Here we are at the end of October and on the cusp of the holiday season. I don’t like the dark and rain of November and December but I do like the holidays. Thanksgiving and New Year’s, two secular holidays, bookend the religious celebrations of Hanukkah and Christmas. It is a good time of year […]
Improving Margins
In my last post I wrote about having Accurate and Timely Financial Information. Let’s say you’ve got your accounting straightened out so that you have good financial information on a timely basis. Now you’ve got something to base decisions on. Let’s assume neither your gross profit margin nor your net income is as high as […]
Book Review: Moonwalking with Einstein
Wouldn’t it be great to have a photographic memory? We’ve all heard of people who have photographic memories, haven’t we? It turns out no one has a photographic memory. No one. I once had a business project where we needed to get people with photographic memories. I talked to a professor at the University of […]
They Can’t Download Me (or You)
Have you ever had proprietary content plagiarized? If you have a website, send out blogs or post on social media, chances are you have. There are services to track this sort of thing. They do matches of word patterns to catch the scofflaws so your lawyer can send a nasty-gram telling them to cease and […]
The Middle 30
This blog is about an important business topic. It’s just going to take me a moment to get to it, so stay with me. Digression 1 Most of my blogs are the result of two or three clients or colleagues mentioning a topic. I figure if two or three are interested, probably more are. In […]
Book Review: The Written World
In my last blog, I related the story of the candidate for a high-level, executive position, who didn’t read books. I felt this was a character flaw that was so fundamental that I would consider it a disqualifier for the job. To me it indicated the lack of critical thinking. I asked for your thoughts […]
Thoughts on a Post-Literate World–“I Don’t Really Read Books”
A client related this story. They were interviewing a candidate for a high-level executive position at a very prominent company. During the interview, they asked the candidate, “What kind of books do you read?” The candidate’s response was, “I don’t really read books.” The “really” wasn’t necessary, the person just doesn’t read books. Perhaps a […]
Book Review: A Higher Loyalty
A Higher Loyalty by James Comey was released on April 17th. I preordered my copy through Amazon and they delivered it on the 17th. I had ‘cleared the decks’ in terms of my reading schedule and dove right in, finishing the book in a week. A couple of comments right up front. First, Donald Trump […]
This Isn’t Rocket Science
The hardest thing about running a business must be figuring out how to manage people. When creating processes, the handoffs in the process, that is the interaction of people and departments are the hardest part. Creating alignment between individual goals and those of the company is endlessly challenging. Think of the creation of an incentive […]
Book Review: Internal Time
This book was recommended by Daniel Pink in his book When—The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, the subject of my last blog. Pink had six books he recommended in his Further Reading section. He said of this book, “You’ll learn more from this smart, concise work—organized into twenty-four chapters to represent the twenty-four hours of […]