After the tech bubble burst (but not long after), I was talking to my boss at a company party. We were drinking. Voices and songs and laughs ricocheted around the hotel ballroom. But something was missing. “These parties feel fake when you haven’t done anything worth celebrating,” he said. The man I was talking with had… [Read more…]
January 19, 2011
Do you offer your employers, business partners,and, most importantly, your customers the Least Restrictive Environment possible? In education, services offered to kids with special needs must be offered in the least restrictive environment. In other words, you can’t send a kid with Type I diabetes to some special medical school because she needs to test… [Read more…]
December 21, 2010
Who decides which practices are the best ones? I hear all the time about best practices. Every company I’ve worked with in the past 12 years talked about following best practices. What I don’t know (what they’ve never bothered to explain) is who decides something is a best practice. These are weasel words–a new way… [Read more…]
June 30, 2010
Companies spend fortunes trying to figure out how the world sees them. Smart. A business that lacks self-awareness is as doomed as a person who lacks self-awareness. Now comes a study that may allow people to create more accurate pictures of their own brands without waiting for the consultants to report out. Or when budgets… [Read more…]
June 21, 2010
Depreciation is a term used in accounting, economics and finance to spread the cost of an asset over the span of several years (Wikipedia, 2010). Have you ever wondered if we’ve spread the idea of depreciation too far? Like, to people? To clients and customers? I read Simon Sinek’s wonderful story of how the U.S.… [Read more…]
June 3, 2010
She looked confused by the question. “I just wanted to know how you develop ideas in the War Room,” I repeated. The young woman looked past me, over my right shoulder, and out the window toward a tree-lined parking lot. Her pupils focused on a distant object, then on something inside her head. “We don’t… [Read more…]
April 7, 2010
Have you ever looked someone in the eye and decided, in an instant, that you can trust him or her? What about a business? Do you trust the companies you do business with? I think people do business with companies they distrust all the time. Most of the time, in fact. If we… [Read more…]
April 7, 2010
Very few companies lead the market in everything unless they do only one thing. Instead, most companies lead in one area, maintain parity in most, and lag in one or two. Trouble starts when when you’ve missed something new altogether. One example is mobility an d social media, which are now blending. The market no… [Read more…]
April 7, 2010
If 100 percent of your meeting time is billable to a client, then you can stop reading. Everyone else will gain a new appreciation for the evil of business meetings. If you think “evil” is a bit too strong, consider: They break your working day into small, incoherent pieces on a schedule incompatible with the… [Read more…]
January 28, 2011
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