What is the mood of the Brockmann visitor? How are the shades of grey in our economy represented by their sentiment? Compared to our first quarter ad hoc survey, When do you expect the recovery to begin? the past nine months or so of economic malaise, layoffs and un-investment in communications equipment, services and technologies has taken their course and economic activity seems to be on the rise. In my own practice, the economy seems to be turning around and promises a brighter 2010. In the meantime, I see the church attendance and church giving up, as compared to 2008, suggesting that Christians in central MA are in a generous mood and are more appreciative of what they have.

Desktop video conferencing with somebody is very easy when you have 483 million friends around the world to connect to.

It is interesting that half of the users' mobile phones are more than 18 months old, despite the typical mobile operator contract of 12 months to get a subsidized phone. Despite Apple having shipped 7.4 million iPhones in the quarter ended September 30, 2009, their most productive quarter ever, business users, who typically respond to Brockmann.com reports and surveys, are more conservative with their employers' money on mobile phones, especially in such demanding economic conditions.

Visitors to Brockmann.com are quite pessimistic about the global economic recession that some report has been underway since early 2007. A third of visitors completing the one-click survey chose the future-most start of recovery date, while 60% expected recovery in 2010!

Personally, I've already seen some signs of recovery - especially considering large enterprise communications-oriented trade show attendance in Florida - where it seemed to me that there were still 92% of Americans working.

The premise for this question was the potential fun of determining how far various styles of games and gaming systems had penetrated business. 

For Christmas 2008, my two college-aged sons banded together and bought me an xBox360. We've been playing Call of Duty and Halo 3 together (or not) pretty much whenever we can. With several TV commercials and even The Office episodes on gaming (remember when Jim in Stanford kept getting his team killed and they pulled him aside for a motivational talk)...

The thought came up, what kind of games does your employer actually tolerate and encourage to facilitate higher productivity, stress relief and even team building? We are contemplating the conduct of market research around these points, particularly as it relates to predicting the impacts of higher performance as a result of these initiatives. 

For the first two employers in my career, the company canceled the Christmas turkey tradition just as the Christmas season came around. Needless to say, I thought I was jinxed until as an MBA CoOp student I received a Christmas turkey - my first.

Many managers are tempted to eliminate the funding for the annual Christmas party, but the wise ones know that the tradition buys a lot of goodwill with employees and leads to higher morale and stronger cameraderie. Of course, having a Christmas party or not has to fit with the company's culture and condition. A firm that lays of 25% of the staff will not have a pleasant Christmas party, but it is better to still have one than to cancel that too.

See the Brockmann & Company report: When Quality Counts