The idea of these “What I Learned” posts is certainly not something original, just the content is. I certainly didn’t create this category, and I have seen more and more of these types of posts and emails out there. So before I get into this week’s, I ask – do you find these useful? Feel free to add a comment to this post or contact me. In the meantime, here’s what’s cross my personal dashboard, in some cases literally.

• If IKEA is the crown jewel of the flat-pack, build-yourself furniture market, then I just found the court jester in Monarch Specialties. I finished putting together a new desk for my daughter which, in the end, looked as nice as the pictures of it online, but was an unbearable experience to build. To begin with, the instructions were extremely tiny, even with a magnifying glass combined with my reading glasses. The instructions also took major “leaps” on each page – rather than step-by-step, several steps, some which required an extra person or fancy maneuvering, were combined together. I could go on, and I just may with a not-so-flattering product review.
• The Nielsen/Norman Group is a consultancy on online usability and user experience and is well-known in the Web space. Their recent article on Privacy Policy and Terns of Use pages on Web sites can be summed up in 3 words – they all suck. Note those are my own words, and you can read the article for yourself if you are so inclined. With the increased number of international privacy laws, coupled with people trying to bypass them, those pages likely won’t get any better.
• Though it was a Merriam-Webster word of the day a while back, for some reason flibbertigibbet didn’t resonate with me then, as I read them daily. But it has stuck with me now as it was the title of a recent episode of the news analysis podcast No Agenda.
• Posts of the picture of Dignity,, a large, unique monument in South Dakota stated appearing recently on LinkedIn. However, Dignity was installed several years ago. I wish I had known about it before and on my family’s road trip that way last year we would have taken a different route to see it.
• My friend Nick Rhodes’ photo booth service OutSnapped now offers a virtual component. And not surprisingly to me, it has a great user experience and creates some great pictures – check it out for yourself and try it for free. If you are hosting a virtual event and want something other than the usual Zoom / Brady Bunch grid, check out OutSnapped.
• I recently ventured over to High Cliff State Park here in Wisconsin. The entry booth is no longer staffed and even the automated pay stations are disabled, thus leaving buying a pass online as the only option. But it has to be an annual pass, not a daily pass. But the extra funds go to a good cause, right?
• A local small business that I have used extensively since we moved here, Donaldson's Cleaners, went delivery-only as a result of the virus and closed its 2 retail stores. As I never visited the stores and as an indicator to send me monthly statements with inserts like this announcement in their customer system was not checked, I didn’t find out until I saw the story on a local newspaper’s Web site. That being said, it has had no impact on me, in the quality cleaning of clothes or their service level.
• If you buy a hitch cover for a trailer hitch on your vehicle, don't forget to buy a hitch lock pin, which is most always sold separately.
• When looking for a place to stay for some form of a real vacation this year, I found the Web site for a hotel that had the interesting description above for its non-existent business center.

As I was editing these I was listening to DJ Liquid Todd on SiriusXM’s BPM channel. I had a déjà vu moment as I recall listening to him on WFNX in Boston back when I was in Boston and there was still a WFNX.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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With professional baseball finally – well, at least as of this writing – starting to come back this year, I have been thinking more about it and other sports, especially how teams and the league are structured. In keeping with the mission here at The Hot Iron, my mind has been pondering how the business world could benefit from being more like professional sports.

Now before you the fair reader says, “hey, pro sports ARE businesses” let me elaborate. First, I concur, as you can’t have teams worth multi-billions and players making multi-millions and not be a business. Where I think they can be more alike, it’s certain aspects unique to sports that would be welcome and refreshing complements to the business world.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, here’s the starting line-up for my 5 ways I wish business was more like sports.

Minor leagues – When you get a job with a company, you are working right away. Some firms may have a training program, and many have a probationary period, but those are in place to get you up to speed and to fire you if need be, respectively. If you are new entering the workforce, say from school or perhaps not, or if you are switching careers, having a minor league system would be a great way to develop your skills and abilities, all the while actually producing.

By being in a minor league system in business, it’d be known that it is still the minors, and expectations would be somewhat different. Such differences could be in your pay and the cost of your services. When you are ready to perform at the top level, you would join the majors. If you never achieved that level, you could stay in the minors or maybe switch careers. In either case the minor leagues of business can be a place to develop the best and brightest people.

Free agency – Talk about the ultimate transparency, as everybody knows what an athlete makes and what the terms of their contracts are. What if that was the same in business, where it is completely the opposite and as non-transparent as one can imagine.

What you are worth to the marketplace would be well-known, and if your current employer couldn’t offer it to you, you could easily go elsewhere, being a free agent. Sure, being a contractor in today’s business environment is a close approximation, but the knowledge of who’s out there and available in any profession or discipline would not be as much of a mystery as it is now.

Working 162 days a year – That’s the number of games in a traditional Major League Baseball season, and other sports have fewer. When you are only working those days, it doesn’t mean you are idle the remainder of the year. When not in a game you are training, relaxing, recovering, getting physical therapy or even meditating.

What if the business work schedule allowed for you to have designated working days and designated training days, days in the middle of the week, and not just at night or the weekends? This way you can prepare better for your work time, ideally correlating to you being more productive and efficient.

No stigma to getting fired – When you get fired in business, it is a bad situation. How many people go around saying, “hey, I got fired?!” There are many reasons why people are fired, including lack of management oversight, new leaders or a change in direction in a company or group. Many times, it is simply personality conflicts. Or simply they could have made mistakes worthy of their termination. Getting fired doesn’t mean you don’t have the skills to do your job. That being said, you are not going to go out looking for a new job saying you were fired from your last one.

In sports, it’s the opposite. Players are getting cut all the time, and many times their unemployment is short as another team signs them. Coaches are getting fired all of the time, only to emerge wearing another team jacket the next season. In all cases it was well-known that the coaches or players were fired, yet nobody is shouting at them during a game because of what they did for their last team. Both players and coaches can perform poorly one season and thrive and win the very next one for a variety of reasons, such as the organization they go to has a much different culture or “system” which works better for them.

Spring Training – In business, an annual kickoff for the new year could be a weekend away for some senior leaders, but for the majority it is a meeting or, these days, a Webinar. What if business had a true spring training, as baseball does, where you get out of the normal office, get some training and bond with your co-workers, and plan and prepare for the upcoming calendar or fiscal year?

Deconstructing Business Being More Like Sports

The way sports have traditionally operated lends to the structure and elements as I have outlined here. As sports have evolved, players and coaches are “working” year round, just as a standard business does. I present here how I have imagined how business can leverage some of these elements from sports, and feel it could transform how businesses function and perform. Isn’t it worth a try to change business as usual?

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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In addition to realizing how much I and my kids miss hearing the words “take your mark” in a competitive swim meet, or in this case a fun swim meet, my brain was enlarged a bit with the below things as well as squeezed by a continuingly hectic schedule.

• My friend Tiffany has started an eponymous home-based bakery called Tiffany’s Brownies and Treats and was recently featured on a Boston TV station. For my readers in the Boston area and across the Bay State, you can buy them locally or have her deliciousness shipped to your door. For the rest of the world, we will have to visit the Commonwealth to get them. That is, unless, one of my Boston-area readers wants to buy some and resend them to me...
• Thinking I have too much in my head and not as much documented on life, I sought a tool to help log all of the minutiae. I found Big Book an Excel spreadsheet for structuring the information. Now to start putting it all down.
• While trying to contribute to the elimination of shortage of coins in America, one coin kicked out of the Coinstar machine that I didn’t recognize. After looking it up I found it was an Andrew Johnson Presidential dollar coin. I had no idea they made such coins. Granted I am no numismatist, but I thought I was aware of all currency out there.
• Though it has been around for several months, many are not familiar that Appleton, Wisconsin, along with other municipalities, are using the locally-created app You Get It First. Though the user experience of it is a little clunky, it gets the word out on major accidents or police actions to avoid.
• There is such a thing as renewable natural gas.
• When I had the wild idea or recording myself speaking blog content and wondering how to convert it to text, a colleague recommended Temi as he uses it himself. I have tried other voice to text methods with varying success, so I may give this a shot.
• I found another online course that I haven’t had the time to take. This time GitLab, the Web based system development and operations platform (or DevOps for short) is offering a remote work certification which I have added to my growing list. Granted I have been working remotely for years, but likely there is something I will take away from it.
• There needs to be more teen/pre-teen movies like Teen Beach Movie.
• I attended my first in-person networking event in about four months. It was held at my co-working space and they are planning them on a regular basis. It was a great opportunity to meet the others I see in passing there, and reminded me networking is not just for yourself, but networking for others is equally as important.
• The somewhat newish Microsoft Edge Web browser recently release a “feature” where it would ask you every time you want to launch an external program, like say Zoom, from a link. As I launch external programs like say Zoom all the time, this was annoying. Fortunately this week an update allowed you to check a box to dismiss the ask.
• As school systems across the US and likely the world are coming up with their phased / hybrid / contingent plans for the new school year, likely something missing from each and every one of them is a way to make it easy for parents to know where their kids need to be. I posted about it here on LinkedIn but the post didn’t get much traction. Am I the only one thinking this?
• Speaking again of school at home, Numb is a short film made by a 15-year old Canadian student about her at-home studying this spring. Sadly, this represents the same experience of many kids around the world.
• Finally on schools, I found the above-pictured display of school supply donation kits at a local market. You buy these for $7, and the market donates them to a local school. In past years I would add one to my shopping order as a small way of giving back and perhaps buying some karma. Though nobody told this year’s checkout clerks as mine was at first bagged with my groceries until I called it out. Likely these will be sent home with students and their Chromebooks for this school year.

I was serious about someone shipping me brownies.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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As our household got a slightly larger, more high definition video monitor, learning to get used to it fortunately is not all I learned this week, as there were heftier things that crossed my mind the last seven days.

• The purchase of U.S. flags is tax free.
• First there was the GDRP, then the CCPA, and now there’s the LGPD, which is the privacy law for Brazil, as compared to the previously-mentioned acronyms for the laws in the European Union and California. If you aren’t familiar with GDRP or CCPA, I wouldn’t worry about LGPD and focus on the first 2 to start.
• The University of Wisconsin Madison did a study on impact of loss of athletics on young people and there was an emphasis on the mental health impact of not playing and performing. This is something I have been concerned with all along. Where it is reassuring to see data behind my gut feel, it doesn’t make dealing with it any easier.
• A by-product of athletes not being athletes and then getting back into it is something called “yips” – a term I learned from a friend of mine who mentioned how his kid was almost forgetting how to accurately throw a baseball. It’s something real, much to my initial disbelief, and significant enough to be written up by the Mayo Clinic and Major League Baseball.
• A couple of new training programs came into my purview. One is the iAI Institute where you can take free online courses to learn about artificial Intelligence. It is offered by Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant that makes iPhones for Apple, and has been controversial here in Dairyland around the opening of manufacturing plants in the southeast corner of the state. I hope the courses can lower my 100,000 foot view of AI to something more down to earth.
• Google is offering something called Career Certificates which are positioning themselves as an alternative to technical school training for a number of careers like tech support. Some may be able to qualify to take the courses for free, or they are offered to anyone for around US $50 each.
• I actually took a course, this one offered by my employer and delivered by the Gartner Group on Delegating Effectively. It was an interesting 45 minute Webinar and was backed by a lot of research that Gartner is known for. However it wasn’t for me – it painted an idyllic picture on delegate to a full-time team, where what would have worked better for me would have been how to do that with a part-time team comprised of employees and contractors.
• My local newspaper is the Post-Crescent and like most major papers in Wisconsin it is owned by USA Today. If you look at a few different USA Today newspapers you will notice their designs are the same. This week their local publication started touting its new look. The first thing I noticed was there were fewer ads that were on top of content and pushing it down the page. Gone was the left and right side arrows where you could conceivably scroll horizontally between stories, something I always found to be a user experience nightmare. In its place is an “X” in a circle at the top right of stories, though not completely obvious but indicates all stories are a pop-up window over the home page. In other words, a page on their site really isn’t a page, and I have no idea why they are doing this.
• Online shoe retailer Zappos announced it is just now selling mixed pairs and single shoes. What may not be obvious to many is a lot of people have different sized feet, which required them to buy 2 pairs of shoes, throwing out one from each. Decades ago I worked with someone who had to do this, as her feet were like 2 sizes different from each other. Perhaps too long overdue, but certainly welcome to people who don’t want to spend double on already increasingly expensive footwear.
• I came across this article on LinkedIn shared by my co-working space on 50 free online advertising methods. Or for me, it was more of a reminder, as many of these are not advertising sites or services per se, rather effective ways to promote your business or whatever you have to promote.
• For the first time in 2020 my family and I stayed in a hotel. Despite this half-year lag, I apparently haven’t lost my touch of finding all of the miniscule flaws in a hotel room within the first few minutes of being in it. For this room, the TV remote didn’t work with the TV and neither did its replacement, there was a noticeable gap at the bottom of one side of the room door, the emergency exit sign behind said door was for the neighboring room and different styles of lightbulbs were in the bathroom light fixture. Not to forget what I presume were used bath towels in one of the nightstand drawers… but masks were required in the public spaces of the hotel.

Happy Brady Birthday RG!

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Where I’d like this simply to be friendly advice, I present it as a warning – update the contact and payment information for your domain names as soon as possible or you could risk losing your Web site and email.

Keep It All Current

It’s a challenge to manage all of the online accounts we have, both personally and for business as well. Often an account can “linger” out there without any problem, such as a frequent flyer account, if you don’t have your most current mailing address on file with the airline. However, a domain name registrar account doesn’t fall under this category. Why? You never know when you will need to make a change to or renew your domain names, and if you need to do so right away, you may be prevented from doing so.

Even if you have private registration on your domain name account, your contact information needs to be current. For those not familiar, private registration is when someone looks up the registration of your domain name, instead of seeing your actual name, address and phone numbers, they will see masked information. This is to prevent someone from scraping your contact info for the means of soliciting you, or worse – scamming you.

Keeping it all current means your domain name registration remains active and accessible. This includes your name, address and phone numbers, as well as the billing credit card for renewing your domain name.

Untimely Lockout

If your information isn’t correct, you may lose access to your domain name account and would need to have it reestablished, or worse, your domain name can expire and you can’t renew it in a timely manner.

How does this happen? Many domain name registrars are activating two-factor authentication, or 2FA, without explicit notification to or opt-in by its customers. 2FA is when you get prompted to enter a code that was sent to you by email or text message, or an app like Google Authenticator which generates a code. I have personally experienced this from several registrars, and if the phone number or email on file is no longer accurate, then you can get locked out of your account. Where the registrars say they are doing this to protect their customers, when a Web site and email is down, more damage is done.

If the information is accurate and correct, you won’t run the risk of losing access to your account. If this does happen, you may have to “prove” who you are offline, including sending in a copy of a driver’s license or other forms of ID, or even articles of incorporation for a business.

Remind Yourself Online and Offline

Most domain name registrars will send you reminder emails or texts when it’s close to your domain name expiration date. That is, if they have your correct email address and phone number, and you have enabled these notifications.

A simple way to remind yourself to check your domain account information is to put an alert in your calendar. I recommend setting one sixty days before the domain name is set to expire. That way if the information is not current, you have some time to take care of any process your registrar imposes, and can still renew it before it expires. Setting alerts every 3 months is not a bad idea either, especially if your credit card changes or your home or business address changes, especially in an increased work-from-home environment.

Additionally, information on your domain name should be in your “vital records” file. In the event there is a change in management or leadership in your form or organization, the first thing the successor may not be thinking about is the domain name. That is, unless it expires and the Web site disappears and email stops working. A simple 1-page sheet, sealed in an envelope and clearly marked, listing all domain names and their expiration date, the registrar Web site and contact info and the login and password should be sufficient.

Pro Tip on Extending Your Registrations

Domain names are often renewed annually, however you have the option to extend their registration up to ten years in advance. I recommend this for the primary domain name for your Web site and email, and any other domain names tied to key sites and services. Where it is not completely a “set it and forget it” scenario, you do gain some peace of mind in not having to renew it annually.

Deconstructing Domain Name Registrations

Everyday your Web sites and email become increasing vital to yourself and your firm or organization. Maintaining their domain names is equally as vital to ensure those services are accessible. This maintenance is not laborious or even time consuming; it simply has to be done. Reminding yourself and others key people will ensure there is awareness and coverage for this important task.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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