Over my many years as a business practitioner and amateur researcher/reader, I have been trying to "figure out" business, in all of its fascinating complexity. By being able to break it down into it's component pieces I hope to be able to better ... [Continue Reading]
Tainted Supply Chain — here we go again…
In the June 18th 2011 issue of the Economist newspaper (look -- it's in a magazine format, it gets issued weekly, it looks, feels, and smells like a magazine -- why do they insist on calling it a newspaper...??? That's my only criticism of the ... [Continue Reading]
Humor — the best preparation for crazy interview questions?
I recall at various times when going through formal job interviews being asked the odd "crazy" question that had little to do with the company or the role I was being interviewed for. They were questions like: "what is the weight -- in kilos -- of a ... [Continue Reading]
Incentives Matter
One of the things that I have learned over my few decades of "business-as-trench-warfare" experience is that properly thought-out and structured performance incentives are a critical component in getting people inside an organization to "do the right ... [Continue Reading]
Thoughts on time management
I'm just reading Ricardo Semler's fascinating book from 1993 -- it's his story of building and running the large Brazilian conglomerate Semco. The book is "Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace, and only 72 pages into ... [Continue Reading]
Career Tip: Don’t be an a**hole!
This "career tip" probably seems very straightforward as obvious advice -- we don't like assholes and nobody should aspire to be one. However, this advice comes from a significant lesson learned in my own career many years ago; it's a real story that ... [Continue Reading]
Career Tip: Work to Put Yourself out of Your Job
OK. I admit that the title might be a bit confusing -- why the heck would you want to put yourself out of a job? What kind of "career tip" is that? In fact, it is one I believe strongly in, and when I look back over my own career I realize that this ... [Continue Reading]
“Corporate Social Responsibility” is a fundamentally flawed concept
The vast majority of business practitioners that I have met and worked with throughout my career are caring, honest people who one would generally regard as striving to be morally and ethically responsible. They don’t particularly want to run ... [Continue Reading]
Wal-Mart, me, and “green” consumption
Wal-Mart fascinates me and, in terms of it's relentless growth in size and scale, it also concerns me somewhat. It clearly has the market power to strongly influence consumption choices and to drive any kind of business practices throughout its' ... [Continue Reading]
Measuring the intangible…
A new subscriber to this blog (thank you, renju87!) had this TED talk posted on their blog and brought it to my attention. The speaker is Chip Conley (CEO of American boutique hotel company "joie de vivre") and this TED talk dates back to mid 2010. ... [Continue Reading]
