I Don't Want Fries With That

As I tried on the suit for the first time in three years, I suddenly realized how the pandemic had affected me on a level I was ignoring. I can't speak for you, but the last couple of years have been challenging and my midriff has paid for it.

As I was donating the suit to a local clothing drive, I realized I had avoided it. Yeah, I put on a few pounds, okay, more than a few pounds and it wasn't the pandemic's fault. It was the guy who avoids mirrors and buys larger tshirts' fault. 

First world problems

Millions around the world won't have a nutritious meal today. My growing girth is not a calamity. It has been caused by a guy who has been working from home the last two plus years who needs to get off his backside, lose the carbs, and stop making excuses. You may also be this guy. 

The emotional toll the pandemic has caused for literally billions is a much larger issue than my waistline and despite the fact losing weight needs to be a top priority for me, I also need to accept that these last couple of years have knocked me down emotionally. I'm sure they have done the same to you. So while I lose the weight and you deal with your situation, let's agree something.  

Let's be kind to each other and compassionate to all of us.

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Ninety-Five Percent

A few weeks ago, I took my mom out for a birthday dinner. It was nice to take her out for a nice meal and catch up. We arrived, they seated us immediately, and the friendly server came over to take our drink order and tell us about the specials. We pursued the menu and ordered our meal.

Our food arrived and that’s when the evening went downhill. Mine was cold; mom’s was overdone; it was an epic fail. I called our server over and told her that our meals weren’t good and she immediately offered a refund and a free replacement meal for each of us. But we decided to skip the whole thing and I took mom home with the promise of a rain check at a different restaurant.

Order Up

Our dinner was a disaster but the restaurant handled it well. They offered to remove the original order from my bill and give us a free dinner right then and there. It was our choice to leave and we may never return. But the point is they tried to fix it right away. Their apologies were sincere; no one got flustered; they handled it well.

That’s the 95%. That’s the majority of what your company is and it has nothing to do with what you do or sell. It’s your people, your customer service, your ability to handle conflict, your capacity to deal with change and potential conflict.

They Did It Right

I may try this restaurant again, but that’s not the point. The real take away was how they dealt with it and treated us with care and respect. We didn’t make a fuss, we didn’t storm out, and we did demand to see the manager or yell and scream. We simply decided our meals weren’t good and we didn’t want to order anything else. But they did try and make it right.

Conflict and communication breakdown happens. It’s what we do about it that really matters. You will mess up with customer and clients, so will I. You will make mistakes, so will I. It’s called being human. But it’s how we deal with it in the heat of any moment that counts most. It’s that connective tissue within your company and relationships with those who engage with your services or buy your products that is critical. And it’s how we take care of things when things don't go well.

That’s the 95% which will separate you from everyone else.
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Celebrate International Women’s Day

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Kneale Mann | Leadership Strategist, consultant, writer, speaker, executive coach facilitating performance growth with leaders, management, and teams.

Kiva

Finding the How

Have you ever dropped an idea because you don’t think you had the money, time, expertise, or network? I was working on a project with a colleague this week and remembered the story of Britta Riley. I posted her story last year but thought it was worth another look.

Riley solved the issue of growing food in her cramped New York apartment. The result is now a global organization called The Windowfarms Project which was built through leadership, teamwork, open source, community, social media, and determined people.

Don't discard that idea you're working on just yet.


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Kneale Mann | Leadership and Culture strategist, writer, speaker, executive coach engaging leaders, collaborative teams, and strong business results.

TED | Britta Riley

Feeding Your Mind

JP Rangaswami poses a question and a challenge to all of us. In our world where information is coming at us at warp speed, what if we looked at it as fuel and something to celebrate much like we view food.

Rangaswami spends a lot of his time studying behavior and speaks at events all over the world. He loves food but equally craves learning. He shares what the two have in common after studying both for over a quarter century.


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Kneale Mann | Leadership and Culture strategist, writer, speaker, executive coach engaging leaders, collaborative teams, and strong business results.

TED | JP Rangaswami

We Stand On Guard for Thee

Today is Canada’s 146th birthday. Since this site has visitors from more than 180 countries, as a proud Canadian, I thought I’d share some fun facts about our country.

Canada’s name comes from a St. Lawrence Iroquoian word, kanata, which means village or settlement. We use the metric system, most of the time.

We are saying about, not a boot. Canadian Graeme Ferguson co-invented IMAX.
The longest highway in the world is the Trans-Canada Highway which is over 7,604 kilometers or 4,725 miles. Toronto is the 30th most populated city in the world.

We prefer using the word couch over sofa. The baseball glove was invented in Canada in 1883. Canada has the world’s smallest jail in Rodney, Ontario which is 24.3 square meters or 270 square feet.

Wayne Gretzky, Michael Buble, James Cameron, Jim Carrey, Alex Trebek, Celine Dion, Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, Mike Myers, Justin Bieber, Leonard Cohen, Steve Nash, Ryan Reynolds and William Shatner are all Canadian.

Canada boasts a 99% literacy rate. The average life expectancy at birth is 81.16 years – the sixth highest in the world and more than 83% of Canadians have internet access compared to the US at 78%.

Silverware is called cutlery. Sorry is a perfectly acceptable response and often our default one. The country has the longest coastline in the world and Canada represents the world's 11th largest GDP.

We have butter tarts, poutine, and ketchup chips but maple syrup is not our national beverage – Google if you must. Canadian Thomas Ahearn invented the electric cooking range in 1882.

Canada has the fourth lowest population density index in the world with just over 34 million people in the second largest country in the world by land mass at approximately 9.9 million square kilometers or 3.8 million square miles.

There have been 22 Nobel Prize laureates from Canada and it's in the top five producing countries of gold, copper, zinc, nickel, aluminum, and natural gas.

Soda is referred to as pop. Canadians James Till and Ernest McCulloch are credited with the discovery of the stem cell.

Basketball was invented by Canadian James Naismith. Canada has the longest coastline of any country in the world. Canadians consume an average of 23.4 pounds of cheddar cheese each year.

Now you know.
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Kneale Mann | Leadership and Culture strategist, writer, speaker, executive coach engaging leaders, collaborative teams, and strong business results.

canada

A Day to Celebrate

Generous estimates put the number of people who celebrate Christmas at about a third of the world’s population. Some extend their celebrations to boxes of chocolate and elaborate meals, brightly wrapped gifts and a cup of good cheer. While others pay respects in a more religious way. And of course, many do a mix of both.

If you celebrate, please make it a safe and fun one!


Kneale Mann

Pearl Jam

When a Community Creates an Idea

How often do you drop an idea because you don’t think you have the money, time, expertise, business savvy, marketing acumen, or network?

Here’s how Britta Riley solved the issue of growing food in her cramped New York apartment. The result is a global organization called The Windowfarms Project which was built through teamwork, open source, social media, and determined people.


Kneale Mann

TED | Britta Riley

How's Your Info Diet?

JP Rangaswami poses a question and a challenge to all of us. In our world where information is coming at us at warp speed, what if we looked at it as fuel and something to celebrate much like we view food.

JP is an economist and rose through the ranks in finance. He then expanded his role into the technology realm becoming a CIO. Rangaswami spends a lot of his time studying behavior and speaks at events all over the world. Like most, he loves food but he equally loves learning. He shares what the two have in common after studying both for over a quarter century.

I'll add one more as you watch JP's TEDTalk. How can we include leadership in all of this?


Kneale Mann

TED | JP Rangaswami

Our Distracted World

Removing Clutter and Adding Clarity

I’m often asked if I am necessary to a client’s business. Water and food are necessary, the rest are choices. I can bring 25+ years of marketing and media experience to a client’s business but only if they want my help and realize it won't happen instantly.

If you take the social channels at face value, many claim they can solve all your problems with the purchase of their book or click of a mouse. Solutions can be buried somewhere between good intentions and snake oil.

Sign Up and Never Read

I was sifting through my in-box recently and realized that I was creating clutter by joining upwards of 100 different services, clubs, email blasts and news sites. Over time, I have subscribed to these services only to glance when the daily email comes in and never read it. Volume has replaced need. So I will unsubscribe to all of them in email form and go back to digesting the content through my reader. Quantity replaced quality and it all became white noise.

The average Facebook user has 130 friends and has joined 80 pages or groups. How much daily interaction happens after the "like" button is pressed? Something caused you to do it in the first place so there may be good stuff, or not, and if not, dump it. The onus is not on you to stay but for them to give you reason to want to stay. Could we see a social media diet plan in place over the next few years? Less will become more while we focus on actual connections rather than collecting numbers.

Ready Shoot Aim

So often we feel we’re going to miss something so we create clutter instead of progress. Companies adopt a new imitative for fear the competition will get a leg up. Someone on Twitter self proclaims some tactic and it makes us wonder if we should adopt it. Every one of our profiles on the social web has a counter on it and the numbers begin to distract us as if they are actually important.

In business, there will always be someone doing better than you and always someone doing worse than you. The critical issue to keep in mind is what is important to you.

Perhaps some thought to what is truly necessary may help.

Kneale Mann

image credit: brickhouse
originally posted: march 2011

Removing Clutter and Distraction

Focusing on the Need

Someone asked me a while ago whether I was necessary to a client’s business. Water and food are necessary, the rest are choices. I can bring 25+ years of marketing and media experience to a client’s business but only if they want my help and realize it won't happen instantly.

If you take the social channels at face value, many claim they can solve all your problems with the purchase of their book or click of a mouse. Solutions can be buried somewhere between good intentions and snake oil.

Sign Up and Never Read

I was sifting through my in-box yesterday and realized that I was creating clutter by joining upwards of 100 different services, clubs, email blasts and news sites. Over time, I have subscribed to these services only to glance when the daily email comes in and never read it. Volume has replaced need. So I will unsubscribe to all of them in email form and go back to digesting the content through my reader. Quantity replaced quality and it all became white noise.

The average Facebook user has 130 friends and has joined 80 pages or groups. How much daily interaction happens after the "like" button is pressed? Something caused you to do it in the first place so there may be good stuff, or not, and if not, dump it. The onus is not on you to stay but for them to give you reason to want to stay. Could we see a social media diet plan in place over the next few years? Less will become more while we focus on actual connections rather than collecting numbers.

Ready Shoot Aim

So often we feel we’re going to miss something so we create clutter instead of progress. Companies adopt a new imitative for fear the competition will get a leg up. Someone on Twitter self proclaims some tactic and it makes us wonder if we should adopt it. Every one of our profiles on the social web has a counter on it and the numbers begin to distract us as if they are actually important.

In business, there will always be someone doing better than you and always someone doing worse than you. The critical issue to keep in mind is what is important.

Other than food and water, what is necessary to you?

Kneale Mann | How can I help?

image credit: majed

It’s All in the Sauce

If you sell stuff, make stuff, create stuff, consult stuff or think about stuff, you get stuck once in a while. I’ve been working on a couple of projects this week and I've been stuck. I was trying to apply some assumptions mixed with generalizations and clearly it wasn’t getting me anywhere. Clearly it's not a wise strategy at the best of times.

And then I remembered Howard Moskowitz.

Howard is a person who studies human behavior. He has grasped the fact that we want to be happy but often we don't know how to achieve it.

Author and thought leader Malcolm Gladwell explains. [video]



knealemann | email


video credit: TED

Finding Passion

It can get lost in busy

A valuable lesson when you get stressed is to remember all the good stuff in your life. Easier said than done? Perhaps. A worthy exercise? Absolutely.

We've all seen stories featuring people overcoming insurmountable odds yet we feel anxiety over the most inane issues in our lives.

A colleague reminded me last week. You do your best, you do what you think is right, you own the responsibility you should own and then you let it go.

We must surround ourselves with those who will cheer us on and not waste our finite time trying to convince the inconvincible

We have to to play great music, eat great food, make company with those we care about and let the rest just wash away with the rest of our memes.

Think about a moment when you completely lost track of time. You were doing something so enjoyable that you weren’t concerned about anything else. That is passion and that is what we need to find and cherish most of all. We need to seek it out and not stop until we find it.

Do you think there is a direct correlation between your passion and your success? Is it worth keeping both within your sights?

knealemann
work with me: contact

image credit: photobucket

Is Your Business Earthy?

Befriending the Environment.

Today is Earth Day as you know. It’s the one day where it seems almost everyone is a bit more environmentally conscious.

I could recycle everything and live in a mud house and still not do all that some of my friends do for our planet.

How Green Are You?

A couple of decades ago, it was a daunting task to become more planet friendly but there are more recycling options, greener products available, it’s cool, it’s cheaper. But how green are we, really?

There is progress every day with those little things we can do – like turning off the laptop every night and refusing to eat take-out from any place that uses Styrofoam! We could all drive smart cars and eat organically grown food but will we do it?

We still have wars over oil and an unrelenting desire for stuff.

How Green Is Your Business?

There seems to be a story every few months about someone protesting big business or government about their waste of energy as they keep a full office tower of fluorescent lights on at night where there isn’t a soul in the place. And often the spokesperson coughs up some lame reason tied to security for why thirty floors need to be lit up like it’s noon at 3am.

I consult on marketing, social media and overall business strategy. Often managers or owners have items in their budget listed as an “expense” rather than money better spent on marketing or staff or training or other useful things. Those expenses can also be paper and pens and waste.

What Can We Do?

So as we all get warm and fuzzy about the Earth today, look at your budget and see where you can cut costs. Take a look at the wasted items that do nothing to advance your business strategy.

You may even save a few trees and lessen your carbon footprint while you’re at it. Do you think you can do it?

@knealemann
strategy. marketing. social media.

photo credit: nasa

UX BizPlan Vending Co.

The vending machine is marvel of retro technology which thrives in our digital hi-tech portable world. Not only can you order items on your cell phone, you can now buy a cell phone from a vending machine!

But let's stick with food for a moment.

Will you hover over your selection just that extra half second to insure you don’t accidentally get black licorice when you wanted cheese doodles?

Dinner In A Bag


It can be stressful when you made the decision to work late and replace dinner with a few handfuls of deep fried potato slices.

Snack food is a multi-billion dollar worldwide industry. There are companies making money hand over chips as we toil late in to the wee hours searching for sustenance.

Conformity and Choice
How can we learn from the vending machine while running a business?

Some say if we are left with too much choice, we make none at all. But if we think we are too restricted, then we are unhappy with the choices presented to us.

User experience must be – by definition – designed for the user. We customize our phone backgrounds and voicemail, we can modify our computer color schemes, choose from the long menu of options for our car and fashion is an individual choice.

Why do we conform in the workplace?

Could it be beneficial to examine the tastes and desires of each member of the team? Is it possible to find a more co-creative workspace by incorporating the choices made by each person involved?

If we all liked the same things, shirts would only be available in blue and the parking lot would be filled with the same make and model of car.

No Rules. No Conclusions.

This is not to suggest you create an atmosphere where everyone chooses and no one makes decisions - that's just as unproductive as a benevolent dictatorship.

If you work with clients or run a business, give some thought to the abundance of knowledge and experience of everyone involved. You may find some surprises along the way and not blindly feed them black licorice when they’d prefer cheese doodles.

What's your selection?

@knealemann
Helping you create your best business
marketing and social media strategy.

image credit: askdavetaylor.com

Can I Help You?

Just looking, thanks.

You barely get your big toe across the threshold of the front door and Chippy Chipperton is all over you like a blanket of annoyance. One thing is clear, Chip is on commission and his manager has pummeled the up sell into his cerebellar cortex. You avoid eye contact and hurriedly say “No thanks, just looking.”




Do You have it in blue?

Then you really need help, you like the shirt but can't find your size. You don’t want to call the Chipster back, you just want the shirt not the sales pitch. Ultimately you walk out with the decision to do without the shirt avoiding more time spent with the over attentive sales dude.

Is it lunchtime yet?

It’s one of those days where you wonder why you’re on the verge of passing out. You then realize that it’s 3pm and all you’ve eaten that day is a chocolate chip cookie at your 10am meeting. You sit at your desk in a haze wondering if anything you said made any sense to anyone. Blood sugar levels need attention.

Anything will do.

So you grab your keys and head to the closest drive-thru’. Guilt is overwritten by need and anything to keep the wolf from the door will do. Then you are met with the barely breathing attendant at the other end of the speaker who can hardly muster the energy to lob your burger combo into the bag. Your happiness is not a concern.

The cheese is missing, they added extra pickle when you asked three times for none and you don’t even like root beer. But you gag down your late afternoon feast and try to forget the ordeal as quickly as possible. Your day ends without that new shirt and a delightful case of heartburn.

Which outlet is giving great customer service?

Chippy doesn’t care about solving your pain, he just wants to make his numbers and our friend at the burger palace is simply putting in time – the similarities between what you ordered and what you get are strictly coincidental.

Are these two places common or rare? How could each improve during our tight economic times? Are you working in either environment?

@knealemann