• BREAKING: Santa to Cut Back Production in 2011

    PRESS RELEASE

    For immediate release

    NORTH POLE – Citing rising energy costs and increased demands for high tech goods, Santa Claus is forecasting a 13% reduction in the number of gifts distributed to the world’s children on December 25th. The 10 year average gift-per-child (GPC) is 5.2, in 2011 Santa Claus will reduce the average to 4.52.

    Santa Claus, Inc. CEO and Chief Delivery Officer Santa Claus reports, “2011 has been one of our most difficult years. Several factors have lead to our decreasing the per gift child forecast to 4.52. (GPC)”

    In a briefing given via their 4th Quarter shareholder webcast, Mr. Claus outlined the factors which lead to this decision.

    • The price of oil globally has continued to increase costs across the board. While the North Pole complex is able to offset some of these costs with their 2009 initiated solar program during the summer months for toy production and shipping/receiving periods, when winter sets in the plants become fully dependent on diesel generatored power.
    • Grain costs for the reindeers has more than doubled in 2011. To offset this for the 2012 season Santa Claus has a team of elves working on a new formula which will combined traditional grains and Fruit Loops with filler from letters children mail to the North Pole during the Christmas season.
    • Labor prices for the North Pole plant have continued to outpace inflation. With rising health care costs and new concessions for wage increases after October’s “Occupy Santa” protests, overall labor prices have increased 9% while production decreased 18% year-over-year.
    • With newspaper and magazine circulation at an all-time low, Santa Claus’ Wish List and Letters to Santa Claus paper recycling programs have decreased revenue sharply. To offset this loss in revenue, Santa Claus, Inc CFO Mrs. Claus has opened an Etsy shop to sell officially licensed mittens, work gloves, sleigh seat covers, and hats.
    • While the release of the Kindle Fire has helped some, North American children are demanding more highly priced toys under the tree for Christmas. Santa has limited each child to one Apple product. Though Santa Claus, Inc is the single largest purchaser of Apple products globally, the price controls by the Cupertino computer maker have not allowed Santa’s elves to negotiate significant discounts. “It’s really a Wal-Mart thing.” Claus reports. “Apple is afraid that if Bentonville hears we are getting a better price than them they will lose their contract.“
    • Significant infrastructure investments have been made exploring an additional toy storage depot in the Southern Hemisphere. Claus reports, “While it makes sense logistically to store some gifts in the South Pole, the South Pole elves are difficult to work with. Frankly, they have sticky fingers– and I don’t mean because they’ve eaten too many candy canes. In the 1980’s we tried a similar endeavor and had to cease operations when we discovered South Pole elves were selling gifts on the black market to China during the summer months.“

    Despite the reduction in the GPC, Mr. Claus is expecting a Merry Christmas. “We don’t let a high fuel prices, elf labor issues, or Wal-Mart stop us from fully enjoying Christmas.”

    The early forecast for 2012 GPC is set to increase significantly in 2012. “Ah yes, with 2012 elections in the United States we will see many more adults on the naughty list. And that’s good for American children as we will be able to spend more on children’s toys.” 

    Press contact and interview requests: press@northpole.org

  • My geeky newsletter starts tomorrow

    Starting tomorrow is my new, totally random, and hopefully useful newsletter– Remnants.

    If you’re into webby things and you want to take a deep dive into the geeky side of web stuff, like how to actually build stuff. Than this is for you.

    If not… I’d suggest not subscribing. 

  • Learn from me next Saturday in Chicago

    Here’s the deal. I am scheduled to teach two classes next Saturday in Chicago. But as of right now… no one has signed up! I’ve got plenty of people interested as watchers on Skillshare but no one has ponied up the money to attend the class. If I don’t get 4-5 people by Monday at midnight Pacific I’m going to cancel the classes and watch football instead.

    I’ve actually just lowered the cost of the class from $25 to $20 to make it a bit easier.

    Growing Your Business with MailChimp

    Mailchimp is an amazingly powerful tool. Whether you are a small start-up, a restaurant, a band, or a non-profit– Mailchimp can help you grow your business. In this 2-hour class we’ll quickly cover the basics of the service and quickly dive into unleashing the power of this amazing email marketing webapp. We’ll talk about lists & groups, templates, integrations with tools like Eventbrite, Facebook, and Salesforce, and email marketing strategy.

    Register here

    Blogging 101

    This class will be laid back but full of experience, practical application, and practice. As a full-time blogger and blog coach I’ve helped countless bloggers get going for their own blogs and even launch small businesses. Topics covered: (But not limited to) – Getting started for free – Choosing the right platform – Customizing your blog – What to write about – How to write for response – How to build a tribe – Intro to analytics and other measurement tools – Principles of social media interaction The class will be two hours. But the format is loose and I won’t leave until I’ve answered all of your questions. My goal is that you walk away with a firm understanding of what to do AND ready to get started.

    Register here

  • Just Friends, No Benefits

    Kind of reminds me of the movie When Harry Met Sally.

    It seems some things in college life never change, right?

  • People are fragile

    “Make sure you take your shoes off today.”

    “Pardon me? I didn’t hear you.” (Taking my headphones out of my ears)

    “You look busy. Don’t forget to take your shoes off today. It’s a beautiful day. Trust me. Go outside, take your shoes off, and walk around. It’ll connect your chi to the earth and your soul will sing to the sun. We need to celebrate that stuff or we we’ll go crazy.”

    “OK, thanks for the tip.”

    “EVERYBODY! TAKE YOUR SHOES OFF RIGHT NOW! CONNECT TO MOTHER EARTH!” (She turns and whistles, literally, as she leaves the shop.)

    The store erupts into sheepish snickers.

    All I wanted was a cup of coffee.

    Somehow in the process I must have made the mistake of making eye contact and saying good morning to my advice-giving-homeless-traveller. My mind was on getting to the office and settling in. But this happy-go-lucky woman flashed me out of my insular space to leave every person in the store staring at me.

    As I was leaving the shop the owner shouted at me… “Hey, sir! Sir!” I turn around to see his huge smile. “Don’t forget to take off your shoes today, OK? It’s good for your chi.”

    Watching the woman walk across the park, happily smiling, skipping, and talking to anyone and everyone– I couldn’t help but chew on this reality: 

    Life is fragile. People are fragile. I am fragile.

    In our innocence we are fragile. In our pain we are fragile. In our addictions we are fragile. In our wonderings we are fragile. God has created us, all of us, as fragile.

    Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?

    Matthew 6:26

  • A brief history of sexting and the power of media manipulation

    Here’s a brief history of sexting.

    • Some students got in trouble for sending sexually explicit pictures of another student around a school.
    • Local news reported on it, after all it contained “teenagers” and “sex” in the same story. Brittany Spears must have been on vacation.
    • In another town a similar case was reported.
    • To make it more interesting, a regional or national news editor aggregated the two stories and gave it a sensational title: sexting.
    • A single national news organization ran a story with the title “sexting.”
    • Other news organizations and certainly those not in the media but whom enjoy making comment on news items (aka– bloggers) picked up the story and repeated it.
    • Remember, this was 1-2 isolated cases aggregated together as an emerging trend.
    • Someone does 45 minutes of research into teen texting behavior from an unrelated marketing survey and determines that 20% of teenagers have sent a sexually explicit text message.
    • Forget that fact that the study was likely unscientific and didn’t study sending/receiving photos or videos… the thing that gets codified is that 20% of teenagers send sexually explicit texts.
    • Any new case similar to this, among the millions of teenagers in America sending trillions of text messages monthly, was now labeled as “sexting.”
    • Sexting began appearing in the vernacular of the public… and an assumption formed that “sexting is something a lot of teenagers do.“
    • Sexting, now a thing, begins to be written about as if it is a real trend affecting millions of teenagers.
    • A news agency, not to be outdone, labels sexting an epidemic.
    • Legislators, keen to make it on the news, murmur about the teenage sexting problem.
    • School boards and soccer moms start to talk about the horrors of sexting.
    • “Sexting cases” start to get aggregated with ANYTHING teenagers do. Any music trend. Prom. Sports. Everything now has a sexting potential.
    • Some students actually start sending explicit photos of one another around… because they hear about how prevalent it is among teenagers on the news. 
    • Sexting begins to appear in the litany of prevention literature. Teenagers and their “malformed pre-frontal lobes” can’t help themselves. Left alone for more than 14 seconds, they will drop their pants and send pictures of their privates to everyone they know. At least that’s what you’d learn from these “concerned organizations.”
    • Soccer moms, parenting from a cocktail of fear and living vicariously through their children, buy the whole thing. They start looking through their children’s texts while they sleep.
    • Sexting becomes something every adult assumes is happening rampantly among teenagers.
    • Someone actually does a study and proves that the whole thing is a fabrication. About 1% of teenagers have ever sent or received a sexually explicit text message.
    • And of course the news machine makes money talking about why sexting isn’t happening at the rate everyone thought it was.

    “Even if you look at 1% or 2% of kids in a high school of a thousand kids, that’s 10 to 20 kids, and that’s plenty of people for whom this is a big issue and for whom this is a troublesome problem in their lives,” says Lenhart, who has researched teen sexting but was not involved in the new study.
    Source

    1% of teenagers isn’t something we need to have a prevention focus on. Stop this perverted fascination on adolescent sexuality! As long as humans could write, people have drawn and written sexually explicit messages.

    As advocates for adolescents, we need to call this stuff out. Our cultures bias against adolescents, including the false creation and labeling of phenomenon, is a form of discrimination that we need to root out.

    Want another example? Look at this Fox News piece.

    It has every stereotype of teenagers in one story. Teenage sex is bad. (Er, look at history. We wouldn’t exist as a society without teen sex.) Malformed teen brains. Negative brain development ties with experiencing sex in the teenage years. (The study is of HAMSTERS!) Fear, fear, and more fear.

  • Bottlenecks

    A bottleneck is a phenomenon where the performance or capacity of an entire system is limited by a single or limited number of components or resources. The term bottleneck is taken from the ‘assets are water’ metaphor. As water is poured out of a bottle, the rate of outflow is limited by the width of the conduit of exit—that is, bottleneck. By increasing the width of the bottleneck one can increase the rate at which the water flows out of the neck at different frequencies. Such limiting components of a system are sometimes referred to as bottleneck points.

    Bottlenecks are one reason the church can’t grow to full capacity in the current model. It’s not that the Gospel of Jesus Christ isn’t appealing to more people. It’s that the mode with which the American church choses to operate is driven to a single bottleneck: The worship service. 

    With a clearly defined bottleneck and the low trust, high control primary management style of most in church leadership– we are seeing other negative non-monetary economic principles come into play.

    3 non-prescriptive solutions to finding church growth

    1. Embrace a high trust, low control management-style.
    2. Create additional entry points to biblical community. (Non-worship service endpoint)
    3. Capitalize on Americans culturally hard-coded draw to good news.

  • Donate your New Orleans Bowl tickets to the Marshall Faulk Foundation

    Like a lot of San Diego State fans, I’m not able to attend this years bowl game in New Orleans. Besides having plans for December 17th already it would have cost more than $1000 to attend. (airfare, hotels, tickets, food, etc.)

    That’s why I was thrilled to see that the SDSU ticket office has made it possible for season ticket holders and the general public to buy tickets for the game and donate them to a deserving child* in New Orleans through the Marshall Faulk Foundation. (see above)

    As a fan and supporter of Aztecs sports I wanted to partner with SDSU in selling their allotment of 9500 tickets. I’ve donated my ticket allotment to the Marshall Faulk Foundation and I am encouraging all fellow season ticket holders, Aztec Club members, alumni, and fans of the Aztecs to do the same.

    Here’s the link to buy tickets to sponsor a child

    Note: *To comply with NCAA rules on recruiting the ticket office has made it clear that tickets donated to the Marshall Faulk Foundation will not go to high school students. (Hence the works “child” and not “youth.”)

  • Kick off the new year with CBEmini

    I’m kind of tired of hearing how biblically illiterate teenagers are today. 

    Ultimately, as spiritual leaders and parents dedicated to investing in those students, biblical illiteracy is on us. Our students don’t know the Bible because we’ve failed to teach them. (Guilty as charged) Worse yet, if students don’t have a love for God’s Word that’s reflecting on our own lack of love for the Bible.

    I’m happy to be a part of something that is changing that and helping people have a brand new relationship with the Bible.

    Marko and I worked with the folks at Biblica (International Bible Society) to create CBEmini.

    What is CBEmini? It’s a 9 day trip through Luke-Acts using The Books of the Bible. Basically, The Books of the Bible is the New Testament laid out like a chapter book. All the words are the same but the format is a lot more simple. No columns, no footnotes, no verse numbers… just the story of Jesus and the early church as Theophilus may have read in in the first century.

    CBEmini is a bit-sized version of the 8 week Community Bible Experience. Our hope is that if your students try the 9 day experience that they will want to continue. So far, in our beta testing, that’s exactly what has happened… people are continuing on because 9 days wasn’t enough. (You read that right– students want to read MORE of the Bible.)

    The format is simple. You get a PDF of Luke-Acts to print and students read it. You get together as a group a few times to talk about what you’re reading in more of a book club format than a typically Bible study. (You get a leaders guide, too.) And watch what happens as student read the Bible, really, for the first time. It’s really cool. 

    Over and over again we’ve heard students say… “It’s almost like I’m reading a story and not the Bible.” Or “I love reading this in the same way I read a good book… I just read until I get tired and put it down, then come back later.” Or “I never knew how good the Bible was at telling stories. Things fit together in ways I never saw before.”

    I’m excited about this project because I can only imagine the movement that would be created if thousands of students fell in love with God’s story in the same way the connect to Harry Potter or Twilight. It’s not that students don’t like to read. They do! This tool just helps them read the Bible in a format that they can connect to.

    The best part? It’s totally free. How cool is that? 

    Here’s the punchline: Go sign-up now.

  • American Airlines CEO quits on moral grounds

    American Airlines, once the largest airline in the United States, declared bankruptcy. This is not surprising news for the beleaguered airline industry; what is different is what is emerging from the wreckage. Gerard J. Arpey, American’s chief executive officer and chairman, resigned and stepped away with no severance package and nearly worthless stock holdings. He split with his employer of 30 years out of a belief that bankruptcy was morally wrong, and that he could not, in good conscience, lead an organization that followed this familiar path.

    Read the rest

    Trying to think of the right word for Gerald Arpey’s choice… hmmm… oh yeah… Morals.

    Remember when those in power were known for their high moral standards? Remember when the person at the top represented the organizations highest standards of excellence and character.

    Maybe we should  get back to that? Maybe we should ask organizations to hire people who will uphold the values of the organization above the profits of the organization?

    We should celebrate Mr. Arpey’s choice. He upheld the moral high ground that the company should pay its debtors and retiree benefits while the rest of the board made the immoral decision to file for bankruptcy as an easy way out “because everyone else is doing it.”

    I also found it interesting that American Airlines is calling it a retirement while the New York Times is reporting it as resigning because he thought the board was morally wrong. I wonder which is the truth?

    Hint: The company who declared bankruptcy in order to get away from paying their debts might just be protecting their behind from Wall Street while the guy who quit because he thought that was wrong is likely telling the truth.

    On top of that– Arpey didn’t hold the board hostage by taking a massive golden parachute. (In fairness, I have no doubt that with 30 years of service and having made $14.34 million in the last 5 years, that Mr. Arpey is hitting the bread line any time soon.) He just said… “You know what? If you make this move you are making it without me.”

    I like that in a leader.