Dog Tricks

How does the saying go: “teaching old dogs new tricks” or “teaching new dogs old tricks”? It must be a function of age but it just seems like same old tricks keep coming round and round again – just dressed up with a modern spin. It’s obvious in cover versions of pop songs and remakes of old movies but it shows up in business too like “the customer is king” now we’d talk about “the consumer being enabled by web 2.0 communications”.

Dinner, Hope and Dispair

I was out to dinner with half a dozen good friends last night, discussing blogging and generally chewing the fat over what is happening to communications, marketing etc. Someone worried (or maybe it was a joke) about being too old for all this new stuff, we soon put the record straight by listing the ages of top bloggers we could think of - it was obvious that age is no barrier to success on line. It’s a good job too considering that there is a new law in the UK next week dealing with age discrimination! Then I saw this great post about late developing geniuses – QED.

We also witnessed a stunning failure of customer service, or if kind a real lack of understanding. When we ordered 3 starters for the 6 of us to share - one of the dishes served had 5 pieces of ravioli. We looked at the waiter and said, that’s a shame one of us will have to miss out, he grinned and walked away – leaving us each with 5/6ths each – we’d have paid for an extra piece of ravioli – but what’s the real cost!