Business Owner’s Blog

I usually keep politics out of this blog, but I’m writing this piece not to change your political views as much as challenge how you think about the relationship between business and politics. Many years ago I was a member of a small business lobby group called NFIB. They poll their members on every position […]

I got this idea from a client - Thanks, Kendra.
In meetings when they have an topic on the agenda they allot a certain amount of time to it. Then they set a timer at the start. It keeps the meeting on schedule.
We also talked about the benefits of spending 15 minutes at the start of […]

It’s a stupid tradition. Most of them get forgotten or broken in a week anyway. So why not just be honest. If something’s worth doing it’s worth doing whether it’s Jan 1, or any other date. So get real.
Takeaways:

Have fun, and don’t drink and drive.

Let’s say you run a grocery store and your computers go down in the middle of the day so you can’t process any payments. What do you do?
Let’s say your employees decide that since the problem was the company’s fault, they shouldn’t make the customers wait, so they let them take their food for free. […]

What would you pay for a tool that could transmit the wisdom of your smartest people out to everyone in your whole organization? One that is able to reduce errors in the most complex activity and achieve consistent results time after time? I’m sure you’d pay a lot, but this tool costs very little and […]

Joel Spolsky recounts his move from a Microsoft to (eventually) Juno Online Services in New York.
Eventually, though, I started to discover that the management philosophy at Juno was old fashioned. The assumption there was that managers exist to tell people what to do. This is quite upside-down from the way management worked in typical west-coast […]

There are examples to show incentives are good: they improve some behaviors and are a way to give people what they want in exchange for effort you want. There are also examples of why incentives are bad: they promote individuality at the expense of teamwork, they morph motivation to extrinsic rewards when motivation could (should?) […]

The titles comes from a great article in the Wall Street Journal by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. It highlights his experience with giving stuff away for free on the web. His results are a mix of plus and minus. Great read.
You may not know that besides being funny, Adams is a very perceptive thinker […]

…is acknowledging what they are worst at. They think they’re good (or good enough) at everything.
But consider that every company needs to get results in four areas.  This means the company needs skills such as:

Designing a product customers want
Producing that product for less than customers will pay
Finding and selling to those customers for less money […]

I’m sure you’ve heard that when you ASSUME it makes an ASS out of U and ME. Here’s a way to make assumptions that work.
Investors all know that business plans are fiction, or rather fairy tales (fiction sometimes has an unhappy ending business plans never do.) And many successful companies thrive without business plans. Even […]