Tag Archives | excellence

Zappos.com: Competency in E-Retail

On November 29, 2010 in Education, Improvement, Technology

About Zappos Founded in 1999 as an online shoe retailer, Zappos.com has grown to dominate its field through an obsessive, customer-centric philosophy combined with organizational and technological flexibility. Zappos’s offerings consist of a wide selections of shoes and clothing that customers purchase online and can expect to receive in as little as two days. The [...]

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Comments on Access Usability

On November 21, 2010 in Education, Improvement, Technology

I found the user experience for Access appalling. One issue in particular that caused me hours of difficulty was the error messages. A typical error pop-up for Access follows a pattern along the lines of, “[The name of the field I just changed] has caused an error with [the name of the object was editing]. [...]

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TEDxYSE

On November 13, 2010 in Education, Improvement

I attended TEDxYSE today, and I’m finding it hard not to criticize the event, for both its content and its implementation. Overall, I wouldn’t call it a waste of time, but I think it lacked a unifying, examined vision for what it wanted to convey. I expected to hear about design and technological solutions to big problems, but instead I feel like I got hit with more of the same.

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Charity: Social Responsibility Beyond the Wallet

On October 27, 2010 in Education, Improvement

I’ve been solicited for money six times today: by 3 homeless people and by 3 ’causes’. It prompted me to think about how both of these categories have a lot in common; one gives to both on an impulse, in a small amount, and has little knowledge of the impact of the donation. Ditto for Breast Cancer [...]

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The MSB Curve & Institutional Mediocrity

On June 5, 2010 in MSB

Two quotations are from MSB professors, made during the last finals period: “In general, the field reports and presentations were very strong. The range of the scores was from 17-20 and the mean was 18.8.” “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that most students did pretty well on the final exam. [...]

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