So it has been entirely too long since I have posted some fresh material on the blog, and I am well aware that I have been breaking one of my cardinal rules of not being active with your site.  On the other hand, I have been very busy with outside projects that have kept me away from writing lately.  So what is so important I feel I need to neglect an important online marketing commandment?

2 weeks ago, my father announced he would be running for the governors office of the state of Kansas!  I have spent a lot of time working on his races before and this announcement was by far the most exciting to date.  He has started off as quite the underdog, but he knew this coming in and we feel very good about our prospects.

So that aside, I found myself with some time today at the Java Break in Lawrence working on the new laptop and wanted write something up.  Something I read about last week in regards to operations caught my eye and I wanted to pass it along.

David Lee Roth is a genius.  There you go.

I don’t say it for his musical abilities.  I am young enough to say that any Van Halen memories for me actually come from the Chicago Cubs in the mid 80′s which used “Jump” as the game time song.

No, David Lee Roth’s genius actually comes from a Fast Company article from this past month and he was able to come up with a sweet way of instantly knowing whether or not his expectations were being met whenever he came to a new city.

Known now as Section 126, the genius was a small disclaimer in Van Halen’s contract for performances and dictated that a bowl of M&M’s completely free of any brown ones would be in the dressing room upon arrival.  All hell would break loose from David if the bowl was not there or contained brown M&M’s.  So what makes this so interesting?

Van Halen’s performances at the time were very demanding technically and the group had very specific demands that needed to be met at every venue.  It was too much for the band to show up and inspect every element themselves in a timely fashion, so they needed a quick way to know immediately whether or not the specs they needed were met.  Enter Section 126.

Buried 2/3rds down in the contract, the bowl of M&M’s stipulation was just a shortcut to see if the stagehands had read the entire contract.  That way, once the band got to a show, they knew right off if there were any reasons to be concerned.  Personally I love this example because of its simple genius.  I am still thinking of ways to build a bowl of brown-free M&M’s in a website,  but I think it is a great lesson in operations efficiency.