I had a customer service need today. I called the company, whom we’ll call Canadian Mozy, and got a very nice young man named “Johnny.” He seemed to have a genuine American accent, clearly understood my issue, and was able to respond in complete sentences. That’s a good first start. Sometimes, I call a company [...]
I’m Twittering today. And I’m Facebooking. And I’m blogging. And I’m writing my newsletter and my podcast. In pursuit of building my so-called personal brand, I’m getting my name out there and sharing my brilliance with the world. Once I get some decent lighting, 2010 will see me introduce a video blog as well. Yessiree, [...]
I was just watching a TED talk by Richard St. John on the 8 Rules of Success. Richard interviewed 500 TED attendees to distill down eight principles. His recommendations are depressingly trite: have passion, work hard, yada, yada, yada. You can see the talk here: http://bit.ly/6VxMaC
It’s not his fault his results are trite, however. As [...]
A friend of mine posted a Facebook entry saying his 30,000+ person company is encouraging people to be entrepreneurial. I replied with a remark that I couldn’t imagine a less likely place to find entrepreneurial behavior.
Much to my surprise, he was surprised that I was surprised. But that’s not surprising. It turns out that at [...]
I just received a voicemail from an amazingly sincere, genuine-sounding coaching “guru.” She went on and on about how she wants to give back to me and show her tremendous appreciation. All I have to do is visit her web page for details.
I visited. It turned out to be a long-form sales letter. You know [...]
My friend Bob Kerns blogged about Stephen Wolfram’s “Alpha” project. The project aims to take on Google by creating a web-retrieval engine that can answer specific factual questions directly. Type in, “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” and it will go out to the Web, retrieve the answer, and tell [...]
You know, I just can’t help feeling outrage, depression, and cynicism at the Big Three auto companies asking for a taxpayer bailout. Twenty years ago, we read cases in business school about how American auto manufacturers had already fallen behind foreign imports in production capability, cost structure, and market responsiveness. At the time, this was [...]
Be Thankful; It’s All in Your Mind
(A Financial Tailspin sucks! Don’t compound it.)
We’re going through some … interesting … times, financially. People feel insecure, established institutions are in desperate need of bailout (funny how attractive socialism becomes when you’re the one who needs the handout) and the world economy seems to be teetering on the [...]
I am a proponent of free markets for the things that markets are good at. Markets are great at pricing things whose future attributes are relatively predictable by the market players, and that don’t require a decision-making time horizon greater than the market trade horizon. For example, markets are great at pricing stocks, because companies [...]
Meetings! I just love meetings … no, I don’t. I hate meetings. But perhaps that’s just because I’m no good at running them.
According to an MSNBC article today, Bush met with the leaders of 20 countries Saturday night. To quote the article:
“After the almost 40-minute meeting and his six-minute statement, the president left the White [...]
