If you haven’t seen the wonderful little program Wordle, go to the website and create some “word clouds” from your own text.  It’s fun and free.

Wordle uses your text and creates an image that illustrates which words appear most often in that text.  I took last year’s Parking Matters blog text and ran it through Wordle to see what we have been blogging about, and thus what we have been thinking about.  The accompanying image shows the words used most frequently as the ones with most prominence.

Clearly “parking” is the winner – no surprise there!  But look at the words that come in below parking:  people, new, work, transportation, industry, time, employees.

Much smaller in size are some words that should be important to us all:  customers, team, strategies, planning, and management.

The real message here is that our words indicate the issues we are emphasizing, or not!  Especially in this economy, the five words mentioned (customers, team, strategies, planning, and management) will continue to be all the more important to add value to our services, both perceived and actual.

This year, give some thought to the words you use — the words you emphasize.  They indicate what is important to you, and they tell others what matters to you most.  The New Year is a great time to develop plans focused on the five words above, inspiring better relationships with staff and customers and clearly describing the objectives for the upcoming year.  

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.”
― T.S. Eliot