Business Explained by Stever

I’d like to share with you a LinkedIn exchange I had on the topic of whether Being Nice is a good business strategy.

Have you seen this story? Our Boston leadership (and I use the term loosely) is once again promoting terror, fear, and ineptitude, in one happy package. An MIT student had a “bomb hoax” on her shirt.
“Hoax” implies she was trying to pull one over on the police. No, she had a piece of wearable electronics [...]

An article in the New York Times says that fewer finance jocks are attending business school. All I can say is: Good! In fact, it’s good for everyone.
The Wall Street jockies whose only real interest is in making a buck can go make their money unimpeded by anything like the knowledge of what a company [...]

Today is September 11, 2007. There are plenty of people out today, celebrating the firefighters, rescure workers, and World Trade Center denizens who lost their life in the terrorist attack of 9/11. My friend from business school, Andy Kates, was one of those.
The destruction of the World Trade Center was a shocking event, made all [...]

I canceled a Verizon Wireless account before the end of my contract, incurring a $200 penalty. No problem. I was fine with that.
I went to the web site to pay my final bill. “Web site temporarily unavailable. Try back later.” it said, after I entered my username and password. They sent me bills, each bill [...]

I was just reading a blog post on David Maister’s BLOG (David is one of the world’s experts on managing professional service firms) about a time he was caught off guard when a CEO publicly questioned his integrity. How should he have responded? What he did was to remain silent until the discussion continued. That [...]

I’ve been doing a lot of examine-your-own-thoughts work in recent months. Sometimes, it seems like a good idea to re-examine unquestioned assumptions and stories to find out whether they’re actually doing you any good. For example, there’s a wonderful story in business schools that “a job in consulting prepares you for anything!” Sadly, it’s just [...]