Think back over everything you have ever bought in your life, What is the favorite thing that you treasure the most?"

Yes, one to two people talked about big ticket items like cars, but the majority of people responded with very individualistic and low priced items. We heard them speak less to the features and functions of the object and more the the meaning. Reminds me of John Maeda in "The Laws of Simplicity" urging us to "subtract the obvious and add the meaningful." The one question also helps put the focus back on the customer's life, what they value, and what is meaningful in their life. Our product and service designs should fit into that.

See also

Diagram of Happy Customer & Corporate Success

The Age of Customer Satisfaction

Design Rules for Building Happy Customer User Experiences (UX)

If we use similar metrics to the GNH for looking at our customers, what might we measure?

1. Economic Wellness: How much does our product/service reduce consumer debt, raise average income, and flatten the income distribution?
2. Environmental Wellness: How much does our product/service reduce pollution, noise, or traffic?
3. Physical Wellness: How much does our product/service reduce severe illness?
4. Mental Wellness: How much does our product/service reduce the usage of antidepressants or the number of psychotherapy patients?
5. Workplace Wellness: How much does our product/service reduce jobless claims, workplace complaints, and lawsuits?
6. Social Wellness: How much does our product/service reduce discrimination, divorce rates, complaints of domestic conflict, family lawsuits, public lawsuits, and crime rates.
7. Political Wellness: how much does our product/service reduce foreign conflicts and increase local democracy and individual freedom.

References

Gross National Happiness

See Also

Diagram of Happy Customer & Corporate Success

The Age of Customer Satisfaction

Design Rules for Building Happy Customer  User Experiences (UX)

Reference

It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be by Paul Arden

• The culture will be more a community that is dynamic and learns and adapts and re-organizes based on the problem/opportunity it is facing.
• All of the people in the company will be able to create content and manage campaigns. They will all have at least basic training and skills in all the facets of digital production. The tools are just too easy not to.
• All the information will be in the cloud and available to anyone in the organization to access at any time.
• All the different metrics for all of the accounts will also be available at any time to anyone in the organization. This includes social media monitoring.

The main difference from today will be the tools that facilitate all of the above new behaviors. You could say the scaffolding that supports this different culture.

• Wikis. All pitches and SOWs will be built on and through wikis.
• Blogs - Every account will have a blog. Every customer segment will have a blog.  These will be accessed/and edited by both the agency and the client.
• DataMart -All the account information, customer information, and project information will be available to everyone.
• A powerful search functionality will stretch across all of the above and let people find information.
• Just as we use Google analytics, Omniture, and now Radian6  to comb through massive amount of information to find out what is the most recent, the most accessed, the most commented on, the most "liked" content - - the agency of the future will do the same will all of the above.

See also: Agency of the Future

B = The skills and knowledge that you have

C = The skills and knowledge you have to learn or get someone to teach you, or figure out some way to get someone else to do for you in your new promotion. These skills and knowledge should be made into a list that you need to check off one by one.

References

What Color Is Your Parachute. I adapted this from his chapter on how to start your own business. It was recently recommended to me to re-read "The Parachute" book once a year, so I am doing so now.  Additionally, it is useful to give me practical ideas/topics and to help focus my discussions with the people I manage and mentor. I highly recommend it.

See also: How to get promoted to Senior User Experience Designer

I found the R/GA videos to be great.
What we do (11:44)
Our Model (4:18) The core of their concept
Our Vision (8:12)
If you are thinking of making a agency of your own, check out the way they present and show who they are. The model they present focuses on showing how they solve problem of integration. The presenters pass the "Yes, I'd love to have a beer with them" test.

I am also reading Jaffe Juice who I have recently stumbled upon and wrote a interesting article called The Agency of the Future.

And another great post on "who says the future needs an advertising agency?"

References

Fred Leis is my manager who said "Lets talk about more about management."

Sundar Chandrasekaran, a Sears employee now, a recent Stanford Grad who was a student of Bob Sutton and was telling me about him in our afternoon meeting. Thanks Sundar!!

Late 80s -90s  in politics - Big national databases that segmented and targeted and identified "influentials"

90s -2000s in politics - rise of talk-radio hosts

Late 2000s in politics - neighborhood by neighborhood organizing the rise of niche micro-movements (donations, volunteers, etc)

Advertising Over the last 30 years - Basically take politics and lag by a decade

90-2000s - Big national databases that segmented and targeted and identified "influentials"

Late 2000s - bloggers who command attention like the talk-radio hosts and guerrilla advertising

2010 - The rise of twitter, niche advertising, and local and "badged" communities

References

From a late night conversation with Michael Leis on ways to explain advertising/social media

I often condense all my notes into a single "image." Here is what I have for this book.