New York. Restaurants. Wow. Extremely well fed. Not enough time.

db Bistro Moderne Friday Night
Modern French-American bistro (duh)
Our ‘fanciest’ for the weekend - changed into nice shirts on the street after having been walking for a while.
What we had: The db Burger - stuffed with short ribs, foie gras, and black truffle, which is their trademark dish. Several of us had cocktails, great Old Fashioned. Other dishes included bacon wrapped salmon with roasted figs. Had some Madeira for dessert.

Otto Saturday Lunch
Mario Batali’s pizzeria
Billie’s favorite of the weekend. Most tables had young children. Lots of space.
What we had: Pizza Lardo (wow, texture), Pizza Vongole (mountain of clams, in the shells, atop the pizza), Pizza Quattro Stagioni, Spaghetti alla Carbonara. Alphonso Olives (purple). Good service.

LAN Saturday Dinner
Japanese Fusion
What we had: Sushi. Inventive. Fresh. Actually got Toro. They had a woman sushi chef! We were obviously the last people on the priority list for service, but they did a good job. Elph had a glass of Tokaj that he’d read about but never tried. Yummy desserts.

Shake Shack Saturday Afternoon
Union Square’s burger and shake joint in Madison Park
Billie stood in line for an hour and 40 minutes, waited another 20 minutes for food.
What she had: cheeseburger, rootbeer float

Union Square Cafe Sunday Brunch
Our second annual Sunday brunch at USC.
Our server Basha was great! They treated us very well. Love the service there!
What we had: raw oysters and champagne, grilled fillet mignon of tuna with wasabi mashed potatoes, black bean soup with Sherry, calamari, gnocci, USC french toast - they brought us several complimentary desserts. Had a nice cup of Sencha. We had a great window seat.

Little Giant Sunday Dinner
Friends of Zing, nice ambiance, music and light were great, it was getting cool and damp outside but it was warm inside, service was a little gruff
What we had: burrata, swine of the week - pork chops, egg cream with Stoli vanilla, short ribs, ginger mojito, cote du rhone (they had no Cab or Syrah). JoeG drank a Bee’s Knees - honey infused vodka, splash of ginger ale, twist.

More pics added to the NYC 2007 photo album.

Long overdue report on mini games from the Great Game of Business conference.

Why have Mini Games?

• To foster teamwork and communication
• To teach and reinforce business skills
• To instill the desire and habit of winning, not of competing with each other
• To let “cave dwellers” know they can’t bring the group down

Mini Game Design:

1. Choose the game.
2. Set the targets.
   It is also important to teach the impact of winning to the bottom lines.
3. Identify who is involved.
   Anyone who is able to influence the score should be in the loop. It would be upsetting to have another department ruin the players’ chance of winning because they didn’t know what was going on.
4. Determine the time frame.
   Long enough to be able to change behavior but short enough to see results. A longer-term game could have some milestones celebrated to keep people involved. Create frequent wins.
5. Decide on prizes.
   Consider creative incentives that will be motivating for different kinds of people. Having t-shirts as prizes gets old, especially for staffers that have been here longer.
   Do a cost analysis of prizes and potential savings as a result of the mini game.
6. Design a scoreboard.
   Everyone should know how to calculate the score.
   Review the score regularly so everyone knows if we’re winning.
7. Play the game.
   A kickoff meeting to launch the mini game will create enthusiasm.
8. Evaluate the results.

Mini games must have qualifiers or things that should not be allowed to slip. For example, if the mini game is focused on going the extra mile for every trouble ticket, one qualifier could be that average resolution time should not drop below 1.6 days.

This summer I participated in the U of Z Leadership Workshop by Ari Weinzweig. It was held over two months, consisting of five sessions and a project.

My classmates were all intelligent, motivated, inspiring, and enthusiastic people. We had different experiences to share, having come from different areas of the ZCoB. Together we read stimulating material on leadership, effecting change, then discussed how it applies to our organization and us personally as leaders.

In addition to the readings, we each picked a project to effect a change in any level of the organization. I chose to do the Zingtranet Forum! The Zing Forum is a new feature on our intranet where staff members can post thoughts, ideas, questions online about various kinds of Zing business. It’s a great way to tap into the collective knowledge of the ZCoB in a structured form.

Following the BLC process, I wrote a vision, compelling reasons and interviewed a microcosm of people across the organization on how to tell everyone about it. Almost half of them suggested running a game. It seemed a perfect fit! A forum follows the Network Effect which means that a service becomes more valuable to a customer as more people use it. A game that incented people to post would increase its value as well as expose it to more users. The game ran for exactly a month. At the end of the game, we had 437 posts, 91 topics in 22 categories, and a bunch of happy prizewinners!

If anyone wants to learn more about what the Leadership Workshop was like, or if you’re interested in the Forum Game, feel free to contact me!

We ran a mini game around inventorying all the computers in the ZCoB and won!  Our reward was attending the ZingFeast on June 28, 2007.

Beverages:
Fresh Strawberry Spritzer
Wild Mulberry Spritzer

Starters:
Grilled Norwegian Mackarel served with a gooseberry chutney atop a crostini
Cold Sour Cherry Soup topped with Marcona almonds
Fresh Arugula Salad tossed with fresh goat cheese, raspberries and tarragon

Mains:
Fresh Twigs & Berries - a salad of whole-wheat berries, sunflower sprouts, fresh cherries, herbs, onions and apple cider vinaigrette
New York Style New Potatoes simply boiled and served with Michigan farm butter
Organic Roasted Pork Shoulder slow roasted with blueberries, vinegar, bay leaves and onions

Dessert:
Fresh raspberry sorbet

For serious tea geeks, how about a tea-themed dinner?

“From tea-smoked salmon fillet, to herb-tea infused rice dishes, to green-tea flavored ice-cream or sorbet, premium teas are really a secret weapon to adding phenomenal flavor and depth to a variety of dishes,” said Thomas Griffiths, Certified Master Chef, professor in nutrition and culinary arts at the CIA.

Lipton-sponsored recipes included.

On Demand Books created the Espresso Book Machine - an instant book printing machine! You press the Order button and it prints you a crisp new book in seven minutes! I want one.

In the video of the launch, the producers talk about what makes it awesome (zero inventory, zero shipping costs, instant gratification, among others), how they see it being used, and how it works.

In Jakob Nielsen’s annual intranet design roundup, he outlines some major trends and winning features of successful and usable intranets. Some new and interesting ones:

1. Photo of the day on the homepage (how about zingy illustration of the day? oh that would be so fun!)
2. Webcams (done!)
3. Managed news feeds, filtered by an editor for relevance
4. Star ratings and user comments
5. Wikis (done!)
6. Employee directory search (done!) plus degrees of social distance (what?!)

What I am most excited about working on is determining the ROI of our Zingtranet. How can we measure its effectiveness?

Create a work of art that expresses who you are, literally. Just send DNA11 a swab from your mouth and they’ll send you a gorgeous print of your genetic markup! If you’re not too paranoid about it, it would make totally awesome room decor!

Just discovered the Image Resizer Powertoy for Windows XP app (yes, from Microsoft). You right-click your image files, select “Resize pictures” from the context menu, and this window pops up. You choose the desination size and voila! Resized copies of all your pictures are instantly created! No need for Photoshop batch scripts anymore.

“There are only two kinds of people: Those who back up their computers, and those who will.” Ha!
NYT article reviews some online backup services for PC users, some free with tiny storage space, some expensive with unlimited storage.