I’ve been following the progress of Randy Pausch for the past several months and wanted to introduce this extraordinary man to all of you.  For those of you who don’t know who Randy Pausch is, he was once a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and was recently diagnosed with cancer, he was given 3-6 months to live and he is currently in month 9.  Randy Pausch is really an amazing person and has inspired people all around the nation to live better lives.  Please watch/read the story of Randy Pausch and help spread it, it’s truly a story worth spreading.  I won’t give away too much information about Randy, instead I will let you watch the following the videos:

Randy Pausch, the last lecture at Carnegie Mellon

Randy Pausch an Oprah, Shorter Version of the Last Lecture

Randy Pausch on Time Management

I hope the following videos were both inspiring and touching.  You can find out more about Randy and see more of his videos (including an interview with Diane Sawyer and an appearance before congress) on his website.  You can also follow Randy’s battle with cancer on his day-to-day update page.

Thanks for reading everyone and I hope you will share this story of hope and inspiration with your friends and family.

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I spent a little while playing on compete.com and found the following charts rather interesting.  I decided to compare the trends of a few popular social networking sites such as myspace, twitter, facebook, youtube, and linkedin.  It’s really interesting to see the growth or decline of these sites.  When looking at the graphs ask yourself what may have caused the following trends.  I also added a brief commentary under each graph, I didn’t want to go in too much detail, but still, I gave my 2 cents.

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Every year Harris Interactive conducts a survey of some of the most visible U.S. companies and publishes the survey for the world to see. One of the most interesting findings (and the title of the post) is that the overall reputation of corporate America is going down faster than the stock market (ok fine, maybe just as fast). This is not to say that American’s don’t have faith in corporate America as the Harris survey also shows that consumers are still willing to invest (buy, recommend, etc.) in companies with a strong reputation. I suppose this shouldn’t be too much of a shock right? After all, you probably don’t want to invest in a company with a weak reputation. Here is a brief overview of some of the results and interesting findings from the Harris survey.

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How hard do you really try to make your customers or your users happy?  When someone comes to you with a question or a problem do you say “sorry, that’s not my department,” and transfer them? or do you take charge and go the extra mile to help your customers/users out?  Do you really work hard to make sure that your customers and users are getting what they want?  Is your team working hard to make sure the customers and users are getting what they want?

There are a lot things that you or your company can improve upon, after all, nobody (and no company) is perfect.  You don’t have to be number 1 or even number 2, as long as your customers and users can see that you are trying to get there.  Remember Avis rent-a-car?  They acknowledge that they are not number one, yet they use that to their advantage.  Their tagline was/is, “We’re number 2. We try harder.”  Think about how powerful this tagline is, “we try harder,” wow.  This is probably one of my all time favorite company taglines, and for good reason.  It does not matter if they are number 2 or number 5, the point is the message that they are trying to get accross to their customers, they try harder than everyone else, including the number one guy, now that’s a powerful statement.

Now think about how hard you try now, what do you think would happen if you tried a little bit harder? and then a little bit harder than that?

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The other day I was walking around San Francisco, yes just walking around, and I noticed that when I would pass people by on the street that they would always look down at the floor when they passed me. It didn’t matter how big or small the person or what gender they were, they just avoided eye contact and stared at the ground. I try to look every person in the eye when I walk by them, not stare at them, but make eye contact and acknowledge their presence. Have you ever noticed how often people look at the ground when you talk to them, or break away eye contact and stare at something else?

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