Tonight in Vidalakis Dining Hall, we gave the Chef and his Wait Staff a standing ovation for around 3 minutes flat out. The food and service here at Stanford has been outstanding. We have been spoilt. Very, very spoilt. No meal has been duplicated; you name a country, we have eaten it - Mexico, Asia, Italy, Spain, Greece, Hawaii, in fact, all the states of America! The options endless; gluten free, dairy free, vegetarian, vegan and desserts that make your mouth water! Fresh fruit, fresh juices including carrot, every manner of sandwich filling, every salad under the sun! Thankfully, my friend and colleague, Karen Fifield who is the CEO of Wellington Zoo, warned me about this aspect of the course. (Thanks Karen!). Karen recommended I apply for ENPL and it's the best referral I have had in a long time. (Again, thanks). Oh, and before, I forget, all produce is grown locally and there are fresh flowers on the tables everyday!
Here are some other great features of Stanford; we have received binders, books, materials, a strategy toolkit, notepads, pens, highlighters, page dividers, everything gratis...laundry powder! A service for shipping all your materials home. There are refreshment rooms we can access 24/7 stocked with snacks and drinks. The list goes on and on. This is customer service supremo! Automation rules here; flushing toilets, water from taps, lights that switch on and off. In fact, all you have to do is wash and dress yourself! They make it so easy. It is so cool - and unreal.
There are other people who need recognition. Every class has a technical support person and class content person who are on call for the professors. When we break, a team come in and clear away all the rubbish and wipe the whiteboard clean. I wonder if any of these guys would like to come and live with me in New Zealand?
Tomorrow is our last day. I can hardly believe it. People have already started leaving and I have noticed a different type of energy entering the lecture room. An impersonation of Jim Phills has been posted on UTube, already. It seems Todd Philips, the Director of Government Relations San Deigo Workforce Partnership, who I now sit next to in class, has a new role in life as an entertainer. More and more people are attending to texts and messaging, some openly doing work on their laptops during the sessions, others skip session to make phone calls or attend meetings with colleagues while they are on the west coast. It's called multi-tasking, I believe.
Another little known fact about Jim Phills - he rides a Ducati! Not only clever but sexy, with it.
Building Strong (Non Profit) Brands
Professor Jennifer Aaker dealt with branding. While a great deal of the material was familiar to me, it was the innovative ways my colleagues design and promote their organisations that was engaging. We all got outed - our brand names were placed in a variety of arrangements. Downstage fell under the dimension of excitement. Words to describe this were: imaginative, unique, up to date, independent, contemporary as well as exciting, trendy, daring, spirited and cool. I was happy with that!
But the section on making mistakes made the most impact on me. We understand this innately with theatre practice but when it comes to our administrative work, we are less forgiving. And yet, studies show that companies that take risks are forgiven more readily than companies that are sincere. Mistakes can hurt, but they can also help. They point to things, especially an appreciation of a relationship you may have with your customers, constituents or donors. Everyone makes them but what matters is how you handle them. My favourite quote of the day was: "In any relationship, one partner will eventually fail - a really smart person!"
The Power of Social Technology
Aaker is the author of the Dragonfly Effect a book on social media. The title conveys the message that; small acts can create big change, and this happens when the core of an idea is deeply meaningful and I would add to that lots of fun, especially in the arena of social media.
This was a session on social persuasion, the strategies and tactics that have successfully harnessed social media towards a specific goal. My favourite quote: people love to buy but hate to be sold to! We were told that research shows that non-profits are seen as warm, but incompetent, while for-profits are seen as competent, but cold. And we were asked, "How do you bridge the gap?" And of course the answer is in the stories we tell.
Humans are not ideally set to understand logic; they are set up to understand stories, says Robert Shank, Cognitive Psychologist. Then we were given breakdowns of the Obama Campaign and C&D's Lemonade fundraising campaign for kids with cancer. We also looked at who buys and who donates and why? To build brands that are authentic, to develop messages that spread, and to harness social media, we are told, we need to get focused, grab attention, tell a story, and enable action.... oh, yes and read a good book.
Making Connections
In our free time before lunch, I met Jessica Robinson-Love of CounterPULSE and Colleen Bailey from The National Steinbeck Museum. We have made a connection because we run theatres; venues and programmes. We took this opportunity to share our "trouble spots" and "bright spots"; and critiqued each other websites. It was a very productive engagement with a robust exchange of ideas. The generosity of like-minded organisations is very powerful.
Computer Simulation: Refugee Relief 2009
After lunch we were back in our study groups testing our queueing theory. The task was to run a simulation, based on a refugee camp, in order to make decisions about patient priority and staff scheduling. What we learnt from this exercise was that increased utilisation of your resources didn't necessarily (in fact never) resulted in higher throughput. We then investigated this phenomena as mathematical equations and in excel spread sheets. And this is where I hit the wall. While I understood the principles, the details and graphs confused me - and I wasn't the only one! However, I could see the application in our organisation to our scheduling of staff, especially Front of House casuals and production week labour and even queues created by audiences preshow and in the intervals. I'll be interested to test this with staff. But I'll need the wizardry of our Financial Manager!
The 'take away' from this session was simply, Snapshot Management is bad; it leads to unintended outcomes and you suffer the consequences. Systems Management is good; it manages flow, inventory and response time. The ratio is between the demand for work versus the supply of work. According to our professor, Jim Patell, priority schemes have no effect on the work to be done, re-ordering does not change the amount of time. However, wait time effects how long somebody waits!
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