After I saw Holland, I'd say, I'd go to Holland again and again

I just read a poem of Emily Perl Kingsley about having a child with disability and I wanted to share it with you..This poem tells a lot and better than most of the sources..



WELCOME TO HOLLAND
by
Emily Perl Kingsley.


c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Zappos & Amazon sitting in a tree =)

I’ve been feeling so excited, happy and curious at the same time since I got the news about Amazon and Zappos. I think I don’t need to tell my feelings about Zappos from the beginning now, but they’re special for me, you know that.

Now Amazon joined the party, too. And now what? I first had the news as “Amazon Acquires Zappos for bla bla” , and there are also a million news as “Amazon buys Zappos”, but it’s actually not exactly like that.

I’m sure that anyone who knows a few things about Zappos also knows that the thing that creates the “Zappos thing” is their culture, values, the people who were chosen carefully to be a perfect fit to Zappos team and it’s not so easy to acquire all of those by a specific amount of money.

As Tony says in his letter today “I personally would prefer the headline “Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree…””. And yep, let’s say so. Because when we say so, we’d also mention one of the most powerful partnerships and then it fits the spirit of the transaction more.

I’m sure it’d be perfect for both of these companies that I adore.

They both think about their customers, they both make us want to shop like crazy, and they’re both good at building relationships with us, customers and making us happy in a way. Only their styles differ in these processes.

As Tony also mentioned, Amazon makes us happy with low prices, variety of goods, and convenience in a lot of ways while Zappos makes us happy by developing sincere relationships, friendly connections and WOWing us all the time.

So I’m excited and happy about the future of the shopping with these companies. It’s so peaceful to know that both of these companies are going to do their bests for us, therefore the only thing to do for us is to enjoy it.

And I’m really curious about what are these companies going to learn from each other and how is it going to reflect to us exactly?

Zappos & Amazon! WOW!

What do you think?

My Culture, Your Culture, Our Culture..

Zappos Core Values by Me

I came to United States about 9 months ago and yep I changed a lot, but it’s impossible to replace all the past years’ experiences with these 9 months' .

There are about 7 billion people in the world who are all different from the each other; we think differently, feel differently, talk differently, live differently, etc. Although we have nearly similar problems, we have different solutions. But, when we look closer we see that some communities have similar solutions or we can at least group some of the people based on some similarities. We can group people according to their nationalities, according to their gender, and according to their jobs. So, what can we call this thing that connects some people, makes them understand others? It is like a secret agreement among the people in a community that helps them to stay together in peace and to create a unity. Yes, our word is CULTURE.

May be we all born with some characteristics, but as we grow, we learn a lot of things from our environment. We learn how to think, how to speak, how to behave and even how to feel. We start being programmed slowly with all these data. When we want to make some changes in our program after a few years, we need to reach main code of our program to make a permanent change, which is not so possible. But one thing we can do is to add some new properties to our program and use the convenient ones in the convenient times.

So culture makes us connected, helps us to understand each other and to generate common solutions, constitutes the feeling of unity, and as a result creates a society that has the same interests.

While there is the culture for a country that creates the feeling of homesickness, another one is the company culture which makes a substantial company and differentiates it from the others.

Zappos is the company that introduced me the concept of company culture. After observing their efforts on creating their core values and keeping them alive, I started to think the importance of having a specific company culture. And it didn’t take me so long to understand its importance after I started following Zappos blog, following Tony and other Zapponians on Twitter, and reading Zappos Culture book. Everyone is working so hard just to present their culture and core values in a lot of different ways, and they are really good at this. As they always do, they again create another brilliant idea to pull us to more inside of Zappos with their 2 day Bootcamp which is to express themselves in a different way. And I found myself again trying to meet these people, to be a closer witness to their success. May be this is my lucky day..

I used to cry..

I have a habit to erase the bad memories from my brain as soon as I can and I do it so good that sometimes I make up some good memories instead of the bad ones. I don’t know should I call it as a habit, or not, because I don’t do it intentionally, it just happens. I’m not saying I never remember any, but sometimes my brain really surprises me with its forgetting ability.

I don’t remember the beginning of this habit, but I remember that I haven’t liked it for a long time. I still sometimes don’t like it because forgetting brings unlimited forgiveness beside and unlimited forgiveness may sometimes hurt you in a lot of ways. But despite the harm, it creates a very peaceful relief inside not to remember a bad incident and to feel empty. Anyways, as I said I don’t remember the exact start of this forgetting and forgiving, but I certainly know that I have this virtue by the help of my sister.

I used to cry when someone stopped me on the way while I was driving my sister’s stroller, which she used for a very long time, and asked me is there a problem with her..

I used to cry when children left the park because of getting scared of her..

I used to cry when I saw her crying when all the kids left the park and she started swinging by herself..

I used to cry when our ‘normal’ neighbors jumped on top of our apartment in the middle of the night because they got disturbed of the sound of the music my sister listened and they decided to give a lesson to us..

By those times, while I was feeling anger and enmity to those people, she was still trying to hug and kiss them. While I wasn’t able to think anything good, she was achieving to be ok and to forget in a way after a while. And I noticed that she was way happier than me by doing so. May be this was her secret.

And now I know that this is her secret. Actually it’s not a secret. Let people be bad, thoughtless by themselves..As one said “Forgiveness is the relief from the past”. Just enjoy your relief..

Google & Microsoft, Wave & Bing

These days, we are hearing names of Microsoft and Google more than ever. The reasons are the new communication tool “Google Wave” and the new search engine, sorry decision engine “Bing”.

So what are these stuffs? And how are they going to affect our lives coming days?

Google Wave

Google Wave was introduced us as the future of communication. It is personal communication and collaboration tool which is open source for us to be a part of this experience. It has several properties which you can have an idea by watching Google I/O developer conference , but mainly the feature called Live Collaborative Editing makes all of us gulp for a moment. This is the feature that makes the participants reply anywhere in the message, edit the content, add participants, and then with playback feature you can rewind or forward all the process if you want. Lars Rasmussen explains the reason why they wanted to implement this feature by saying “Instant messengers spent half of your time by showing she is typing..” So by combining e-mail, chat, conversations, documents, everything together what they do is to speed up our conversations, our mailing experiences.

Microsoft Bing

Another product that gets our interests is the new search engine of Microsoft, Bing. Actually Bing is called as a decision engine instead of a search engine because it does not only show a group of results, but also it gives a bunch of information that helps us to make a decision. In the introduction video it is said that, Bing is for helping us to overcome search overload and find the best choice faster. And they say “The world does not need just another search engine, it needs a decision engine.” We can see that Microsoft has really strong feelings about Bing by looking their $80 million to $100 million ad campaigns.

Another new product of Microsoft that is being spoken these days is Xbox360 since it’s probably going to start completely a new era in game world by its “no controllers” feature.

All of these products are just signs of the coming products; I’m just curious what’s next?

Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service

A few weeks ago I read a case study of Harvard Business School about Starbucks (Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service). It was generally about the expansion of Starbucks and the results. Starbucks has always been one of the companies that really impress me with the importance they give to customer service. So I want to share my views about this study with you.

I think this case study is trying to tell us two things.

First of all, regardless of how big and how good our company is, we should be careful about company expansion because it is a hard thing to maintain the same environment and culture in each branch. It is also stated in the book ‘Discovering the Soul of Service’ as “Maintaining effective internal company communications, reinforcing the company’s vision and culture, and delivering consistently high quality service – essential success factors – are challenged by expansion.”

Second idea is we should never see a customer oriented investment as an expense. In my interview with Zappos, they also told me that they are doing anything to give a good service to the customers without thinking about the expenses. This may be harmful for them in the short-run, but they are never concerned about the short-term outcomes; what they are interested in are the long-term advantages.

After this case study I started to think that expansion or being everywhere are not the main indicators of success. We should first realize a pace in the existing branches and after that we should think about an expansion. Because the important thing is to have the same culture, same environment in each branch and the main aim of the expansion should be reinforcing the company’s vision.

Another thing that attracted my attention is the process between being a barista and then a manager. It is said in the study that 70% of the company’s store managers were ex-baristas and about 60% of the district managers were ex-store managers. I think this is not only good for motivating the baristas, but also it is a good technique to have the managers understand the importance of customer service. Again for this situation, Zappos is an example of this application; all the new employees are working four weeks in the call center and one week in the warehouse to understand the importance of the customer service. 

I noticed that most of the successful companies have a common aim, customer satisfaction. To sum up, a company should never forget the most important thing is the satisfaction of the customers and they should always be careful about the customer satisfaction gap and service gap and they should not let these gaps grow.  Therefore I think that, giving importance to customer service and company culture, and employee satisfaction are significant steps in the way of success of a company. 

 

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Happy Birthday sunshine!

It's my sister's birthday today..I love her so much..To all these special kids..

Do you really know what Down syndrome is?

Down syndrome is the most common genetic disorder. While normally, a human cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes equally inherited from each parent, in Down syndrome some or all of the cells have an extra copy of the chromosome 21.

Most common form of Down syndrome is trisomy 21 and cells of the individuals with Trisomy 21 contain 47 chromosomes instead of the usual number, 46. Trisomy 21 occurs because of an error in cell division called nondisjunction. Error first occurs in the embryo when the 21^st pair of chromosomes in either sperm or egg fails to separate and after that as embryo develops; the extra chromosome is replicated in every cell of the body.

Another and least common form of Down syndrome is mosaicism which occurs after fertilication. For mosaicism, the situation is more different compared with trisomy 21 because this time, there are both 46 chromosome and 47 chromosome cells in the body. According to a research conducted to 30 typical Down syndrome children and 30 mosaic Down syndrome, IQ of the mosaic children is 12 points higher than the typical Down syndrome group.

One of the forms of Down syndrome is translocation that occurs during the cell division because of the 21^st chromosome’s breaking off and attaching to another chromosome.

The reason of Down syndrome is still unknown, but it is known that the cause of the extra chromosome is neither environmental factor nor anything the mother does before or during her pregnancy.

Some bullet points:

• Today, more than 400,000 people in United States have Down syndrome.
  
• The chance of having a Down syndrome kid is higher for a younger mom because of higher fertility rates.
  
• Most of the Down syndrome people have IQs that is enough for public and private educational programs.
  
• People with Down syndrome have feelings like everyone else.
  
• People with Down syndrome date, socialize, and marry.
  
• Down syndrome people are today working at banks, hotels, restaurants, etc.
  
• Research is showing that, the genes that cause Down syndrome are going to be identified and it will be possible to prevent or improve the problems.
  
  

I love a Down Kid..Do you?

It may be difficult to be perfectly optimistic in the beginning. But it is very easy to gain this optimism as you get to know your kid. You’ll realize that you have the most special child; you’ll start not being able to describe your feelings by just the word 'love'. Because it is not just love..It’s attachment, responsibility, self sacrifice, happiness, hope, warmth, patience, a smile, and to feel…It’s the life itself, and it’s yourself..

Sustaining Service Success

Having a successful company does not mean that you can relax and have a rest for the rest of your life. Actually, sustaining this success is a more difficult thing to do. So what can be done or what should be always remembered after having a successful company?

According to Leonard Berry, there are three challenges in sustaining service success; these are operating effectively while growing rapidly, operating effectively when competing on price and keeping the initial entrepreneurial spirit of a young, smaller company such as a start-up.

Operating effectively while growing rapidly

It is a very difficult thing to balance the growth and company execution. Core values, standards, and culture are the elements that make and keep the company strong. But as a company expands rapidly, it can be hard to keep these values and the culture. As the companies are growing, relaxing the standards and not being as careful as before while hiring new employees is a common solution and mistake. This situation can result as having employees who does not fit to the company culture and consequently the culture of the company starts to shake. 

Maintaining the core values, company culture, internal communication, and strengthening the company’s vision are the steps for delivering a high quality service. And before any expansion, a company should be first careful about these entities. Because if the company can be successful at keeping these values as it is growing, then the expansion would be stronger.

As we saw in Starbucks study example, although Starbucks is such a good company, a little carelessness while growing rapidly was nearly going to cause them to lose some of their customers.

When we look at Zappos, they are using different techniques while they are hiring new employees and they are even offering the new employees $2000 after the first five week training process to quit if these people are not suitable for the company culture. They are saying that the company culture gets stronger as company grows, but only with the right people.

Operating effectively when competing on price

When companies cannot differentiate themselves with their services or their products they mostly choose the solution of using the price as a marketing tool. Price cutting is one of the favorite solutions for the companies because they can both implement this solution quickly and they have profit in the short-term. But in the long-term there can be some bad consequences of this solution. For example, cutting the price may lead to cutting the costs and it may weaken the execution eventually. 

Actually this is a vicious circle because companies are cutting the prices for the reason that they are not being able to differentiate themselves with their services and products and vice versa; as they are cutting the prices, they are cutting the costs, and consequently the execution slows down which prevent them to develop and differentiate themselves.

I will again give Zappos as an example because although they are not applying very low prices, they have loyal customers and the number of their customers is increasing each day. The only reason of this is that they are differentiating themselves with their customer service.

Keeping the entrepreneurial spirit of a small, younger company

As the company grows and matures, it is a challenge to keep the entrepreneurial spirit. When the companies are first started, they have the dream and desire of building a great business, so they have the spirit. However, as they are growing, they usually tend to lose that spirit and start being more closed to criticism and innovations. 

Small companies are trying to be aware of all the innovations and shape their companies according to the critiques of the people and these innovations. And I think this is the right thing to do for any company. A big company may have a wrong belief of continuing always with the same applications as they grew. The reason for that is their tendency to forget how they achieved the growth. But change is also a changing entity and what the companies should do is to be always open to change and innovations. 

In mature companies another problem is that after a while rules are replacing with the personal dinteractions. While the ideas are being created by the employees and customers in the smaller and young companies, in older and mature companies mostly rules are shaping the ideas. 

Some of the core values of Zappos are ‘Be humble’, ‘Embrace and Drive Change’, and ‘Be Adventurous, Creative and Open Minded’. I think these are the core values which makes Zappos to keep their entrepreneurial spirit. They are always open to new ideas from anyone and they do not try to continue as they are now. They are taking risks and developing themselves all the time, even if there is a possibility to fail.

Zappos Presentation Tomorrow

I also prepared my slides for tomorrow's presentation for the Zappos interview! I'll present this to my Marketing: When Product is a Service Class. Hope I can have them understand Zappos sell a lot more than shoes! So wish me luck..

Zappos Interview Presentation

View more presentations from Yuksel Ulgen.

My Zappos interview & report

I just finished my report [http://www.box.net/shared/8ynpfx3krt] that I was writing for a class project. But it was more than a class project for me since it was about Zappos.com. This was one of the rare moments that a person can get so excited about a homework..I was so happy because I finally found a chance for learning something about their success story from someone inside..I made an interview with Aaron Magness who oversees the PR department at Zappos and finally wrote this report by using his answers and some other sources. 

I want to thank also Tony Hsieh for replying all my tweets and helping me to conduct this interview. As soon as I sent a message to him through Twitter, he told me that I can send the questions to him and asked Aaron Magness to help me with the questions.  They were all so helpfull and kind.  

I really don't have any idea how Tony can find time for everything, but I'm glad he is doing so.

Thank you Aaron Magness, Tony Hsieh, Zappos..

Link for the report: http://www.box.net/shared/8ynpfx3krt

Table of Contents

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 

2. ZAPPOS (Powered by Service) 

a. EMPLOYEES 

b. ZAPPOS CULTURE 

3. SERVICES & KEY SERVICES 

a. A WOW experience memory 

4. CUSTOMERS 

5. BUSINESS EXPANSION 

6. COMPETITORS

7. ADVERTISEMENT & MARKETING

8. ANALYSIS & RECOMMENDATIONS 

9. REFERENCES 

a. Pictures are taken from