While it might be memorable for a HORSE to remain nameless, I find that not many people respond positively to this same treatment. Using names can:

• personalize what you’re saying
• make a more permanent connection
• give a sense of belonging

Over the years, I’ve tried to practically apply this concept.

An important aspect of my Customer Service role for The Worthwhile Company is to identify people I come in contact with by name. My opportunities are many throughout a day — phone calls, correspondence, other employees and guests who come through the front door. My whole team helps me in practical ways to add that personal touch. Contact information is kept up-to-date, surprise visitors are met by employees who know them, and meeting appointments include guests’ names so that I can quickly glance at the calendar and greet people by name.

In business,  there are a lot of decisions and strategies that have to be worked through for goals to be reached. A simple approach for connections that build relationships and trust is to make the effort to leave no one “nameless.”

For me it has been a learning situation and I have been amazed at how often lessons learned on the bike translate to real life — especially a competitive business environment. One such instance stood out to me in a recent race. It exposed for me a weakness on the bike that I also realized is something I need to overcome in my business life.

Cycling is a team sport. However, only one team member crosses the line as the winner. During a race each team member must make multiple decisions. Often, he must do so without collaboration with his mates. Those individual decisions affect the entire team.

This demands a level of trust and commitment. It allows the leader of the team for that day to focus on the one task — winning. He knows that his teammates are working to make sure he is kept in the best position. He knows they will be willing to turn themselves inside out in order to bring back a threat. There is an incredible bond in a team with the right chemistry.

Then the time comes for the rider for whom the team worked so hard to make his move. During a recent race, that was the position I found myself in with a kilometer to go. My team had me set up perfectly. I moved up with 500 meters to go and was in the fourth position. I was confident that I could take the win — there was really only one threat and he was somewhere behind me.

At 200 meters I made a mistake. I took my mind off of the goal in front of me and started thinking about the threat behind me. I knew he was strong and I reasoned that if I went too early, he would be able to ride in my draft to the final meters and then swing around me with the momentum to win.

I settled in on the front waiting. My thought was that as he came up to me, I would counter and we would race to the finish with the fastest man winning. Unfortunately, that is not what happened.

The known threat never appeared. He had gotten boxed in during the shuffle of the field sprint. What happened was two riders on the same team split me on the right and left. They came from several riders deep so by the time they got to me their speed put me in a deficit. I could not accelerate quickly enough to counter. They finished side-by-side with me in third place right behind them.

My team had put me in the perfect position to win. It was time for me to deliver. However, instead of focusing on the goal, I got side tracked trying to analyze the competition.

In a field sprint with 200 meters to go, it is not time to think. It is time to act! When you see the finish line, you don’t hesitate. You DO. When you make that move, you GO! You go with 150%. You leave nothing in the tank.

At Worthwhile, we have a great team. It is a team built on trust and competency. The decisions made each day by the individual team members set the team up to win. However, there are those times when the goal is in sight and it is time to DO. Then you GO with 150%. Pausing to over analyze leaves you playing catchup.

Put trust in your team. Put trust in your own training. Put threats out of your mind. Put the focus on the goal. Put the pedal down and give 150%. It works in cycling and it works in life. It will make both you and your team winners.

Read more of Jonathan’s cycling thoughts at LowCadence.com.

Ian Wagner, Software Developer at The Worthwhile Company, competed in the 6th Annual Mercer University Spring Programming Competition on February 27, 2010.

Ian’s team took second place out of the 27 teams in the programming competition. Georgia Tech, Mercer, and Wofford were among the schools in attendance.

Teams had 5 hours to build computer software in order to solve 11 complex problems.

Congratulations to Ian and his Bob Jones University team!

All of these things were seemingly great ideas until the unexpected reared its ugly head. All of these things needed someone’s professional recommendation, or at least ideas of possible ‘hiccups’ that may be encountered. Had these innovators consulted more knowledgeable people before implementing their ideas, the outcomes may have been dramatically different.

If you’re thinking about a new website, or a revamp of your existing one, I encourage you to get some professional input. We know websites; it’s what we do all day, every day. We may not be able to help you think through all of the issues you might face while printing a magazine ad or scheduling cable advertising spots, but we can definitely give you sound advice about deploying a successful website. We have an initial phase of any new project that we call Discovery – this is where we do our homework on your project. We investigate your competitors, your perceived audiences, your business goals and expectations. We can then craft a plan for attack – and you get to be a part from the beginning. This helps Worthwhile avoid launching a big Hindenburg for your business, and it helps you understand exactly what your website can do for you.

In relationships, people play “hard to get” in order to get the other person to desire them more.

When a routine becomes boring, you may look at someone else’s routine and think that’s where true excitement lies.

You look at the things you own and become dissatisfied when you compare them with someone else’s possessions.

There is something about this principle that is not completely negative. Yes, there is definitely a lesson to be learned about contentment and responsibility. You shouldn’t desire to be on the other side of the fence just because you’ve been told you can’t be over there.

However, there is something in all of us that pushes us to work harder, to improve, to be better. In that way, it’s great to challenge the status quo and look to improve your relationships, your work, and your life overall. If you’re looking at the greener grass on the other side, today’s challenge is to look for ways to stay on this side of the fence and make your own grass greener.

After completing their autopsy on the vehicle, I received an offer that was less than half of my asking price. I scrounged up every kind nerve I could find in me to say “thanks, have a good day,” got in the car and left.

On the way back home, I couldn’t help but bust up laughing at the whole situation. I mean, sometimes it honestly seems like certain people put extra time and effort into poor planning that makes life difficult for others! Though this event seemed highly unprofitable at the time, I’m taking three things away from it that apply to most pursuits.

• Lost? Stop and ask. Don’t know what to do? Ask questions! Chances are really good that someone around you knows the answer or can at least point you in the right direction. In the same way, there’s nothing worse than spending hours of time working on a project and then realizing you did it the wrong way, or worse yet, that you could have completed the whole process with two clicks.
• Expect the unexpected. Go ahead and plan on things not going exactly as you planned. If your computer is going to crash, plan on it happening right before you click save on that 95 page business report.
• Establish your destination before you start. Where are you headed? What’s your main goal? Taking a moment to determine where you want to end up can save you a lot of time, money, and frustration, that could otherwise be spent on unplanned “sightseeing adventures.”

Sometimes surprises actually turn out for the good, so don’t spaz out when things aren’t going exactly as you had planned. However, if you’ve taken the right steps and are still surprised, just remember “these are the experiences that make us better,” somehow.

An hour and a half into the book (and about half-way through it), I was hooked — and excited about the positive approach to a negative subject. According to the author, Patrick Lencioni, miserable jobs aren’t about the work a person does. The summary — you can take three steps to ensure that all employees don’t suffer in misery.

Told as a fable, this book is a fast read. But, more importantly, it’s about change that each and everyone of us can achieve by valuing people. The three areas to evaluate yourself in:

• anonymity — do I know the people I work with? Their interests, what they do with their time, where they are at in their lives today.
• irrelevance — do people around me see their work as a series of self-involved activities? Or, do they have a vision beyond what they are doing to who is impacted and exactly how their work helps.
• immeasurement — do I help people assess their own success without me having to do it for them? Work at making sure they aren’t dependent on someone else to subjectively judge performance, but given solid goals and measurements to keep track of progress — in a way that is relevant to what they do.

Lencioni puts it bluntly: “No one gets out of bed in the morning to program software or assemble furniture or do whatever it is that accountants do. They get out of bed to live their lives, and their work tasks are only a part of their lives. People want to be managed as people, not as mere workers.”

The result, a workforce of self-motivated, self-directed employees who would never use the word “miserable” to describe their job.

The Web Strategy team at Worthwhile, we look at hundreds of websites each week, only we’re not only creating/developing websites or just surfing the Web for fun. We view the Web from a critical perspective, since, as mentioned above, that’s what we do!

Observations aren’t absolute. Neither are they to be fully considered as science. Nevertheless, observations from experts regarding their field are helpful.

At the risk of sounding like a know-it-all, here are some commonly ignored and neglected Web practices that you should be aware of, especially if you depend on a Web firm for your Web development:

• Cross-browser Optimization: “Cross-browser stuff is overrated. I mean, my website is optimized for 85% of all internet users.” Problem: You don’t know who’s using YOUR website. It really doesn’t matter for which browsers you are optimized; only the ones for which you’re not optimized really matter. Why? Almost every user to visit your site will only ever see your site in one browser. If they have significant layout issues or part of the page doesn’t load, you’ve just made a costly mistake that, worst of all, may never be realized, since it’s hard to measure the clients you didn’t know you lost. Fact: Not all Web developers cross-browser optimize. Make sure yours does, and does it well.

• Testing: “Are you saying that someone would actually launch a site to the world that hadn’t been fully tested doubly through?” Um. Yes. Absolutely. It’s frightening really. While Cross-browser Optimization is (should be) a main avenue of website testing, it involves so much more than that. Once you’ve proofed the site for grammatical/typographical mistakes and link-checking, I’d say the most important website testing possible is usability testing — Is this website as usable as possible? What could be done (within scope) to give the user a better experience? Is a solid landing page needed here? — The list could go on. The point is, testing isn’t just to make sure the thing works. It needs to work WELL. And you thought design was the only beautiful part of a website.

• Goal-driven execution: “What the heck, right? What does that mean?” Frankly, I’m tired of hearing from potential clients, “Well, Steve Fred said he could build me a website for 1/2 of your price.” Questions I want to ask if the conversation continues — (1) Is Steve Fred a professional? (2) Is he a loner or a part of an expert team? (3) Do you think I’m intimidated that he can build a site cheaper?  Ask BMW if they could build a car for 1/2 of the price that a 3 series sells for. SURE THEY  CAN. Would they? Nope. Why? Quality costs money. Certain goals have to be met to achieve “The Ultimate Driving Experience.” It takes time (and costs money) to plan a Web project around very precise goals and to properly execute the project through the filter of those goals.

Closing Argument: Not all websites are created equally. Success in a Web project isn’t only linked to the launching of that project. There are other seemingly-minute elements in Web design and production that will cost you dearly if you don’t pay for them. Stay Quality, my friends.

I’ve come a long way. Now instead of a clunky Walkman I can pick me up a nifty iPod touch. Instead of a clunky bag phone I can sport my new Droid! Better yet I can surf the web via Google Chrome instead of IE6. Life is good.

But what about my future? It can’t be too bad if in my lifetime we have traded the Dewey Decimal System for Google! The Internet has probably been one of if not the most revolutionary inventions of my lifetime (no thanks to Al Gore). Even in my lifetime the Internet has progressed greatly. It seems to me the Internet is taking two routes. You have the Apple approach and the Google approach.

Apple Approach: use Apps to run on their Mac products. You simply download the free (or cheap) App to your device and you can interface with Facebook, Twitter, or compete against others in classic games like Paper Toss. You basically run software (App) on your device that interfaces with the internet so you don’t need a standard browser to use the Internet. You live in a world of Apps.

Google Approach: use their Chrome OS to run your whole computer. In other words do everything from the internet (cloud computing). When you turn on your computer it would basically load your web browser (Google Chrome of course) and you could do everything online. Your software turns into the Internet. You live in a web browser (although Apps are not mutually exclusive to the Google approach).

Which one is better? Which one will chart the course of human history? Who will have kids looking back and saying, “Remember when we had to use .…” Who knows — maybe a completely new way of using the Internet will come to use?

Until then I’m going to make me some instant Mac ‘n’ Cheese — bet you didn’t see that invention coming, did ya mom?

On February 10th, ReadWriteWeb.com posted an article called “Facebook Wants to be Your One True Login”. The comments then began to fill up with confused and frustrated Facebook users wanting to know how to log in. This grew to about 300 comments. When I first read these comments, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It soon became clear: many internet users use Google to “access” the internet. In this case, they were typing “Facebook login” into the search bar and clicking the first link. In this instance, Google’s new feed was at the top, and RWW article was the first result.

Comment #85 confirms this: “for those of you that want to get in face book now just go to Bing..put in face book and search (or it will pop up) hit on face book login and it takes you to your password page…i did it.… if this ever gets back to normal I will use the address bar from now on.….”

It also goes another level: Probably influenced by Facebook’s recent layout redesign, many, if not all, of these commenters couldn’t tell that they were on a blog article and not Facebook itself. They thought this was part of the redesign process.

No wonder phishing scams work out so well!

Is it really this hard to log on to Facebook? Google has become the gateway to the internet for people, and they likely don’t wander too far. While it’s good comedy, it’s an eye-opening look into how some people use the internet. Is it ironic that this happens just weeks after the iPad is announced and techies debate how it has no place in the market?

It’s hard to tell how many users utilize Google in this way, for some may have realized they were in the wrong place before attacking the comments box. Unfortunately, we can’t change how users behave, but maybe through incidents like this we can better understand how they interact with the web. So why doesn’t the actual Facebook login page come up when you type “Facebook login” into Google? Do users actually see a link or some design element or feature you implemented? How do you get them to do what you want? Are we making the internet too hard for people?