Weekend Thoughts, Reads and the Last Lecture

Some of my Favorites and Musings from the week, hope you enjoy.....

1. On Friday we learned of the passing of Randy Pausch the famed computer science prof and all around great guy from Carnegie Mellon after a battle with Pancreatic Cancer at the young age of 48. His legendary "Last Lecture" is lengthy but always worth the time as the lessons are invaluable.....and very moving.

2. A quote from Michael Jordan (while the souce is questionable, the message is not)

I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occassions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot....and I missed! I have failed over and over and over again in my life and that is precisely why I succeed.

Obviously, it is not important to just fail, it is important to fail and learn from those failures so that you do not make the same mistakes again. You may make new ones but not the same ones. In that vein there is a great Post Mortem on Monitor 110 that we should all read and use as a reminder to be honest with ourselves and analyze our failures so that we may learn from where we have been.

3. Almost every week you could pick numerous of Seth Godin's posts. I am a fan of Chris Anderson and The Long Tail. Seth has a post this week about the Profit in the Tail. If for some reason you have not read The Long Tail....grab it and read it (at least the article) this weekend.

4. Lastly, in support of my Delighting the Customer theme I provide a link to the Six Laws of Customer Experience. Have a read and I hope the theme of focusing on the customer experience is one that you will remember, maybe try some of my suggestions and by doing so you create not just good customer but good advocates, spokespeople and marketers for your growing business.