Madison Who’s Who Blog

In an effort to showcase new ideas and innovations in marketing, Madison Who’s Who brings you this article authored by Steve Rubenstein Special to The San Francisco Chronicle.

A dozen guys were standing around a San Jose backyard the other day, gazing fondly at a naked chicken. It was a moment of some significance. It was not just about a dozen guys and a naked chicken. It was, perhaps, even historical. For man has achieved great things in the course of history, but one thing he has never achieved is the right to attend sales parties – at least not in the way that women attend sales parties – and stand around in a backyard in the company of a commission salesman and a naked chicken.

There are Tupperware parties and Mary Kay parties. Men may be legally allowed to attend such parties but they never do, because Tupperware is plastic bowls and Mary Kay is lipstick. But now, thanks to a new Minnesota company, there are sales parties for guys, with barbecue gear as the merchandise.

On hand in San Jose were a dozen guys who had been lured to this particular backyard by the promise of free beer.

“Free beer,” said salesman John Schaffran, in the hushed voice of a man imparting a great truth, “is something that will always get a crowd of guys together.”

Schaffran is a newly minted sales rep for something called Man Cave, the outfit that is hawking the barbecue equipment. He is trying very hard to prove that men can, in the company of friends and a “party” setting, fall for a catalog full of high-priced gewgaws as readily as any female of the species.

Thanks to the beer, everyone was in either a good mood or a very good mood. It was time to do a little selling. Schaffran shoved a can full of beer into the innards of the chicken and placed it on the barbecue grill. The can was no ordinary can but a special can specifically designed to be filled with beer and shoved up the business end of a naked chicken. It’s in the catalog, for $29 plus shipping.

It was only Schaffran’s second sales demonstration, so he had to do quite a bit of shoving to get the can inside the chicken. The guys stood around, watching what was happening to the chicken and offering advice in the way that guys do when trying to sound as if they know what they’re talking about.

While the chicken cooked, Schaffran tried to get folks interested in his company’s other fine and indispensable wares, which consisted of a set of rollers for cooking bratwurst ($30), a giant spatula big enough to flip four burgers at a time ($25) and a branding iron for burning the owner’s initials into a sirloin steak ($55).

The guys stood around and watched the chicken. No one was placing an order. A recession is perhaps not the best time to be selling $25 spatulas. Clearly, the first-ever barbecue sales party for men was not going the way that revolutionary events are supposed to go.

And then Schaffran got a terrific idea. It was the kind of idea that guys hardly ever get. He decided to ask for advice.

And the person he decided to ask for advice was not just anyone, but his mom.

Schaffran’s mom, Peggy, just happened to be hanging out in the kitchen of the home, listening through a window to her son’s sales pitch. Peggy Schaffran, in addition to being a loyal mom, is also a veteran Tupperware saleswoman. She raised her family through the sale of plastic bowls and knows a thing or two about getting people to buy high-priced goods from a catalog.

“You’re doing fine,” she told John, when he ducked inside to confer about why sales were lagging. “You know the product and you’re pointing out its features. That’s great. Now try offering a premium if they buy a certain amount.”

That’s what they do at Tupperware parties, she said. Buy $100 worth of bowls and get a water bottle, or some such. John Schaffran, wise beyond his years, realized a fellow can learn quite a bit from his sainted mother.

He went back outside and made an announcement.

“Buy $100 worth,” he said, “and you get this automatic pop-off beer bottle opener.”

Free bottle opener

The automatic pop-off bottle opener was a splendid thing. You push the opener down on the bottle and the cap pops off by itself. True, it did not work very well (it took Schaffran four tries to open a bottle with it), but it was made of stainless steel, it looked great, it sold in the catalog for $15 and it was, under the terms of Mom’s inspired plan, absolutely free.

That did it. About half the guys stopped gazing idly at the chicken and began filling out the order forms. And, sure enough, they were ordering just enough stuff from the catalog to push their totals over the magic $100 mark and qualify for the free bottle opener. This proved not only that a guy can be maneuvered into buying high-priced stuff as surely as anyone else but that a son, at any age, can do far worse than put himself in the hands of his mother.

The first-ever multilevel marketing party for men in San Jose was over. And, thanks to mom, it had been yanked to safety at the last moment like an unattended bratwurst beginning to turn black.

After the party, Peggy Schaffran said she was honored that her son was not only following in her footsteps in the catalog party sales business (”The apple never falls far from the tree,” she said) but had chosen to take her advice as well, especially because it was good advice gleaned from 20 years in the plastic bowl trade.

“I know what I’m talking about,” she said.

She picked up the automatic pop-off beer bottle opener and admired its many fine features but wisely, being not only a mom but a veteran of catalog sales premiums, did not try to open a bottle with it.

www.sfgate.com

Today Steve Jobs did another of his long anticipated big reveals. “We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical and revolutionary new product,” Jobs said early on to ease the throngs of technology journalists and analysts who knew what was coming. Perhaps the worst kept secret since, well, the iPhone, the iPad is a 10-inch touch-screen computer, starting at $499 and available in March. It resembles an oversized iPod Touch. Leading up to the long-speculated launch of Apple’s iPad tablet computer, the publishing industry — newspapers, magazines and books — seemed to be the target. Could the iPad instantly succeed — like the iPod did for digital music before it — where Amazon’s Kindle had been slowly gaining steam? It should come as no surprise that a publisher — the New York Times — was the first partner that was shown during the Apple announcement at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco today. “Why did we come out three weeks ago to develop an app for the iPad?” said Martin Nisenholtz, the N.Y. Times senior vice president for digital operations, during the announcement. “We think that we’ve captured the essence of reading a newspaper… all in a native app.” Apple took a direct shot at Amazon with the iBook Store. The application looks like a bookshelf, showing the digital books owned by the user. And of course, a store along the lines of the iTunes Store, where book publishers can sell their virtual wares.

“We’re going to open up the floodgates for the rest of the publishing world starting this afternoon,” Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said on-stage. Prices shown in the demo appear comparable to Amazon’s Kindle store. Amazon already has an app for its bookstore made for the iPhone, so the company can’t be happy that Apple is stepping into its home court. Yet the Kindle is considered easier on the eyes than the Ipad. For Print Media fans and producers it’s all good.

But the iPad is not just about digitizing the paper. Electronic Arts showed off Need for Speed: Shift, a racing game built for the device. Brushes, a canvas for drawing art (finger-painting?), was also demoed. And the MLB, which has been quick to jump on new application platforms, showed off its live video app.

Compiled from two articles written by Mark Milian for the L.A. Times.

This would have been timelier posted on this past Monday as a form of recognition for Martin Luther King Day, but, as in any worthwhile thing, there is no time like the present. At the start of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, King stated his case boldly and for all levels of society to hear and understand. In an article found in the London Times authored by Simon Maier and Jeremy Kourdi this speech and this man demonstrate techniques that are helpful for the times when one has to make a presentation that will motivate your listeners to productive action.

Whatever your stage skills (and we all have some), hone them: King had a physically commanding presence. Strong, energetic, tall and broad, he possessed a deep, sonorous voice that had the power to project his message with clarity and authority across America.

Build a powerful rhythm and cadence, using tone and language: King’s speeches had a strong, driving rhythm that was almost musical. It drew the listener in. It comforted and then excited. This came from his speeches’ structure, the tone and use of language. For example, “I have a dream today” is one of several sentences that are repeated at regular intervals in the speech. Like a chorus in a song, it becomes a familiar refrain that people can, and want to, repeat and remember.

Provide a specific, compelling, exciting but truthful vision of the future: King was inclusive, with a message that had an appeal as wide as it was deep. The images and vision of the future invoked by him were powerful and universal.

Know and respect your audience: King understood that his audience passionately wanted progress and change and that they were peaceful, ordinary people. He projected this normality as a stirring and virtuous stand, for example by saying: “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”

Use metaphors and familiar, appealing images: King dipped into the natural world as well as the Bible to find stirring, evocative popular images. For example: “Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.” And: “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream”. The images express power: the energy of the Sun, the force of a torrent. The point he is making is that his ideas are both natural and inexorable. The language is superb and soaring.

With the marketplace the way it is at present it’s no wonder that market researchers are more interested in what makes the consumer tick than ever before. What with the new and improved thoughtful spending of the American consumer it’s a harder grab to get and hold the customer’s attention. A recent article in US News and World Report authored by Rick Newman list some ways consumers have changed.

Less credit, more cash. Consumer borrowing has fallen by record amounts, as Americans pay down debt and adjust to banks lowering their credit card limits. Credit card spending dropped sharply in early 2009, moderated, then started plunging again. But overall spending hasn’t fallen quite as much, which suggests more people are paying for purchases in cash.

The end of the monthly payer. Many consumers used to be comfortable piling up debt as long as their income could cover the monthly payments. No more. “The era of unbridled, debt-financed consumer spending is over, and the monthly payer is out of action,” Eric Janszen, president of iTulip, a finance-advisory firm, wrote in Harvard Business Review last year. As consumers focus more on their total debt, they’ll probably buy less and shun high-priced status symbols. But they’ll still spend on certain things.

Greater suspicion. Banks wrecked the economy, then cut lending and raised fees. The government prevented a depression, but not before giving billions to Wall Street titans. Stock prices are surging while jobs disappear. The past few years have been a Great Letdown, among other things, with polls showing that Americans’ confidence in banks, big business, and other pillars of the establishment is at record lows.

More resourcefulness. If you can’t count on anybody else, then you’re likely to rely more on yourself. Americans are taking more responsibility for their own finances and careers, undertaking more do-it-yourself projects, and learning how to cook at home instead of eating out. Travel spending is down, but sales of camping gear are up. Savvy workers are taking more midcareer courses to keep up with turbulent times.

Less brand loyalty. Millions of consumers traded down to store brands over the past couple of years—and many plan to stick with them. The quality of off-price products has turned out to be better than expected, so there may be little reason to pay more for brand-name goods with essentially the same quality. “The shift of consumers away from more expensive products is a widespread trend,” declares a 2009 report from consulting firm McKinsey.

Smaller is bigger. It goes without saying that many things are getting smaller rather than bigger, including household budgets and people’s ambitions. “Smaller things now make the bigger statement,” says the Futures Co., a market-research firm. “Smaller portions, smaller houses, smaller cars, and local communities.”

A rental rebound. The “ownership society” is over. After peaking a few years ago, home ownership rates, not surprisingly, have started a long journey downward, as foreclosures shake out people who couldn’t afford their homes in the first place and tough borrowing standards limit new buyers. The home ownership rate peaked in 2004–2005, when about 70 of households were occupied by owners. That percentage could sink to the low 60s within a decade. A renter’s mentality is extending to other big purchases, like cars and furniture: The Aaron’s rent-to-own furniture chain, for example, has been thriving.

Less window shopping. When you browse, you buy—so more people seem to be eliminating window shopping as a casual pastime. Heather Mitchell of Friendswood, Texas, says that since she stopped making unnecessary trips to the mall, “it’s hard to measure the savings, since I would impulse-buy on those trips to stroll the stores. I’ve also saved a lot in gas and wear and tear on my car.”

More closet shopping. Americans have piled up a lot of goods in recent years, and many people are surprised at how much good clothing or other stuff they’ve squirreled away. “I shop in my closet when the urge hits me to buy something new,” says Paige Hodges of Los Angeles, “and I always find a little treasure that I forgot I had.”

Decluttering. There are a lot of reasons to offload unnecessary accoutrements: Downsizing to a smaller home, getting laid off and doing some spring cleaning, or picking up a few bucks selling stuff you don’t need. “Somebody will always buy the stuff you don’t want,” says Joe Pasquale of Nashville, who sells three or four unused items a week online. “Old routers. Old clothes. A pair of my wife’s Lucky jeans. It’s amazing what people will buy.”

Food frugality. Spending on restaurants is down, but those who do eat out are ordering fewer side dishes and appetizers or substituting an appetizer for a main dish, according to the NPD Group, a market-research firm. Others are cutting back on home meals and taking other steps to reduce food costs. “I find that in shopping for food, the smaller the store, the less I spend,” says Nancy Bymers of Albuquerque. “A smaller store has fewer choices and conveniences. Who really needs three types of peppers diced into bits at over $5? I am very capable of disassembling a pepper.”

More gardening. Veggies from the backyard are usually cheaper, and more healthful, than those from the store. That’s one reason sales of canning equipment have boomed over the past two years. While you’re at it, grow a cut-flower garden, says Lois Barber of Sandy Hook, Conn. “This will allow you to have fresh flowers in your house. They’ll lift your spirits, make you feel rich, and make a great gift if someone invites you over for dinner.”

Less waste. When you have less money, you waste less, for obvious reasons. The Futures Co. thinks this “renunciation of wastefulness” constitutes a movement: “Perhaps more than any other single element, not being wasteful will define overall value in the recovery consumer marketplace,” the firm says in a recent report.

Less healthcare. There’s no upside here. With unemployment skyrocketing, millions have lost health insurance coverage or cut back on care to save money. Some people go without drugs they’ve been prescribed or cut the dosages in half, so the pills last longer. (Not recommended!) In some areas, people are compensating for reduced coverage by taking advantage of free offerings like mammograms or flu shots.

More negotiating. It’s no longer cool to pay the list price for everything, and consumers are less embarrassed asking for discounts. Retail merchants won’t always haggle, but eBay sellers will, and state-your-price websites like Priceline have been booming.

More volunteering. Americans with more time on their hands find it rewarding to spend some of it helping others. “I do volunteer projects to help keep social connections up,” says Kathy Bowman of Joseph, Ore. “Think volunteering at community events, serving on the boards of disability or folk dance organizations, small donations to the humane society or kids’ projects.”

Redefining success. We used to measure it by how much money and stuff we had. Whoops. With jobs scarce and money tight, Americans are seeking more satisfying work—and giving up material goods to get it. Cathy Goerz of San Francisco spent the past year making a low-budget film documentary—a longtime goal—after losing her job at a corporate communications firm. She lives on 75 percent less than before, but she cherishes the freedom: “My quality of life has not changed at all,” she says. “I think it’s improved. I’m not tied down by location, and I don’t have to be under somebody’s gaze eight hours a day.” Now that’s a recovery.

The only good thing about tragedy is that it does have the ability to bring out the best in people. The earthquake and its aftershocks have caused and are still causing devastation in Haiti, yet this has brought about a counter-swell of sympathy from all over the world. Everyone wants to help out, but too much help can cause problems. This is in no way a means to throw a wet blanket on the impulse to help, just some helpful information as to how to focus that help to give the most benefit out of that help. In other words it’s the economics of assistance.

1. Donating Money:
Money is the most efficient way of giving right now since at the moment there at the moment there are no commercial flights into Haiti.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has urged Internet users to be cautious and do their research before giving money to help the relief effort in Haiti.

“Past tragedies and natural disasters have prompted individuals with criminal intent to solicit contributions purportedly for a charitable organization,” the agency said in a statement.

TEXT Giving: many Americans are making donations via text message to help Haiti. The American Red Cross, is taking donations at 90999 (text the word “HAITI” and an automatic $10 donation is made), and you can support the foundation of musician Wyclef Jean by texting the word “Yele” to the number 501501.

Although the above two text methods are above board, the Better Business Bureau notes that this emerging method for donating “is ripe for exploitation by scammers.” It has not heard of any text message scams yet, but they’re probably inevitable. As a result, consumers need to keep a number of things in mind when considering giving by text message as well as by more traditional methods. When giving by text message, the money might not get to where it needs to go for weeks or more, though carriers said they were working to try to speed up the process. “What people may not realize is that it could take up to 90 days before the money actually reaches the charity,” said Art Taylor, president of the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance. His giving advice: “Follow up that $10 donation by going to the Web sites and donating directly.” Or give to the charity Web site’s directly in the first place, call the charity or send a check directly to the charity in the mail.

Here are some more tips from the Better Business Bureau and the F.B.I.:

• Don’t automatically trust the numbers your friends and networks pass along. Instead, confirm the text message number directly with the charity by checking the charity’s Web site. The American Red Cross, for instance, mentions the 90999 number on its site.

• Do not respond to any unsolicited e-mail messages about giving to Haiti, and be skeptical of individuals representing themselves as surviving victims or officials asking for donations via e-mail or social networking sites.

• Be cautious of e-mail messages that claim to show pictures of the disaster areas in attached files, because the files may contain viruses.

• Don’t assume the links your well-meaning friends are sending you are legitimate or represent the best organizations. Before giving, vet the charity you’re giving to to make sure it’s not fraudulent and is best equipped to actually help and use the money responsibly.

2. Food and Clothing Drives:

Drives for food and clothing—while well intentioned— may not necessarily be the quickest way to help those in need – unless the organization has the staff and infrastructure to be able to properly distribute such aid. Ask the charity about their transportation and distribution plans. Be wary of those who are not experienced in disaster relief assistance. A trusted organization of this sort is The Salvation Army in your community. You can visit them or the website, for information about this sort of donation, for over time, all of those things will be needed.

Tips on Vetting a Charity:

* Find out if the charity has an on-the-ground presence in the impacted areas.

Unless the charity already has staff in the effected areas, it may be difficult to get new aid workers to quickly provide assistance.  See if the charity’s website clearly describes what they can do to address immediate needs.

* Find out if the charity is providing direct aid or raising money for other groups.

Some charities may be raising money to pass along to relief organizations.  If so, you may want to consider “avoiding the middleman” and giving directly to charities that have a presence in the region. Or, at a minimum, check out the ultimate recipients of these donations to ensure the organizations are equipped to effectively provide aid.

(If you’re looking for organizations to give to, check out BBB Wise Giving Alliance’s list of charities providing assistance in response to the earthquake.)

Got Guilt? Who doesn’t. It’s human to feel the itches and pangs of regrettable circumstances. To each his or her own as to what we feel guilty about and how deep the guilt goes. There are some still kicking themselves for not getting to everyone on their Christmas Card list. There are those that are not fazed about this because they assure themselves there is only so much one person can do and perhaps they even saved a small sapling by not conquering the Christmas Card list this year. However there are those slights that just don’t go away, that make one lie awake at night wishing for an opportunity to atone.  Well here the internet comes in handy once again. An article from The Wall Street Journal written by Elizabeth Bernstein tells of the new trend of the decades late apology.

Jane Angelich carried the guilt around for more than four decades. Years ago, she had been cruel to someone and had never acknowledged her actions. Often, she thought of the person she had hurt and wondered: Had he ever forgiven her?

Finally, she decided she could carry her burden no longer. So last winter she went online and looked up the person she had mistreated. Then she apologized for telling him to “drop dead” when he called her house back in 1961.

They were both 10 years old at the time.

“When something is nagging at you for 48 years, you need to clear it up,” says Ms. Angelich, 58 years old, a pet-products company chief executive in Novato, Calif. “That was the meanest thing I ever did to anyone.”

Jane Angelich, explained in her email to him that she hung up on him because she didn’t know how to talk to a boy at the time and was embarrassed that her mother was listening. He replied to her apology, she says, and said he did not remember the incident. “It was good to know, though, that luckily he wasn’t scarred for life,” she says.

Along with helping people reconnect with old flames, childhood friends and even long-lost relatives, the Internet is giving rise to a newer phenomenon: the decades-late apology. The Web allows us to converse by email, a form of communication that often makes us braver and more impulsive—and occasionally even more thoughtful—about what we say. There are even Web sites, such as ThePublicApology.com and PerfectApology.com, dedicated to facilitating our quest for absolution.

All this raises the question: Just because there is someone from our past we could apologize to, should we? After all, how effective is an act of contrition—whether proffered over the Web or otherwise—that comes many, many years late?

Consider my friend, who recently received a lengthy email from a guy she dated in college, apologizing for the way he treated her at a bar one night in 1987. He said he had always regretted his behavior. She says she had no idea what he was talking about.

Of course, some apologies—for things like theft or backstabbing a colleague—are serious and really should be made. But we live in a self-help culture, where therapists, 12-step program guides and talk-show hosts are forever reminding us that forgiveness and gratitude are the way to happiness (and sobriety). Many times, a long-overdue apology, much like a confession, does more for the person offering it up than it does for the one receiving it.

When an old high-school rival of Kathy Somes contacted her through Classmates.com last March, Ms. Somes, 46, apologized for her behavior years ago, which included putting gum in the girl’s hair, shooting her with a rubber-pellet gun and blowing a trumpet into her ear during band practice.

“I didn’t really care if she accepted my apology or not,” says Ms. Somes, an investment analyst in Kirtland, Ohio. “I felt better.” (And, she says, her classmate did accept her apology.)

So what do you do if you are overcome with the urge to apologize for something you did ages ago? Here are some tips:

• Make sure you are apologizing for the sake of the other person and not yourself. (A woman I interviewed who apologized to her sister—a year later—for mentioning her weight gain says her sister got upset all over again and accused her of “reminding her that she was fat.”) If your motives are selfish, don’t bother saying you are sorry.

• Resist sending an apology via a social-networking Web site. It’s too flip. Use the phone. Or at least write an email, which demonstrates a little more thoughtfulness.

• Ask how your actions affected the other person. “The best gift you can offer is the willingness to finally hear exactly what the other person felt like as a result of your actions,” says Karen Gail Lewis, a marriage and family therapist in Cincinnati.

• Be sincere. Explain why you did what you did, and why you are apologizing now.

• And—at the risk of sounding like your mother—try to apologize in a timelier manner next time. My 21-month-old nephew Zach did it last weekend, after throwing one of his toys at me. If he can do it, you can too.

An old Proverb says, “Change is the only constant.” That saying only keeps getting truer with the rate technology advances. Once upon a time Monarchs were one of a few things that changed in a century.  In the last fifty years you could get somewhat of a picture of what the world would be like in a decade. Nowadays five years is a tricky leap to hazard a guess about. The office has often been a front line of change, especially in the technology realm. Get ready for the “Thin Client”, which is not the name of a John Grisham diet book.

In a recent article authored by Rachel King for Business Week you’ll get a peek at the beginnings of what may be on your desk in the future.

Tech executive Parikshit Arora had an unconventional response the morning he discovered that his office computer was no longer working. Rather than fixing it himself or calling in help from the information technology department, he discarded the device. “It wasn’t booting up,” says Arora, vice-president for technology at iQor, a company that handles call-center work for clients. “I didn’t even care to find out why. I threw it away and got another one.”

The same goes for most of iQor’s 11,000 employees. Why the seemingly cavalier take on computers? Two years ago, New York-based iQor ditched most of its Dell and Hewlett-Packard desktop computers and installed a fleet of cheaper, stripped-down machines that lacked hard drives. Also made by HP and known as thin clients, these smaller, virtually disposable devices leave most processing and storage tasks to a centrally located server. “We refer to thin clients as lollipops,” says iQor Chief Executive Vikas Kapoor. “If yours isn’t working, just get another one.” Now, about 75% of iQor’s employees use thin clients with files and software stored elsewhere. When a machine dies, staffers get a new one and resume work in minutes.

iQor may be a harbinger of things to come in corporate computing. While traditional laptops and desktops reign supreme in the workplace, accounting for the vast majority of employee computers, companies are increasingly willing to consider alternatives. Some are experimenting with thin clients in a bid to cut costs while many others are betting on netbooks. Employees are spending more work time on smartphones, while Apple’s Mac—once viewed as a machine for artists and educators—is wending its way into corporations. “We’ve got the most diverse offerings of PCs that we’ve ever had,” says Richard Shim, research manager for IDC’s personal computing program, which is now tracking some 20 different kinds of personal computers, up from 16 in 2008.

No single kind of machine has gained wide workplace acceptance. Yet in aggregate, the alternatives reflect a shift in the way corporations think about computing. For instance, the Mac operating system was installed in about 2.7% of corporate computers in July 2008 but the figure had increased to 3.6% by March 2009, according to Forrester Research.

The worldwide thin client market may grow to 7 million units in 2012, from 2.9 million in 2007, according to IDC. Gartner (IT) expects that by 2014, 15% of traditional professional desktop PCs will be replaced by so-called virtual desktops, which also leave most computing and storage tasks to a centrally located computer, rather than maintain them at the employee’s workstation.

Executives at iQor opted for a nontraditional computing environment in large part to save money. “For every dollar I spent buying a PC, I spent 50¢ to the dollar every year maintaining it,” Kapoor says. “There’s a lot of technical expertise that’s required to do that maintenance.” iQor has eliminated its help desk and, before long, expects to cut its IT staff to about a quarter its previous size.

Decisions about what kind of computer to buy will come to a head in 2010 for the multitudes of companies expected to step up hardware purchases as the recession ends. In a November survey of 1,752 IT employees by ChangeWave Research, about 22% of respondents said they plan to increase IT spending in the first quarter of 2010, up from about 10% a year earlier. No longer can chief information officers make a straightforward choice between a desktop or a laptop. Now companies need to assess rising demand for portable computers, smartphones, virtual desktops, and so-called cloud computing, where processing, storage, and other tasks are handled off-site, often by a third-party provider.

Weaning employees off customary equipment isn’t always easy. “Initially [the thin client] wasn’t as fast as our PCs,” says iQor’s Arora. “It was quite frustrating at the beginning,” he says, adding that since the kinks were worked out, everything has functioned as it should. “I feel I have the lashes on my back to show the pain,” CEO Kapoor says.

While growing numbers of companies are toying with alternative computing modes such as thin clients, few have committed to putting thousands of users through the transition, says Annette Jump, research director at Gartner. “In times like this, CIOs are going to experiment with a lot of different technology,” says Ric Echevarria, a vice-president at chipmaker Intel. He says many CIOs conclude that business PCs provide better performance and security and that they’re easier to manage.

No one expects PCs to go away altogether. “Up until now, the center of a corporate user’s universe was their PC, but as we go forward the PC is going to be just one of the key tools that workers use,” says Al Gillen, an analyst at IDC. “The net result is that we’re talking about a PC market that will still grow in size in the future but it won’t be the fastest-growing market anymore—there will be many more options.”

Everyone loves a deal or a legitimate steal.  It should come as no surprise that the authorized dealing and stealing in the marketplace is a well thought out enticement to beckon buyers. Dan Ariely is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT. He is also a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and a visiting professor at Duke University. His book Predictably Irrational starts off with an examination of the use of Free. What follows are excerpts from the first chapter of Predictably Irrational and an interview Dan Ariely gave Kai Ryssdal on NPR’s Marketplace January 4, 2010

Case in Point #1:

The Economist has the following subscription offers: internet only $59, print only $125, print and internet $125

Dan Ariely supposed that the wizards of manipulation at the Economist were trying to get him to avoid the “internet only” option. They knew something important about human behavior. Humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don’t have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another and estimate the value accordingly (For instance we assume a 6 cylinder car is more expensive than a 4 cylinder one, without knowing the basic mechanics that make up the worth of an automobile based on the amount of cylinders it has.)

In the case of the Economist, he may not have known whether the ‘Internet Only” option was a better deal, but he knew that the print-and-internet option for $125 was better than the print only one for $125, in fact you can deduce that in the combination package that the internet is free! Dan had to admit that if he had been inclined to subscribe that he would have taken the package deal. Later when he tested the offer on a large number of participants, the vast majority preferred the internet-and-print deal.

When he gave the Economist subscription offer to 100 students of MIT Sloan School of Management they opted as follows: 16 went for the internet only, 0 print only, 84 internet-and-print. But no doubt they were influenced by the “decoy” internet only option. When this option was removed this time 68 of the students chose the internet only option and 32 chose the internet-and-print option.

Case in Point #2:

Dan Ariely: Imagine that one of your co-workers comes to the office with home-baked cookies, and she’s offering you the cookies for a very cheap price. Let’s say 5 cents per cookie. And she has 100 cookies on the tray, and there are 20 people in the office. How many cookies will you take?

Kai Ryssdal: I’d probably take like five. I’d give her a quarter, and take five cookies.

Dan Ariely: OK, but what would happen if it was free?

Kai Ryssdal: Well, now see, I’m torn here, because I would either take a lot and be a real piggy, or I would take maybe one or two because I wouldn’t want to be a glutton.

Dan Ariely: That’s right. So let’s assume that you would not feel like being a pig. In fact you can actually imagine how if she offered you the cookies for 5 cents a piece, you would feel perfectly fine to take the whole batch, but if she charged you nothing, you would not feel that you can take as much as you really want.

Kai Ryssdal: Is this about the value we put on it, or is it about us internally?

Dan Ariely: It’s about the fact that when something is free all of the sudden different norms get applied to the situation, and you start thinking about other people. So you have lots of other co-workers in the office, and if you took all the cookies to yourself, nobody else would have any cookie. What’s interesting is that when the price is a positive price, like 5 cents, you don’t actually think about the welfare of other people.

Kai Ryssdal: You bet, because I’ve paid my nickel and by gosh, I’m going to take as many cookies as I want, right?

Dan Ariely: But you know this is a good deal. And you have lots of other people in the office that you like and care about. Why don’t you think about their welfare? Don’t you want them to be happy as well?

Kai Ryssdal: Yeah, I suppose. But you know, if the cookies are good, then…

Dan Ariely: But the cookies are also good when they’re free. So what’s interesting is when something is free you all of the sudden think about the welfare of others. But when it costs something, it’s just you and your cost-benefit analysis.

Kai Ryssdal: All right, so take it away from my cookies and me looking out for the welfare of the office, and apply it to real life, then.

Dan Ariely: Well, cookies are real life. This thought, this general idea, I think also has application for the carbon-trade idea.

Kai Ryssdal: Carbon trade as in global warming. We’re going from cookies to global warming?

Dan Ariely: Obviously, what other connections would you make? So think about it, pollution, carbon trade, or recycling, or whatever it is, is in the public goods domain. We think about our kids, the next generation, the welfare of the world. But if it’s not costing us money now we start to apply different norms and different rules. Now I don’t think about the welfare of others. It’s just about what is it worth for me to pollute and not to pollute. I’m actually worried that when we move from a system that we care about our pollution and CO2 emissions, and so on, because of the welfare generally of the world, we’re going to apply a certain norm. If they charge us a lot of money then of course we would be very careful, and we might try to reduce dramatically pollution. But if they don’t charge us that much, it could actually end up backfiring.

Kai Ryssdal: Right, so you’re worried that the politicians won’t be able to agree on a higher price of carbon, so it will be something so small as to be meaningless and maybe even harmful?

Dan Ariely: That’s right. If we started charging a lot of money for it, it would really dramatically change the economy, and I don’t think we understand how this will work. And at the low level I think that rather than getting us to care more, it will actually end up getting us to care less.

http://marketplace.publicradio.org

www.predictablyirrational.com

It’s a good time for books. Books are handy to read while traveling for the holidays or even if one’s daily commute has been delayed because of the winter weather. This list could be timely too in preparation for New Year’s Resolutions, if yours is to spend more time between the pages than at surfing channels or the web. I know I wish I read more this year, that’s why I went to the editors of The Atlantic Monthly to fashion this list of books.

1. One of Deputy Editor Scott Stossel’s Picks: My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, by John Updike
Updike’s last collection of short stories, published a few months after his death early this year, reveal a preoccupation with aging and mortality. (For fun, compare Updike’s fictional reckonings with his senescence to his peer Philip Roth’s: the former’s tend toward wistful nostalgia, the latter toward strangulated expressions of bitterness.) Updike’s final stories also remind us that he was one of the most artful crafters of English sentences that the modern language has known. (We published one of these stories in The Atlantic.) Even the clunkers in this collection (and there are only one or two) have lines that make you exclaim admiringly to yourself. Updike was so good for so long that we almost seemed to have stopped noticing.

2. Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, Senior Editor’s Pick: War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy (Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky translation)
I’ve started and abandoned plenty of great masterpieces in my time. I’ve read and reread Pip’s explanation of how he got his name but still haven’t met Miss Havisham. And Swann’s Way, which I find delicious in small bites, is currently lying under a pile of magazines on my nightstand. War and Peace was different: after 10 pages, I was so wholly absorbed that I found myself turning off the television, staying up late, even making excuses not to go out so I could spend the evening with the Bolkonskys and the Rostovs.

I owe a huge part of my enjoyment to the translators. Richard Pevear and his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, managed to render Tolstoy in smooth, natural English without bulldozing over his idiosyncrasies. The two-word sentence Kápli kápali has been translated by others as “The branches dripped,” “The trees were dripping,” or “Raindrops dripped.” Pevear and Volokhonsky simply write, “Drops dripped”—unafraid to pass along Tolstoy’s repetition and brevity. The odd freshness of this language makes the story that much more captivating. And it frees Tolstoy to do what he does best, which is to make fictional characters from far-off times and places feel deeply, startlingly, three-dimensionally human.

3. Daniel Indiviglio, Staff Editor’s Pick: The Prince of Darkness, by Robert D. Novak
The Prince of Darkness, is a 672-page autobiographical account of Robert Novak’s 50 years of reporting in the nation’s capital. No matter your view on Novak’s politics, his talent for breaking huge stories and his ambition as a reporter were undeniable.
The book is written in the tight, unforgiving tone that made his writing famous. The pages fly by. It also provides a glimpse into his personal life, which makes it all the more interesting. From the Plame affair to his obsession with sports to his conversion to the Catholic faith despite his Jewish roots, his life was far from ordinary.

Reading about the history he witnessed up close — and often was the first to document — blew my mind. Beyond his pure talent, Novak worked hard, rested rarely, and had an insatiable hunger for news — which is why he was able to accomplish so much during his career.

4. James Fallows, National Correspondent: “I can’t name the “best” book I’ve read recently, but I have some alternative categories to suggest. One is “Best Book Most Readers Are Likely to Have Missed”: Two Kinds of Time, by Graham Peck
A marvelous words-and-drawings chronicle of travels through China in the decade leading up to the Communist revolution in 1949. Peck, whose day job was as a U.S. foreign service officer, was also a gifted artist and a very witty writer and observer. The book, reissued this year (with a new introduction by Robert Kapp) after its original publication in 1950, is very long but does not contain an uninteresting page.

5. Benjamin Schwarz, Literary and National Editor: Moving Pictures, by Budd Schulberg

This has been a particularly anxious year for me (for most of us), and in the predawn hours, after checking the Fidelity website for the sixteenth time, I’ve reached for books that give me some succor and courage. For succor, nothing beat Budd Schulberg’s dry, elegiac 500-page memoir of his boyhood in Hollywood’s golden age, a reissue of which I chanced on this summer. I found it completely absorbing (I could have really used the book back in March, before the rally), but this year’s dark nights of the soul have required books that I can read again and again.

And: Essays, by George Orwell
For years I’ve kept by my bedside the single-volume 1408-page Everyman collection of Orwell’s Essays. (I always assign it in a seminar I teach on Orwell’s nonfiction), and this year I turned to it (particularly “Charles Dickens,” “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” “The Lion and the Unicorn,” and “Boys’ Weeklies”) several nights a week. Orwell’s bracing intelligence and austere but lithe prose have the same effect on me (in my warm bed) that the skirl of bagpipes had on grenadiers going over the top, and though I don’t cotton to the notion that literature has any purpose, I do believe that reading Orwell will make you a clearer thinker, a cleaner writer, and a more thoughtful—and brave—human being.

6. Marc Ambinder, Politics Editor: The Road To Reality: A Complete Guide To The Laws Of The Universe, by Roger Penrose

“The {fij},” we are told on page 989 of this tome, “are reduced modulo quantities of the form {hi-hj}.” Ah, just when I had gotten my mind around the differences between Lagrangians and Hamiltonians, it took me a day and a half to understand what the physicist Roger Penrose was trying to convey. But such unabridged complexity is one reason why his book, unsubtly titled The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, is probably the best primer on physics ever created for thinking audiences. Penrose, the Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, wrote his magnum opus in 2004. After an admonition to give mathematics a chance, it starts in with philosophy, exploring what reality means to a quantum physicist.

By the end of the first chapter, one finds oneself largely agreeing with Penrose that there is something “real” about the mysterious connections among the physical world, the mental world, and the platonic mathematical structure that gives rise to modern physics. Penrose, who has fallen in love with the aesthetics of physics, takes the reader on a journey from Euclid’s geometry to Mandelbrot sets to Reimann torus topology to Newton’s calculus—and then on to the Grassmann algebras and hypercomplex numbers. By page 251, an exasperated reader will have had quite enough math and might be wondering where the familiar descriptive-metaphor physics comes in. But Penrose simply won’t insult his readers, and this is the strength of the book. He takes us inside the mind of mathematicians as they play with mental models and with mathematic concepts, inviting us to understand physics as it is understood by those who practice it.

About 500 pages in, we begin to get to the meat of the book: modern quantum physics and cosmology. Even having picked up only a fraction of the math, the reader is much the better for it.  But begin the book halfway through, and you’ll be just fine. Penrose is one of our finest living scientists, and he provides a systematic, witty survey of all the major topics and debates in particle physics. He is delightfully clear on where consensus has been built and where he disagrees with that consensus. (He does not agree with the standard explanation for entropy prior to the Big Bang, for example, and is also quite skeptical about superstring theory—currently en vogue.)   He is a trenchant critic as well of anthropic reasoning in physics, whereby constraints are set just so, and life and consciousness emerge from a grand design.

I don’t much like math myself, but I’ve found the delights of cosmology and particle physics to be an escape of sorts from the complexities of the real world. This is a book that teems with provocations and fascinating discursions – a rare popular physics book that’s unafraid to be what it is. Highly recommended!

http://bestbook.theatlantic.com/

Fingerprints, no two are alike, that’s what makes them the ‘go to’ marker of identification. It’s relatively easy to give one’s fingerprint. However, if you push too hard or too lightly the print is obscured. If you don’t do the ‘roll’ you don’t reveal all the print’s elements, there could be missing pieces of arches, whorls, and loops. Enough about fingerprints, this is about personality and revealing the inner fingerprint. Most people can monitor and control how much of themselves they want to show in general social situations, like on a morning commute. However when it comes to circumstances where there is a little more on the line – from networking on a social media site, at a job interview or the office, to how we come across to friends and family – things can get in the way of the character one tries to convey. The unconscious, subconscious, and conscious mind of the sender can whip up waves of interference not to mention the receiver having their own assumptions that jam up reception.

What follows is an excerpt from the article Mixed Signals By Sam Gosling, published on September 01, 2009 in Psychology Today

Are You Sending the Wrong Signals?
Many of us have times when we are misunderstood. People perceive us as cold and unfriendly when we’re really just feeling shy, as flirtatious when we’re just trying to be friendly, or as depressed when we’re just tired. Being misunderstood is largely a problem of a lack of information—not communicating effectively with the people around you through your words and body language.
For many years, Randall Colvin of Northeastern University has been studying the attributes of people who are easily judged—people others just “get.” Colvin found that easily judgeable people tend to be extroverted, warm, consistent, and emotionally stable. These traits are known as “amplifiers” because they increase the expression of other traits. It’s easier to judge the creativity of an extrovert than that of an introvert, for example, because the extrovert sends a barrage of thoughts your way, while the introvert might keep them to herself.
Extroversion amplifies other traits because extroverts simply say and do more. The enormous amount of verbal and behavioral information they furnish makes extroverts easier to understand on all aspects of personality, not just their extroversion.
People are also easier to judge if they have a quality called “blirtatiousness,” the tendency to respond to others quickly and effusively. It’s one of the best amplifiers identified to date—blurters are open books.
So if you feel misunderstood, say and do more. Even introverts can train themselves to communicate more through their words—telling people directly what they like and how they feel. But before you can work on making sure you’re sending the right signals, you’ll need to know how others perceive you.
Why are we so hopeless at knowing how we come across? Because we not only fail to consider the information used by observers, but we also actively take into account information observers fail to consider, according to John Chambers, a psychologist at the University of Florida.
You may know you’re less reckless than you used to be, more talkative than your friends, and less productive than you might wish. But such information about your past, your friends, and your wishes is not easily accessible to others. Even so, when guessing what others think of you, you’ll find it almost impossible to disregard all the things you know about yourself to which others don’t have access.
How you’re seen does matter. Social judgment forms the basis for social interaction itself. Almost every decision others make about you, from promotions to friendships to marriages, is based on how people see you. So even if you never learn what you’re really like, learning how others perceive you is a worthwhile goal.
The solution is asking others what they see. The best way to do this is to solicit their opinions directly—though just asking your mom won’t cut it. You’ll need to get feedback from multiple people—your friends, coworkers, family, and, if you can, your enemies. Offer the cloak of anonymity without which they wouldn’t dare share the brutal truth—the Facebook app “Honesty Box,” for instance, allows people to send you anonymous notes. You may also want to videotape yourself to get a more objective perspective.
To provide users with systematic feedback on how their personality traits were viewed by multiple others, my collaborators David Evans and Anthony Carroll and I developed a Facebook application called YouJustGetMe, which helped users understand the signals they were sending with their Facebook profiles. Sure enough, people were surprised by the feedback they got. People were seen as less open-minded and neurotic than they saw themselves—but more dependable, warm, and outgoing.
Getting an outsider’s perspective actually provides you new information. In a classic study, Richard Robins of the University of California at Davis and Oliver John of Berkeley examined how people viewed their own contributions to a group discussion task. First, subjects were asked to rate their own performance. Then they watched a video of the discussion. When asked again what they thought of their performance after seeing the video, people downgraded their evaluations of how well they did—bringing their assessments more in line with those of others.
In Akira Kurosawa’s epic movie Rashomon, four witnesses provide only partially overlapping—and at times contradictory—accounts of the same robbery. In the same way, no single perspective on the self is complete. That’s why we need to augment our self-views with the views of others, not only to overcome our personal biases, but also because other people have access to information we miss.
There’s a lot to be learned about ourselves and others by seeking multiple perspectives. Even Kirsten could learn something about her punctuality issues by supplementing her own views with information provided by others. All she needs to do is set up a meeting to solicit feedback from them. Oh, wait!
Even if you’re clueless about how you’re seen, you may occasionally stumble onto a glimpse of how others see you. An overheard conversation or a carelessly forwarded email may allow us, as the 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns put it, “To see oursel’s as ithers see us.” I had my own moment of self-insight recently, accidentally furnished by a group of friends as I was recounting a story. “Now, I see myself as a pretty sensitive guy,” I began—at which point my audience simultaneously did double takes and exchanged stunned looks. Huh. Perhaps I’m not as sensitive as I imagine!

Millions of first impressions are now formed online. So along with Simine Vazire and my student Sam Gaddis, I decided to examine how well people understand the impressions they’re making with their Facebook profiles. We found that people know how extroverted they seem, but are clueless about the other impressions they convey. So Danielle knows she’s seen as an introvert, but doesn’t realize she’s also seen as dependable, laid-back, and creative.