Here's the result. You'll need to turn your speakers up (the sound's a little low, and the video is a teeny bit choppy in one section).

Enjoy!

As it slides inexorably into Treadmill, watch for increasingly bureaucratic hoops in dealing with JetBlue, a gradual erosion of comfort and inflight options (probably accompanied by an attention-diverting rebranding exercise), and possibly a 'merger' with one or more of the other, more traditional low-cost airlines.

My money is on an acquisition by Southwest, and a return by Neeleman to some role in the combined organization. Watch this space.

In Predictable Success® terms, Starbucks has hit Treadmill.

To succeed in pulling Starbucks back to Predictable Success®, Schultz' return must accomplish six goals that most returning leaders overlook.

Click here to read the full text of our press release on this topic.

Are they different from their predecessors (GenX and the Baby Boomers), or are people just...well, ...people?

I contributed to an online debate on the subject. Here's the link to the resulting article.

That led me to think about the decision-making 'energy conversion ratio' in the organizations I work with: Do you have a manager, a peer, a team member who's decision-making 'energy conversion ratio' is higher than 1:1?

Someone, in other words, in whom you have to invest five, seven, ten times more energy in managing them, than the organization gets back in return?

If so, what are you going to do about it?

A recent study by staffing firm Robert Half International found that a third of employers fail to provide a formal orientation program for new hires. For those who do, more than 50 percent of employees rated the orientation as anywhere from "not effective" to "only somewhat effective."

I contributed substantially to the article - but the other contributions are right on the mark as well :)

I love the example at the start of Guy Kawasaki's enjoyable 'Art of the Start' presentation:

1. An email arrived from Microsoft, with this clickable link right at the top:

"Read this issue online if you can't see the images or are using Outlook 2007"

Huh? Microsoft are sending emails that can't be read by their own software?

2. Coming out of the Post Office, I found someone's credit card lying on the ground. I called the 800 number on the back to report the lost card. The operator asks for my name, address and telephone number. I tell her that that information is irrelevant, I'm merely reporting the lost card, and all she needs to know is the card number and the cardholder's name.

The operator proceeds to tell me that it is 'mandatory' for me to supply her with my contact details (remember, I'm not even a customer of these people - merely an innocent bystander trying to help), and that unless I do supply those details, she cannot report the card as lost. [I hung up and cut the card in pieces.]

Lesson? You know you're in Bureaucracy when not only are you providing terrible customer service, you're in fact actively trying to tee your customers off.

The format is pretty simple - and pretty much right on track with the Predictable Success(r) methodology on group communication: 20 slides, 20 seconds each - 6 minutes 40 seconds to complete your presentation and sit back down. Cool.

Check out the Wikipedia article here.

Other Pecha Kucha links from Google.

This is a particularly difficult step for founder/owners to take, as it often feels like their very identity is being threatened. As it is also usually achieved by external appointments - recruiting new (often younger) executives to head up divisions, departments teams and groups - the process, if successful, is also accompanied by large, if slow, shifts in the corporate culture (if the culture doesn't change, the new appointees are usually 'rejected by the organism' over time, and the organization remains in Treadmill, or worse, slides down into Bureaucracy).

It's fascinating to watch Microsoft - locked in one of the classic Treadmill / Bureaucracy struggles of all time - play this out in real time.

The recent (last 24 months at time of writing) appointment of new managers from organizations such as aQuantive Brian McAndrews, Senior VP, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions), Electronic Arts (Don Mattrick, Senior VP, Interactive Entertainment Business), Ask.com (Steve Berkowitz (Senior VP, Online Services) Groove Networks (Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect) shows that they're certainly trying to make this happen. Time will tell whether or not they will be successful.

My own view? I think it might be too late for them to succeed - but I sure as heck would never bet against them.