Tool of the Week: 99 Designs
99designs.com Work with designers of your choosing or start a contest for your project and let designers compete to win the work. Base prices start at $79 for a Twitter header and go up to $599 for logo and brand identity pack. The number of services is wide and deep, with service categories including Logo […]
Not All People Are Likable
People tend to do business with people they know, like, and trust. The problem is, not all people are likeable. Somedays, maybe even most aren’t. When operating a business, we have to deal with people. Even in a business-to-business enterprise, we’re not actually interacting with the business – we interact with the people who constitute […]
The Man in the Arena
One hundred and nine years ago today, barely one year removed from his second term as President of the United States and less than a decade before his untimely death from a blood clot at age 60, Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech to a crowd of thousands at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. The title of the hour-long […]
The Courage to Decide
“Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.” ~ William Shakespeare When there’s a difficult and potentially unpopular decision to be made, beware of the person who demands that more research is needed. This is their way of avoiding the commitment and responsibility that goes along with taking […]
Little things
Sometimes when companies consider ways to reward their employees, they get paralyzed by indecision as a result of choosing between multiple grand gestures and, sadly, wind up doing nothing. Better to do something small than nothing at all. And much better do something small consistently than one grand gesture that is never repeated. I always […]
Tool: Egg timer
Here is a tool I use frequently when I’m sitting at my computer or laptop and want to put a quick limit on myself for a certain task. https://e.ggtimer.com/ It’s especially helpful when I text the following call request to someone hard to reach in order to ensure that I’m living up to my promise […]
Go Have a Look
When you come in out of the rain, you don’t stay inside forever. You check to see if conditions have changed and when it stops raining, you go outside again. Far too often we don’t do the same in business. We make a business decision based on conditions and then don’t go outside and have […]
Make Time
The amount of time it takes for the sun to appear in the same relative spot in the Earth’s sky defines the length of our day: 24 hours. Despite the fact that we humans complain non-stop about there not being enough time, from a universal perspective, time is infinite. All of this fuss about there […]
Sears Files Bankruptcy
On January 14th of 2017, Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus announced they would fold the big top for the final time in May of that year. In a post about the announcement, I mentioned that the death spiral for Sears was playing out in a public way. Earlier this week, on October 15th, Sears […]
Don’t Believe Them
It’s human nature to swallow whole all of the praise offered us while spitting out every bit of criticism we receive. We should fight this inclination. Instead, take what they offer, hold it in your hands for a minute, acknowledge it, then drop it on the ground and get back to work. Critics are fickle […]
