Thoughts for spring..... we are evolving and this is a fast part of a long cycle

Humans have been evolving and its been happening over so long, the changes have generally been so slow, we mostly don't take it into account in the course of one human life.

When I compare how I grew up to how my daughter grew up - I biked around the neighborhood every day after school - for fun! She walked to Borders books with friends - and they missed it terribly when the store closed - so much so, they bought souvenirs for each other when they sold the store fittings.

My social circle was limited to the folks I saw in school, the neighbors and local cousins plus a penpal in New Zealand.

Her social circle is unlimited - she is part of a tribe she joined on the Internet: At a young age, she wanted to go to LA to be part of the first Youtube conference put on by the Vlogbrothers & friends! So I went and was part of it too. It felt like the average age was 16 years, .... 12 year olds accompanied by one of their parents. I think there were 2000 people there in that sold out conference at the Century City hotel on the Avenue for the Stars. It was fun for parents too!

We host people as part of the AirBnb network - its like staying at home and the world comes to visit! I realized how different a life we lead than most because our visitors tell us.... "I have never stayed in a house with so many magazines (Atlantic, New Yorker, Harpers, the Economist, etc) and the New York Times newspaper delivered daily"

As usual, this annual event was three days of amazing content, networking and best practice sharing among inside sales peers. Paul and Mark did a great job condensing three days of great presentations into a fast-paced summary. Here are their slides, which largely are taken from presentations from a wide variety of inside sales leaders and vendors (you can see a list of those companies on slide 51).

Whether you manage inside sales or work with teams that do, this deck is worth a quick flip through.

Heston Blumenthal has spent most of his career amazing people. The world-famous British chef; who is renowned for his unusual culinary concoctions such as Edible Fairy Lights, Exploding Potato Donuts & Black Pudding Chocolate Spread; could never be referred to as predictable. However in 2008, he did something that nobody could have ever expected. The owner of the three Michelin starred Fat Duck restaurant agreed to help turn around the fortunes of the faltering British ‘greasy spoon’ restaurant chain Little Chef, which had been taken into administration and rescued only two years earlier.

Blumenthal was given £350,000 and asked to re-invent the Little Chef menu and test the proposition via a concept restaurant in Popham, Hampshire. The entire engagement was captured in a series of Channel 4 documentaries aired in 2009, the final one of which can be seen here:

E4 Did Heston Change Little Chef by zodiacza

Have you noticed how easy and enjoyable most smartphone apps are to use? How intuitive, sticky and user-friendly cloud-based applications such as Evernote and Salesforce have become?

With the rise of cloud-based, on-demand software, more and more software offerings are designed to cater explicitly to the needs of users. They typically require little or no training, are intuitive and easy to use, offer simple designs and feature-sets, and provide much more enjoyment.

There are several trends responsible for this. The economic model for software has changed dramatically. The days of massive expenditures and locking in customers with software that is difficult to replace are limited. The new model of cloud-based, on-demand software makes it easier for users to switch to better offerings. In the past, vendors could get away with ugly, cumbersome, difficult-to-use software. Today, they simply can’t. In fact, Net Promoter Scores for software vendors are more correlated to customer experience than product performance.