Business Owner’s Blog

Thanks to an email from Will Hill and Paul Graham’s latest essay I’ve shortened my advice (so you get to do less reading)
1. Make something people want.
As obvious as it sounds this advice is often ignored. Well not exactly ignored, but confused. Inventors especially, are apt to confuse the word “people” with the word “me”. […]

Doing any thing takes time - agreed?
We are limited to 24 hours each day - right?
So, the number of things we can do is limited by time - are you with me so far?
Most entrepreneurs respond to this truth by trying to do as much as they can every day. But what happens is they […]

Dan Pink turned me on to this post by a guy named Jason and this one by Mark Cuban (at least I’ve heard of him) with tips for start-ups. I was mildly distressed by the focus on tech and software companies. What about an old school company that makes stuff out of atoms not bits? […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

The key to growing your company is to prevent problems rather than solve them. There are two parts to this: Attitude and Skill.
Attitude - you must not like being the hero
Heroes solve problems. Usually at the last moment in dramatic fashion with a fanfare and a flourish of cape - just before they dash off […]