Darryl Web, Tribune

I’ve written in the past Mesa should display provocative art work to draw visitors to the city.

Build something that gets people to talk about.  But it cannot be anything boring because that won’t get anyone to talk about.  By “boring”, I mean, it cannot be museums, ballparks, theaters, and all other stuff that other cities already own.  Those buildings are too safe, and since people in different cities already have those, they won’t come out of their way to Mesa, not worth visiting unless the city builds something spectacular.

Well, it looks like they were already thinking about doing something like this for a long time — If you drive down on Main, you’ll see 25 foot tall God Bless America statues. The city is borrowing it for a few months. Wait to Go, Mesa!!

This takes the guts to do, and some will resist to this seemingly idea. But it’s far more effective than placing some boring, safe, nothing special bronze statues that no heads turn to see. It’s provocative, controversial, and that’s what art is meant to do.

Bring more people to downtown, Mesa.

Yeay!

Sometimes I say, “I am too busy with school!”

And others say,  ”I am too busy for school!”

Neither one of the mindset moves us to accomplish anything important.

The only thing that matters is things we actually do.

I enjoy writing even though I am not the best one at it. But to make up for the lack of insight, I try reading more than others.

Then there are many who are already brilliant, insightful, courageous, empowering, and inspiring people who think about writing and never do. My guess is they’re telling themselves nobody would read anything they write.

But if you’re worried about whether or not people would read your articles, I don’t think you’ll ever write anything. If you’re TRULY passionate about something, and you’re overwhelmed by the need to share what you know, I think you’ll write.

And if your topic speaks to others, and if others share the same values with you, people will find you because that’s how the Internet works.

Every day, though, people think about doing important stuff. But if all we do is think, all these thinking won’t translate into anything worthwhile.

In fact, the only thing that matters is anything we do. So, next time you feel the “itch” to write about something you’re passionate about, just remind yourself that you are a great writer.

English is my second language, but that doesn’t stop me from writing.

The world needs you, your community needs you, and your family needs you, so go write something that matters to you. Soon, you’ll find yourself leading others who share the same values as yours.

Southwest Airlines is attempting to recover public relations after messing with the wrong guy this past weekend. Kevin Smith, film director with 1.6 million Twitter followers @ThatKevinSmith at the time of incident was removed from the passenger seat after he had already seated.

“Because It’s Our Policy”

Similar things happen every day although we never hear about it while getting silenced under the name of policy. In fact, many organizations implement policies to make people “go away” (even though they know it doesn’t sound right). The reason we never hear about it is the policy remains unchanged for the most part because good employees don’t question why it exists within an organization.

The lesson learned here is organizations are too busy today looking outwardly about ways to bring customers and forget what’s neglected inside. Instead of looking outwardly and spending millions of dollars investing in new advertising ideas, why not use Southwest Airlinens’ lesson as an opportunity to reevaluate what you can improve internally in your own organization?

WHY Do You Do What You Do?

Most organizations, particularly large ones, have things that don’t make sense even to its employees. When this happens, it disconnects the organizational ethos that bonds the values of employees together. As a result, employees become discouraged to create initiatives that could otherwise produce great ideas. They lose the very WHY of what they do for work and soon only start describing the HOW and the WHAT they do.

Fear Kills Our Creativity

We experience the same stuff while growing up. To be a good employee, we don’t question the system already in place, and we’re supposed to let schools design the way we should behave at work. After learning this way for a while, we become too scared to make mistakes, to appear wrong, and delegate the brave work to the quirky folks who are not afraid to look different than others. This fear kills our creativity, the very thing we use to challenge the status quo and start looking outwardly until our creativity gets completely replaced with spreadsheets and multi-tasking skills.

Does the Policy Meet the Objectives?

If a policy doesn’t make sense to anyone, especially to people who work for your organization, it’s less likely that makes any sense to your customers. Too late, though, if it ends up sabotaging the very thing you worked hard to build. So before this happens, such policy needs to be revisited.

We’re often too busy doing umimporant stuff every day at work (like answering emails) and lose time to do really important work, and these initiatives only take place in an environment where dreaming is encouraged.

What Is Really Important for Your Work and Organization?

That’s the ultimate question you need to answer yourself. What is it that you need to stand for? If you can give one thing to the world better than anyone else you know, what would it be?

Write that down and this will become the manifesto that spreads your idea. And if it speaks to others, and if there are others share the same values as you do, pretty soon you’ll find yourself leading others.

And to do this, you cannot care about what others think of you. Your organization, your community and your family needs you. Share your passion and empower others with possibilities they never knew it was possible to reach.

New Orleans Saints won its first Super Bowl title. Pro athletes repeat mundane and boring practice all their lives to make ONE play that determines the outcome of the game. Every day, I believe the most of our lives are filled with mundane stuff, but they are what give people inspiration in times of need, making everything else we go through worthwhile doing.

I am often reminded that great results occur as a residual effect of doing these small, boring, and mundane things.

How about you?

Congratulations, Saints. Your fans, your city and your team needed the victory – you earned it and deserve it.

I watched Miss America over the weekend. All pretty and smart girls from all over America, competing for the title.

Most girls respond to questions thoughtfully, but I believe people want more than just the safe answers. Inspiring people aren’t usually the safest ones, but having decided that their belief is more important than their fear of looking stupid on television.

Safe answers are boring, they’re just a click away. The braves, they don’t necessarily overcome fear, but are authentic, passionate, courageous, and sometimes even introvert.

Brave people aren’t always charismatic, but they do it anyway. 

That “doing” is what gives brave people charisma.

If you own the iPhone and do some cool stuff with it, get Google Voice.

With Google Voice, you can read voicemail like a text message, receive incoming calls to your home to ring your cellphone, desk phone or even office phone.

It means, when your friend calls ONE number, all of your phones ring (you can set setting, of course).

The best part about it is free — it’s by Google, you know?

The only catch is you’d have to be invited. Yes, it’s by invitation only. Google loves doing that to you.

Here is the link, send your email and wait for the invitation — https://www.google.com/voice

Here is an example of Social Media spreading news.

My friend Yaneth White (my old college classmate) told everyone in Facebook something I have not heard in the mainstream news.

Social Media is a useful tool to spread news. It’s up to us to utilize it for our benefit.

Here is a remarkable way to tell a story worthwhile spreading.

Thank you Yaneth for this valuable information.

Here is a smart word of mouth marketing by Dunkin Donuts.

Instead of rewarding everyone who walks in, why not reward a few? Such marketing strategy spreads among those who benefit.

Each month, Dunkin Donuts is running different promotions:

• Tuesdays in December 2009 – firefighters
• Tuesdays in January 2010 – police
• Tuesdays in February 2010 – teachers
• Tuesdays in March 2010 – nurses
• Tuesdays in April 2010 – active military personnel

Bonuses only designed to reward limited group of people connect one village of people to another.

People are loyal to businesses who give them access to limited promotion. But unlike the bogus rewards given at grocery stores, the promotion here needs to be very exclusive to create scarcity.

Can you create something like this for your business? You  bet! Just get creative and think of people who are already connected with each other as a group.

If you can’t get enough following by limiting the promotion to one demographic of people, you can broaden the promotion by providing customers with secret code. In-n-Out does this with their menu which gives their customers the ability to tell a story.

The trick is to make the whole shopping experience worthwhile talking. If it is, people can’t help but to tell others about your business.

This is what happened to my wife yesterday.

Wells Fargo calls up our house and said, “We’d like to appreciate you for being a valued customer and would like to offer you our great life insurance”. A few moments later, the lady who made the initial call, hands the call to her male manager. He said we could try 30 day free trial of their life insurance, and if we don’t like it, we could just cancel it.

My wife, not designated as our family’s finance manager, politely declined the offer. As soon as she says no, the manager got annoyed and discontinued the call.

Why would Wells Fargo do this?

Why would you do anything to jeopardize relationship with your “valued customer” by interrupting her life and offering something which wasn’t requested?

Wells Fargo does this because they see other banks doing it. They see Citi does it, so why not them? That’s how their industry works, right? After all, they have our personal information, so why not abuse it and pitch products and services?

How about offering services like ING Direct? Instead of offering low interest bearing saving, why not reinvest your profit into high interest yielding accounts? Why not get rid of branches at cheesy strip malls and build call center with live operators? Why not get rid of annoying telemarketers and generate businesses more from referrals?

It’s so easy for Wells Fargo to do what ING Direct does, but they’re not doing it. Because they see other banks do stuff they do to their customers, so why not them?

But here is the problem. People’s time is getting more expensive today than ever before. People have more choices every day than they ever did before. So if Wells Fargo is merely offering services and products that Citi does or Bank of America already does, they won’t grow.

People today need to be blown away. They must feel overwhelmed by your ability to deliver.

If you cannot do that, you’re only “great”, which is the irony of everything in business today — it used to be it was okay just being “great”. But not today though, everything great is only a click away. Instead, you have to be exceptional to stand out from the rest.

If not, this economy will eat you out. If you’re trying to be sneaky on the call, trying to enroll someone who has no idea why you’re calling, you’re not doing any service to your customers.

Wells Fargo, delight your customers or go home. You’re not doing your customers any favor by offering “$10 gas cards” for their time wasted listening to your stupid sales pitch.