It could have been worse. I could’ve been stranded on the runway for eight hours. Instead, I was stuck at the JetBlue terminal for 12 hours last Thursday before finding out my flight was cancelled. [1]

Here are some communication lessons learned from the fiasco:

Put all your soldiers on the front lines. Jet Blue’s corporate offices are located near JFK so they brought in a bunch of people who normally work there to help out at the terminal. They wore Jet Blue vests and/or badges and wandered around the terminal answering questions, directing customers, and listening to complaints. Granted, a lot of these people didn’t know much more than the passengers but, hey, at least they were there. A lot of customers just wanted to vent and know someone was listening. You need boots on the ground to do the little things. I saw one rep ask an irate customer for a business card so he could follow up with him later. A small step, but it just might save a customer.

Be the guy with the megaphone. The PA system by the gates was pitiful. The volume was feeble and you could barely make out the thin announcements (which were similar to the unintelligible conductor announcements on the NYC subways). People were desperate to know what was going on. Enter megaphone man. Rumor was that he actually worked as legal counsel to JetBlue. He went to each gate with a megaphone and updated all the passengers with the latest info. Then he’d walk toward the rear of that gate and repeat the info again for those who hadn’t heard the first time. It wasn’t always good news. But at least an actual person was there, communicating something clearly.

Have an operator reserve force. A lot of the JetBlue reps on the scene encouraged passengers to call (800) Jet-Blue for more info. The problem was the phone lines were so jampacked there was no way to get through. This forced already irate customers to wait in lines for hours in order to find out information that easily could have been shared over the phone. The result: Anger builds and the people onsite had to deal with it.

Take it personally. When people are stuck on board a plane for eight hours with no clean toilets, they take it personally. And when your company promise is to “bring humanity back to air travel,” you better take it personally too.

The founder and chief executive of JetBlue says he’s “humiliated and mortified” by what happened. He’s taking responsibility and promising real changes. That’s what customers want to hear.

Mr. Neeleman said he would enact what he called a customer bill of rights that would financially penalize JetBlue — and reward passengers — for any repeat of the current upheaval. He said he would propose a plan to pay customers, after some amount of time, by the hour for being stranded on a plane…He says knows he has to deliver. “I can flap my lips all I want,” he said. “Talk is cheap. Watch us.”

Your site is a PR weapon. Neeleman’s emotional response was nowhere to be found at JetBlue.com though. The latest JetBlue news at the site is the addition of 3 blind moose Merlot and Chardonnay to flights. Hmm, is that really the big JetBlue news right now? And the last entry at the CEO’s blog at the site has the title “2007 Takes Off in the Right Direction.”

Granted, there’s a link that says “Operational Interruptions” in the site’s header but it only takes you to a bunch of sterile, boilerplate text (e.g, “JetBlue continues to experience cancellations and delays as a result of Wednesday’s ice storm in the Northeast. Please check the status of your flight online before proceeding to the airport.”)

The site needs to become the online version of the guy with the megaphone. There should be a letter from the CEO. There should be an apology. There should be details about changes that are going to happen to prevent this from occurring again. If they can’t easily make changes to the current site, they should set up a special crisis site to deal specifically with this debacle. As it is now, the company’s online presence seems disconnected from reality.

Erik K. Antonsson, a prof at Caltech, has a page of quotations related to design and engineering. Some samples:

“If a major project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and its exact schedule at the beginning. And if in fact you do know the exact cost and the exact schedule, chances are that the technology is obsolete.”
-Joseph G. Gavin, Jr., discussing the design of the lunar module that landed NASA astronauts on the moon.

“What appears at first to be well-articulated, firmly established architecture often consists of a broad (perhaps even vague) product concept; a set of evolving, sometimes loosely formulated specifications; and multiple, often conflicting targets that may be difficult to meet. The product is invariably complex and the planning process, its attention to detail notwithstanding, is unlikely to uncover all the relevant conflicts and problems in advance. To meet an objective such as `the door on the new luxury sedan should create a feeling of solidity and security when it closes’ may be difficult, involving the application of technical expertise and a great deal of negotiation with engineers working on the body, electrical system, stamping, and assembly. Though planning establishes overall direction and architecture, product engineering must still confront numerous conflicts and trade-offs in local components and subsystems.”
-Kim B. Clark and Takahiro Fujimoto, “Product Development Performance: Strategy, Organization and Management in the World Auto Industry”

“And let it be noted that there is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to set up as the leader in the introduction of changes. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new.”
-Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince”

Ex-Gizmodo guru Joel Johnson returns to the site to rant about why he hates gadgets and early adopters.

Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don’t need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn’t do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it.

You want to know the punchline? The average Joe that makes up the market is smarter than you saps. The market-at-large waits until a clear leader emerges, then takes a modest plunge. You may think you’re making up the “bleeding edge” of “gadget pimpatude” but you’re really just a loose confederation of marks the consumer electronics industry uses as free market research and easy money.

Some quotes from an interview Stanley Kubrick gave about the film Barry Lyndon [via CP]...

There is an aspect of film-making which can be compared to a sporting contest. You can start with a game plan but depending on where the ball bounces and where the other side happens to be, opportunities and problems arise which can only be effectively dealt with at that very moment.

[On the topic of period costuming] What is very important is to get some actual clothes of the period to learn how they were originally made. To get them to look right, you really have to make them the same way.

(That’s a Christopher Alexander theme too…you can’t make “the same thing” with a different process.)

I think Nabokov may have had the right approach to interviews. He would only agree to write down the answers and then send them on to the interviewer who would then write the questions.

...and here’s a couple more interesting quotes from thinkexist.com’s Kubrick quotes page.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.

Related: All of Coudal’s posts on Stanley Kubrick (“A look back through our archives reveals an obsession with the work of Stanley Kubrick…”)

Speaking of weather, Yahoo weather says “Unknown Precipitation” is falling from the sky in NYC.

WeatherDock opts for the phrase “Wintry Mix,” which makes the precip sound more like a cocktail or lounge music compilation.

And then there’s the icon that accompanies it: every crappy weather icon you can think of layered on top of each other. I think if you look really close at it, you can see locusts.

I hadn’t been in a Blockbuster for years so I found a recent trip there amusing. See, Blockbuster offers 2-day movie rentals. But the company gives you a one-week grace period too. So, in reality, you get 2 days + 1 week to return that movie at no additional cost. And if you get a 7-day rental, you actually get 14 days. The poor clerk who had to explain this setup sounded like he was trapped in an Abbott and Costello routine.

Similarly, I recently received an Amazon Reward Certificates valid for 18 months. But the certificates says it’s “valid for 18 months, followed by a 6-month grace period, after which it will expire.”

So 2 days is actually 9 days. 7 days is 14 days. And 18 months is actually 24 months. The extra time is nice, but it’s too bad people don’t just say what they mean anymore.

Sixties City has some interesting flipbook-style examples of dance moves:

The cool thing about the images above is they’re scannable at a glance. If these were videos, you would have to watch each one in order to know what’s going on. The multiple frame view, on the other hand, gives you an instant overview.

Small multiples
In Envisioning information, Edward Tufte discusses how small multiple designs answer the question “Compared to what?”

Small multiple designs, multivariate and data bountiful, answer directly by visually enforcing comparisons of changes, of the differences among objects, of the scope of alternatives. For a wide range of problems in data presentation, small multiples are the best design solution.

Illustrations of postage-stamp size are indexed by category or a label, sequenced over time like the frames of a movie, or ordered by a quantitative variable not used in the single image itself. Information slices are positioned within the eyespan, so that viewers make comparisons at a glance — uninterrupted visual reasoning. Constancy of design puts the emphasis on changes in data, not changes in data frames.

Getting to “Aha!” ASAP
While the sort of multiple frame technique shown above has many applications, online videos seem like a natural home for it. As the number of videos available grows, people will seek quicker ways to grasp what’s going on in a clip and whether it’s worth viewing.

So what if YouTube posted multiple frames instead of just picking one frame?

For example, the frame YouTube chooses to show for this Conan clip doesn’t prepare you at all for the clip’s actual contents.

Multiple frames do a much better job:

Jason Turgeon writes: “The textbook evaluator blog by Mark Montgomery has become a must read for me, not so much because it’s relevant to my work as because it’s so well-written.  Right now, the author is deconstructing, chapter-by-chapter, a book called Closing the Achievement Gap: A Vision for Changing Beliefs and Practices.  His reviews are vicious, funny, and fit right in with the spirit of 37signals.  He’s taking the authors to task for using unnecessarily big words simply for the sake of using big words. I’d love to see you write about this series of posts.”

Here’s an excerpt from the blog called Direct Vocabulary Instruction: An Idea Whose Time Has Come:

Anyway, all this discussion of convoluted defintions is starting to drive me crazy. The point that Marzano makes is this (drum roll, please): those kids who know more (who possess more “crystalized intelligence”, as he confusingly calls it) display higher academic achievement.

Let me state it again.

Students who know more are higher academic achievers.

Whoa. Blinding Flash of the Obvious.

So what does this have to do with direct vocabulary instruction? It means that we have to teach our kids new words. We have to provide direct instruction. We have to make them learn new words…

I “know” more words than a lot of people. Friends make fun of me when I use weird words like “limn” or “tintinabulation.”

And get this: I’m not smarter than my friends. I just know more words.

Why?

Because I studied them. I had teachers who instructed me–and taught me to love–the power of words.

Thus it irks me no end when people like Marzano have to invent new phrases and concepts. They end up obscuring the true power of words, even as they argue that our children should receive more vocabulary instruction. Even as I agreed with every word Marzano wrote, I became more and more irritated by his verbal obfuscation. Can’t academics use normal words–even if they are big ones? “Crystallized intelligence”? Please.

It’s all about knowledge. Plain. Simple. Easy to understand.

Got an interesting copywriting excerpt for Signal vs. Noise? Send the excerpt and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

“Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business” is restaurateur Danny Meyer’s new book. In a speech at NYU, Meyer explained his philosophy:

“The customer is not always right. While the customer is not always right, he/she must always feel heard.”

Meyer said his business strategy is built on both good service, defined as the technical delivery of a product, and “enlightened hospitality,” which is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel. He argued that hospitality is the distinguishing factor for success in this new, service economy. In the information age, competitors know how to offer the same products and services, but the culture and experience companies create for their customers will help them stand out. “It’s all about how you make the customer feel. You must make customers feel that you’re on their side,” he said.

To create this hospitable culture, restaurants must hire the right people, said Meyer. He hires “51 percenters” – staff with a high “hospitality quotient (HQ)” whose skills are 49 percent technical and 51 percent emotional. The emotional skills that are required to create a high HQ are: (1) optimism and kindness, (2) curiosity about learning, (3) an exceptional work ethic, (4) a high degree of empathy, and (5) self-awareness and integrity.

Meyer reinforced that the first and most important application of hospitality is to the people who work for you, and then, in descending order of priority, to the guests, the community, the suppliers, and the investors. “By putting your employees first, you have happier employees, which then lead to a higher HQ. A higher HQ leads to happy customers, which benefits all the stakeholders. The cycle is virtuous, not linear, because the stakeholders all impact each other.”

In an interview with Amazon, Meyer discusses “hospitalitarians” and the restaurant version of defensive design:

[A hospitalitarian is] someone with a very high “HQ”—or hospitality quotient. It’s someone whose emotional makeup leads them to derive pleasure from the act of delivering pleasure…

Don’t judge a restaurant by the honest mistakes it makes; do judge a place by how effectively and thoughtfully it strives to overcome those mistakes!...

People will generally forgive an honest mistake when someone takes responsibility for it with genuine concern.

Mark Hurst has invited Meyer to speak at GEL and yesterday posted an excerpt from the book where Meyer describes the difference between “service” and “hospitality.”

The Ritz-Carlton hotels are deservedly famous for their focus on service; they don’t call it hospitality. But as a guest there, I have occasionally sensed a rote quality in the process, when every employee responds with exactly the same phrase, “My pleasure,” to anything guests ask or say. Hearing “My pleasure” over and over again can get rather creepy after a while. It’s like hearing a flight attendant chirp, “Bye now!” and “Bye-bye!” 200 times as passengers disembark from an airplane. Hospitality can not flow from a monologue.

Humument is Tom Phillips treated version of the Victorian novel ”A Human Document” by W.H. Mallock. Phillips transforms the text by drawing and painting over it and revealing just selected words. You can view the converted text online or in book form (Amazon).

In the mid-1960s, inspired by William Burroughs’s “cut-up” writing technique, Tom Phillips bought an obscure Victorian novel for three pence — W. H. Mallock’s 1892 novel, A Human Document. He began cutting and pasting the extant text, treating the pages with gouache and ink, isolating the words that interested him while scoring out unwanted words or painting over them. The result was A Humument, and the first version appeared in 1970.

The artist writes, “I plundered, mined, and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents, and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I’d stripped away with visual images of all kinds. It began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams, and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love’s casualties.”