The cost of the transaction was .25.  That's 25 CENTS.  Really.  

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I've made my first transaction to pay for some website work via Dwolla. For my web-master friend, between our two bank accounts, the cost of the transaction was .25.  That's 25 CENTS.  Really.  That was all.  No %-age fee, no credit cards.

It took a week or so to set up, but now the bank set-up is fully verified, similar to how PayPal does it.  Now I'm ready to request or send funds with anyone with a Dwolla connection through their bank.

On the merchant end of things, if this catches on, it could be huge. If Google somehow gets connected to Dwolla at some point, it WILL be huge.  It might also help Google with it's new YouTube merchandising business.  It certainly fits with the "don't be evil" ethic suggested by the giant.

A typical reason it might not work would be the usual: leadership failure. With cautionary tales like RIMM (the Blackberry manufacturer) and Rubbermaid, leadership #fails can stall even the most innovative companies.

Here's hoping that Dwolla takes off to be a blazing 2012 success, if for nothing else than how, like the #OWS / 99% protests, it helps most of us, not just a select few who profit, perhaps a bit too much, from the many. 

Where I'm at these days, including my curation newsletters:

• Leadership: www.Reveln.com  
• LinkedIn:  Deborah Nystrom 

Curating:

• Change Leadership
  • Cautionary Change Leader Tales: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives  (Forbes via ScoopIt) and the

• Innovation & Institutions:  Will it Blend?
• Peer Learning
• Social Media Learning Lab

Source:  Future Midwest 2011, Dan Gilbert's presenation, Photo - Deb

via flickr.com

via flickr.com via my Flickr name, Tatiana12 (Deb)

Last weekend, the New York Times featured a story in its Style section about the onslaught of hip, young urban pioneers streaming into downtown Detroit.

These “creatives,” as they are being called, are taking advantage of low rents and the opportunity to recycle this abandoned, blank slate of an urban landscape into something new and exciting.

There are restaurateurs and entrepreneurs of all stripes living alongside environmentalists and urban farmers. 

...One woman said that there’s a cool party just about every evening. 

The article pointed out that even though recent census figures show that Detroit’s overall population shrank by 25 percent in the last 10 years, downtown Detroit experienced a 59 percent increase in the number of college-educated residents under the age of 35.

...behind the scene, millions of public, private and foundation dollars are greasing the wheels. Last April, Blueprint America profiled an effort called Live Midtown, an incentive program created to lure some of the 30,000 employees of midtown’s major anchor institutions (Wayne State University, Detroit Medical Center and Henry Ford Health System) to move from the suburbs back into the city. 

...And more incentives are on the way.

Dan Gilbert, the founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, for instance, is one of the city’s biggest boosters.  He calls his revitalization effort “Detroit 2.0” and seems to be putting his money (more than $100 million by some estimates) where his mouth is.

Gilbert recently moved Quicken Loans’ headquarters (and the 2,000 employees who worked there) out of a nearby suburb into downtown Detroit.  And he’s in the process of buying four historic buildings which he plans to fill with tech and web-based companies, some of which will no doubt come from Bizdom U, an “entrepreneurial boot camp” Gilbert started several years ago.

Biz U offers graduates financing opportunities of up to $100,000 if they base their start-up in Detroit.

via flickr.com Creative Commons.

A paper available for download from Stanford University, with multiple funding sources features the problems of the overload of decision & choice:

 

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Has the proliferation of choice uniformly made life easier and better?  The answer is a resounding no.

~ Decision Fatigue Exhausts Self-Regulatory Resources

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The New York Times has articulated the issue well in listing out the differences on EXACTLY the same judicial cases heard at different times of the day.  

Troy Davis has passed from our midst today. I have to wonder...

An overload of options awaits us every time we enter a big box store or approach the world of Social Media.  

It is the reason that I choose to:

• Enjoy Facebook and Google+ competitions 
  • including how they are tuning their platforms to give me news and connections tailored to what I want to see, 
  • especially as they compete to get me, and my friends, family and acquaintances tuning in.  
  • I think it is cool, not creepy.  
  • Bring it!

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 “The best decision makers, are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.” ~ Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist, 

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• Keep my LinkedIn profile up to date.
  • Add in business contacts to what is listed above for Facebook & Google+ 

• Follow my intuition now more clearly than ever.  
  • After a half a century of living, my unconscious mind seems to understand complexity more than I'll ever grasp.  The leads are 80% good ones, to date.

• Shop at Trader Joes, a "right-sized" organically oriented grocery chain. 
  • I can buy organic, not be overwhelmed with too many choices, and enjoy a folksy ambience that fits what I want.  

via theatlantic.com

• be a happy Apple device/computers owner.  
  • Holding at iPhone 4.
  • There's an accessible number of choices, even including the pending iPhone5 via my Social Media blog post on the pending release.  
  • That does not include 10, 5, or even 3 versions of the iPhone5, unless you want to count the color of the case.

• PC owners can read about Dell below, and then agree about the plethhora of PC choices.
  • Elegant simplicity, including the size of my local Apple store.  PC owners, good luck with that.

• Craig's List anyone?  When's the last time they changed their platform? Still going strong!

Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault.

Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. It was all about timing, as researchers discovered by analyzing more than 1,100 decisions over the course of a year.

...The odds favored the prisoner who appeared at 8:50 a.m. — and he did in fact receive parole.

 ...There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges’ behavior, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University.

...The judges’ erratic judgment was due to the occupational hazard of being, as George W. Bush once put it, “the decider.”

...The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down. 

 ...Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister

...experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. 

 ...which phase of the decision-making process was most fatiguing?

using the self-service Web site of Dell Computers. One group in the experiment carefully studied the advantages and disadvantages of various features available for a computer — the type of screen, the size of the hard drive, etc. — without actually making a final decision on which ones to choose.

A second group was given a list of predetermined specifications and told to configure a computer by going through the laborious, step-by-step process of locating the specified features among the arrays of options and then clicking on the right ones.

The third group had to figure out for themselves which features they wanted on their computers and go through the process of choosing them

When self-control was measured, [the THIRD group] were the one who were most depleted, by far.

“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist, points out.

That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach.

“The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”

 

More on this topic:

Decision Fatigue: Why I'm iPhone4 & Holding | The Atlantic & Reveln

People, Institutions are Biased against Creative Ideas, Studies Find | Physorg.com & Reveln

Strategic Agility Update 2011 | Reveln & Forbes

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"How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?" ~ Jack Goncalo, Asst. Professor of Organizational Behavior, University of Pennsylvania and co-author of new research published in Psychological Science.

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Excerpted:

 The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers.

Fresh research indicates they don't even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.

"How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?" said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.

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 Studies on bias against creative ideas show that uncertainty makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most.

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The studies' findings include:

• Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.

• People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical -- tried and true.

• Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.

• Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.

To uncover bias against creativity, the researchers used a subtle technique to measure unconscious bias.

...Results revealed that while people explicitly claimed to desire creative ideas, they actually associated creative ideas with negative words such as "vomit," "poison" and "agony."

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 The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity."

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Goncalo said this bias caused subjects to reject ideas for new products that were novel and high quality.

The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity."

The study, "The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas," might validate the frustrations of creative people, Goncalo said.

The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.    Reference: Cornell University

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People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas -- tried and true.  Tell this to Ptolemy and Copernicus... and Galileo, Tesla, and Darwin.  Oh wait... turns out they were ridiculed for their innovation. To death.  And then some.

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via physorg.com

Excerpted:

by Lance Haun

Classroom lessons

Dan Ariely is a great author and his book Predictable Irrationality is a favorite of mine. He recently wrote about an issue he dealt with in his classroom:

....my undergraduate students ...promised that if they used their laptops, it would only be for course-related activities like taking notes. However, as the semester drew on...they were Facebooking more and more.   ...I became increasingly frustrated.”

...A couple of his students took it upon themselves to set up an experiment. They wrote two emails to the students in class (half would get one email, the other half would get the alternative). In one of the emails, they supplied a link to the purported answers to the final exam. In the other email, they still supplied a link to it but, as a postscript note, they said that the university prohibited gaining any unfair advantage. The results?

Using Google Analytics, the students tracked how many people from each group visited the website. ...without the honor code reminder, about 69 percent of the class accessed the website with the answers. However, when the message included the reminder about the honor code, 41 percent accessed the website. As it turns out, students who were reminded of the honor code were significantly less likely to cheat. 

Changing the tune

Combining the example from Ariely’s classroom and the code of ethics [60 pages long]  from Enron, I think we get a much clearer picture of what causes ethical breakdowns. It seems to be three parts:

1. It must be clear — ...Ethics should be clear, ...no wiggle room, a...no excuse why a person couldn’t read and clearly understand it in a few minutes.
2. There must be reminders — ...When faced with major decisions, a reminder about the code of ethics can be imperative to preventing [lapses by those tempted.]
3. Look out for culture creep — ...Ariely’s class turned into a place where ethical decisions were unclear   .... A culture of unethical behavior doesn’t come and go quickly.

...the third one is the most difficult. 

Lance Haun is Contributing Editor for TLNT.

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 It's the day to day decisions, the moments of clarity of whether stated value & ethics have really been taken to heart, most often modeled by leaders, that make all the difference.    ~ Yiddish proverb

via flickr.com by Hamed Saber

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What is your experience with values and ethics that create an persistent ethical culture?

Preliminary photos and slides from the Bullying @ Work session at the Center for Independent Living this Friday. We had a full house, great discussion, and dug into the topic quite a bit in the allotted two hours.

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The most frequent form of workplace aggression is not physical, it is emotional and psychological in nature.  -- Loraleigh Keashly, Ph.D.  

Interpersonal and Systemic Aspects of 

Emotional Abuse at Work: 

The Target's Perspective, Violence and Victims. 

New York: 2001. Vol. 16, Iss. 3; pg. 233, 32 pgs

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Click here to download:

Bullying_at_Work,_Preview,_2011,_CIL_&_Reveln.ppt (1.55 MB)

(download)

Click here to download:

Bullying_at_Work,_Preview,_2011,_CIL_&_Reveln.ppt (1.55 MB)

The full slide share is coming soon!   If you'd like to stay in touch about that and other Reveln news, updates are available:

1. Facebook business page for Reveln Consulting here,
2. my LinkedIn profile page here, and
3. via my Reveln website with this blog post listed here as a link on page 1.

Thanks to Lisa Mangigian for arranging the session and asking me to present. Thank you to Stephanie Stiles for the social media shout outs, the blog post on the CIL website here, the photography and help with the equipment.

Related posts:

• Gender Peer Group Power: The Chicken & Egg in Women Modeling Math & Science Careers
• Leadership Integrity at All Levels
• Company Values Reveal Long Term Priorities

Where I'm at these days:

I have three main channels for my work. 

1) My core is the "mothership" Reveln website, which covers the heart of my consulting & executive leader coaching.  I offer the benefits of helping you align your data, people and passion for business.   

2) My 2nd channel is change management that I enjoy with WholeScale change colleagues Ron Koller & Dr. Rick Fenwick. ChangeManagementResources.com is aimed to be a "non-partisan" website of rich resources.

3) My third channel is in Social Media, which I enjoy using with change leaders, consultants, coaches & business owners: Reveln Social Business.