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<p>When I started this Medium page (You can’t really call it a blog), I made a pact that it would be a forum for the explanation, exploration, and promotion of the ideas about which I’m so passionate. This included everything from how good economics can alleviate poverty, to solutions for the call center industry, to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Image by Open Grid Scheduler via Flickr As much as the contact center world is deploying AI and bots, like any other business, to optimize its operations with existing humans, or someday replace them, there has been a parallel, growing body of practice known as “Video consumer Service” that is quietly changing our industry as well. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>I’ve been living in Berlin, Germany this summer. It has been an incredibly productive time for me and for Rethink Staffing as a whole, including finally building a real sales team that can deliver results. My favorite breakfast place is two blocks from where we’re renting a flat, called Anna Blume. It was introduced to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Depending on the pundits you read, we have a crisis in employee engagement in the American labor force. Gallup reports that only ⅓ of all workers in the American economy report feeling “engaged” at work. Within the call center industry, surveys like McKinsey’s show that it’s actually much worse. The same is true in the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The Kingdom of Spain in 1491 must have been an exciting time in the history of the world, full of promise, possibility and danger. One year before Columbus launched his historic journey, the promise of untold riches in the new world was all anyone in the royal court could speak of. Spain in 1491 is [&hellip;]</p>

<p>American culture has long mythologized the open road, and the individual freedom that a vehicle brings to a person. In the post-war era in America, when incomes were rising and a new middle-class was being built, the car or motorcycle was simply another word for freedom within the American mind-set. You weren’t free unless you [&hellip;]</p>

<p>We were interviewing for a new sales exec at Fair Trade Outsourcing. At first, I thought I wanted someone directly from the BPO industry, working for a competitor, figuring that experience and contacts would be a great place to start as we try and grow the company. When talking to a few candidates, they kept [&hellip;]</p>

<p>I’m still reflecting on my time at the PACE conference last week. It was my first call center industry conference, and there were a lot of people there who had been in the industry much longer than I have. I came away a little sad at what I experienced from those leaders that had been [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Photo credit: <a href="https://pixabay.com/en/philippines-slums-manila-321674/" rel="nofollow">https://pixabay.com/en/philippines-slums-manila-321674/</a> I have written about how the BPO industry should be proud of its poverty alleviation record, and how the industry has been good at producing positive outcomes for agents. The fact is this: If the economics don’t work — “it” doesn’t work. What do we mean by “it”? It refers to most things in [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Photo: Mark Probst via Flickr under a Creative Commons license. #WorldBookDay is a great reminder that we all need to read more! I truly enjoy reading, and I never find enough time to do it. The following six books are not strictly about Fair Trade Entrepreneurship. I define Fair Trade Entrepreneurship as a framework by which [&hellip;]</p>

<p>I’m here at the PACE annual conference outside of Atlanta. While getting ready for the conference, I started doing some research on some of the participants, and I saw a few organizations that seem to be speaking the same language we do at Rethink Staffing. Back in 2013 and 2014, the concept of “Impact Sourcing” [&hellip;]</p>

<p>I wasn’t always a good practitioner of fair trade. In fact, I only became engrossed in fair trade practices when I made a now-defunct investment in growing coffee in the Philippines, which I love. That investment fell through, but my passion for fair trade continued to flourish. Fair Trade Entrepreneurship is a framework by which [&hellip;]</p>

<p>I was in bed most of last week sick with that flu that’s been going around. One happy by-product of that downtime was that, when I wasn’t sleeping, I was binge re-watching Downtown Abbey — that wonderful BBC series about country life and societal in Yorkshire England from 1912–1928. There are many larger themes that play-out between [&hellip;]</p>

<p>I wasn’t always a good practitioner of fair trade. In fact, I only became engrossed in fair trade practices when I made an investment in coffee, which I love. That investment fell through, but my passion for fair trade continued to flourish. One of the first questions I asked myself back then was “can fair [&hellip;]</p>

<p>I started Rethink Fair Trade Outsourcing in September of 2015 largely because I was personally going broke. For five years, I had another business, MODsolar, that had a great dream but was in a bad shape because of changes in the industry at that time. Margins were too low and we were in the wrong [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Two centuries ago, a man named Robert Owen owned a textile mill in Scotland at the height of the industrial revolution. Owen’s competitors ran mills that treated their workers despicably. Long hours, dangerous working conditions, and low pay. Child labor was common, drunkenness at work was expected. It was hell on earth. Owen had a [&hellip;]</p>