While there may only be pennies of direct costs in having your IT team add a few more checkboxes to a web form, or activate several "mandatory" fields in your order entry system, there is a very real cost in terms of expediency and user experience. By way of example, I worked with a client who had an immensely tedious form on their website to request a product brochure. The joke on the marketing team was that the only fields left to add were pet's names, and a request for a DNA sample. When I suggested they streamline the form to nothing more than customer name and mailing address, they had a massive increase in brochure requests.

The original form was so onerous, the company was actually turning potential customers away, and abandoning a potential contact before they could even enter the first step in the sales funnel.

Similarly, I have seen countless internal systems that require all manner of "mandatory" information, and most of us have sat on the phone while some poor customer service rep checks dozens of boxes, and populates a plethora of fields while we grow increasingly impatient. While it was cheap to have IT activate these mandatory fields, one can only imagine the costs of gathering that data, and in lost sales as customers abandon convoluted sales processes. Moreover, what value does this additional information bring to the company, other than a handful of long-forgotten reports or unused metrics?

While that little nugget of data might be great on some esoteric report, or streamline some internal back-office function, consider how it impacts your customer interactions and sales processes. Is your company easy to do business with, or do your customers face a twenty-question interrogation upon merely attempting to buy from you?

Perhaps I am among the dammed (although it appears we are in good company), but the purported end of the world passed my family and I by unscathed. If you missed the pronouncement, a US-based organization (or group of hucksters depending on your view) claimed that after extensively studying the Bible, the world would come to an end on 21 May 2011. I waited a few weeks before penning this section to be sure, but apparently we are all safe.

While jokes and comments like mine about this date abound, most religions have some sort of end of the world concept. Even those that profess no religious beliefs often subscribe to various theories that our world will one day come to an end due to a solar explosion or other cosmic event. In any case, actuarial tables indicate death seems to be a 100% certainty for every human, so we will all experience our end at some point.

What interested me about the Bible-based end of the world predictions is that they seem fundamentally flawed. Like most religious texts, the Christian Bible does not indicate even a general date when the world will end, and even admonishes readers that the end will come "like a thief in the night," essentially extolling the reader to act in a virtuous manner since they cannot know when "judgment day" will arrive. This seems like a nice concept regardless of religious faith, but largely incongruous with an organization publishing a definitive date for the end of the world, and then claiming "mathematical error" and taking a second stab at the prediction. While much of the Bible is open to interpretation, the whole "thief in the night" metaphor seems abundantly clear, and I suspect you'll continue to receive this newsletter after the next predicted date, 21 October!

Apple seems to have ignited a trend whereby every product proudly claims where it was designed, and in an invariably smaller font, notes that it was actually "Made in China." Even fairly rudimentary implements bear this distinction; I recently purchased a water bottle for my bicycle, which proudly noted the city in California where it was designed.

Perhaps this is clever marketing, and diffuses some of the consumer backlash directed at companies that manufacture products in lower-cost countries. On a more philosophical scale, this seems to represent a shift in western thinking, emphasizing design and conception over manufacturing prowess, much of which has shifted to lower-cost regions.

Personally, I find design to often be for naught without competent execution. A finely machine motorcycle part that doesn't quite fit is just as bad as a lovely consumer electronics product with faulty buttons, or myriad creaks and rattles. Perhaps instead of trumpeting the various geographies that contributed to a product, manufactures could settle for "Designed and Made Well."

Le goȗter is a traditional French afternoon snack, typically for children, and occurring with clocklike precision at 4PM. Like all good things French, le goȗter involves chocolate, and my wife and I have settled on Petite Ecolier biscuits, a dry cookie/cracker with a healthy slab of chocolate affixed through some culinary trick as our goȗter compliment of choice, along with a small cup of Italian espresso.

Since I generally work from a home office when not travelling to a client site, my wife or I will generally start lurking around the kitchen around 3PM, and we'll look at each other and simultaneously say "goȗter?"

Perhaps one of my favorite aspects of travel is this ability to experience other cultures, and borrow little aspects of them. While our grocery-store cookies and at-home espressos are no match for the streets of Paris, our modified goȗter allows us to mentally travel back to these places every afternoon.