It seems that in the various countries I spent time in during 2010, there was a universal joke about the ineffectiveness of government services. From shared sympathy in France over long waits at the Prefecture du Police, the French "one stop shop" for services from residence permits to driver's licenses, to the universally derided Department of Motor Vehicles in most US states, nearly everyone has a story of a long wait and poor service.

I have experienced the long waits, surly employees and paper pushing mentalities of a half dozen departments of motor vehicles, which are administered by each individual US state. Prepared for the worst, I had a minimal wait and refreshingly helpful employee on my first visit to South Carolina's DMV when moving here several years ago. I wrote the experience off as a fluke, but during several visits over the intervening years, the most recent a couple of weeks ago, the DMV has consistently impressed me. Employees are happy and quick to help, and during the most recent visit, I was handed a ticket with a number, and before I could even orient myself and find a seat in the waiting area, I was being summoned for service. Changing some documentation and getting a new sticker for a license plate since ours was lost in the mail, usually a tedious experience, took all of four minutes and incurred no cost.

While I like to think the people in my home state are innately happier and friendlier than everyone else in the world, I would imagine that the customer-centric attitude at the DMV is the product of careful study and diligent effort. I've often heard that organizational changes to employee's attitudes and customer focus are too hard, and ingrained cultural norms too difficult to shift with any perceptible result. However, if the oft-derided and perennially underfunded Department of Motor Vehicles can do it, your team or organization can likely do the same.

My son will celebrate his first birthday this month (or more accurately, mom and dad will celebrate as the little guy likely will have no concept of age and birthdays at this point). One of the things that has amazed me most as I have watched him grow is his complete lack of any fear of failure. As he learned how to crawl, much to his parents' chagrin, he would crawl off the bed without regard for the effects of gravity that would take over as he neared the edge, resulting in a couple of bruises and bumps when mom and dad were not fast enough to stop him. Eventually he learned not to crawl off the edge of elevated objects, but only after testing gravity until satisfied.

He started walking a couple of months ago, and applied a similar attitude. As he waddled around like a drunken penguin, his initial falls often resulted in a bumped head and a few tears, but less than a minute later, he would try walking again and again, until a couple of steps turned into the ability to do laps around the kitchen.

I have rarely seen the focus and attention he applies to any new object or person that enters his world and you can almost see the mental wheels turning as he analyzes an unfamiliar animal, sound or person. He is literally panting most of his day as he aggressively explores, learns and studies with a diligence I have never seen in adults.

I never thought I would find life lessons from someone whose age is measured in weeks and months, but my son's focus on the task at hand, and complete lack of any fear of failure to try and experiment are truly amazing to watch.

I was in a meeting some time ago, and grew increasingly flabbergasted as three mid-level managers explained a special exception process they had created. Essentially, the company was selling its scrap office paper to a local recycling vendor, certainly a commendable effort in our green-minded times. Where my eyes started growing wider was as they detailed the various machinations they needed to go through to generate an internally "compliant" invoice to the recycler, and handle the payments since this was well outside of their usual product offering.

From the meetings that were held to develop this exception process, to the various people required to implement and maintain it, my quick mental calculations tallied up a five figure cost to develop this process, and 20-40 hours of these mid-level managers' time to actually generate and process these invoices annually. When I asked how much revenue this recycling process generated, my jaw nearly hit the floor when they told me it was "about $200" annually. Just our conversation about this process likley wasted several hundred dollars.

Surely every business has some wasteful practices, but when employees let such a grossly unprofitable process pass them by with nary a raised eyebrow for the sake of "compliance" or some other questionable rationale, they either lack empowerment or have been embedded in their role so long they ignore basic logic.

In case you missed them, my regular column on CBS' Tech Republic contained the following articles in the month of December (short list due to the holidays):

Enterprise tech trends we'll see in 2011
How do you reinvigorate IT?