Perspective

Work
Have you heard? The economy is getting to be more than a little worrisome.
One of the few good things about challenging economic times (and this list is an awfully short one) is that it forces all of us to take a step back and assess what we are doing in order to see if there is an opportunity to do it more efficiently or even to decide whether we should be doing it at all.
Over the past few months we’ve been asked by several organizations to find inefficiencies and waste in their communications practices. Surprisingly this is often not all that difficult an exercise (but of course just prior to billing we go on at length about how difficult it really was).
Since our organizational focus is on developing relevant, data-driven, personalized communications streams our approach to this kind of assignment is to seek ways to transform the communications infrastructure from pre-printed and generic to a variable and on-demand approach. By moving away from generic communications to a world where each constituent’s information is assembled on-the-fly for them there are plenty of opportunities to save. Our recent work has uncovered the following real life opportunities to save:

• Eliminating pre-printed, generic material means reducing storage and wastage costs.
• Printing material as required by individual recipients means that a lot of ‘general’ information can be eliminated from each package. This results in fewer pages and reduced postage.
• Grouping together multiple messages (that currently require multiple packages) to a single recipient we can drastically reduce print, mail and postage fees.
• Migrating people to online interaction reduces print, mail and postage fees.
• Automating the fulfilment of material based on life cycle triggers or events drastically reduces the amount of person time required to deliver material.
• Print-on-demand personalized packages require far less picking and packing than traditional packages.

So while the cost per piece of the packages that are being delivered may go up, the overall opportunity for savings is often staggering.
It seems that organizations and people all need a little nudge to move beyond current state and make changes, even if those changes are clearly beneficial. The economy sputtering both in the US and Canada is a good nudge to start doing things smarter.

Life
One more marathon under my belt, and once again it was tough. I won’t go into details because I feel like I'd rather say thank you.
I ran in Toronto last weekend. Now since I don’t live right in Toronto I can say that just about the entire country views Toronto as being a bit of a cold, mind your own business, selfish kind of town.
When you’re a slow runner like me you’ve got a lot of time to think during a marathon and over the course of my run my views got decidedly cheerier about the city of Toronto and gosh darn it maybe even all of humanity.
The route of a big marathon like Toronto is lined with people. These people aren’t just standing there, they are clapping and cheering and encouraging. Race bibs have your name on them so many of the people are calling out your name and encouraging you along. At 20 or so places over the course of the route a small army of volunteers are handing out water and Gatorade as well as cleaning up the mess that runners leave behind. Based on the span of runners in a race, these people are out there for five hours at these stations.
Nobody is doing this for money, fame, or achievement. They are doing it because they want to support and help people they don’t even know.
Ok so a few times I got annoyed: when I ran by someone at a moment when I was in serious pain barely able to continue and they yelled, “Come on Cam pick it up a bit!” But that was more my fault than theirs. While at the time I felt like telling them to get lost, after a little recovering I realized that they were just out there trying to help me through it.
So I guess I’m saying thanks to all those people who line the route and if you want to fall in love with your city all over again, go run a marathon.