This story broke today, “Carpooling Illegal? PickupPal Learns the Hard Way“. It’s embarrassing enough that this happened but the fact it was covered on TechCrunch means the world is reading it which means we look like idiots the world over.

Why is it illegal? Bottom line, it gets in the way of bus company profits. It’s a great example of mixed interests and who really influences legislation and policies. Unfortunately the environment isn’t a for profit venture with lobbyists and powerful unions.

We fined a company that operates this service around the world, in 104 countries. That’s embarrassing. The specific fine? The company that was fined is reporting that it was for a shared ride from Toronto to Montreal for $60. They claim they made nothing off of the ride and were fined $11,336.07, not including their legal fees.

The ridiculous list of requirements you must satisfy in order for your ridesharing to be considered legal?

“The only way you can ride with someone is if you meet ALL of the following extremely impractical set of specific criteria:

• You must travel from home to work only – (Not Home to School, or Home to the Hospital or the Airport)
• You cannot cross municipal boundaries – (Live outside the city and drive in – sorry you cannot share the ride with your neighbour)
• You must ride with the same driver each day – (Want to mix it up go with one person one day and another person another day – no sorry cannot do that – must be same person each day)
• You must pay the driver no more frequently than weekly – (Neighbour drives you to work better not pay her right away just in case she drives you later on in the week)”

Didn’t we recently install a series of HOV lanes in Toronto? I’m sure I’m naive but wouldn’t the best way to make use of those lanes be to support, and encourage, businesses that facilitate carpooling instead of fining them?

I’m with Doug, not much has changed….

“I was an idealistic country boy. Eventually I realized that the world is getting more complex at an ever more rapid rate, that complex problems have to be dealt with collectively, and that our collective ability for dealing with them is not improving nearly as fast as the complexity is increasing. The best thing I could think of doing was to try and help boost mankind’s capability for dealing with complex problems”, Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse

Next Wednesday evening is DempCampGuelph7. It’s an open event, all are welcome including mom, talk about us, get people out! If you’re attending, please make sure to put your name on the wiki attendee list. If you want to demo, contact me.

To be blunt, I really don’t know where I stand on how to effectively price software. The answer for me is that there isn’t AN answer. It’s one of those questions like “what’s the secret to a great relationship?” or “what’s the best job?”. There isn’t an answer. It depends on everything, you, your people, your clients, your software, the climate around you, competition, etc, etc. Warning, there are no answers in this post…..

I can tell you about one of my ideal sales experiences which was of all places, Blockbuster. Why? The main reason is that they managed to always make it about me and my goals. The first time I ever rented at blockbuster was painless. I went in, picked out a video, prepared to be sold to and wade through paperwork. Instead I flashed a credit card, signed one thing, paid some cash and was out in not much more than the average member rental time, carrying a new membership card.

I didn’t think much about it at the time but later realized how lovely this was. We’re so used to being pushed silver, gold and platinum packages and features that we hardly notice it now. In this case they recognized that all I needed was the ability to rent a video. They got me setup for that and left it there. That I greatly appreciate.

Did they miss out on the upsell? Well no. A few weeks later after having rented a whack of videos, they technically did upsell me but again it was about me. They now recognized that my rental patterns dictated that I could save some cash through joining their rewards program. They offered it once, explained the benefits based on MY buying patterns and I happily signed up. There was no fictional pitch. No “well IF you do this and IF you do that then maybe you’ll save this”. It was “you’ve rented x videos in the past y weeks. With this program you would have saved $z”. Am I giving blockbuster too much credit? Well possibly but I still never felt sold to which is more than I can say for just about every other company I’ve dealt with.

If anyone’s paying attention, things may be a little quiet here over the summer.

Paul Polak was on The Hour a few weeks back. From what little I saw, I like Paul and his company D-Rev. The quick story, most major innovation and design is aimed at the wealthiest 10% of our population. D-Rev is “Design for the other 90%”.

One point Paul which struck a cord with me was when discussing the treadle pump and it’s total cost of $25. He said that one of their goals is NOT to give things for free. You can’t gift people out of poverty, hand outs are not a way to end poverty but a way to create a welfare system. Instead they require that individuals invest and pay for a pump themselves. If people aren’t willing to invest $25, it likely doesn’t bring them enough value. “Virtually everything we do is designed to give a 300 percent net investment, and that way, they can leverage up”.

It got me thinking about my kids and allowances. I remember hearing the author of a book called Young Bucks say that giving your children an allowance was a great way to raise welfare children. Bold statement I’m not sure Paul would disagree with.

It also got me thinking about extreme welfare shows like Extreme Makeover. Everytime I see them tear down a rat infested shack and replace it with a multi-million dollar mansion complete with grounds, pools, and fancy gadgets to maintain, I wonder how insane a leap that would require. To go from the human and capital cost of not maintaining a one room shack to maintaining an estate. Who can do that? Someone should start a show where they return to these homes a year later to see how all those gadgets are holding up.

The people on these shows are no doubt in need of help but when it comes to long-term, sustainable results, I’ll take Paul’s help anyday over ABC’s. Paul and D-Rev are eye opening as it’s way too easy for us in business to get lost staring at the people with the big wallets.

Warning, there is no geek stuff in here…

I love my local convenience store. It’s a short walk from home and I can get most things I need in a pinch, including a decent dvd. Having that allows me to walk over at 9pm, grab milk, bagels, chips, and a movie. It’s run by Bea who would often say “if you can’t find something, let me know and I’ll make sure it’s here for you next time”. Up until recently I knew all the staff by name.

My lovely little store was recently sold. One of the staff told me yesterday that all staff are being let go so who really knows what the future holds for our store. What’s my point? I think we all deserve a well run convenience store within walking distance from our homes. When I think back over the years to all the times I would have had to climb into my car and drive, instead of walk, to a store further away, it blows my mind. Yes, I’m suggesting that convenience stores are an environmental issue!

Here’s my pitch. Someone, since I’m out of time, needs to start up a franchise network for convenience stores based on Great Harvest’s model. That being a solid supporting network of owners with heavily customized, local franchises. The goal being quality, walkable convenience stores that are shaped, influenced, and ‘owned’ by the communities they support and serve. Traditional cookie-cutter 7-11 franchises won’t work for this.

Oh boy, apparently my new platform is ‘convenient convenience stores for all’?

Holy crap, I cried, I almost literally wept. Thanks Kyle for this…

Thanks for the pic Rannie, see all mesh08 pics here. I think I look grumpier in medium format?

Mark Roseman turned me onto a great article titled “Getting to We“. Mark also does a great job of summarizing it in his post.

“Roberts notes that the students eventually got to collaboration, but not before they had exhausted the alternatives of authoritarianism and competition.”

They go on to talk about the idea that “people fail into collaboration“. As a result, it’s only the “wicked problems” that ever reach the collaboration stage. I love that quote, “fail into collaboration”. It’s just so true of human nature. We always start on our own and fail our way through several stages on our way to collaboration.

The concept of ‘wicked problems’ reminded me a lot of a great book Mark recommended to me a few years back titled ‘Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities‘.

“Scaling up the known collaboration processes to country or world sizes will require significant advances in collaboration tools and networking”. While we’re starting with company not world sizes, this is part of our mission at brainpark. All of it hopefully leading to the “hallmark of successful collaboration is the experience of solidarity and new energy: a ‘we'”.

The article also gets me thinking about the entire *Camp movement. Whether we’re freelancers, early startups, or people working in traditional companies, if we want to move up and start tackling the wicked problems then we have to move beyond information sharing, coordination, and cooperation and on to true collaboration.