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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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?) […]

Leadership has been getting all the spotlight in recent years, but management is really where the action is if you want results. Management is the hard work of developing (as well as sustaining) an environment that supports people to be successful in a common goal. The common goal, of course is the success of your […]

This from Paul Orfalea
[founder of Kinkos which got acquired by FedEx
and now has 1,200 stores in 10 countries]
You must be flexible and astute and focus on the big picture. Busyness is not your friend. Startup entrepreneurs too often try to run away from their anxiety by being busy. But you have to leave time open […]

Everyone knows that to grow a business you have to delegate. But it’s hard. Here’s why. Most of what you do (and want to delegate) is knowledge work. Peter Drucker coined the term Knowledge Worker to mean someone who works in information or who develops knowledge in the work place. This makes it distinct from […]