Business Owner’s Blog

I got the blue plastic tub for free and turned it into a garbage can because it used to hold car wash soap so I didn’t want to use it for a compost bin and we turned the old garbage can into a compost bin. Do you know how much money they want for […]

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? […]

This post is not about what you think. It really is about business. First a little background. I started a company in 1991 when I lived in Texas. Two years later I moved to Connecticut but the company stayed Texas. I’ve run it long-distance as a “remote control CEO”. I had to […]

I mentioned this before but I don’t think I gave it the focus it deserves. The focus it deserves is actually in this New Yorker article and a shorter one in Fast Company.
But consider this key quote
If someone found a new drug that could wipe out infections with anything remotely like the effectiveness of […]

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?) […]

…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 […]

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 […]