This video of Dan Ariely from TED  has several enlightening and surprising ideas you can use. It’s 18 min long but the last 2 minutes are an ad.

Why people cheat and steal and how this can be encouraged or discouraged. The reasons are not at all what you’d expect.

How these conditions were exacerbated by the stock market and financial systems to cause the mess we’re in.

Why our intuitions can lead us wrong and what to do about it. This doesn’t come up till about the 14th minute but it’s the most important takeaway. It broadens the appeal beyond cheating and beyond the financial mess. How many of your intutions do you rely on to run your business and how many have you really tested?

Takeaways:

1. Buy Dan’s book here  http://www.predictablyirrational.com/
2. Test your intuitions. This is a hard and painful process for most people. Hard because our intuitions are often invisible – we just think of them as “how things work.” And painful because self inspection often is. Hire a coach to help if you want to break out of the limits your intuitions are imposing on your growth.

[tags] CEO skills, entrepreneurs, intuition, small business, management [/tags]

I had sporadic problems getting online. It would work fine for anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. Then (sometimes in the middle of loading a page) it would tell me sites were loading (no “page not found” errors) but they never loaded. This happened in all my browsers (Firefox, Chrome and IE). At the same time email would work and I could see other computers on the network. And any other computer could get on the internet fine. I had to reboot to get back to normal.

All my other computers are running XP. This one is my first with Vista (Home Premium) and like I thought I was supposed to, I loaded protection: AVG anti-virus and Zone Alarm. Both free versions. They’d worked well in my history with XP.
Solution:
A shout out to Mark Wasserman of Janus Systems in Branford Connecticut who diagnosed it in ten minutes over the phone. Zone Alarm was the problem.  He says windows firewall is fine for what I do (I don’t spend lots of time online in what he calls dangerous environments – like airports and coffe shops) so I uninstalled Zone Alarms, turned on the windows firewall and am good to go. Mark also said that AVG is fine and virus protection is more important for me.
Bonus – shut down and start up are a lot faster. Also I used to get an error with Firefox. If I shut it down while it was having a problem and tried to restart it without rebooting, it would tell me it couldn’t start because it was already running. This has now gone away.

NOTE: This is a blog about business tips not my cat (or my computer) but I’m posting here because I had the hardest time finding any solution online. I hope that by posting it here the search engine spiders will pick it up and others can be helped. As always there’s a takeaway for business.

Takeaways:

• Technology keeps evolving. (I thought windows firewall was bad and Zone Alarms was almost a reguirement – those may have been true when I learned them but certainly aren’t now). Every company needs a relationship with someone who keeps up with it.
• That person should not be you unless that’s your job or your hobby.
• One size does not fit all – Mark asked me a lot about how I used my computer and would have a different recommendation if I hung out at Starbucks all day. Make sure your tech person understands this.

[tags] Technology, Small Business Computing [/tags]