Mark W. Shead

Fort Scott is a small community about 1.5 hours South of Kansas City. The city itself has about 7,000 residence and it is the seat for Bourbon county so a good deal of the rural population relies on the town. It has been interesting to watch how a small town in rural America behaves and tries to get things done. Money of course is always in short supply so the basic method of funding projects is by raising taxes.  Unfortunately this has been going on for a long time and Fort Scott now has a sales tax that is as high or higher than Texas. Not that there is anything wrong with Texas, but down South they have decided to use sales tax instead of an income tax. Fort Scott has the high sales tax and a state income tax.  In Fort Scott’s defense, much of the sales tax problem comes from the state level and leaves the city and the county with very little room to work.

What is most disappointing is how much effort and money gets spent on maintaining the status quo instead of doing something new. If everyone were happy with the current status, then that would be one thing, but a lot of money goes into maintaining things that everyone agrees are broken to start with. Education in Fort Scott is a good example. Funding has been cut, but both the USD234 school system and the Fort Scott Community college aren’t making any fundamental changes to the way they handle education. Instead they are simply raising the taxes on the community.  As far as the property taxes go, I’m not too concerned about how high they are other than the fact that some people might not choose to live in Fort Scott because the higher the taxes the higher it costs to live here. I am concerned that the ability to just take more money from people in the community makes it a lot easier for Fort Scott educational institutions to simply preserve what they have been doing in the past instead of innovating and adapting to new levels of funding, new technologies and new student needs.

On of the bright spots in Fort Scott is the airport. It is small and progress is slow, but they have an incredible manager who is getting things done and bringing in grants, planes and people who will spend money in the city. Last summer he was able to get a formation clinic to use the airport for a week. The airport sold a lot of fuel. Hotels had a lot of rooms booked, restaurants sold a lot of meals and the city collected a lot of sales tax.

One thing that is going to increasingly become a problem in Fort Scott is the lack of affordable bandwidth. Right now the only way to really get bandwidth in Fort Scott is through AT&T and it is very expensive. There isn’t any real competition. There are several fiber runs from large providers, but they just go right through town without any type of connection point. Without inexpensive bandwidth, it is always going to be difficult to get reliable and affordable connections to homes and businesses. There is a group trying to increase broadband access, but at the last meeting they announced that they had decided to forgo any type of five year plan and instead just want to talk to a bunch of venders and get them to cooperate.

The problems in Fort Scott are probably the same issues that are hurting small towns across the US. I believe there are solutions and ways to make small communities grow and thrive, but the pace of change makes it very difficult to try new things on any type of time scale where it is possible to learn and adapt.

When we visit a city, the zoo is one our top family activities. While on one hand it seems like the animals might be happier being in the wild, but on the other their quality of life in a good zoo is much higher than running free. Zoos also seem to serve a pretty important function in keeping people aware of wildlife in parts of the world they are unlikely to ever visit.

While I’d love to take my kids on a a gorilla tour or some other type of safari, the fact is that they probably wouldn’t have seen a live gorilla without a zoo. There is something amazing about being able to get within a few feet of an animal and see them up close.  Speaking of gorilla’s, the St. Louis Zoo has a bald gorilla that is pretty amazing.  He looks like Gollum from Lord of the Rings.  The zoo keepers say he is fine–he just has no hair.

Some time ago, some people taught a gorilla how to use sign language. What has been interesting is the new word combinations the gorilla came up with on her own.  She made up things like “water bird” to refer to a duck and “finger bracelet” to refer to a ring. The researchers were trying to get a male gorilla around her in hope that he would learn sign language as well and then they could reproduce and teach the baby, but so far that hasn’t worked out.

If you aren’t familiar with Silver Dollar City, it is a 1800′s themed amusement park build on top of Marvel Cave in Branson, MO. They have a mixture of rides and period crafts and artists. This week I was noticing how they manage the lines at their rides.

We were there during the off season so the park wasn’t overly full. However, the lines still seemed to take a very long time. Waits of 20 minutes to an hour were common. I notice that many rides were only operating at 1/4 capacity. 75% of the cars were sitting idle.

I realized that Silver Dollar City must know exactly how few rides they can run before people start getting upset. The fewer cars they run the fewer people they need to operate them, so it saves them a little money. I’m guessing they know exactly how poor of an experience they can give people before it starts hurting their profits.

On the other hand, they have people paid to walk around and encourage people in line to squish together–so the line doesn’t look so long. Of course the line is still just as long. If those workers were deployed running the rides the lines might actually be shorter.

Now perhaps I just happened to hit all the rides at exactly the wrong time, but I know there were a great number of people in the same situation I was in. The extra cost of adequately staffing the rides would have been minimal and would have created a much better customer experience.

Mail Finch lets you automate physical mail campaigns just like email autoresponders let you automate email campaigns.  For people doing around 100 pieces of mail each month, the cost is about $1 per piece.  The mail goes out with a real stamp and a printed envelope and can include up to four sides (11×17 folded in half to 8.5×11 and then tri-folded) in a standard envelope.  Its a nice service and the drip marketing potential is amazing–especially when combined with the online side of things.

As people become more accustomed to email and other forms of digital communication, going back to good old fashioned mail can give you an edge and help you stand out.

I don’t usually use any type of cover on my laptop, but here is a laptop cover I’d be proud to use. I love the etch-a-sketch idea! When I was an IT director we took a picture of an etch-a-sketch and used photoshop to change it to Dell gray and added a windows desktop to the “screen”. We sent it out to all of the staff on April 1st notifying them that we were switching everyone over to these new computers along with some frequently asked questions:

• How do I reboot it?  – Raise it above your head and shake it.
• What do I do if it locks up? – Raise it above your head and shake it.
• How do I close a program? – Raise it above your head and shake it.
• How do I log out? – Raise it above your head and shake it.

While the Russian spy story makes for great news, no one seems to be focusing on what the spies were supposed to be spying on. It doesn’t sound like they were in a position to get any information that couldn’t be obtained by anyone simply using the Internet.

Of course, they have been here for years so their operation was probably planned well before the Internet was anything near what we have today.

I have critiqued several resume’s for people over the past 5 years and I wanted to take a chance to write down some of the common issues I’ve seen.

Be organized

Your resume needs to show a high degree of organization.  You don’t want to have a junior college degree listed under an “extra curricular” section and a bachelors degree listed under the “education” section. If your resume isn’t organized it leaves a bad impression.  If you say you received the “Best student of the year” award from Yale, make sure that your time at Yale actually is listed on your resume.  People will notice these types of things.  At best they will think you are unorganized.  At worse they will think you are lying about something.

Look at other resumes

Many people who are creating their resumes only have one or two examples to look at.  Ideally you want to look at a bunch of resume examples and see how they would make you feel as a potential employer.  Try to take note of the things that are helpful and use those attributes in your own resume.  The stock word format probably isn’t your best choice.  Try to find something that looks well designed, but will make your resume stand out from the average Joe who simply picked the standard Microsoft Word template.

Deal with gaps

The best way to deal with a gap in your resume is to not let one form in the first place.  If you are off work for an extended period of time do one of the following:

• Enroll in some college courses.
• Start volunteering on a regular basis for a local non-profit.
• Join a mentoring group.
• Start helping an open source project.
• Do self directed study of a subject.
• Start some type of business.
• Start a website and build a community around it.
• Get an industry certification.

Ideally you want to do something specific that you can put on your resume.  It doesn’t have to be something you do 40 hours per week, you just need to show that you were doing something productive with your time to help fill in the gap.  If you already have a gap, try to find a few things from that time period that you did that were productive uses of your time that would look good on your resume.  Education or certifications are good particularly when they lead to some type of specific recognition.

Customize for each job

You’ll get the best out of your resume if you can customize it for each job.  For example, if you are looking at applying for  a teaching job, you may want to move your educational qualifications to the top.  Other jobs may be more interested in your work experience and education should be moved to the bottom. Tweaking a resume to try to emphasis similarities with the person who will be interviewing you is another good strategy if you have enough information in advance to do this.

Education

Education is important, but stay focused on what it lets you do.  If you have an MBA, focus on any volunteer work you did, or how you’ve been able to help companies.  People are becoming wary of MBA and other graduates who feel that their degree means they should pay more when often it just means they were the first to be fired in the last economic downturn.

Personal Life

Some people like to put personal life items on their resume.  I have mixed feelings about this.  On the plus side, it can help show that you are a well rounded person.  On the negative side, many people entering the work force today are giving human resources a lot of problems because they expect their job to revolve around them and around the way they want to work. Too much on the personal side of things may be detrimental.

If you are interviewing with someone younger, the personal aspects might be more important.  Almost time you can show similarities between yourself and the person interviewing.  For example, if you know that the person interviewing you helps with the girl scouts, your involvement in the boy scouts might be a helpful thing to list.

Having an assistant can be a bit of a double edged sword.  On one hand they can save you a lot of time.  On the other you will have to invest time into building a productive working relationship before they will really be able to help you at full capacity.

If you are completely and totally unorganized this may not be the case.  Unorganized people might benefit from an assistant immediately because nothing is getting done without them.  However, if you have reached a certain level of organization and productivity on your own, it will take awhile to get an assistant up to speed.

One of the most powerful ways to help keep an assistant productive early on is to have a list of things that can be done, but that are not urgent.  Ideally you want tasks that can be done on a regular basis, but where there is no downside if they get put off or delayed.  Your assistant can work of this list in order to make sure that they have something helpful to do even if you aren’t available at the moment.

Copiers are a very central part of the document management strategy for most companies.  However, these devices represent a significant security risk. The hard drives in most copiers contain more information than most people realize.  Even if they delete a file after it is printed, the file contents stay on the drive until it is over written.  This represents a significant risk for many businesses.  The copiers can contain sensitive information from anything printed, scanned or faxed from the device.

An off lease copier can end up leased to another organization or sold pretty much anywhere in the world. Think of the implications if a malicious group got a hold of a random selection of documents that have gone through your copier for the past few years.

When a copier leaves your organization, you need to make sure that you aren’t sending any sensitive information with it. At a minimum you should overwrite the entire hard drive and reinstall the copier’s software. Given the complexity of doing this, it may be simpler to simply replace the drive with a new one and physically destroy the old drive.

Copiers leaving your organization with sensitive data represents a significant security risk and should be treated with the same level of care that you would a hard drive from your computer.

I’ve found two pieces of free software that are becoming very valuable to me.  They are Evernote and Dropbox.

Evernote

Evernote gives you a synchronized repository to store your notes in. Their free version gives you plenty of space for recording the information you are likely to jot down on a sticky note.  Their paid version gives you more of the features you’d need to use them as a paperless office management system. I recently had to ship my computer out to be fixed.  I simply installed Evernote on my wife’s laptop, synched it with their servers and I was back up and running with all my notes. For more information see this Evernote Review.

Dropbox

The second piece of software that I’m starting to depend on is Dropbox.  Dropbox syncs in a way similar to Evernote, but you can store any type of file in it. They give you 2 GB for free, but you can increase it to 5GB by referring friends to sign up. Dropbox is great when you need to keep a handful of files synced between multiple computers.  The size limitation of the free version doesn’t let you sync large documents, but it is more than adequate to move a few presentations and word documents around. For more information see our Dropbox review.