If you only have a few minutes, the first 2/3 of the video is what you should watch. Some key points:

• making the case for change
• transformation through technology in a very short period of time
• 92% of employees take the employee survey (45 minutes)
• key question – is my manager / supervisor practicing the Aetna way (at 83%)
• they had a situation where staff did not admit they worked for Aetna
• employee engagement moved from 48% to 78%
• the are focusing on a high performance organization (expectation, not fear based)
• their performance management system is based on results AND leadership (can’t get results while not developing and leading staff  - if you achieve good results but have poor leadership = no reward!

Source: MIT World

• Each year the amount of information created in the enterprise, paper and digital combined, grows faster than 65%.
• Non-productive information work, such as reformatting documents or reentering documents into computers, consumed more than $1.5 trillion in U.S. salaries last year.
• Survey respondents spend as much as 26% of their time trying to manage information overload.
• Respondents split their time evenly between dealing with paper and digital information, but 71% prefer to deal with digital information.
• The amount of time U.S. information workers spent last year managing paper-driven information overload cost $460 billion in salaries.
• Reducing the time wasted dealing with information overload by 15% could save a company with 500 employees more than $2 million a year.

Source: IDC survey, Information Overload Site

And more serious:

• 28% – The percentage of the typical workday wasted by interruptions caused by unnecessary information
• 53% – The percentage of people who believe that less than half of the information they receive is valuable
• 42% – The percentage of people who accidentally use the wrong information at least once per week

So what is IOS? Watch this video!

FYI: This area is very close to the children’s villages being built and run by Watoto.ca. Our daughter Tanya is working for the Watoto Canadian office and is responsible for coordinating volunteer trips to Uganda.

Refugee camp in DRC

Child who grew up in refugee camp

Child soldiers

Condition: Critical

DRC and Uganda

This short video below highlights the plight of the people caught in this horrible situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Condition Critical is a short film that brings us the voices of those who are living there every day. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) – Doctors without Borders has been working in the DRC since 1992.

Source: Condition Critical

The website with more information and updates is http://www.condition-critical.org/

In this interview Tom Peters and Seth Godin tell us if you have loyal employees the loyal customers will come.

There are more interview excerpts on the site “Inside the Entrepreneurial Mind”.

• Loyal employees vs. loyal customers
• Let’s hear it for the blog
• Are Gen X employees different?
• The effect of social networking on brands
• Social networking – good for small business

Check out New Perspectives on Business. Also take a look at the other sections: “The Business of Technology”, “How the Biz does Business”, “The Business of Food” and “Richard Branson”.

The site is Open Forum, sponsored by American Express.

From: ZDNet.com

Check out this 2-part video blog “Life is not so linear” from Beachwalks.tv.

Part 1

Part 2

Beachwalks with Rox is a great video blog that provides some insightful reflection and personal development. Lots of great episodes on the site.

From: Rocketboom.com

Our family has participated for many years as our children grew up, both through our church and christian school. It is easy to anyone to fill a shoebox and deliver it to one of the thousands of groups assembling shipments of shoeboxes. If you don’t know about this program, check out this short video.

From: Mahalo Daily

Some more information at Wikipedia.

Watch the video at Government Technology where Vivek Kundra, CTO for Washington, D.C. talks about using these tools while acquiring a new police evidence warehouse.

This is Procurement 2.0, using the services available on the internet to move to a increased transparency for the duration of a systems acquisition. This short interview will change your opinion of how the public sector is using these “consumer” tools.

Source: Government Technology

Then comes the “call to action” – implement some of these techniques in my everyday life.

The following is a short interview with Veronica Belmont on Mahalo Daily.

From: Mahalo Daily

From: Rocketboom

For the more advanced user check out the first 2-3 minutes of this one. And you thought a stylus for your PDA/Smartphone was a recent invention.

The blog has regular updates and photos from the village. Donations for the work in Nata can also be made on the site.

I think this is a great idea. The challenge for business will be to be ready to allow these students to make use of all the technologies they have been exposed to when they enter the workforce.

Support your teen and let them know about this website and that “It’s No Fun if Your Dead”.

There are prizes for youth who are residents of British Columbia.