After a disappointing absence (err… unexpected repeat last week – presumably due to the Academy Awards) Undercover Boss resumed this week for the fifth episode. This week the series profiled Churchill Downs Inc. executive William (Bill) Carstanjen.

Churchill Downs Inc., headquartered in Louisville, Ky., is a $500 million dollar company that owns and operates world-renowned horse racing venues throughout the United States. The Company’s four racetracks in Florida, Illinois, Kentucky and Louisiana host many of North America’s most prestigious races, including the [read more]

Weeks 1 and 2 of Undercover Boss were pretty informative, enlightening and inspirational, so I am going to continue this series of observations and synthesis of the lessons I am learning from the show. This week featured Joe DePinto, President and CEO of the convenience store giant 7-Eleven. There are very few brands, especially retail chains that have the global reach (36,000 stores worldwide) and recognition than 7-11. They pretty much defined what we consider to be the modern convenience store.

Every employee has a story [read more]

After the Super Bowl I decided to watch Undercover Boss on ABC. Admittedly, I was a bit reluctant to watch it, but something was nagging at me to watch the show. The premier featured Waste Management and their President / COO Larry O’Donnell and what he learned when he went undercover within his organization. What follows is what I learned from the show:

The higher up you are in a corporation/organization, the more chance that you are either out of touch or growing further out of [read more]

If you love cool photography and aren’t familiar with Tilt-Shift, you really have to check out some of these pics. For those that are unfamiliar with the technique, Tilt-Shift gives the subject of a photo a miniature look or toy-like appearance. It can either be achieved with a special camera lens and other shooting techniques, or it done in post processing with applications like Photoshop.

Photo Credit: Karl Randay (pixelherder) @ flickr

Posted [read more]

The theme for the 3rd annual Blog Action Day is Climate Change and it’s a topic that I have a pretty keen interest in. Now I’m not going to reiterate what I said on Earth Day because my opinion on the importance of doing what we can to minimize our impact on the earth hasn’t changed – nor is it likely to – I’m just going to say that each and every one of us knows what he/she is or isn’t doing to make a [read more]

I had planned on being in Toronto for the 2009 ASAE Annual Conference. My flight and hotel were booked, my bags were partially packed (they always are) and I even won the coveted Toonie prize for creating the first feed successfully submitted to ASAE for inclusion in their aggregated event feed. I love everything about Annual – from the build-up to all of the on-site activity and interaction to the post-conference buzz that I carry with me for weeks after – but for the past [read more]

Thanks to Maddie Grant for sharing this (link) and tweeting about it (link). My wife is a musician and music teacher and while I am not musical – except for having a strong ear for sound (almost abnormally so) – I have always felt the magic of music. It truly can unite people who don’t have a whole lot in common and is definitely a unifying force. This piece from the World Science Festival demonstrates that what unites us is so much more powerful than [read more]

For the purposes of this post we’ll keep things short and simple. Set-up and installation of the app on my BB 8330 (Curve) was quite easy. The application is pretty polished and intuitive and I haven’t experienced any technical issues yet.

There are one or two issues that I have note specific to adding categories to the post (e.g. I couldn’t move into the category field directly rather I had to access it via the BlackBerry menu key. And once I was in to the category [read more]