Wal-Mart only kind of sucks (now)

April 21, 2008
Add Comment

Introduction
Crowded aisles, pushy and oblivious customers, and rude staff can all be used to describe my past experiences at Wal-Mart. While they do have lower prices than most competitors, I found myself gladly willing to pay an extra couple dollars per item in order to avoid the atmosphere of the low cost leader. But I now have a slightly improved view of the company.

We recently set out to find a play set for my daughter and found that a number of different places around town didn’t have it. We went to the Wal-Mart (Store G) near my house and they told us they didn’t have one but called around and found that another Wal-Mart (Store S) nearby had four. So I called Store S and asked if they could hold one for me. No. “We don’t do that.” I asked Store G about it and was told that they do regularly hold items and someone at Store S just didn’t want to deal with it. So I called back and tried again. No. So I went over a couple days later, verified that they still had them in stock, and asked to go ahead and pay then come back in a few hours with a truck. No. “We don’t do that.” Seriously?!?! The manager politely smiled and nodded while I complained but did nothing to help me. Screw it. I’m not giving them my money.


The original playset we were looking for.

Climax
So I called back over to Store G, the one near my house, and they promptly apologized for the actions of the other store, said that they should have held it, and told us they had one in stock now. I asked them to hold it and they said they would. One hour later we showed up and hung around for the next hour while they tried to locate our play set, which consisted of three 10′ boxes weighing ~300 lbs each. The manager finally came out and told us that, despite a note with our names on it and it being placed right outside his office, someone had sold our play set to another customer. So now I had wasted almost an entire day due to the incompetence of Wal-Mart and was pretty annoyed.

Surprise Ending
The manager came out with a slew of staff and they were all extremely polite and apologetic. They informed me they were already reviewing the security cameras to determine who took the play set and take actions (which I could have cared less about except that it showed me they were trying) and then offered to upgrade us to the next play set for a significant discount. The deal was too good to pass up and we agreed. The manager walked us up to a closed register and rang up our purchase to avoid any further waiting. He then apologized more for our poor experience and then monitored a team of employees as they loaded the set into my neighbor’s truck.

0075211365208_500x500.jpg
The play set we ended up with.

I found out later that Wal-Mart Store G was ranked number five within the company for customer service. It shows. I will never shop at Store S again but no longer avoid Store G. Wal-Mark, on the whole, still has an image problem but if they could only get the rest of their stores like Store G their company would truly take over the world.

Book review – Leadership: Essential Steps Every Manager Needs to Know

April 14, 2008
Add Comment

Leadership: Essential Steps Every Manager Needs to Know, by Elwood N. Chapman and Sharon Lund O’Neil, was surprisingly good. When I first opened it up I must admit that I judged a book by its “cover” and thought that it would not be very good based upon its somewhat cheesy clip art like images. But I looked past the graphics and gave it a chance, which I am glad I did.

4172k6q3y7l_sl500_aa240_.jpg

As with many leadership books, this one breaks the art of leadership down into a number of categories. In particular, this book defines the effectiveness of leadership as being the sum of visionary mission, decisiveness, application of mutual reward theory, effective communication, and power of influence, multiplied by a positive attitude. It goes on to explain in detail what each of these mean, how it can best be applied, and the different aspects of each. I found mutual reward theory to be particularly enlightening as I had yet to hear about this theory.

All in all, it is a good book and a rather quick read. While none of the content will revolutionize your career by itself, the information contained in these pages should help anyone identify where they can change to help bring their leadership to the next level.

Introducing the Web FOB

April 10, 2008
Add Comment

I have been toying around with the concept of a web fob. The concept is the same as a key fob, only it would be entirely web based. The primary benefit of this would be that you wouldn’t have to carry around a hardware security token in order to gain access to secure systems.

Here’s how it would work:

1. The user would navigate to an undisclosed site and log in, at which time a security token would be generated.
The user would know, most likely through site/network administrators, that they must go to another location to gather the security token. They would navigate to this undisclosed web site, enter their authentication information, and would be handed a token. This token could be a series of digits, a phrase, or even a file that the user downloads. The possibilities are really only limited by the imagination. The ways this token could be generated are numerous and are already a well solved problem with key fobs. The technique would likely be the same or very similar, only web based. The key to this would be in maintaining secrecy in how the security tokens are generated, meaning the processing would need to be done server side.

2. A user would attempt to gain access to the secure system and would be prompted for a security token to proceed.
This could be a website, VPN, or any other system. The only basic criteria is that authentication must include something more than a simple user name and password. The user would be greeted with the login page for the site which would display fields asking for username, password, whatever else is important, and the security token. This page would have no indication of where the security token should come from.

webfob.png

3. The token would be input into the site, along with login credentials.
Self explanatory.

4. The application would authenticate the token.
The application would either know how to authenticate the security token itself (4a) or would have a server side service that exposed a validation routine from the servers generating the security token (4b).

5. The user is granted access.
Assuming successful authentication, of course.

I know enough about security to ride the edge of chaos and mostly get away with it but by no means consider myself a guru. The main problem I see with this lies in the maintenance of the security token site and keeping it secure. So to all you security gurus: what do you think of this concept? Is it secure? Is there a benefit? Is it already being done somewhere (I couldn’t find one)?