The Olympics are coming... well, the committee from the US Olympics organization that will be choosing between Chicago and Los Angeles for the US entry for the 2016 summer Olympics is coming. They will arrive on Tuesday, and are promised to be given the red-carpet treatment by the city organization that has well-packaged plans and millions of dollars in the bank to make it happen.

The Sears Tower will feature the Chicago Olympics logo projected over 20 stories on its north side. Several weeks back I was in Millennium Park and saw workers testing a similar logo on the side of the AON Center. Here’s how I was able to capture it with my Treo smartphone:

Do I want the Olympics to come to Chicago? Of course! It will be a boost for the local and regional economy, not to mention property values. Though it is difficult for me to determine if I will be here in Chicago – we are talking about an event nine years from now, and nine years ago I had no idea I would be in Chicago!

As for the title of this blog post – You Are The Light is the name of the Olympic fanfare song; you can hear the trumpets right now in your head.

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The other day I got a letter from a vendor whose name I will purposely withhold. By the nature of their business, my relationship with them is always personal. The letter I received was addressed to, "Dear Valued Client."

Am I really a valued client? They have my contact information to generate the mailing label that went on the envelope. How hard was it to do a mail-merge and address the letter personally to me?

Perhaps the letter was misaddressed after all?

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I shred about 80% of the postal mail I receive. Most of the items chewed up by my shredder are the old stand-bys – offers for credit cards and insurance – and a few are for charities I have never heard of. As my intuition on junk mail has heightened over the years, many of these go right into the shredder without being opened.

The other day, my shredder stopped in the middle of shredding an item. When I pulled it out, I saw a shiny new Jefferson nickel in the address window. A nickel? Messaging inside the envelope mentioned something about sending the nickel back to the charity, accompanied by many more.

Just as spammers are trying to get their message across, so are snail mailers. Continuing that comparison, are nickels the new Trojan files attached to email? I cannot recall the name of the charity that sent that mailing with the nickel, and they certainly did not get it or a red cent from me.

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There has been much talk about Starbucks' founder Howard Schultz's Valentine's Day memo entitled "The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience." In short, he says that decisions made by the coffee chain in order to scale to its massive size, such as automatic espresso machines and putting beans in flavor-lock bags, have had a detrimental effect on the overall Starbucks experience. Or as I take that, Starbucks stores are losing their mojo.

Will Starbucks be able to turn it around and return some of the magic to the experience of paying several dollars for a cup of coffee? They can look to their neighbor in Redmond, Microsoft, for how to make a dramatic turnaround... from over a decade ago. In the early 90's Microsoft did not have an Internet strategy. Within a year, they were able to turn it around, introducing the Internet Explorer browser and the Active Server Pages language, and take a lead in delivering Internet solutions. Granted they licensed the Spyglass browser and remade it into IE, but they were able to go from nothing to something relatively quickly. Not bad for the early 90’s.

Then again, maybe Microsoft should look to its past for some help itself.

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As I am writing this post, my printer is hard at work cranking out nametags for the Breakfast Network Club. The BNC is a networking organization in Chicago that has morphed from meetings in the morning (thus the name) to holding specialized meetings by industry and discipline. I have been involved with the group for about a year and through it have made many networking connections.

I saw an opportunity to help with providing nametags as the group, like many of the entrepreneurs who attend the meetings, runs a tight ship. Each nametag features the BNC logo at the top and "nametag powered by Dunkirk Systems @ dunkirk.biz" at the bottom, with my logo in the place of my company name. The cost of the nametags is minimal – a box of mailing labels and the ink to print on them.

Is my phone ringing off the hook as a result? No. But that is not why I am doing it. My goal for sponsoring the nametags is name recognition in the Chicago market and goodwill from giving a little bit back to a worthy group. The president of the BNC, David Carman, also makes a point to introduce me when I am at a meeting and thanks me for making the nametags. But if the phone does ring from someone who saw my name on the nametag they wore back to the office after a meeting, all the better.

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