Interview with Professor Gardner on the Ethical Mind

The Harvard Business Review of March 2007 contains an interview worth reading with Harvard Graduate School Professor of Cognition and Education Howard Gardner.
Gardner became well known by his 1983 book Frames of Mind, in which he argued that people don't have one, but multiple intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence.

Likewise, Gardner now proposes to distinguish between Five Types of Cognitive Minds:

1. The Disciplined Mind - What we gain through applying ourselves in a disciplined way in school.
2. The Synthesizing Mind - Surveys a wide range of sources, decides what is important and is worth paying attention to.
3. The Creating Mind - Looks for new ideas and practices, innovates, takes chances, dicovers.
4. The Respectful Mind - The kind of open mind that tries to understand and form relationshipss with other human beings.
5. The Ethical Mind - Broadens the respect for others (see 4) into something more abstract. Asks: "What kind of a person, worker, and citizen do I want to be?"

The Ethical Mind grows at home and in the surrounding community. Bad behavior of others can undermine it. Gardner mentions cheating MBA students as an example of this undermining, and thinks that it is more difficult for businesspeople to adhere to an ethical mind than it is for other professionals, because business is strictly not a profession, has no guild-structure, no professional model, no standards and no penalties for bad behavior. The only requirement is to make money and not run afoul of the law.

In order to stay on the right track, Gardner advises business leaders to:

1. Believe doing so is essential for the good of the organization, especially during difficult times.
2. Take the time to step back and reflect about the nature of their work.
3. Undergo "positive periodic inoculations", being forced to rethink what you're doing.
4. Use consultants, which should include a trusted advisor within the organization, the councel of someone completely outside the organization (an old friend), a genuine independent board.

See also the related website The Good Work Project, an "effort to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work—work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningfulto its practitioners—and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our society".

Flight Centre and Lastminute Australia updates

Two parallel but unrelated activities going on in public traded travel companies in Australia. The Flight Centre bid collapse and potential build up to a potential sale of the Lastminute.com.au joint venture. There is some great commentary on this from Tom Boreham in the Australian on both of these public companies and the public travel market in general. Interesting read.

How To Skyrocket Results With Your Home Business Sales Page

Have a home-based business website, but the sales copy isn't converting? If so, here are some tips to turn visits into sales!

Secific Questions Your Sales Letters Must Answer To Achieve The Best Results

by: Joanne L. Mason

Here’s a surefire method to guarantee you achieve the best results from your sales letters. Rather than make a sales pitch that your prospects will very likely ignore, instead present your products or services as the answer to their problems.

When you offer the help that your target audience is looking for it won’t be hard to make sales. You can show that you really do understand the needs of your market by addressing these five specific questions right up front in your sales letter.

1. What's In It For Me?

This is the number one rule of salesmanship. People buy products for one reason only...what they will receive out of it. You must instantly tell any prospect exactly what they will get out of your product. Your best opportunity to do this is in your headline. Make a bold statement right up front and capture your target audience immediately.

2. How Will My Life Become Better?

This is where you have to understand the emotional appeals that attract your prospects like moths to a flame. Do they want to become richer, smarter, better looking, thinner or more popular? Do they want to save time, money or effort? Study your niche market until you know what emotional buttons to push and you'll see a huge increase in your sales instantly.

3. What Will Happen If I Say No?

You have to give people a compelling reason to buy from you. A good way to do that is by reminding them what will happen if they don’t purchase your product. What problems will continue to exist for them, how much money will they lose, how type of frustration will they continue to endure? Help your prospects to see that they really can’t afford to say no because your product truly is the solution to their problems.

4. Why Should I Trust You?

The best way to establish trust in your sales letters is by using testimonials. A good testimonial is the written equivalence of a word of mouth referral. Prospects naturally trust what other people say about their experience with you. Get your past customers who have been happy with your business to give you testimonials to use in your sales letter.

5. Will I Be Stuck With Your Product?

Here’s where you can literally seal the deal. Reverse the risk of doing business with you. Always offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident that they won’t lose out if your product is not what they expected. When your prospects see that you stand behind your products enough to assume the risk they can feel more comfortable in purchasing your products.

When you use these easy tips to answer your prospects questions in your sales letter, not only will you gain an unfair advantage over your competition, but you'll also show your prospect that you care about their problems and your product is the solution that they need.

About The Author Joanne Mason's articles have helped thousands of small business owners to significantly increase their profits by discovering the secrets to writing better sales letters. Get a FREE subscription to her ezine, Sales Letter Secrets, at http://www.moneymakingsalesletters.com jlmason@moneymakingsalesletters.com

The new "portal"

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise Product Team

Following last week's release of Google Apps, there is a lot of excitement about the Start Page functionality which allows users to preview and access their inboxes and calendars, find relevant information from your organization or business, and search the web. Why do users like this so much? Because the ideal end-user portal not only has company information like dashboards, business data feeds, and enterprise search, but also combines personal information like news and stock tickers, weather, sports scores, and various RSS feeds from favorite news sources and blogs. The Google Start Page in Google Apps gives users just that, access to the thousands of Google Personalized Homepage Modules from which they can pick and choose what best serves their information needs.

In a great move to further break down this barrier between the traditional enterprise and the vast amount of information and resources available on the Internet, IBM announced support for Google Gadgets within WebSphere. I think this is a major win for users everywhere, and furthers the trend of bringing great consumer driven innovation into the old world of enterprise IT.

Italy vs Australia - World Cup round 2 (Italian Government vs Qantas)

Had two very interesting and (I originally planned) to be unrelated travel experiences/plans today. First step was to go to the local office of the Italian consulate to register my new daughter for a passport and the second was to go to a Qantas office to have a minor change made to an airline ticket (for the same daughter). So two stops, with two famous pain in the arse bureaucracies. Good chance to see who is worse at customer service - the Italian government or the flying kangaroo. You can see where this is going. The visit to the Italians took 40 minutes including the initial queue up, time with the consul assistant to process a stack of documents, to pay the processing charge and for the admin assistant to add the name of my daughter to mine and my wife's passport. At Qantas it took 40 minutes for a person to put a very small sticker on a ticket. At the Italian embassy every staff member was perpetually talking to someone. There was a turnaround of people and constant flow of documents, issues and responses. At Qantas I counted 8 staff members, sitting at their customer service desks, doing nothing. Not on the phone, not typing on their computers, not doing anything- actually that is not quite true, two of them were talking to each other about clothes shopping. Meanwhile three customers and I sat patiently "waiting for Godot". There was no-one at the Qantas office looking at the situation of customers without service and service agents without customers and doing the obvious thing.

I was not and should not be surprised. As I discussed in this post, their is no customer service culture at Qantas any more. Instead they have a "process" culture. That is a culture based not on "how can I give you the best experience as a traveller" but instead "what is the process that needs to be followed to get these people from A-to-B in the fastest, cheapest, least impactful way."

So in the world cup final of bad bureaucracies Australia has beaten Italy, avenging the outrageous defeat of Australia by Italy in the real world cup. Forza Qantas...

UPDATE - nice/tragic post here on Travelmole from a travel journalist trying to book a "free" frequent flyer ticket with Qantas. My own experience is here