Hey everyone, here we go. . . . . .
IN OUR WORLD
I am coming to you live from beautiful Minneapolis where I am getting some relief from the intense Dallas heat!
I am starting a project around the Repeatable Successful Acts platform and am so honored to launch my ideas to a new audience.
I am really excited to announce Darren Horwitz of Imprint PR as the newest member of the Creative Ventures team! Darren will be responsible for all my PR and media relations work! We kick off this new strategy July 1!
Next week I get to work with new clients in Dallas, as well as moving closer to a couple of big projects that have been hanging around in the pipeline.
HEY, YOU CAN FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER –CREATIVEVENTURE
AND ON FACEBOOK – STEPHEN HARVILL!
THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW
You may not know this, but there is a “HAPPINESS” movement going on in the world. I mean a real, focused, strategic and substantive amount of attention being placed on how happiness is becoming a measurable amount of business capital.
Tony Hsieh, the CEO of my friends at Zappos and Chip Cowley, the CEO of Joie de Vivre hotels are two great examples of this new focus on happiness and the economic impact it can have to your bottom line.
Tony’s new book Delivering Happiness, chronicles the impact a small amount of focus can have on how the people feel not only about working for your company, but about how the transference of that “good feeling” impacts the people that buy your product or service. Happiness is highly damn contagious!
Chip goes even farther and his studies into happiness have taken him through every housekeeper who toils in the cleanliness of his hotel rooms to the king of the small Himalayan country of Bhutan, where they measure happiness. He has found that the formula of:
HAPPINESS = Wanting what you have
Having what you want
seems to work.
Chip believes the problem of giving happiness value is our problem in measuring it. Our obsession with measurement, a throw back to our industrial revolution roots, limits both our desire to think about happiness and our focus on making it a business fundamental. Yet we intuitively know that happy people make for happy customers and nothing beats happy customers for the bottom line of profit.
There are currently over 40 countries studying happiness, looking to find the right fit for a companion to Gross National Product (GNP), a Gross National Happiness or GNH.
My strategy of Attack The Second Level (a result of the Repeatable Successful Acts platform) shows the importance of not only leaders being attuned to the culture you have created, but all of the support staff as well.
So you choose, miserable or happy? The key is you can make either a reality!
ENTERTAINMENT
MOVIES: Knight and Day: Time for a little spy fun!
NetFlix Fans: This Is It: This is the fantastic Michael Jackson documentary about the preparation for his HUGE international concert series he was rehearsing for prior to his death. An explosion in creativity, you get to watch the making of a concert that was going to be bigger than life!
TV: Wimbledon has been full of drama, especially with the Herculean match between Isner and Mahut. The World Cup has provided drama in its own way, though getting there is kind of a beating. You watch 90 minutes of kicking the ball around the field to catch a glimpse of a goal attempt.
BOOKS: The Real Enjoyment of Living – By Schachter. This rather obscure little book, published in 1954, is on the reading list of the new Happiness movement leaders.
MUSIC: One of the spectacular guitarists in the world today, Pedro Javier Gonzalez!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKN9c1llqhc
WEB SITES: A daily dose of good news.
SOUTH OF NORMAL
It is almost time for the epic ComicCon (http://www.comic-con.org/cci/ ) convention in San Diego where everything comic and movie gathers for a week of geekdom heaven! I have always dreamed of going, but have not yet made it. Here are a few comic book facts to entertain your South of Normal reading habits!
- Typical price of a comic book is about $3.99.
- Comics and their cousin, the graphic novels have increase 20% in sales since 2005.
- Action Comics #1 – the introduction of Superman, sold for $1.5 million in March!
- Michigan State has the largest catalogued collection of comic books in the world.
- The average age for comic book readers is between 25 and 28.
Maybe next year.
Drop me a note with your comments at steve@creativeventures.com
Thanks for stopping by and until next time, Adios and Aloha.
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