wants us to think, there are three post offices.

First, there is the post office everyone loves to hate: The rate-raising-long-lined-junk-mail-delivering-bureaucratic-government-run-stale-office organization. Second, is the post office that runs one of the world’s most complex automation systems, and delivers 580 million pieces of mail a day with remarkable accuracy to every address in the nation, six days every week. Third, is the post office that delivers a hand-written letter from an old friend, a tax refund from the IRS, or an anticipated acceptance from the college admittance office. This is the office that gives the tiniest towns their own proud postmarks. It's the post office that found you even when the address under your name was so incredibly incorrect it was laughable.

Today, Louisville’s Courier Journal published that in 2006, the post office “moved more than 102 billion pieces of advertising and bulk mail, 11.6 billion pounds in all, compared with 97.6 billion pieces of first-class mail weighing 4.4 billion pounds.” And recently, I learned that more than 800,000 people are employed by the USPS, making it the 3rd largest employer in the US second only to The Department of Defense and, you got it, Wal-Mart.

If you are like me, then this means that 72% of the poundage moved by some of the more than 800,000 people was immediately thrown in the recycling. 72%!! I didn’t read it, I didn’t open it, and I probably didn’t even check to see if it was addressed to me. I simply tossed it.

Add everyone else like me up and the result is a HUGE amount of waste both in dollars and paper (also dollars.)

There is probably more than one solution to this grossness, but I strongly believe that privatizing the postal delivery is the best. It will reduce inefficiency. It will make the experience of mailing more enjoyable. With time it will entirely eliminate the entire first image painted by the Washington Post. As for the second and third images of being a successful logistics company and nostalgic service provider? Well clearly, the private entities will have to do those as well. Otherwise they will not succeed.

What do you think?

Interviews - Married in an hour

Many of you know I have been looking for a new job. Some of you know that looking for this new job has become more like a second career.

What do I want to do, you ask? Well, I want to help make a small entrepreneurial company grow to become a successful one. Then I want to start my own and do that same. I want to get experience in sales, business development, operations, strategy, and management. I'm really not interested in gaining accounting experience. That's why there is outsourcing.

As part of my figuring-out-what-I-want-to-do process, I have taken up lots of reading. I have done this partly because I simply don't have enough to do in my current job to stay busy, but mostly because I want to be better informed. One of the blogs I read daily is written by Seth Godin, author of The Purple Cow, Small is the New Big, The Dip, and many other highly-read business books.

Today, I found an entry he posted in September: "The End of The Job Interview". Since I have been interviewing notoriously, his message hit home. Instead of making a decision after a 1-2 hour awkward conversation, he writes, hire the person for a task. If they succeed, hire them for a weekend. Then make your decision.

Would you marry someone after talking for an hour? Of course not! Then why hire them?

The first thing I'm going to do when I'm hired is begin work in enhancing the process for my new company. Tack on Human Resources as something else I want to do.