21st century philanthropy

21st century philanthropy

I babbled about philanthropy in an earlier posting called “Wealth now, philanthropy later”, so I was thrilled to see this blog posting on the Harvard Business Review website:

Steve Jobs, World’s Greatest Philanthropist

Try to ignore the hyperbolic title of the article and just absorb the content.

Making the world a better place means making decisions your whole life that either incrementally or substantially make people’s lives better. People dislike hearing that investing in a promising new company could potentially have more of an impact on the world that the more common charitable action of, say, donating food to starving children.

However, if your conscious investments create jobs for people who are treated kindly and with respect, and something is also created that benefits the customers of your company, it can have a huge multiplier effect.

This all fits nicely in with the concept of Slow Money. There are certainly wealthy people that have made their money in ways that cause suffering to people and give nothing back to the world other than charity-by-guilt or by giving to causes that exacerbate problems rather than solving them.… READ THE REST

The perils of watching time-shifted tennis

The perils of watching time-shifted tennis

First world problem.

I record a lot of tennis on TiVo partly because it’s usually inconvenient to watch it live (time zone differences) and if I time-shift it, I can zap the commercials or skim matches I don’t have time to watch all of.

It’s gotten increasingly difficult to not have the outcomes of matches I’ve queued up be spoiled before I’ve gotten a chance to see them. I almost need to cut myself off from the outside world during a tournament I’m watching. Here are the various ways matches can be easily spoiled:

  • I follow tennis players on social media and they obviously are going to announce the outcomes of their matches.
  • I play tennis often and players love to chatter about matches and will spoil ones I haven’t watched. Even if I tell them not to spoil it, they’ll do it in some subtle way (e.g. If they say a match was “shocking”, then it’s probably the underdog that won).
… READ THE REST
Did I provide you with excellent service?

Did I provide you with excellent service?

It seems like every time I make a phone call to the customer service department of a big company, I get an email, a return phone call, or a postal mail survey asking how my customer experience was. They always say I was randomly chosen but that defies the laws of probability.

It’s hard to argue conceptually with the idea that you should ask your customers how they are doing. But how about this:

  • Talk to your employees manning the phones. They probably have a good idea about whether customers are generally happy or not.
  • Listen in on some phone calls and take notes.
  • If you’re going to survey, try to do a very small random selection so it’s an uncommon occurrence.

When I think of companies that have outstanding customer service (Zappos, Apple, Air New Zealand, Charles Schwab, Sonic.net, American Express), I can’t recall ever getting surveyed by them.

Spending effort to make customer service great is far better than wasting money to find out if it’s great or not.… READ THE REST

New tennis faces for 2011

New tennis faces for 2011

The highlight of the Australian Open this year for me was seeing three very promising players that I’ve never seen before, two of which I’ve never even heard of:

  1. Bernard Tomic, who has a very unconventional style that really messes with people’s minds. You never know quite what he’s going to do. Does need to ditch his father as a coach.
  2. Alexandr Dolgopolov, who also has somewhat of an unusual style, but can surprise you with easy power.
  3. Milos Raonic  was the most impressive of all, although he didn’t make it as far as Dolgopolov. He’s much more of a classic player, with an incredible serve.

All three clearly need more experience and to work on some things, but I was very impressed with their calm and collected attitudes and I will be very excited to see them play in 2011.

… READ THE REST
Civil discourse and “tone”

Civil discourse and “tone”

Often when people get into a vigorous debate of ideas, especially with those that disagree with them, it gets derailed by someone complaining about the “tone” of the debate or pleading for “civil discourse”.

As usual, Glenn Greenwald has a brilliant summation of this issue:

“One other point about this fixation on the “tone” of our politics. Political debates are inherently acrimonious – much of the rhetoric during the time of the American Founding, as well as throughout the 19th Century, easily competes with, if not exceeds, what we have now in terms of noxiousness and extremity – but far more important than tone, in my view, is content. I don’t think anyone disputes that our discourse would benefit if it were more substantive and rational, but it’s usually the ideas themselves – not the tone used to express them – that are the culprits.“

If only that could fit on a bumper sticker!… READ THE REST

Come for the tennis, stay for our captive breeding program

Come for the tennis, stay for our captive breeding program

I played tennis recently at a “public” court owned by Valley Church in Cupertino, CA. I was browsing their website today and came across a page about the tennis courts:

Valley Church: Sports Ministry

I think the mission statement bears repeating:

Building bridges with people through sports, introducing them to Jesus Christ, establishing them in their faith, assimilating them into the church and training them to reproduce.

Could that possibly be any creepier? Note that they’ve since removed that text but I found an old version of it.… READ THE REST

Wealth now, philanthropy later

Wealth now, philanthropy later

Seeing this latest monument to Bill Gates’ ego reminded me of the following quote from the book Slow Money by Woody Tasch:

“Wealth now, philanthropy later” is an inappropriate response to the challenges of the 21st century.

It has long bothered me that born-again philanthropists are lauded for their contributions for society, while ignoring all the suffering they caused and damage they’ve done to the environment. Suddenly they got old enough (or guilty enough) to start being concerned about their legacy.… READ THE REST

Google vs inertia

Google vs inertia

I can’t remember the last time I used Google to find a piece of factual information and ended up with a completely wrong result.

The rare exception recently was a search I did for:

“I promise you I will” lyrics

I was trying to find the name of the artist whose song repeats that phrase over and over. Here’s what Google found:

Top result: Depeche mode
8 of the top 10 results: Depeche mode
13 of the top 20 results: Depeche mode

The real answer?

A one-hit wonder band called When in Rome. The poor guys had their one hit and pretty much everyone seems to think that it’s actually a Depeche Mode song.

This illustrates one potentially interesting weakness with web search. If a majority of people, including reputable ones, believe something to be true and keep adding links to things they believe are true, that’s what Google is going to put up at the top.… READ THE REST