One of team members snapped this picture at O'Hare. It fascinated us. Here is a touted Chicago area recycling effort (note the big poster on the front of the bin).

However, the bin is marked "clean paper" only on top. What the heck is clean paper? And if you know, do you think most people do?

Is the purpose of this bin is to increase recycling or reduce improper attempts at recycling?

Hard for us to say, and because it isn't clear, we suspect it accomplishes neither. Make sure your messages are clear to your target audience, or they are likely to only make money for your agency. 

In its early days, we remember never being able to contact anyone live at amazon.com. Like almost all dotcoms of the day (and too many still today), you could only contact them via email or similar and wait for a response. Not so anymore.

One of us had a problem with her Kindle. She clicked help on the Kindle screen and it asked if she would like to talk with a customer service rep. She clicked yes and it asked her to enter a phone # for amazon to call. She did and figured tomorrow ... maybe. No sooner had she put the Kindle down than the phone rang.

It was amazon to help her and they indeed solved the problem.

People rave about Apple support, but we find their first action is to ask you to buy a support agreement then tell you that you don't need one. Amazon rocks. What a difference a decade (and maybe Zappos) makes.

Business fads come and go. Driven by consultants and academics looking to sell the latest "it" thing we suspect. MBO, Re-engineering, 6-Sigma are just a few that come to mind. However, Kevan Hall, posits another one, with which we agree; and that is "teams."

While neither Kevan or we are against teams, his research suggests that over-reliance on team-based everything (our words not his) is inhibiting productivity and costing companies money. (He estimates $20K/person/year).

Many of the classes in MBA programs are almost all team-based at this point. Thus driving a belief that teams are the answer, what was the question? We feel that approach does not help create better prepared graduates, and have seen too many instances in the real world of process improvement inhibited by unnecessary teamwork. Again this does not suggest teams are bad, just not the "final solution."

Kevan's company's research, as reported by Chiefexecutive.net, is interesting (at least to us since we agree with it). It may change your thinking about teams as well. For more on our thinking about teams check out our Teamformance website.