Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

Peninsula to Favor Telecommuting?

Facebook ban commuting

I just returned from a few days in California, including the last day or so in Los Angeles. While I was there, the Texas Transportation Insitute issued its annual study of traffic congestion, which led to this story in the Los Angeles Times:

The Texas report says motorists in Los Angeles and Orange counties spent an average of 72 extra hours in rush-hour traffic in 2005, the subject of the current study. That’s one day shy of two full workweeks a year and is 20 hours more than in 1985. The delay represents the difference between how long it takes to travel during peak periods compared with hours when traffic flows freely.

Unlike last week’s bogus “study” that alleged Facebook was costing British firms “dear,” this traffic study is being criticized for underestimating the actual time lost in traffic.

(Note: Despite requesting a copy of the study from Peninsula, I still haven’t received it. And Dennis Howlett has a great analysis of the ludicrous math behind Peninsula’s headline-chasing. Where are the professional journalists when you need them? Why do they uncritically repeat these allegations without doing a quick calculation, as Dennis did, of whether such a figure is even possible, to say nothing of its plausibility? Thanks to Neville Hobson for pointing out Dennis’ post on his For Immediate Release podcast with Shel Holtz. And Shel read this humorous take on the issue, how employers are infringing on employees’ free time.)

In the reporting on the traffic study, by contrast, the LA Times does something novel: it reports the assumptions behind the study findings and quotes someone who challenges them.

The study “does a great disservice to the state and the region,” said Hasan Ikhrata, the organization’s director of planning and policy. “I would not make policy decisions based on their data, period.”

Ikhrata contends that the new method used by the institute mistakenly assumes that traffic in Los Angeles County, Orange County, the Inland Empire and Oxnard-Ventura is moving much faster during rush hours than it actually is.

Texas researchers assumed that traffic is traveling at an average of 35 mph during peak travel times. However, SCAG planners say that sensors buried in the pavement of major freeways in the Los Angeles area show that the average speed during rush hours is closer to 20 mph. By this measurement, Ikhrata said the extra delay is roughly 100 hours per year, nearly 40% worse than the Texas estimate.

Ikhrata said the actual data, collected from the sensors by the state Department of Transportation, indicate that all of the Los Angeles region’s major freeways have segments moving at less than 10 mph during the most heavily traveled part of the long morning and evening peak periods.

Having just been in LA and the OC, I’m with Hasan on this one. Going from downtown LA to Angels Stadium in Anaheim took about 80 minutes, or a full hour longer than if traffic had been moving.

I wonder whether the next headline from Peninsula will be a call for firms to initiate telecommuting policies to reclaim lost productivity. Might we a good way for this UK-based firm to expand into the US market.

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Facebook Tip: Don’t Be Just a Number

One of Facebook‘s limits is that with more than 40 million users, and a million added each week, it’s sometimes hard to find a person searching just by name.

Facebook tip don't be just a number
For example, last night I met Adam Brown from Coca Cola (with whom I am participating as part of a panel today at the Arthur W. Page Society conference.) I went back to my room and wanted to “friend” him, but when I did the search by name for “Adam Brown” I got this result:

Name number facebook

I don’t know exactly how many Adam Browns Facebook has, but it’s more than 500. Finding him would be an arduous process if I had to click through, screen-by-screen, viewing a handful at a time. Fortunately I was able to use the search within other networks function to narrow it to the Coca Cola network and send him the invitation. (By the way, the Coca Cola network has 915 members.)

Then last night I got a friend invitation from Mari Smith, and after I had accepted I saw that she had added an application called Profile Web Address, which lets you create a more memorable URL so people can find you on Facebook.

Which is more memorable? This:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=777087888

or this:

http://profile.to/leeaase

To ask is to answer, isn’t it?

This application isn’t that essential for someone like me because my name is unique enough. When you Google Lee Aase, you get my blog as the first result. When you search for Lee Aase in Facebook, you get four results (one of which is my Professional Contacts group.)

But the reason I added this application anyway is so someone else doesn’t take my name, so I would encourage everyone in Facebook to add this application and stake your claim. It would be great if profile.to would create a similar application for groups, too. That would enable organizations to create official groups within Facebook and not have them lost in less relevant results that may also use the organization’s name.

If you have a common name like the Browns and Smiths listed above, and if you have a Yahoo or Gmail account, you might want to use that as your Profile Web Address. That way, when you’re meeting people and they want to know how to connect with you, you could tell them, “I’m joesmith23@gmail.com or profile.to/joesmith23.”

When Facebook profiles become available in Google (which should be in a couple of weeks), it may make this tool less relevant. I may be able to search for “Adam Brown Coca Cola” and have his profile show up on top. But for now, I think this is a worthwhile application.

And this is why I typically accept friend requests from people who read my blog, because by seeing what they are doing and the applications they’re adding, I learn things I can apply myself. And I’m still about 4,900 behind Scoble.

For tips and background on using Facebook in business or in your non-profit or not-for-profit organization, click here or the Facebook Business tab above.

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It’s about Time(s)

timesselect free
The New York Times announces in tomorrow’s paper that its experiment with charging for a portion of its content on the web has come to an end:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

The Times’s site has about 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, far more than any other newspaper site. Ms. Schiller would not say how much increased Web traffic the paper expects by eliminating the charges, or how much additional ad revenue the move was expected to generate.

You can read the whole announcement here and get Jeff Jarvis’ take here.

I used to echo the standard line that “content is king.” If that were true, the Times wouldn’t be giving it away. The reality is relationships and conversations are what matter, and the TimesSelect wall was cutting off those relationships.Content is nobility at best (since users can generate it, too), not royalty.

In the city where I work — Rochester, Minnesota — the Post-Bulletin has likewise opened all of its content to non-subscribers. The reason: it was losing online ad revenue.

As Jarvis notes, it seems much more likely that the Wall Street Journal will soon open its online content to non-subscribers, especially under its new ownership.

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Arthur W. Page Society and Blue Oceans

Blue Oceans

I’ve been listening to an interesting book, Blue Ocean Strategy, over the last couple of weeks. It’s about “value innovation” that companies use to leave the “red oceans” of cutthroat, bloody competition and chart a course for wide-open “blue oceans” of market opportunity. As the authors’ web site puts it:

The aim of BOS is not to out-perform the competition in the existing industry, but to create new market space or a blue ocean, thereby making the competition irrelevant.

I’ll do a more in-depth review of this book when I’m done listening; it’s one of the most compelling business books I’ve encountered.

As the authors say, Good to Great is, well… great, but they argue that the real unit of analysis needs to be the strategic move. The main point is that companies that succeed in creating blue oceans of relatively competition-free markets identify product offerings that can attract the industry’s previous non-customers. They do this by finding key factors that, if present, would turn these non-customers into customers. Then they eliminate or reduce everything else, to provide great value at an attractive price.

Southwest Airlines, Apple, Casella wines, Novo Nordisk, Home Depot and Curves exercise clubs for women are among the profiled companies that followed this strategic approach.

In every case, the companies needed to think creatively and offer an innovative product or service to find these blue oceans.

In hindsight, their moves may seem obvious. But they weren’t obvious at the time. These companies resisted taking the customary but uncreative approach of benchmarking against competitors and trying to offer a little more at a slightly better price for increased market share, which would have been a recipe for commodity pricing and low profitability.

As the authors indicate, a specific kind of creativity is needed to unlock blue oceans. It finds value innovations that provide compelling value to customers and non-customers. It looks at why non-customers don’t buy from your industry, and what you can do to attract them.

I had planned to wait to do this review until I was done with the book (and I will finish it later), but I couldn’t resist posting this much when I got to the Ritz Carlton Laguna Niguel for the Arthur W. Page Society’s Annual Conference, and saw the beautiful blue ocean you see in the picture above. The camera phone obviously doesn’t do it justice.

We heard an interesting keynote this evening from Miles White, CEO of Abbott, who kicked off the conference. Laura Hall from Wieck Media will be writing the official conference blog, which will be linked to the Page Society web site. If that blog is available to non-Page members, I will link to it. The conference organizers have asked presenters to be provocative and controversial, and Mr. White certainly fulfilled that goal. As a CEO who has been through some high-profile public controversies, he brought home the fact that “red oceans” aren’t always made bloody by competition within your industry, but sometimes by the agendas of “stakeholder” groups.

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Highlights and Links 9-15-07

Here are some recent posts from others that I think are interesting, but haven’t blogged about myself:

And here are highlights from my posts of the last week:

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