grow profits and owner equity by creating transferable wealth and wisdom

The National Federation of Independent Business — which always seems to have the gloomiest or, depending on how you look at it, realistic data — found small-business owners’ confidence in December had risen for the fourth month in a row. Their headline: “While Economic Winter Continues, It Appears to be Getting Warmer.”...

Attending to the needs of a dog is challenging.  Why are they considered

Inject productive ritual into our lives:  The caring routine keeps us “out there”, safely experiencing life.  Being there for or with a friend, opens the door to serendipity (what happens while we are busy doing something else).  For example, if you weren’t out walking the dog, you may not have noticed a beautiful sunset or met the new neighbor...

Using a special date such as New Years as a watershed for personal growth

 2. Draw a relationship target.  Place yourself and loved ones in the bull’s eye.  In the second ring, list your best friends.  In the next add good friends, then on to casual friends, and in the last ring associates such as neighbors and colleagues.  Inventory where you spent time last year.  My initial assessment identified that I spent time...

First, get it through the Industrial-age riddled heads of your management

A great place to start the learning process is to accept that the future belongs to millennials..disregard at your peril..  YES!  They will require your wisdom and support.  YES! they must learn the people side of business. BUT NO!  they nor you will  benefit from forcing them to conform to your company’s current  knowledge and experience...

“To start a business, the CEO must be everything.  To grow a business

Radically shifting markets, a plethora of price challenging products, ever changing technology, and the unrelenting hand of time are making the aging owners of small to mid size businesses (SMBs) vulnerable. For many of them, this is a new and uncomfortable mindset. Fiercely independent, hard working, and resilient, the majority of SMB owners  have...

The poem, Beowulf , written in Old English sometime before the tenth century

A.D., describes the adventures of a great Scandinavian warrior of the sixth century.   Beowulf , the oldest surviving epic in British literature, exists in only one manuscript. This copy survived both the wholesale destruction of religious artifacts during the dissolution...

Successful organizations, like hurricanes, have a central core around

which everything revolves and toward which everything is focused. At the center are values (what the organization believes in) and vision (where the organization is going). Business plans and the hierarchy of organization charts make no sense in the “I” where the generation...

Recently Yahoo fired its CEO, Carol Bartz. Although the company’s stock

Yahoo’s problem is that  web portals are yesterday’s news. People don’t need a single site to click through multiple menus and sub-menus to find what they’re looking for. Search engines like Google deliver more precise results. Yahoo no longer gives web users a compelling reason to visit their site.Yahoo is still a popular site in terms...

Your grandparents did not work for organizations like the one you work

Everyone and everything is moving all the time. As companies jockey for position, mergers and acquisitions become the fastest way to secure temporary security and grow market share. ‘Job security’ has come to mean moving rapidly from one company to another. My oldest son, who plays lead guitar in his rock band, told me, ‘Dad, no one...

Political correctness is dampening the human spirit at work, at home,

and out in the community. Life is tough enough without imposing  language filters on each other. Relying on your own sense of what’s right and wrong when making language choices is risky, but don’t let political correctness blind you from  laughing at life’s humorous side...