At an Open Forum panel for ZingTrain’s Art of Giving Great Service seminar, one of the questions that came up was, “The whole Zingerman’s culture. When you go home after work, how do you turn it off?”

Turn it… off? The panelists all blinked at each other. Is that even possible?

Great service, honest communication, servant leadership — these are things we wholeheartedly believe in as employees and as individuals. There isn’t anything we do or teach that is bad. By having work values that coincide with our personal values, we are able to live in integrity.

Expectations are high in this organization. By taking a job here, you make a commitment to provide great service to customers and coworkers, to forecast key numbers for the department, to learn finance, to develop a professional palate, to participate in decision-making for the business, to train other staff members, to devote time for personal growth, and a whole slew of other responsibilities in addition to, say, making a cup of coffee. This isn’t the right fit for everyone - and that’s alright. But for some people, this is exactly the kind of place they want to be.

It’s not perfect, no sirree. Sometimes we fall short of expectations or we don’t get along with everyone(!). We’re human. But at the end of the day, we respect each other, we have fun, and coming to work never feels like a chore.

Business leaders often say the most valuable resource a company has is its people. So hire people for the company you want. Build the culture and they will come.

How to make time-tracking fun and tangible:
1. Buy a box of Legos.
2. Assign a color to every project.
3. Lay a Lego board by your desk.
4. For every chunk of time spent on a project, stack a Lego piece of the corresponding color on the board.
5. End of week: Admire and analyze!

Other possible uses in the department:
3D representation of the project board
Weekly presence tracker

Tom Root lent me an uncopyedited not-for-sale manuscript of Daniel Suarez’s (aka Leinard Zeraus) Daemon.

Techno thrillers are generally disappointing. Anyone who has seen Swordfish or Antitrust will understand. And by the second page of Daemon, I was already cringing on my couch. The writing is oh so painfully self-conscious. He uses brand names to introduce his cast (the reporter with her Louis Vuitton bag, the consultant and his BMW, the mastermind’s Hummer of Doom). He tells you matter-of-factly every character’s motivation and personality, leaving nothing to the imagination. Then there’s the (surprisingly few) clichés, such as the clueless experts. At one point in the story, representatives from the CIA, DARPA, FBI, and NSA are meeting to discuss the cyber crime issue on their hands. The young NSA doctor (one of the lead characters) has to explain to them how a Denial of Service attack works. Aw heck, if they don’t know what a DDOS is, we’re beyond screwed. Has no one in the room been briefed?

Heavy-handed writing aside, the technology is spot-on. Everything from database hacking to MMORPG’s to software development to WAP setup. It’s all airtight.

Halfway into the book the technology he describes turns from “current day” to more “current day if someone would just do it already.” I especially love the HUD glasses with overlay information on real world space. Imagine wearing a pair of glasses that delivers additional information on the physical space you’re moving in. You could be walking past a restaurant and see a call-out above it with its star rating. Or real-time directions superimposed on the streets. All the components already exist, so why isn’t this here yet?!

I’d recommend you wait for the movie instead, but it won’t be made. The technology  isn’t cutting edge enough to outlive the production period. So I’ll just tell you right now how it ends. It doesn’t. I hear he’s planning a sequel.

Everything really does taste better with bacon.

This is why IT huddles rock.

EDIT (06/04/08): Curious folks have asked. Yup, it’s homemade. It’s a rum-brown sugar cream base with candied bacon bits. And yes, it’s delicious!

In the middle of the intense four-week orientation, Zappos gives new employees a bribe to walk away from it all. If they accept “The Offer,” the company will pay them for the amount of time worked plus give them a $1000 bonus. Why is Zappos paying new hires to quit?

Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick—and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later.

Innovative thinking! How much does disengaged employee hurt our bottom lines?

Joel on Software lays out his company’s recipe for customer service that parallels our own Zing approach. How very uplifting to read about other IT groups focusing on the user!

#2 is hilarious yet practical, giving customers a graceful exit out of a user-error problem.

Of all his steps, this one really caught my eye:
#8 Give customer service people a career path

Here at Fog Creek, customer support is just the first year of a three-year management training program that includes a master’s degree in technology management at Columbia University.

Now that’s commitment to customer service!

Dell’s IdeaStorm takes feedback and suggestions from the Dell user community and allows them to promote the ones they like and demote the ones they don’t.

This mind-blowing CSS sniffing technique takes advantage of the changes in color for visited links. Display a set of links on the page, use Javascript to check if the color has changed - And voila! Browsing history captured.

Benevolent genius uses:
Personalize the your browsing experience by displaying only RSS aggregators / social bookmarking tools that you use

Evil overlord uses:
User profiling
Ad placement based on brand websites you’ve visited
Product recommendations

It’s so brilliantly cool, yet scarily powerful.

The Theme
Southern foods from the Lee Bros. Cookbook

The Date
January 24, 2008

The Location
Billie’s House

The Menu
Mint Juleps - Joe
Pimento cheese platter with celery sticks, baguette, pain de montagne - Kathleen
Crab cakes - Brian
Lemon grits - Craig/Jenny
Sneaky collards - Elph
Fried apples with bourbon caramel - Billie
Buttermilk ice cream - Billie

bad monster, bad

glop of green on broken cookie

rawr

“at the tone the time will be…”

the bad caulk job

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Last year’s Cookie Challenge here.